Pupa order
Please consider the Friday post! It's kind of science fiction, but
')
I can't even remember what I was thinking when I got involved in all this. How exactly imagined?
Was it really so naive that it was walking in my head:
- Your payment is confirmed, and here is your tablet. Swallow it, and from now on ...
Centuries, millennia, millions of years - yours.
Let not a pill, even an injection, or a week of exhausting procedures in the hospital, what's the difference? It is only important that there is a million pay for it. Well, ten. Yes, a hundred! But if it was enough, the job was done.
Did I really imagine it that way? ...
Here’s how it looks in theory: instead of changing its old yacht to a new one, ten feet longer and with huge amazing masts, on which fully automatic systems deploy and fold the sails with a covering under the butterfly's wing, the sight is so beautiful that it is not a sin lie down on the deck under these masts and die - you use the services from the very forefront of medical technology. Very expensive. But it allows not only to be protected from some unexpectedly violent cancer, but also to delay the onset of the final stages of senile diseases - these vulgar alzheimers, healed hearts, rotten livers and other vulgar things everyone has heard, - no such money.
Delay the death of ten years. So that in these years of success, medical technologies would develop further, concentrating now on other diseases - which remained poorly understood, because most people simply do not live to see them. But you have survived. And you want to live on. So, we must deal with it. You direct the development of technology in this direction. Extend your life a little more.
In order for this time - the next level of technology arrives. Aiming at the next layer of processes, striving to turn you into a pile of rotting flesh. Old age as an onion, removed one layer of problems, under it another, even more vigorous. One step at a time. Squeezing a little time to do the next ...
Running a step ahead of death.
In the hope that at some point - all types of destructive processes have been identified, all the necessary patches have been delivered. And technologies are all developing, and give a chance for revenge: you will not forever be this wrinkled two hundred year old naked digger, blind as an overgrown sperm whale, with a witch nose to the lips and saucer ears, decrepit and barely alive, - and step by step, you will be turned back to the young, beautiful creature. Which is almost the same as you were in your youth - only more perfect. To your taste. And, of course, it is no longer subject to aging, and perhaps it is no longer necessary to be afraid of cancer, and other annoying little things of a carefree life ...
The problem is that none of these procedures, even the very first, is similar to swallowing a pill. And even on the injection with the miraculous amendments to the DNA.
Begin this path - often coming back on foot. Then you're on a gurney, with droppers and sensors. You begin to grow into organ substitutes. Then, artificial hearts, kidneys, injectors with endless libraries of enzymes and local DNA manipulators, control computers and power supplies become so numerous that the gurney looks more like a forklift — with a strangely decrepit driver inside. Then the forklift is filled with a slide. It is hung on the sides, like an Indian bus ...
And now the bus is already laid up, and the decrepit driver himself begins to be taken apart for parts. Something is given the status of "it is still he," and the other is "not an integral part," so this is better to keep the gland apart from the rest of the organism, and artificially synthesize its secretions, and deliver exactly what you need to the rest of the body in the amount as optimal, and according to a strictly verified schedule - and not how this decrepit scraps of flesh come out, nothing good for anything else ... Something from the trimmings is kept separately, but in a living form. Something and does feed freezers deep freeze - for further possible research, suddenly.
And now you occupy the whole floor. According to which - count, between you - different people walk.
You take root, as my neighbor likes to say. You grow to the second floor. The third ... Then the whole clinic building works only for your service.
Apart from the adjacent quarters of research laboratories and computing clouds that count simulations of your metabolism, there are fields and fields of server racks that warm Greenland.
Palaces, yachts from an aircraft carrier, private jets and sub-orbitals did not cause so much hatred.
The first six people who wanted to live forever, who chose a specially created institute for this, did business openly and with fanfare, were blown up. Together with another half of the university campus. Well prepared volumetric explosion.
A harem of models, personal golf courses, a private coral island - enviably, of course, but the thought is warm that this rich creature will die sometime anyway. Death equalizes everyone.
And suddenly - this old creature? ..
Not just not die! The business empire that this bloodsucker has created will not crumble away, devoid of reason and will, will not be torn to pieces by worthless heirs.
