Tag: Mind uploading

Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café by M. Bennardo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café by M. Bennardo (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2022) is set in a future where humanity has uploaded itself to a virtual reality where people spend their time experiencing a variety of simulations:

Closing his eyes, Felix took a sip of the tea, held it in his mouth, and felt its warmth diffuse through his sinuses. It was an incredible detail, just like every other detail in the place. The feeling of physical presence, of reality, of existential weight. He could not deny that the Trainview Café was utterly unlike any other simulation program he had experienced in the decades since he had left his own human body behind. But all the same, Felix couldn’t see what all of these finely turned details added up to. What was the point, except to remind him of what he no longer was?
Slowly, Felix inverted the paper cup over the edge of the platform. Steam rose hissing as the remaining tea splattered onto the gravel below, staining it dark gray. He squashed the paper cup and threw it down onto the tracks, wondering how much longer he had to wait before he would be disconnected. He vaguely recalled that the program had charged him for forty-eight minutes. It was an unusual increment of time, but it had been the only one available. And it had been expensive, too: more expensive than twelve hours in most other high-end simulations. Yet, here he was, only twenty minutes in and already bored.  p. 118

Felix eventually becomes so bored that he goes down to the tracks and lies there, waiting for the next train to come—but, before this can happen, he is asked by a woman to move. She adds that his behaviour is spoiling the simulation for everyone else and, if he doesn’t do as he is told, she will disconnect him.
Felix gets back on to the platform and ends up having a conversation with the woman, Nancy, who tries to explain to him that the simulation is not event driven but is dedicated to detail. She then takes him to see goldfinches at a birdfeeder, explaining that the birds are rendered at close to cellular level, never repeating themselves or looping as would be the case in other simulations (“Practically speaking, at every level above the size of a cell, they are real birds”). Felix doesn’t get it, but the challenge of trying to understand what other visitors are getting from the simulation breaks through the ennui he has recently been experiencing (something highlighted when he revisits the Blue Glacier climbing simulation, an experience that was thrilling the first time he made the ascent but has now lost its attraction).
Felix subsequently makes another visit to the Train Station simulation, and once again upsets the people there by banging on the window and frightening the goldfinches away. Then, on his next trip, he arranges to meet Nancy, and they have a long back and forth conversation about the simulation and the philosophy behind it. Nancy suggests that, if he wants to spend more time there, he could become an admin. Felix declines. Then Nancy offers to show him one of the hacks that she and the other admins have been working on—the ability to get on an outbound train and stay there all night until they return to the train station the next day (this enables the users to permanently stay in the simulation, which would otherwise be a very expensive proposition due to the processing power required).
There are shortcomings to this hack, however, as Felix finds out when they both set off on the “Night Train” and he is told to close his eyes and keep them closed. When he does, Felix experiences the motion and sound of the train, but (spoiler) he is unable to just lie there and enjoy the limited experience and, when he eventually opens his eyes, Felix finds himself in an unsettling low-resolution world of lines and unfilled spaces, an image that reveals the “endless nightmare” that he and (I think) all uploaded humans are trapped in.
This is a slickly told story—Bennardo has a concise and transparent style—and the concept is pretty neat. That said, I don’t think the ending is as good as the rest of it, possibly because it doesn’t clearly make its point. (Is this his personal nightmare or one for humanity? Do people really desire thrills or normal life?) Not bad at all, though, and I’ll be interested to see more work from this writer.
*** (Good). 6,950 words. Story link.

Glitch by Alex Irvine

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Glitch by Alex Irvine (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with Kyle waking up in a medical facility and realising that he has been “recompiled” (uploaded) into a new body (he notes a missing tattoo, unpierced ears). His partner Shari tells him that he was killed in a terrorist bomb blast and that there has been a glitch in his persona upload (there are unconvincing explanations about why they have had to delete his backup and so cannot repeat the process). Then, when Kyle later remembers the attack from the bomber’s perspective, he realises that part of the terrorist’s persona has also been uploaded into his new body:

