Identity as Distance : A short story
A powerful man receives a call-to-action from his own mortality.
I am a relic, and it is terrible to feel so alive. The warm, comforting glow of my virile body regaining circulation is a reminder of the metabolic machine slowly wearing itself away again. As my consciousness dawns, the initialisation of routine neural processes begins consuming the scarcest resource of all. I emerge from my somnolent1 stasis for an early vicennial2 commute. Maeve must be waiting for me by the car like all the preceding times. How many more times do I have left? How many more could I take?
Fading fast through the New City - reflections on the hail-ride window of a modulating downtown canopy gave view to pink, blue, and black. Each sunset-occluding penthouse, office, and sky-garden was separated by 20, maybe 30 feet and a sheer vertical drop to the street. The heuristic fractal-like urban planning optimised for minimising footprint on the scarce land resulting in a forest of intertwined steel, glass, concrete, and greenery. Each second towering structure a forever famished colossus, fighting to be the seeding point of the next Singularity. The world’s ambition is concentrated here. It precipitates from the upper cirrus of technologists and financiers, absorbed by the trunks and roots supporting the revered canopy.
“Maeve?”
She was sitting cross-legged across from me, where the driver's seat would have traditionally been located. It was the conversation seat now - with its back against a shaded windshield facing into the cabin. It’s one of the rare things that makes me truly feel old, that I still sometimes feel an ancient urge to call ‘shotgun’ - it doesn’t make sense at all anymore.
“Is there something I should know about the demo?”
“It’s a surprise, Ilya.” Her eyes mostly hidden behind a shaded eyepiece paused scanning the passing New City skyline for a brief moment to intercept mine. “I don’t want to contaminate your priors.”
When I first met Maeve it seemed that The Singularity was announced by doomerists and accelerationists alike every other month. Yet it still managed to creep up on me. The boy who cried ‘artificial human-level cognition’ was continuously beaten by moving goalposts and novel metrics, but not without total disruption of markets and industries. As always there were luddites, and fan-boys - both eventually forgotten by the banality of yet another industrial revolution. The XX century saw a long, dull, exponential rise in quality-of-life and wealth, with the trend now continuing well past the XXI century. The Singularity was nothing new - always just more things to take for granted.
“The kids take this all for granted, you know.” The ever-changing stochastic branches of the city’s streets, arches, bridges, and glimpses of sky never failed to be novel to me. Floating high above the canopy of this wild city one could almost perceive the super-containerships3, depots, launch platforms, and communication centres. Novel material science and automation have created distant buoyant silk highways in the sky. I always forget that even in this complex, living city - the dynamics of civilisation now concentrate above. “I still remember having to look both ways before crossing the road.”
“Is that so terrible, Ilya?” Between the two of us, the present couldn’t keep up with Maeve. I was always stuck a few steps behind her, which is why I hired her in the first place. “Your childhood would have been magical for a mediaeval peasant, hell - even a King. Fresh fruit all year round, a refrigerator, the ability to travel around the equator in a day or two, the entirety of human knowledge in your pock-”
“Alright, alright, I get it, it all becomes mundane to us.” She really thinks I am an old man.
“I believe that so will the demo.”
Interfacing natural minds with the gift of artificial cognition steadily chugged along from code, to natural language, to images, to thought. Delegation of cognition was widely adopted, as it had started long before with smartphones, and before that with writing. The topology of humanity’s brains has always changed and shifted - Ship-of-Theseus remnants of the hunter-gatherer, then agriculturalist, then industrialist mind being slowly stripped and replaced. Perhaps it’s unfair for me to feel a fleeting alarm, but children are growing up with their prefrontal cortex delegating path planning and prediction away to machines - freeing up more bandwidth for more ‘important’ tasks.
“Welcome back.” I could hear the suppressed excitement in Maeve’s voice, an unaltered trait from when she was a prodigal neurotechnologist promising me she’d guide my technocapital’s4 capabilities to deliver everlasting life.
The lobby of the colossus was empty, minimalist, quiet. Where a pretty and polite receptionist may once have been welcoming, was now simply a liminal space kept in-part for vanity. Maeve’s prefrontal cortex seamlessly and without thought took control of the glossy marbled lift, instructing it to take us to the top floor - like a muscle she shared between everyone else authorised in the building.
“Hold this for a moment.” She hands me her handbag, pulling out a beautiful silk eye mask to put on.
“For a mystery demo, shouldn’t I be putting that on?”