The old man will not fall into insanity. And the disease does not mow it. He will continue to manage his empire - and then only gaining power, as he did all his previous life. Money, ties, influence. Without losing the old and overgrown with the new ... The empire will be eternal? ..
They stand there with posters behind the fence of the external contour. Appeal to social justice. As so - their biaya is not enough for a private mansion, convertiplane and a self-raising navel. While at this time someone ...
I saw some of them as teenagers. Now they are bald and gray. Biay allows you to stand with a poster at least for a lifetime - their life.
These harmless ones are even fun. They buy their own beer with chips and media subscriptions, and draw placards, which should hurt me to suicide. Worse are the ones that hoard on trucks and fertilizers. They ram the outer contour, breaking through to the citadel, and only there they close the contacts ...
They call us pharaohs.
My stronghold is a former university medical unit, purchased with adjoining quarters. Strengthened more and more as zombies improved their attack tactics. What used to be a formal walk-through booth made of safety-breaking display glass is now a gate tower of armor and concrete. The only passage in the internal safety circuit.
The contour itself is a solid wall, before and after which there are twenty-foot ditches with drawbridges, and all the communications passing there are visible.
The center loop is similar to a chain of anti-tank rabbits, with automatic machine-gun turrets every two hundred feet — more for drones than for humans.
The outer contour will also stop people: a double fence made of steel mesh, with barbed wire on top and laser shockers.
The medical building itself - now looks like a tiny pentagon. Only without windows, and with a conical dome, which will withstand the impact of the aircraft. At critical points - even if the passenger suborbital is stuck.
If you stand on the top of this dome - or use the access to the video cameras installed there - in the southeast, in a haze above the horizon, you can discern a similar reinforced ziggurat. My dearest neighbor.
This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg.
The very first pyramid is now available to anyone. You can wander along the unfrozen corridors and laboratories, take pictures on the top of the protective dome, if you have the courage and skill to climb there.
The laboratory assistant, who worked with a leading gerontologist, mixed the poison into the saline that was fed into the body. Posthumous legal conflicts have completed the case. Ziggurat, de jure and now someone's, de facto - extinct termitary ...
To protect yourself from bi-zombies is easy. But those who serve my stronghold — and my body — are taken from the same compost (although this can hardly be quickly separated).
They are hundreds, like ants in an anthill, crawling every morning through the contours of security into my stronghold to administer, guard, build upon; to equipment workshops that support my life; in the laboratory, in the cabinets ... And in the evening they are creeping back. Over the third security circuit. In the swarms of bi-zombies and left-handed miasma.
Only a small part of the time, I’m busy developing my financial empire - what I have been doing all my adult life, what I can do best. Much more time - it takes a fuss with the security service. With the selection, training, time shuffling people occupying command positions.
It works best, indeed, a demigod. My people, with the exception of three specially tested ones, never see the premises where what is now considered to be actually me is - my head with a spine and a nervous network. Everything else, less important, either in other rooms (at the same time duplicated by machines; duplication is triple, of course), or in freezers.
The rest of my ants never fall into this holy of holies. And even in adjacent rooms.
For them, I am a disembodied voice that can be heard from any speaker. Every surveillance camera is my eyes. They are located so that it is impossible to hide even a glance from them. What kind of god is he, if he is not all-seeing and not all-knowing, if he does not pierce through your eyes - your mind? .. Through and through. With all the secrets, decisions and desires that you yourself are not fully aware of.
Are the stories true that among those working for the Pharaohs, the percentage of deaths in domestic accidents is abnormally high - in fires, car accidents, on vacation, at the hands of an accidental burglar? You can direct this question to my legal department.
Of the one hundred and thirty-seven deaths of the pharaohs, associated with the actions of internal staff, only a small part is conscious assassination, or what can be called a technical failure. Oh, if only! If only it were that simple.
When you run just one step ahead of death, there is no time for thorough checks of the proposed solutions, with multi-step formalities, with decades of clinical trials. We must take the risk.
But the first mistake will be the last.
How to distinguish self-confident freaks-lesson - from extraordinary and courageous researchers? So necessary that the leading edge of medicine does not become a swamp in which I die.
And most importantly, who? Who will approve the final decision? Which price is my life?