An image drifted through his head, smeary and fleeting. A toddler on the bricks of Monument Square, spilling out of a baby backpack. Eyes closed, mouth open, dust in pale streaks on his skin and in the black springs of his hair. An adult’s arm still twisted through one strap of the backpack. Blood dark on the bricks.
One more maggot won’t grow up to be a roach.
Kyle twitched and his eyes snapped into focus. God, what kind of a person—
The thought had come from inside his mind.
He leaned his elbows on the porch railing and rested his face in his hands. Imagine dying, he thought, and that’s one of your last thoughts . . . and now it’s one of my memories. Because he did remember it, and to his shame a part of him had felt a visceral satisfaction. That was the other person.
Brian. That was his name. Another neural pathway knitting itself into the gooey matrix that made Kyle Brooks who he was, and who he would be. Brian.
“You’re a fucking asshole racist, Brian,” Kyle said into his hands. “Sooner you’re gone, overwritten, forgotten, whatever . . . sooner the better. I hope nobody recompiles you.”  p. 19

This idea of being trapped inside your own head with a racist terrorist is quite a promising one (in a chilling way) and, for the first part of the story, it is reasonably well handled—we get further racist outbursts from Brian, and memories of bomb-making with his wife Marie, etc. (that said, his character is never really developed much beyond a sanitised version of a stereotypical white supremacist villain1). Then the Feds turn up to question Kyle, suspecting that he has some or all of Brian’s persona in him; they tell him that if they find out that is the case, they will (by some legal hand-wavium) arrest him.
Kyle then goes to see Abdi, a Somali business contact and hacker, who agrees to track down the source of the hack that corrupted Kyle’s persona backup (Kyle figures that if he can find out more about the bomber he can make a deal with the Feds). Then a ticking clock is introduced when Kyle learns that the Feds have an arrest warrant for him, and the tempo speeds up further when Kyle sees a second bomb in one of Brian’s memories.
The rest of the story sees Kyle and three of Abdi’s cog swapping friends (body-swappers) run around (directed by Abdi’s magical hacker skills) looking for the bomb and, in one sequence, Kyle cogswaps with a transgender woman and goes to a club looking for a contact of Brian’s. There are further convenient memory reveals from Brian which move the plot forward when Abdi’s computer isn’t doing so.
The action draws to a conclusion when (spoiler) Kyle finds the bomb and the real Brian at a house Abdi has located from his computer searches. Brian beats up Kyle and injures him, but Kyle is rescued by Chantel from the house fire Brian starts afterwards. Then Kyle, Chantel and another cogswapper have to chase Brian to a fairground where Kyle finds the bomb under a school bus. Then Brian finds Kyle, and Kyle has to deal with Brian, the bomb and (of course!) his own inherent racism:

Over the loudspeaker, Kyle heard a voice instructing fairgoers to please exit to the parking lots in a calm and orderly fashion. He unzipped the backpack, exposing the explosive charge. Through the fog of agony, the Brian in his head tried to stop him, but Kyle was in charge now. You’re just an ugly part of me that already existed, he thought. And because I died, you got a name. Once I accepted that, I understood how weak you are.
you’re not so different, I fit right in
Kyle’s heel gouged a furrow in the ground as Brian dragged him all the way out.
As he emerged into the light again, he remembered Marie’s hands. He remembered exactly what they had done. Anyone pulls the red wires, boom.
He heard both Brians at once. No no no don’t—
He pulled the red wires.  p. 48

Kyle awakens in a new body, and sees Shari and Abdi (who has edited out Brian from the new persona backup that he has conveniently been running for Kyle since earlier in the story). Kyle has no recollection of anything that has happened since the original bombing.
This story starts with a neat idea but it is one that is sloppily executed (how did Brian’s persona get mixed up with Kyle’s; why are there such stupid laws surrounding the backup technology and responsibility for criminal acts, etc.). Much worse is the second part of the story, which devolves into a sub-Hollywood cyberpunk thriller with good guys and bad guys. I lost interest halfway through.2
* (Mediocre). 21,600 words. Story link.

1. Stephen King does a much better job of putting his readers in the heads of genuinely unpleasant characters, and you can’t help but think that if he wrote this story that Brian would have been portrayed in a considerably more realistic way. In particular, the absence of the n-word in a story that is about a racist terrorist shows the extent to which the author or editor or publishers (or all of them) are self-censoring. Now, I can understand that any one, or maybe all, of the above may not want to use language like that in their work or magazine (and I’m not particularly keen on having to read it). But, if that is the case, I’d suggest that you may want to avoid using racist characters like this as convenient stereotypical villains, because all you are doing is presenting a filtered and unrealistic version of such people.

2. I think Jim Harris may have lost interest before I did: he wrote a long blog post listing all the suspension-of-disbelief problems he had with the story. I note that he mentions that Irvine is a comic book writer: I should have picked up on that from the mindless action in the second half, if not from the poor conceptualisation in the first.