The canopy of the New City glistened from above. The sudden elevation breathed a few additional minutes of life into the sunset. In this light, high altitude platforms shone like planets above. The dying light was split, reflected and refracted into intersecting beams by the towers. Maeve’s team all stood ready to meet with their backs to the golden illumination, in silence, with identical keen, nervous, childish looks in their eyes. There were fewer of them than I remember, but I never questioned Maeve’s hiring or firing decisions before, and I wasn’t going to now.
Well, where is it? I watch the now blindfolded Maeve stride briskly ahead of me, each step cool and confident. Was she showing off some new sensory interface that allowed her to confidently perceive her surroundings? That would be nothing novel, and certainly not something justifying the early termination of the somnolence. She halted and clicked the heels of her boots to turn back towards me.
“Try to figure it out, Ilya.”
A recognisable long-time senior engineer with a distinct neanderthal-like skull shape that I couldn’t forget and a name that I couldn’t recall stepped forward to stand by my side.
“Pick a card.” He sounded excited. His grin seemed familiar, but also out of character. When talking to a Senior Citizen like me, the norm for post-singularity kids was to speak with respect and humility. After all, those of us who were still left were largely responsible for the world order.
“There are no sensors here, we are alone.” Funny she says that in a room full of a dozen people - I think I understand. But was this really all she wanted to show me?
She could borrow the perception of her employees, share their experience, or borrow their processed perception. Parallel perception with machines was old news, in fact it was one of the first integrations that came about with embedded brain-interface technology - this seemed to be just a small iteration upon that. A card trick that she’s able to track and calculate ‘with her eyes closed’ would be disappointingly dull, despite the lingering nostalgic resemblance of century-old demos when our paths first crossed.
“This is what you wanted to show me?” How dare she? “I didn’t need to wake up for this.”
She was hurt. The space filled with disappointment as the whole team was too.
“Ilya, wait.” Familiar adolescent frustration at the old man - me. Her brows and urgency told me ‘you just don’t get it’. “Let’s talk more privately.”
It was a beautiful private room, closed off to the interior of the building, but wide open to the expanse of the city below via an elegantly framed balcony. Her tabletop was dimpled from wear, wooden, and old. A gift from myself, a lifetime ago meant then as a jest in reference to a changing era. Maeve leant forward imposing eye contact, her eyewear now off, and her elbows compressing the vintage spruce grain. She was behaving in a much more masculine manner than I ever remember, but was just as impressively assertive.
“Ilya, I know you well. This is what you want! Don’t you see? This isn’t like last time. This is not an emulation, or a copy - this is real transference. This is finally what-”
“You’ve developed a way to see from another person’s perspective.” Another beautiful, terrifying, somewhat poetic technology I live to witness. “This doesn’t fulfil my needs.”
A painful pause. Maeve’s pitying silence struck me. I was out of touch again - am I the old man I wanted to avoid becoming?
“You do remember our first contract - The objective that we agreed upon?”
“I do. Yes.. Leg-”
“Legacy. An infinite window to assert your will onto the universe. Supposed immortality was achieved by Alexander, Shakespeare, Stalin through large impacts - but their contributions to our history are diluted with every second that passes - no. You want continued agency. While they were just ballistic projectiles, you want to have an active say in the chaos of history - adaptation. You want closed-loop control.”
All true. All people are driven by legacy, from conquerors to nurturing mothers. It is the desire to constrain the dynamic system of reality to an acceptable set of possible futures. After death, we lose the ability to apply our gains. The conventional human life-span is a burst of will-power, aimed carelessly with a short barrel - like a bullet fired into a brick wall. The future is a moving target, and a 9mm 85-year-long life that was the standard not so long ago isn’t enough. I need to be a cruise missile.
It’s almost been 60 years since my illusion of immortality was broken - my first grey hair at age 83. Explosive progress in the fields of biochemistry, medicine, exo-immunology5, and bionics (much like any field during The Singularity) seemed to promise me an unlimited window of agency that we call a lifespan. Short-lived social and political unrest, wars, and other symptoms of rapid disruption closed that window for many, but I was lucky enough to reap the rewards. Even with perfect health, neurogenic cocktails, and a Ford-like6 body, I am not immortal - my window of opportunity is merely extended to find and fund the effort that would smash the glass pane indefinitely - until then, I delegate my agency and technocapital to Maeve as I isolate and slow my metabolism and lived experience to delay the unwavering marching of the clock.
“When I developed and demod ad-Din7 I failed you because you wanted continuity of experience. An immortal copy of you is not satisfactory. I am sorry.”