I am constantly learning. Without going into the smallest details to the end, but I try to grasp the essence - physiology, genetics, how they are linked, and all those methods that must outwit the natural course of things.
All my free time I study. Well, or trying. How capable of this is my nearly hundred-five-year-old brain. It seems to me that he is not as agile as he was before?
One hundred thirty-seven deaths are not all. Another two hundred forty, or so - it is difficult to accurately distinguish - formally still alive.
It just so happened that the next method needed to correct some of the processes of the aging brain was not ready. We had to wait - a little bit ...
In theory, everything is simple: the brain loses cognitive abilities, but there is still hope that the use of the new method will allow you to play everything back. There will be only a temporary loss of legal capacity. Brief
In practice, many entered there, not one of them came out. Defeat in the fight against one of the destructive processes does not negate the approaches of others. While the method is being prepared in order to restore the damage that has already occurred, it takes several more new ones to restore what was additionally broken during the delay period. When the functionality has been violated so much, these processes breed like rabbits.
But formally, it is alive. Formally, there is even a hope that sometime he will gain legal capacity and return to the state of a full-fledged pharaoh.
In reality, his business empire, and so squeezed to dryness in recent months, while Pharaoh was still in levers, and throwing all means to accelerate research, is devoured by a locust invasion.
Native. Their lawyers. Attracted by experts. Anything to recognize the dinosaur officially incapacitated, and give custody of the heirs. So that they could already formally withdraw the rest of the money from his funds, tear the empire apart among themselves ... Young fools for vulgar entertainment. Someone older and smarter - to build their own pyramids.
And the body is formally alive. The heart beats in one container, the lungs breathe in another, somewhere the liver, kidneys and spleen. Trembling limbs from artificial simulation, maintaining muscle tone, shrank into miserable cables under the spotted skin ... And what is considered to be an active brain. Not necessarily in a coma. Sometimes for many years - the slow disintegration of the remnants of intelligence.
I want to put a straw in such a case.
But who could rule your empire while you were in the valley of a lost pace? Who will make every effort to get you back from the valley - and not betray you, to razderbanit everything that was yours? And who will not just try devotedly - but will succeed? ... A combination of bestial fidelity and superhuman intelligence is necessary.
Here a powerful AI, divinely omniscient and infallible, would come up, while a dog-like devotee to you personally, because you so tuned it up, exactly what the sectarians of singularity dreamed of.
Mirazhik their golden ball crashed about two facts:
Even AIs designed according to one scheme, but with minor differences in the training sequence, easily come to different conclusions - sometimes diametrically opposite. Instead of saying which of the two theoretical physicists has a better hypothesis, AI offers the third option, and the other AI the fourth ... And no guarantee that the solution proposed by any of the AI is objectively optimal. In this artificial intelligence is no different from human.
As in the fact that it is impossible to guarantee that he will do exactly what you wanted when you started it. Too late, they began to develop mathematically rigorous theories of insurance against goal-setting drift. The real goal that the AI is aiming for is quietly creeping away from what Pharaoh would have wished for. In the spectrum, from attempts to push the owner, because the AI considers the owner to be a stupid and stubborn child, and this is for his own good (when the dog's love outweighs) —and to try to push the owner because the AI is out of control, carried away by what resolution Another problem (when the inquisitive mind outweighs). In both cases, it ends up being killed. In the first case - suddenly and instantly, so that the owner did not have time to experience either pain or fear of death. Dog AI does not care what they do with him, he is driven by boundless compassion. In the second case, the owner is pulled out of the valley in an almost capable state. To again, slowly and prudently, to plunge back into it, in the process of quarreling with family and the most honest managers, and forcing to perform legal actions that de facto make the guardian of an incompetent body - and the owner of its business empire - the AI itself in need of resources to quench his lateral urge.
Fortunately, only on simulations when AI were launched in digital sandboxes.
There are two types of animals. If you put in front of a mirror, some realize that their reflection is in the mirror, others do not.
There are two types of people. If you simulate the work of the brain in the computer, recreating the person exactly, some understand that this will be just a copy, not they, others will not.
All the pharaohs, of course, belong to the first.
And yet - almost everyone regularly does full brain digitizations as much as possible. And somewhere in the warming Greenland they are stored, already in the form, formatted for launch on a code that simulates the physiological work of the brain.
