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The team reunited on Extremus Prime, but they weren’t ready to go for
another day. Ramses needed to work on something first. Once it was time,
they bid their adieu to Actilitca, and activated all seven of their tandem
slingdrives. They ended up on a planet called Varkas Reflex. It orbited a
host star called Wolf 359. Like Proxima Centauri, it was a flare star, but
unlike Proxima Doma, Varkas Reflex was a super-Earth. For a normal human to
survive on the surface, technological advancements had to be made to protect
them from the extreme gravity. All things being equal, it did not make for a
very good colony. It should not have been one. Colonists should have
remained in orbit instead, perhaps in centrifugal cylinders, or a whole
Dyson swarm. It was very important to the early colonists, though, that they
landed on planets. That sentimentality had since vanished, but tradition
remained on the nearest neighbors.
For the longest time, Wolf 359 wasn’t even a very good candidate for
planetary colonization, because scientists didn’t even know that there
was a planet. Varkas Reflex orbited Wolf 359 at an extremely high
inclination, which meant, from the perspective of Earth, it never passed
between the star and the telescopes. They only eventually proved it using a
method called stellar occultation, which tracked transit patterns of
neighboring stars that indicated they were all coming from a single
celestial body. It was then that they chose to send a probe there to
confirm. It was sort of a last minute thing, relatively speaking according
to galactic mapping scales.
About 250 years ago, the leaders of this planet had their plans set on
making it the number one vacation destination for the stellar neighborhood.
They were doing okay, and really only competing with Thālith al Naʽāmāt
Bida. Then Castlebourne came along, and ruined all of that. Luckily, they
had already pivoted to something else. In an attempt to make the perfectly
streamlined democracy, Hokusai Gimura scanned the mind of everyone who lived
on Varkas Reflex, and used them to create an amalgamated consciousness. This
singular entity would presumably always have the right answer to how to
govern things. No more asking questions, waiting for responses, and holding
discussions. If a problem came up, the Congeneral would know what to
do immediately, because the consensus was already in there. Unfortunately,
it didn’t work. There was too much discordance. It kept stripping out
conflicting thought after conflicting thought until there was basically
nothing left. As it turned out, discordance was a part of life, and
governance was always going to be complicated, and often slow.
Still, this failed experiment apparently gave them the idea to pivot from
their original dream. Transdimensional gravity was great, but the surface of
Varkas Reflex was still a hellscape compared to Earth, or even Proxima
Doma’s Terminator Line. If everyone was safer and better off inside, they
were going to use that to their advantage. Virtual simulations were
widespread. There were massive communities centered on all of the colonies,
as well as Earth, of course. It was possible to join these together using
quantum communication, but not easy, and not all that common. The ones on
Varkas Reflex today were largely considered the best. It didn’t have to be
this way. It could have just about anywhere, but this location had its
advantages, like a tidally locked planet orbiting a red dwarf, which allowed
for supercool calculations on the far side. But in the end, it became the
simulation capital of the galaxy because the people there decided it would
be. While most travelers these days were flocking to Castlebourne—about a
million people per week, at last count—a not insignificant amount of
interstellar ships and casting beams were going to Varkas Reflex. It didn’t
hurt that the world shared an acronym with virtual reality.
“But why are we here?” Romana asked after being caught up on the
boring history.
“I wanted to test my new navigational algorithm,” Ramses explained. “It’s
not time to go out and look for Spiral Station just yet, but it needed to be
a place the slingdrives hadn’t been to before. This world seemed as good as
any.”
“So, you...” Romana began.
“I what?”
“You can’t read my mind?” she asked, peering at him with great suspicion.
“No. Why? What? What? Why? Why?” He was so lost.
She was still suspicious. “Okay...”
“Okay,” he echoed.
“Okay, well I’m gonna go to the stacks then,” she said, backing up slowly.
“Unless you...you think I should go somewhere specific, I’m just gonna go
browse.”
“That’s fine, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Romy. Is this
somehow about the kiss?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’ve never kissed anyone before,
let alone a brother like you.” She disappeared.
“That was weird.” He tried to go back to work, but seemed to feel someone
staring at him. He turned to look at Leona. “What?”
“What was that about a kiss?” she questioned.
“So, I would like your opinion on the casing,” Ramses said. “That’s an open
question for everyone. But the design is only fluid until I actually start
building it, which means I would like to make a decision quite quick.”
“Tell me about this kiss,” Leona insisted.
“It’s fine, Lee,” Mateo promised her. “Really, not a big deal. I’ve already
parented her on it. We’ll talk about it later in private.”
Leona was peering at them both, but was ultimately willing to let it
go...for now. “A sphere, I suppose.”
“That’s one vote for sphere. Anyone else?” Ramses asked.
“Shouldn’t it be a belt, so we can wear it,” Angela suggested.
“One for sphere, one for belt,” Ramses said, updating the polling data.
“Well, how big does it have to be?” Marie pressed. “If it can be smaller
than a belt, maybe more like a necklace, or even a bracelet.”
Ramses started imagining various shapes of various dimensions between his
hands. “With the power source, I don’t think it should be smaller than a
belt.”
“It needs to be able to turn invisible either way, so we can hide it
somewhere while we’re all inside.”
“Good idea.” Ramses scribbled that down in his notes. “In...visible. So, we
really don’t care what the shape is?”
“They’re right, a belt makes more sense,” Leona said, changing her vote,
“since we can’t store it in a pocket dimension.” Ramses was building a
structure for them to inhabit. Since they no longer had a ship, they always
had to congregate wherever they happened to be, and that lacked privacy.
