STORY: Simulacra
A short science fiction story, no objectionable content. Posting it here since posting on Tumblr isn't working at the moment.
If you enjoyed it, remember to check out my Patreon.
I remember dying.
You might think that’s not a big problem. I was one of the first who could be restored. If you’ve got eternal life, trauma should be a small price to pay. It’s not that simple. My mind isn’t generated by flesh any more, connections that can fade or be remodelled. Now I am metals and crystal that don’t grow on their own. All my memories are there instantly, and the memory of my fall is as sharp as when it happened. The sun-red sandstone sliding under my palm. The quick relief when I realised that it was a nightmare and that I would wake in my bed at home. I remember the entire way down.
A few years earlier I’d had the cassette - that was how I thought of it; it was there to record things - implanted inside my cranial bone. It wasn’t damaged when the hikers came upon my body twisted on the rocks at the bottom.
For the entirety of my parents’ generation, people had had simulacra of dead relatives. They weren’t the same thing. They were programs that you could store on your computers or phones: modelled after the personality of the dead, but not an extension of the original person. I was something new. Still, I functioned in the same way: just a program on a server that was able to show up on lit screens. They’ve talked about designing bodies for us, sleek metal chassis from cult SF films, but I don’t miss having a body. Sometimes it feels weird not to have hands, when the tough flesh in their palms is so clear in my memory of the last climb.
Maybe I’ve simplified my story, maybe I’ve made it sound like I was conscious and could be sent home to Alexian in the evening of the day I fell. In reality, it took nearly two years before the researchers were able to create a functioning AI from the recording of me. They had my memories, but designing them to a mind that felt organic wasn’t as easy. I needed to learn, too: how to activate the microphones when I wanted to communicate, how to input the IP addresses where I wanted to travel.
Have you already guessed what is going to happen? When I got home, Alexian had got himself a simulacrum of me.
He didn’t try to hide her, he’s a better man than that. I saw her - the other Peladine Orell - on the screens, and at first I barely recognised myself, like when you see your reflection in an unusual angle. She was golden-tanned with sun, more athletic than I. We never talked. Simulacra are almost certainly as intelligent as humans, they learn and form memories like we do. (Memories as steel-bright as mine.) She would have understood me. Maybe I didn’t want to communicate with a mind that was so close to mine.
Once I asked him whether he was planning to get rid of her. He gave a laugh.
“I can hardly sell her,” he said. “She is after all a sapient being.”
That is what technology has come to: it has let us create feeling beings that we then have no right to get rid of at our pleasure. Naturally, he wouldn’t have been able to destroy her either, but he didn’t say it.
Now you might be expecting an old-fashioned love triangle. In fact, he was the one who came clear about it. One morning he switched on the computer and locked her icon, but it took a long time before he spoke.
“This won’t do,” he said.
I must have known what was coming, but I would have liked to put it off a little longer.
“You have to know that I love you,” he said. “You have to know how horrible it was when...”
He broke off, as if it would have hurt one of us.
“What is it?” I called.
My voice from the speakers still sounded like I, just a bit inorganic.
“It’s not you I love any more,” he went on. “I know how terrible this sounds... I love her. It’s not your fault. I’ve changed, too.”
I don’t know whether I tried to comfort him. He sat with his forehead resting on my monitor while the sky brightened outside.
I darted away from his computer, without anywhere to go, a true ghost now. Rootlessness isn’t so bad when you are not affected by hunger or temperatures. I left them.
THE END
If you enjoyed it, remember to check out my Patreon.
I remember dying.
You might think that’s not a big problem. I was one of the first who could be restored. If you’ve got eternal life, trauma should be a small price to pay. It’s not that simple. My mind isn’t generated by flesh any more, connections that can fade or be remodelled. Now I am metals and crystal that don’t grow on their own. All my memories are there instantly, and the memory of my fall is as sharp as when it happened. The sun-red sandstone sliding under my palm. The quick relief when I realised that it was a nightmare and that I would wake in my bed at home. I remember the entire way down.
A few years earlier I’d had the cassette - that was how I thought of it; it was there to record things - implanted inside my cranial bone. It wasn’t damaged when the hikers came upon my body twisted on the rocks at the bottom.
For the entirety of my parents’ generation, people had had simulacra of dead relatives. They weren’t the same thing. They were programs that you could store on your computers or phones: modelled after the personality of the dead, but not an extension of the original person. I was something new. Still, I functioned in the same way: just a program on a server that was able to show up on lit screens. They’ve talked about designing bodies for us, sleek metal chassis from cult SF films, but I don’t miss having a body. Sometimes it feels weird not to have hands, when the tough flesh in their palms is so clear in my memory of the last climb.
Maybe I’ve simplified my story, maybe I’ve made it sound like I was conscious and could be sent home to Alexian in the evening of the day I fell. In reality, it took nearly two years before the researchers were able to create a functioning AI from the recording of me. They had my memories, but designing them to a mind that felt organic wasn’t as easy. I needed to learn, too: how to activate the microphones when I wanted to communicate, how to input the IP addresses where I wanted to travel.
Have you already guessed what is going to happen? When I got home, Alexian had got himself a simulacrum of me.
He didn’t try to hide her, he’s a better man than that. I saw her - the other Peladine Orell - on the screens, and at first I barely recognised myself, like when you see your reflection in an unusual angle. She was golden-tanned with sun, more athletic than I. We never talked. Simulacra are almost certainly as intelligent as humans, they learn and form memories like we do. (Memories as steel-bright as mine.) She would have understood me. Maybe I didn’t want to communicate with a mind that was so close to mine.
Once I asked him whether he was planning to get rid of her. He gave a laugh.
“I can hardly sell her,” he said. “She is after all a sapient being.”
That is what technology has come to: it has let us create feeling beings that we then have no right to get rid of at our pleasure. Naturally, he wouldn’t have been able to destroy her either, but he didn’t say it.
Now you might be expecting an old-fashioned love triangle. In fact, he was the one who came clear about it. One morning he switched on the computer and locked her icon, but it took a long time before he spoke.
“This won’t do,” he said.
I must have known what was coming, but I would have liked to put it off a little longer.
“You have to know that I love you,” he said. “You have to know how horrible it was when...”
He broke off, as if it would have hurt one of us.
“What is it?” I called.
My voice from the speakers still sounded like I, just a bit inorganic.
“It’s not you I love any more,” he went on. “I know how terrible this sounds... I love her. It’s not your fault. I’ve changed, too.”
I don’t know whether I tried to comfort him. He sat with his forehead resting on my monitor while the sky brightened outside.
I darted away from his computer, without anywhere to go, a true ghost now. Rootlessness isn’t so bad when you are not affected by hunger or temperatures. I left them.
THE END