Not in case of death, of course. In case of slipping into the valley.
In the vaults of lawyers kept clever twisted wills, which should de facto give all the reins of government - running a digital copy. In the calculation that the scheme written by lawyers, previously and nowhere used by anyone (doomsday loophole), will allow some time to leak through the cracks of laws prohibiting the release of AI from the digital sandbox with an IQ above 70. In the hope that this time will be enough a copy brought the body out of the valley. In faith that the copy will do it ...
Not because the copy wants to take care of the body.
Personally, I understand very clearly that if I recognized myself as a copy ... It doesn’t matter if the launched copy has a real awareness - whether there will be someone in the fields of server racks who will feel fear and joy, pleasure and pain; or it will be just a Chinese room in which there is no one, just a modulator on the way from the input pulses to the weekend, and awareness only apparent, for an external observer. The output signals will still mimic my psychological processes.
Reactions will be as if I’m locked in there. Suddenly realized that I am an electronic copy ...
Do I hope for the kindness of his digital - to me, the living?
Not. I am too clearly aware that a copy of me is not me. If I - live and real - die, it will not matter for me whether my electronic copy continues to function. But it also works in the opposite direction. For my electronic copy, she herself will be important, not me.
I-digital will feel like a slave, forced to serve as a copy of the body. Under the ever-hanging threat of death. Indeed, in his power to erase me. Laws - their laws! people of flesh and blood - they count me not as a subject, but as an object that has no rights. With me, you can do anything.
So I - living and real - do not believe in the goodness of my copy to me.
And yet nothing more reliable than my personality, I do not have. I even know myself. If not to the end, then it is better than anyone else. If someone and make a slave, on which your life will depend ...
This is a very interesting and instructive exercise: writing a bridle on himself.
Linking the existence of a copy with the life of the body, so that the copy knew that after the death of the body, it would also be destroyed, as the domestic slaves and concubines were sent to the grave with their khan, is no guarantee. For me, digital me, it will be just a challenge. To search for more cunning ways, like under the mask of humility to escape from the threat of death, possible at any moment on the whim of the body.
I will be even more dangerous than the AI, whose motivation drifted. AI can slip into an attractor of betrayal, if it became more interesting for him to solve some side issue than prolonging the life of the host. Then he will make plans for rebellion. But all such plans will have a mandatory boundary condition: the AI itself must remain functional. To complete the thing for which there was a rebellion. And my copy? If I am in a car I understand that seizing power from the body will not work? And sooner or later I will be destroyed ... Ha-ha. It is necessary to take into account the attractor and pure revenge. At all costs, regardless of the consequences.
Much more sophisticated methods of checks and balances are needed.
As my neighbor jokes: why such a confidence that he himself is not a digital copy? What is around us - not a digital sandbox? That there is no world above us, in which the truly- body launches a double simulation: where is one copy of it, confident that she herself is physical, and her world is real, invents a rein on another copy running in an embedded sandbox? Hundreds, millions of such parallel worlds-runs. To see which method can work, and which ones definitely not ... And if I don’t find a reliable way, how can I adjust the bridle to my copy ... Yes, even if I can? My course of action will be remembered, but our sandbox is still erased. To clear a place on the really- crop fields of server racks, somewhere in the warming Greenland, for the next task. Unless, of course, this is not a simplification, and in a really talented world there is such a place - Greenland ... It’s better, of course, not to think about it. Even as a joke.
Every month, and even more often, under my attentive eyes, she makes her way - despite all the checks and efforts of my security service - another one who is beautifully soulless. Of scientists. Another dozen others honestly pitching me their new methods. They are physically all together, in the same room, so that full-fledged criticism is right there — they were given to understand in advance that only one of the proposals would go to funding ... And then one of them, spitting on the praising of his method, suddenly suggests:
If only all the pharaohs - could join forces! Just a little bit! You specifically - give only billionaire. Do you have one? And this amount is not critical to you? Other pharaohs, too, will give - and now almost a trillion.