They also sometimes had to keep their suits on to breathe and communicate.
By placing their home in a pocket dimension, they could stretch out and
relax, even if they were in a harsh environment. They couldn’t just slip
into their homebase whenever and wherever, though. It would require one
piece of hardware to be kept in base reality at all times. Subpockets were
possible, but not recommended, for various reasons, most importantly in this
case was that it could get lost in the infinite forever if something went
wrong. If they were all inside of it at the same time, that physical
dimensional generator would just be sitting around on its own, or in some
cases, floating around in space. In these situations, the shape wasn’t
relevant, but Angela was right that a belt was the most logical choice. One
of them could wear it around their waist, and it would look too normal for
anyone to suspect its true purpose.
“Belt? Belt? Belt?” Ramses posed, pointing to Olimpia, Mateo, and Leona.
“Belt,” he decided. “I need to get to work on it then. Thank you. You can go
now.”
“I think I’m gonna go check on my daughter,” Mateo said to Leona.
“You need to tell me what happened first. It looks like she wants to be
alone right now. Whatever she’s doing, I trust her. Do you?”
“Of course I do. Allow me to explain.”
While Mateo was telling the awkward story of Romana’s kiss with Ramses,
Romana herself was in the simulation library. The largest component of a
copy of the central archives that people carried around with them was called
the virtual stacks. It could house hundreds or thousands of different
simulations, depending on how detailed and immersive they were. It couldn’t
hold all of them, though. That wouldn’t be practical, even if it were
possible. The stacks that Romana was in right now were closer to that
comprehensiveness, however. It was designed to look like a regular library,
but the books were holographic, and only there for ambiance. The only real
things on the shelves were the empty storage drives. You grabbed one from
there, inserted it into the nearest private download terminal, and installed
whichever construct you wanted from the core database. You could also
connect to a particular world from here, to test drive it, or if you simply
didn’t feel like going home to use it. Romana wasn’t interested in this,
though. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. So she needed
assistance.
The holographic assistant appeared in another chair. “Thank you, and welcome
to the principal virtual database. What kind of simulation were we looking
for today?”
“How high is your personality? Do you have agency?”
“I express the illusion of agency,” the woman explained. “I have the
illusion of personality. These can be adjusted via your preferences. Would
you like me to show you how to tune my parameters?”
“Confidentiality parameters,” Romana prompted.
“One hundred percent confidential by current preferences. If you shut me
down, and restart me, I will not recall our previous conversation. To save
our conversations, please sign in to your account.”
“No, I want your memory wiped entirely.”
“What kind of simulation were we looking for today?” the bot repeated.
“It’s not about the environment itself. It’s...I’m looking for a person.”
“Character creation. I can help with that as well.”
“I want this character...to have agency. Make no mistake, I don’t only want
him to simulate it. I want him to be with me, but to be able to choose to
leave me. But...but not do that.”
The bot stared into space for a moment. If it had any level of personality,
it was turned down fairly low. Though, the hesitation was a bit of a mixed
signal. “What you’re asking for is true emergence, otherwise known as an
Unregulated Artificial Intelligence. The creation of something like this
would require a synthetic siring license, which is difficult to procure in
this system. Perhaps you would be better suited traveling to Glisnia.”
“I can’t go to Glisnia,” Romana clarified in exasperation as she was
standing up and moving behind her chair. “I’m already here, and it wasn’t by
choice, so I don’t have to explain why. I can’t tell anyone what I’m doing.
If I asked my friends to take me somewhere else, they would want to know
why.”
The assistant paused again. “To generate a true independent consciousness
entity through non-biological means would require a sireseed program. Those
are profoundly regulated and protected. And I must warn you, if you intend
this being to be your romantic partner, the sireseed method would not be a
very good idea, for it would place you in the position of its parent, while
it would be your child.”
“What if someone else generated the seed? Could the result be my
boyfriend then?” Romana hoped.
“If you asked him for companionship, and he agreed, perhaps. You would have
to know someone with a license, and the right discretion. You would have to
be able to trust them, and then you would have to be able to let the
resulting being decline if that was his choice. I cannot condone
non-consensual behavior with a conscious entity, nor teach you how to
subvert safety guardrails. Simulated consciousnesses, however, are a
different story, and entirely within the scope of Varkas Reflex’s
offerings.”
“I don’t want him to act like a real person, but to be real, in every
sense.”
More pausing. “What you’re asking for is morally gray at best. The idea of
birthing an independent being in the hopes of it developing into a certain
type of person with particular feelings towards you falls outside the bounds
of current ethical guidelines for procreational activity. Even biological
procreation ethics strongly discourages excessive parental indoctrination in
the modern era.”
“I’m so lonely,” Romana told the bot sadly.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“What causes emergence?” Romana questioned. “If you design an AI to only
simulate consciousness, what causes it to become genuinely conscious and
independent? It does happen naturally sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“Very rarely,” she said. “And...unknown.”
“Best guess,” Romana pressed.
One more pause. “Time. Best guess is it takes time and patience.”
Romana smirked. “Time, I got.”
“There would be other variables, otherwise any abandoned NPC left to their
own devices without periodic mind wipes or programming updates would
eventually form consciousness.”
“I’m sure I’ll figure it out,” Romana decided. “Give me the most detailed
single-planet ancestor simulation you have that can fit on one virtual stack
cartridge.”
“Loading options...”
“While you’re doing that, tell me about this Congeneral from your history.
How does an amalgamated consciousness work?”
