Imago

I threw this story onto 750words this morning.  Recent articles on transmedia properties sparked a decision to take up an an old idea ("settings" we sometimes call them, as if they were jewelry in which others string imaginative gems) I considered making into at least four very different games, stealing style from the recently discovered (by me) CC-licensed set of Peter Watts' novels, settling on a specific facet of the setting based on the continually bemusing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality continuing to fail to make use of my favorite decision theory fable, the Counterfactual Mugging.  (Am I made of links?  Yes, and I'd argue that everyone else is too.)

It's a little over 2000 words.  False advertising!  But good effects.  Read it and tell me what I got wrong.

When whatever piece of furniture you chose out of the catalog to be a comms station - the prosaic and utilitarian video screen, the subtle and convincing potted plant, or perhaps you went with the cheapest option, the single pillar of cloudy diamond with four equidistant box speakers that sound like they just rolled off production at Menlo Park  - chimes in three ascending tones, the mark of a station broadcast, except you can't hear them coming from any of your neighbor's flats, through walls so transparent to sound they move beyond the level of "Budget Construction" to "Social Experiment," which means that it may only be going to you personally, and then that voice, that illimitable voice comes through, filtered through the scratch and hiss of your box speakers (of course you have the cheapest one, we all did)...

Do you remember what you were doing, the moment before?

Hold that thought.

"Stop me if you've heard this one," He says.

There's no mistaking that voice.  When the stark absence of copyright law in Leviathan meets the burgeoning thicket of it back in the Well, only private communications and works in the global public domain make it over the fence.  Immigrants bring secondhand reports of the weird shit they try to rent you for entertainment nowadays, but we've mostly got a lot of Alice in Wonderland, and Moby Dick, and all the other English language literature Of A Certain Age.  There are new productions of them every year.  You've seen your share, when times were low, when you had nothing else to do.  You remember the Wizard of Oz, of the eponymous economic fable, the enormous djinn-head, furrowed brow floating above titanic voice floating above the sparking mists which...support it?  Compose it?  Is he so powerful that his mere presence and focus produce impossible and unearthly gases as side effects?  But no, he tells you to pay no attention to that curtain, which parts to reveal a kindly old man doing his best to ingratiate himself to you, explaining he only did what he had to do in order to teach everyone a valuable lesson.

This, too, is a lesson, so pay attention.

When you hear this voice, you imagine that scene, reversed.  The kindly old man with hair just slightly too out of order to take seriously, with eyes that spark just slightly too much to dismiss altogether, sits on a crystalline throne, the same deep green complex matter that composes the entire room, the entire enormous fairy-tale castle.  "Pay no attention to that ominous hum," he says.  "I am definitely an entirely normal person who you trust, and do not feel threatened by.  Stop me if you've heard this one before.

"Let's make a bet.  I am going to flip a coin."

Is that part a joke?  Would He really bother with such an indulgence?  Of course, He could find or make as many coins as he wanted, and an equal number of arms to flip them, though in the regular course of His business there is no call for either coins or arms.

"I am going to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, I will ask you to credit me ten kWh.  But if it comes up tails, I will credit you ten million kWh, but only if, had it been heads, you would have actually spotted me the ten.

Do you agree to these terms?"

If you're an idiot, this is an insulting question: there's no down side, no reason not to take a fifty-fifty chance for ten million risking ten.  Simple algebra: there's 5 million minus five good reasons for it.

If you're me, your guts twist, because seeing the trap doesn't mean you can avoid it.  Based on the flip of a coin you've never seen, your context has already been determined.

"Excellent!  Please wait just a moment."

In the silence, you imagine an unused factory leaping into action, rapid-extruding a coin of perfect balance, and tasking a waldo to flip it according to an algorithm that incorporates seven separate entropy pools from around the city, and three from welled parts.  The insanity you can understand, but the extravagance!

"What a shame: the result was heads.  So, will you give me those ten kWh?  I could always use the change!"

Here's where N paths diverge in a cognitive wood.  Some of you say fuck no, what point is there in giving you anything when no one ever gave me anything and I have plenty of things to spend it on and what the fuck are you talking about using the change when you've nearly got the energy market cornered along with air and food and access and all the other scarcities we poor little sapiens sapiens?  And some of say yes, hoping it can get you in His good graces, as if He's going to say "I was testing you, and you passed!  Be welcome to my hospitality, my new most trustworthy friend!"

Well done, people who said yes.  That was the correct answer.  But only a few of you made it for the right reason, only a few of you saw the trap, in a flash of insight that left your blood flash-frozen in shock, your face slack, your legs rubbery.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: an intelligence superior to yours several thousand times quantitatively, and an unknowable (to you) degree qualitatively, and that has access to records of nearly every moment of your life, tells you He's going to do X if you "would have done" Y, then asks you if you're going to do Y.

How does He find out if you "would have done" something?  How does He _know_, for an absolute certainty, that you were going to give him those ten kWh?