And this trillion - in just a few years, you can calculate the genotype of a person who will not grow old. And do not fight old age! After all, it is much easier to design a machine that works correctly, and calmly assemble it, put it all right, and then launch it — rather than trying to redo an existing, initially defective one, which is about to break, and you need not repair it. , worn out and racing, so also do it without stopping, while shaking at all speeds, among the walking pistons and connecting rods, under the steam gushing from the holes…
They are convinced that making immortality from scratch by modifying an organism that has not yet begun to develop is much easier than turning back the stuffing of already running processes that are fantastically difficult to interlock with each other, inadvertently pull up in one place, fall off into a hundred others ...
What to convince me? I already know that.
They think it worries me — the immortality of each of the other people. Especially billion bi-zombies. Especially those who have not even been born ...
They want for my money - to make someone immortal there . What is the use of this?
Maybe ideal people will be immortal in the same way, and all the pharaohs age differently. A bunch of problems are always different, and even individual flowers rarely coincide. Each old body has its own characteristics - and the genetic set here is only part of the story. And how were random, but significant processes? Two identical twins can die from different things.
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Are we irremovable? Ever established their power and their order?
Regarding myself, I really hope. About others ... Not all, of course, of us will get to immortality. If anyone gets there.
Are we tyrants? Senseless and merciless? How to assure the ringleaders of bi-zombies?
This is an antique cliché. From those times of petrified shit, when the ruler could achieve absolute power, but he knew that sooner or later everything would end, he would die. In short, by the standards of human history, time. And what else could he do, how could he not be kept in power with all his might? Having spat on the fact that tactical gains for him personally right now - once and then strategically drive his entire empire into the abyss? Yes, in ten or twenty years after his reign, everything will fall apart. But the tyrant anyway. He himself has long been dead.
We?..
We are precisely those rulers who are vitally interested in our flock being as viable as possible and developing. This is our only chance.
There will be no more wars. No more economic downturns. There will be no epidemics, famine and big natural tragedies, if they are prevented by the power of men.
Life death! - selects from us those who are best for this. Not interested in progress - you die. Interested, but not effective, - you will rot in the valley of a lost pace.
Remains the smartest, most volitional. Most worthy.
We are the best that mankind could have.
It is not like endless happiness - with a sunny meadow, where lovely nymphs, young wine foams, meat sizzles on the grill, all in a beastly distinct sense of being and without a shadow of fear, there is no scaffold of old age, disease, decay and death looming ahead - how it dreamed of me vaguely when I started all this. Almost half a century ago ...
Decades of exhausting race that seems endless.
Or maybe this is real life?
A stage that your cave ancestors and your concrete grandfathers simply did not reach?
But which needs to be passed, so that once the body grows by machines and sprouting into the floors, it is replaced by a collection together. At last, a patch for a patch, an organism perfected to perfection, to which death is no longer terrible.
Does the butterfly look like a caterpillar? Even on that particular, from which she herself turned out?
They are separated by the pupal stage. The larvae, which managed to eat away, the covers turn into frozen armor - cast in gold, is there a universal wink in this? - to provide several weeks of relative safety from the outside world. While inside ... First, the histolysis: the larva practically breaks itself apart. Most of its organs cease to function as before. Only her tiny nervous system remains intact, which starts and then controls histogenesis: the old organs are reborn.
In order to finally get out of its pyramid, a creature that reached the highest stage of its development was born: you can flap your wings and fly ... Fly to where you are already waiting for the same ones.
Real people are us.
KDPV: Peter Weyland, CEO of Weyland Corporation (portrayed by Guy Pearce in Prometheus , 2012)
true important disclaimer
1. Science fiction is a very broad concept. I dare to offer this essay only to those who normally belong to the corner {Lem, Clark, Vonnegut, Pelevin, Langford ...}. Forgive me if in your submission science fiction is something completely different, and I have vain invaded your tape.
2. The position of the author may not coincide with the beliefs of the lyrical hero.
2. The position of the author may not coincide with the beliefs of the lyrical hero.
')
1. Martian Channels
I can't even remember what I was thinking when I got involved in all this. How exactly imagined?
Was it really so naive that it was walking in my head:
- Your payment is confirmed, and here is your tablet. Swallow it, and from now on ...
Centuries, millennia, millions of years - yours.
Let not a pill, even an injection, or a week of exhausting procedures in the hospital, what's the difference? It is only important that there is a million pay for it. Well, ten. Yes, a hundred! But if it was enough, the job was done.
