Do what, Madoc? Damon countered. He sounded mystified, but I didnt believe him. I didnt believe he was Eido, either. I figured this for somebody elses game. Or some thing elses game.
It required a tremendous effort in either case, but I or the other I managed to say Liar.
I never lied to you, Madoc, Damons voice was quick to say. I didnt know what we were up against. I still dont but I wont be underestimating them again. You have to believe me, Madoc I didnt know . I wouldnt have sent you in if Id known. Youre my best man, Madoc. My best friend. I would never do anything to harm you . Ill do everything within my power to save you. Youll be back, Madoc, as good as new. I swear it.
Mercifully, I faded out then. It wasnt because anyone had actually taken pity on me, of course. If I could be certain of anything, I could be certain of that.
I faded out because it, or they, figured that it, or they, had done all that could be done with that particular script. There was nowhere else for it to go without killing one or both of me.
Thirty-Five
A Stray Meditation
Cogito, ergo sum. There is a thought, therefore there is a thinker. Whatever else we doubt, we can always fall back on that meager comfort. Nor is the thought a lonely thing suspended in a cold intellectual vacuum; it is part of a train fueled by a flow of sensory data.
There was once a time when philosophers were willing to take the intuitive leap knowing all the time that there was a tiny risk involved of trusting that flow of data. They retained certain careful doubts about the reliability and limited scope of the senses, but they considered it a reasonable hazard to bet that the world that appeared to them must be closely and intelligibly related to the world that actually was, and that the memories mysteriously engraved in their flesh were similarly trustworthy. They could not believe that God, or the pressure of natural selection, would condemn them to a life of perverse illusion. They could not believe that their little trains of thought might be chugging through an infinite darkness, save for the company of a malevolent demon whose sole reason for being was to feed them a diet of clever lies, while the tracks of memory were torn up behind them and relaid in crazy patterns of deception.
And then we invented Virtual Experience and Internal Technology.
In the beginning, the makers of VE the movers and shakers of the modern world even had the nerve to call it Virtual Reality . Ironically, they stopped calling it that at almost exactly the point when IT augmentation of VE gave it a substantial boost in the direction of reality simulation.
After that, of course, the odds changed. The old bets no longer seemed so reasonable. Once we had IT-augmented VE, it was all too easy to believe in a malevolent demon that might be feeding lies to every one of our gullible senses, laying down false memories if not actually reconstructing the ones we already had.
After the advent of IT-assisted VE, people who really wanted to do so could live the greater part of their lives immersed in custom-built illusions. In the early days the overindulgent few got nasty sores from lying too long in their data suits, but some of them did it anyway and while reports of people literally rotting away without ever noticing that they were dying were urban myths, people did die in VE. Most people were careful enough, and moderate enough, to ensure that by the time the manufactured illusions became 90 percent convincing their care and moderation had become habitual but all the nightmare scenarios happened occasionally, and there was one kind of nightmare that could never again be banished to the realm of obsolete bugaboos.
After the advent of sophisticated VE, nobody waking up in a strange environment could ever be completely sure whether or not it was real. And no matter how many times a man might wake thereafter, or to what kind of environment, he remained in the depths of the maze of uncertainty, knowing that he could never be sure of his escape.
It wasnt quite that bad in practice not, at least, in my young days. In my young days, every discriminating person thought he or she could tell the difference between meatspace and the cleverest imaginable VE. Even in those days, though, youd have had to be a complete fool not to see which way the world was going, and know that it wouldnt always be that easy.
Maybe it would have been easy enough if the manufactured illusions had always had to rely on human programmers, but anyone whod thought long and hard about it even in my day would probably have realized that there was another important threshold yet to be crossed.
If ever the machines that were manufacturing the illusions became independently smart, cutting human programmers out of the loop, there would be a whole new ballgame. And which AIs, out of the billions manufactured for human use, were the most likely to make the jump to self-consciousness and self-direction? Fancy spaceships? Humaniform robots? Communication systems? Or VE feeders? Or all of the above? Who could tell?