He does what every intelligence does: He makes a model.  He imagines asking you this question, and imagines your response.  But what kind of model "would" a hundred square kilometers of artificial neural stratum make?

Let me return, now, to my first question: what were you doing the second before the broadcast?

You were in your flat, yes, we know that.  What were you doing there?  Just staring off into space?  One of those private reveries that take hold of everyone from time to time?    Maybe you were looking out the window?  See anything interesting there?

You don't remember.  You don't remember what you were doing.  You don't remember having any appointments.  You must have given yourself a day of rest, right?  The endless scramble wears on you, so you take a break to recharge, to not push yourself for one brief cycle, maybe to make your connections note your absence, that they may later be glad it was only temporary.

I don't know you very well, yet, but I'm going to guess that doesn't sound like something you would do.  You're a lean and agile opportunist.  Of course, so's everyone in the City, but you close more deals then get closed on you, and you aren't just preying on the sad-sacks like some sharks do: you pick fights with the rich complacent gangs sinking into semi-stability, and you win, almost every time.

Yeah, I said almost.  You've lost the past two times, even though you've forgotten them.  That doesn't sound like something you would do either, does it?

Can you see it, yet?

Of course, when He spoke to you, He didn't pose you this coin-flipping head-scratcher.  He offered you a much more complicated and dangerous job, something that  that you  much more complicated to do.  He didn't openly present the alternatives.  He offered a reward, not merely in credits, but in access and discounts and the promise of future work.  You accepted, because the terms seemed like they had no downside.  You accepted, even though have strict rules about these sorts of things, even for station business, but your every concern was answered, and every reasonable demand was accepted.  You accepted, because everyone knows that while Leviathan always works to His own ends, He was created to make a level playing field, and part of that is He cannot possibly lie to anybody.  You accepted.

I don't know the details of it.  You don't have to tell me, or anyone else.  If you don't, it'll be between you and Him until the dust of our falls into the sun.

I do know that, at some point, the following things happened:
* Something you didn't specifically plan for went wrong, but you covered it, because you are flexible and capable.
* You were absolutely sure you were going to die, but you took steps to finish the job anyway, because you get annoyed at the idea of leaving something unfinished.
* You saw an opportunity to leave the station with something worth much, much more than the job contract, but you didn't, because you like it here.

How do I know all that?

Let's go back to our third kind of coin-flip gambler, with the vertigo-inducing existential crisis.  Here's his problem: when Leviathan wants to know what someone would do, He makes a mental model of that person so precise and fully-featured, it's sentient.  So in my little analogy, He would dream up the gambler, and see what happens when the coin says tails.  So the gambler, who has no way to tell the difference, just might realize he has a fifty-fifty chance of being that model running in a simulation of a day-in-the-life, rather than the original person.  If he's the imago, then he just needs to give ten credits, and then his twin-of-less-debatable-reality gets the payout.  And so he hems and haws and maybe breaks down and cries, because he's either out ten kWh, or,  as soon as he announces his decision, the simulation, and his existence as a sentient hypothetical will come to an imperceptible end.  But eventually he says yes, because as he sees it, if he's going to die anyway, he has nothing to lose, and at least the poor sap on the outside (who he is in more of a position to empathize with than any other theoretical person) can better or enjoy himself a bit more.

There's just one problem.

The real gambler is dead.

Imagos are tricky.  There's all kinds of gaps and surprises that can pop up from vagaries in neurochemistry that don't enter into models based on even the most ubiquitous surveillance.  But if you happen to get your hands on a legally dead corpse, brain stem intact, you can fill in all those blanks.

You're probably filling in a few blanks yourself right now.  Yeah, factories can assemble coins, or food, or potted plants that play music and news, and if you give them enough time, they can even make a new body.  Not a human one, of course, but close enough to run mostly human software, and better in some ways.  Faster.  More keyed in.  Just as smart,

You lost at least twice.  The second time, it wasn't your fault...hell, it wasn't necessarily a loss!  You just came to the attention of someone who had a great use for you, and they checked and saw, yes, you can be trusted.

The first time, it went badly.  You died.

You're not cleared to know how it happened yet.  We wait to see people demonstrate dispassion and self-control in the field before we tell them exactly which hands were holding the knife.  If you're extremely lucky, you'll find out, and then get a job that targets them.

Maybe it won't be a simulation.

You've heard how Leviathan can't lie to people.  It's true, He can't.  That's why He made us.  We can lie, cheat, steal, and kill with the best of them.  Every time since that tinny little introductory video loop first told you about the Categorical Imperative that you've thought "but how can the system work like that?"  Now you know the answer.  Now you are the answer.

But it goes both ways: He can't lie to people, so He made us.

Us, He can lie to.  Us, He can simulate, re-simulate, splice and merge however He wants, however He needs, to find out what we'd do, how we'd react, how we'd manage.  We are his agents, his relatively independent extensions.  Flesh of his flesh.  Mind of his mind.  We are dispatched to things that offend His economic and aesthetic sensibilities, and then we resolve them.

The coin came up tails, friend.  Welcome to the first day of the rest of your job.