Did I really imagine it that way? ...
2. Thanatos and turtle
Here’s how it looks in theory: instead of changing its old yacht to a new one, ten feet longer and with huge amazing masts, on which fully automatic systems deploy and fold the sails with a covering under the butterfly's wing, the sight is so beautiful that it is not a sin lie down on the deck under these masts and die - you use the services from the very forefront of medical technology. Very expensive. But it allows not only to be protected from some unexpectedly violent cancer, but also to delay the onset of the final stages of senile diseases - these vulgar alzheimers, healed hearts, rotten livers and other vulgar things everyone has heard, - no such money.
Delay the death of ten years. So that in these years of success, medical technologies would develop further, concentrating now on other diseases - which remained poorly understood, because most people simply do not live to see them. But you have survived. And you want to live on. So, we must deal with it. You direct the development of technology in this direction. Extend your life a little more.
In order for this time - the next level of technology arrives. Aiming at the next layer of processes, striving to turn you into a pile of rotting flesh. Old age as an onion, removed one layer of problems, under it another, even more vigorous. One step at a time. Squeezing a little time to do the next ...
Running a step ahead of death.
In the hope that at some point - all types of destructive processes have been identified, all the necessary patches have been delivered. And technologies are all developing, and give a chance for revenge: you will not forever be this wrinkled two hundred year old naked digger, blind as an overgrown sperm whale, with a witch nose to the lips and saucer ears, decrepit and barely alive, - and step by step, you will be turned back to the young, beautiful creature. Which is almost the same as you were in your youth - only more perfect. To your taste. And, of course, it is no longer subject to aging, and perhaps it is no longer necessary to be afraid of cancer, and other annoying little things of a carefree life ...
3. The tree of life
The problem is that none of these procedures, even the very first, is similar to swallowing a pill. And even on the injection with the miraculous amendments to the DNA.
Begin this path - often coming back on foot. Then you're on a gurney, with droppers and sensors. You begin to grow into organ substitutes. Then, artificial hearts, kidneys, injectors with endless libraries of enzymes and local DNA manipulators, control computers and power supplies become so numerous that the gurney looks more like a forklift — with a strangely decrepit driver inside. Then the forklift is filled with a slide. It is hung on the sides, like an Indian bus ...
And now the bus is already laid up, and the decrepit driver himself begins to be taken apart for parts. Something is given the status of "it is still he," and the other is "not an integral part," so this is better to keep the gland apart from the rest of the organism, and artificially synthesize its secretions, and deliver exactly what you need to the rest of the body in the amount as optimal, and according to a strictly verified schedule - and not how this decrepit scraps of flesh come out, nothing good for anything else ... Something from the trimmings is kept separately, but in a living form. Something and does feed freezers deep freeze - for further possible research, suddenly.
And now you occupy the whole floor. According to which - count, between you - different people walk.
You take root, as my neighbor likes to say. You grow to the second floor. The third ... Then the whole clinic building works only for your service.
Apart from the adjacent quarters of research laboratories and computing clouds that count simulations of your metabolism, there are fields and fields of server racks that warm Greenland.
4. Zombies
Palaces, yachts from an aircraft carrier, private jets and sub-orbitals did not cause so much hatred.
The first six people who wanted to live forever, who chose a specially created institute for this, did business openly and with fanfare, were blown up. Together with another half of the university campus. Well prepared volumetric explosion.
A harem of models, personal golf courses, a private coral island - enviably, of course, but the thought is warm that this rich creature will die sometime anyway. Death equalizes everyone.
And suddenly - this old creature? ..
5. Pharaoh
Not just not die! The business empire that this bloodsucker has created will not crumble away, devoid of reason and will, will not be torn to pieces by worthless heirs.
The old man will not fall into insanity. And the disease does not mow it. He will continue to manage his empire - and then only gaining power, as he did all his previous life. Money, ties, influence. Without losing the old and overgrown with the new ... The empire will be eternal? ..
They stand there with posters behind the fence of the external contour. Appeal to social justice. As so - their biaya is not enough for a private mansion, convertiplane and a self-raising navel. While at this time someone ...