Also true, after multi decade-long phases of exercise, veganism, hormone therapy, metabolic suppression and now finally somnolence, my natural mind would eventually succumb to the void and an artificial imitation of it would diverge from the ground truth with time. It simply isn’t good enough to have a finite fidelity mind-mimicking machine on the infinite journey of immortality. “I’m sorry, Maeve, but I do not see how any of this is relevant.” She’s still not learnt to cut to the chase.
“What I wanted to show you today was myself, Ilya. I - We. All of us here share not just our perception, but thoughts, feelings, we share consciousness. Our individual lives stay intact, but we adapt, learn from each other, and perpetuate our volition on each other at such a rate, that there is no differentiation between a local or received thought” What she had entered was the ultimate pact of loyalty. “And I would like to see you join me.”
I was consistently taken aback by the transformation of Maeve every 20 years during my somnolence cycles. The technomorphoses8 of her mannerisms and appearance, would evoke an ancient misplaced bittersweetness of watching a hardworking daughter mature. Despite the constant self-modification she had always maintained a clear untouchable ego. But what about now? The unison of the engineer’s and Maeve’s smiles, the uniformity in emotional state - It dawns on me.
“Is Maeve gone?”
It is a millennium-old trope. Lifelong couples seem to adopt each-other’s physical and personal traits. Minds converge through proximity, and ultimately combine after a critical informational throughput is achieved. The cognitive transference between all the subjects reduces each individual to a single element of a mind. The Maeve I trusted, believed in, cared for, has diluted herself, and conjoined with an amorphous cognitive union. I do not truly recognise her.
“I am very much alive.” Her emotions were still there, and the nerves she was displaying indeed did seem like her’s. “I am still Maeve, but I am free. I no longer live through just this body and whatever data feeds that were wired to it. I now live in the bodies of the entire team, and them - in mine. When this body does expire, my legacy will live on in the bodies and machines I live through now.”
The room dimmed to the brightness of the invariant bioluminescent glow of the wall panels as the inevitable dusk began to set in. Disappointment, anger, and heartbreak had sunk into my chest. “This isn’t immortality. This is death preceded by ego-death. I want to always stay myself, and I always wanted you to stay yourself. I want you to be Maeve!” To preserve identity, one must maintain distance - a proven truth of ventures, cultures, and myself. “None of *this* would even exist without my individualism. How can I live, when you want to kill that part of me, even that part of yourself?” Gentle health warnings tell me to calm down, lighting up my peripheral vision occluded by my skull. I had not raised my voice in a century, nor had my heart beaten at this rate since before the end of my last marriage. This is not optimal behaviour for ensuring longevity.
Rising from behind the table, Maeve seems larger than life. Her smooth pale face has remained mostly unchanged all these years. But the consistency is only skin thin. Her mastoid process9 has been rebuilt dozens of times anew as a gateway for new cognitive and sensory hardware. “It is true that there is a compromise between your sole identity and the possibility for everlasting agency. But Ilya, dispose of your ego. I beg you.” But how could I? Agency, and ultimately the aims and gains that I can assert onto the volatile world are defined by my ego. No amount of neo-Buddhist harmony bullshit will convince me to let myself die at will - nor meld into the moving average of the wills of others. I may have just lost my last remaining friend.
“I think we’re done here. Goodbye, Maeve.”
The horizon lit up in a golden solar razor, slicing open the black and blue. It was at this shallow angle of illumination that the skyborne infrastructure of a thriving Earth-Moon system was most visible to the naked human eye. Oblique streams of illuminated white thread their way from suspended buoyant orbital launch platforms. Observing from Low Earth Orbit, the high altitude platforms shift and flow, like glacial schools of fish. Each score that I spend under somnolence on Earth delays total irreversible neurodegeneration and enables history to leave me behind. Every moment of consciousness here is a moment slowly degrading the most precious resource, and how long could I wait? Eternal life is out of reach without the dissolution of myself - the primitive immortality of glory, however, is not.
A mortal relic, an old-fashioned mind. Like the pilgrims of old, or the Proto-Australians, I am leaving my world behind. Asserting my identity elsewhere.
Farewell New City, Earth, Sol.
Goodbye, Maeve
.
A surreal, dreamy, sleepy state of mind - somnolence.
Occurring once every 20 years.
Larger, aerial equivalent of container ships which world trade relies on.
The leverage of technology and machinery to exact the will of a controlling figure.
The study of artificial immune systems (I made it up).
Replaceable parts for automotives were pioneered by the Ford Model T.
The Hebrew/Islamic ‘Day of Judgement’, where believers’ souls are taken to the afterlife - Yawm ad-Din.
The process of the alteration of the body and mind of a human with technology.
The boney protrusion behind the ear of a person.