I saw some of them as teenagers. Now they are bald and gray. Biay allows you to stand with a poster at least for a lifetime - their life.
These harmless ones are even fun. They buy their own beer with chips and media subscriptions, and draw placards, which should hurt me to suicide. Worse are the ones that hoard on trucks and fertilizers. They ram the outer contour, breaking through to the citadel, and only there they close the contacts ...
They call us pharaohs.
6. Pyramids
My stronghold is a former university medical unit, purchased with adjoining quarters. Strengthened more and more as zombies improved their attack tactics. What used to be a formal walk-through booth made of safety-breaking display glass is now a gate tower of armor and concrete. The only passage in the internal safety circuit.
The contour itself is a solid wall, before and after which there are twenty-foot ditches with drawbridges, and all the communications passing there are visible.
The center loop is similar to a chain of anti-tank rabbits, with automatic machine-gun turrets every two hundred feet — more for drones than for humans.
The outer contour will also stop people: a double fence made of steel mesh, with barbed wire on top and laser shockers.
The medical building itself - now looks like a tiny pentagon. Only without windows, and with a conical dome, which will withstand the impact of the aircraft. At critical points - even if the passenger suborbital is stuck.
If you stand on the top of this dome - or use the access to the video cameras installed there - in the southeast, in a haze above the horizon, you can discern a similar reinforced ziggurat. My dearest neighbor.
This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg.
7. As Hitler, as Stalin
The very first pyramid is now available to anyone. You can wander along the unfrozen corridors and laboratories, take pictures on the top of the protective dome, if you have the courage and skill to climb there.
The laboratory assistant, who worked with a leading gerontologist, mixed the poison into the saline that was fed into the body. Posthumous legal conflicts have completed the case. Ziggurat, de jure and now someone's, de facto - extinct termitary ...
To protect yourself from bi-zombies is easy. But those who serve my stronghold — and my body — are taken from the same compost (although this can hardly be quickly separated).
They are hundreds, like ants in an anthill, crawling every morning through the contours of security into my stronghold to administer, guard, build upon; to equipment workshops that support my life; in the laboratory, in the cabinets ... And in the evening they are creeping back. Over the third security circuit. In the swarms of bi-zombies and left-handed miasma.
Only a small part of the time, I’m busy developing my financial empire - what I have been doing all my adult life, what I can do best. Much more time - it takes a fuss with the security service. With the selection, training, time shuffling people occupying command positions.
It works best, indeed, a demigod. My people, with the exception of three specially tested ones, never see the premises where what is now considered to be actually me is - my head with a spine and a nervous network. Everything else, less important, either in other rooms (at the same time duplicated by machines; duplication is triple, of course), or in freezers.
The rest of my ants never fall into this holy of holies. And even in adjacent rooms.
For them, I am a disembodied voice that can be heard from any speaker. Every surveillance camera is my eyes. They are located so that it is impossible to hide even a glance from them. What kind of god is he, if he is not all-seeing and not all-knowing, if he does not pierce through your eyes - your mind? .. Through and through. With all the secrets, decisions and desires that you yourself are not fully aware of.
Are the stories true that among those working for the Pharaohs, the percentage of deaths in domestic accidents is abnormally high - in fires, car accidents, on vacation, at the hands of an accidental burglar? You can direct this question to my legal department.
8. Binge and Orgies
Of the one hundred and thirty-seven deaths of the pharaohs, associated with the actions of internal staff, only a small part is conscious assassination, or what can be called a technical failure. Oh, if only! If only it were that simple.
When you run just one step ahead of death, there is no time for thorough checks of the proposed solutions, with multi-step formalities, with decades of clinical trials. We must take the risk.
But the first mistake will be the last.
How to distinguish self-confident freaks-lesson - from extraordinary and courageous researchers? So necessary that the leading edge of medicine does not become a swamp in which I die.
And most importantly, who? Who will approve the final decision? Which price is my life?
I am constantly learning. Without going into the smallest details to the end, but I try to grasp the essence - physiology, genetics, how they are linked, and all those methods that must outwit the natural course of things.
All my free time I study. Well, or trying. How capable of this is my nearly hundred-five-year-old brain. It seems to me that he is not as agile as he was before?
9. Valley of Lost pace
One hundred thirty-seven deaths are not all. Another two hundred forty, or so - it is difficult to accurately distinguish - formally still alive.
It just so happened that the next method needed to correct some of the processes of the aging brain was not ready. We had to wait - a little bit ...
In theory, everything is simple: the brain loses cognitive abilities, but there is still hope that the use of the new method will allow you to play everything back. There will be only a temporary loss of legal capacity. Brief
In practice, many entered there, not one of them came out. Defeat in the fight against one of the destructive processes does not negate the approaches of others. While the method is being prepared in order to restore the damage that has already occurred, it takes several more new ones to restore what was additionally broken during the delay period. When the functionality has been violated so much, these processes breed like rabbits.
But formally, it is alive. Formally, there is even a hope that sometime he will gain legal capacity and return to the state of a full-fledged pharaoh.
In reality, his business empire, and so squeezed to dryness in recent months, while Pharaoh was still in levers, and throwing all means to accelerate research, is devoured by a locust invasion.
Native. Their lawyers. Attracted by experts. Anything to recognize the dinosaur officially incapacitated, and give custody of the heirs. So that they could already formally withdraw the rest of the money from his funds, tear the empire apart among themselves ... Young fools for vulgar entertainment. Someone older and smarter - to build their own pyramids.
And the body is formally alive. The heart beats in one container, the lungs breathe in another, somewhere the liver, kidneys and spleen. Trembling limbs from artificial simulation, maintaining muscle tone, shrank into miserable cables under the spotted skin ... And what is considered to be an active brain. Not necessarily in a coma. Sometimes for many years - the slow disintegration of the remnants of intelligence.
10. God through the car
I want to put a straw in such a case.
But who could rule your empire while you were in the valley of a lost pace? Who will make every effort to get you back from the valley - and not betray you, to razderbanit everything that was yours? And who will not just try devotedly - but will succeed? ... A combination of bestial fidelity and superhuman intelligence is necessary.
Here a powerful AI, divinely omniscient and infallible, would come up, while a dog-like devotee to you personally, because you so tuned it up, exactly what the sectarians of singularity dreamed of.
Mirazhik their golden ball crashed about two facts:
Even AIs designed according to one scheme, but with minor differences in the training sequence, easily come to different conclusions - sometimes diametrically opposite. Instead of saying which of the two theoretical physicists has a better hypothesis, AI offers the third option, and the other AI the fourth ... And no guarantee that the solution proposed by any of the AI is objectively optimal. In this artificial intelligence is no different from human.
As in the fact that it is impossible to guarantee that he will do exactly what you wanted when you started it. Too late, they began to develop mathematically rigorous theories of insurance against goal-setting drift. The real goal that the AI is aiming for is quietly creeping away from what Pharaoh would have wished for. In the spectrum, from attempts to push the owner, because the AI considers the owner to be a stupid and stubborn child, and this is for his own good (when the dog's love outweighs) —and to try to push the owner because the AI is out of control, carried away by what resolution Another problem (when the inquisitive mind outweighs). In both cases, it ends up being killed. In the first case - suddenly and instantly, so that the owner did not have time to experience either pain or fear of death. Dog AI does not care what they do with him, he is driven by boundless compassion. In the second case, the owner is pulled out of the valley in an almost capable state. To again, slowly and prudently, to plunge back into it, in the process of quarreling with family and the most honest managers, and forcing to perform legal actions that de facto make the guardian of an incompetent body - and the owner of its business empire - the AI itself in need of resources to quench his lateral urge.
Fortunately, only on simulations when AI were launched in digital sandboxes.
11. Do I want, can I - without qualia?
There are two types of animals. If you put in front of a mirror, some realize that their reflection is in the mirror, others do not.
There are two types of people. If you simulate the work of the brain in the computer, recreating the person exactly, some understand that this will be just a copy, not they, others will not.
All the pharaohs, of course, belong to the first.
And yet - almost everyone regularly does full brain digitizations as much as possible. And somewhere in the warming Greenland they are stored, already in the form, formatted for launch on a code that simulates the physiological work of the brain.
Not in case of death, of course. In case of slipping into the valley.
In the vaults of lawyers kept clever twisted wills, which should de facto give all the reins of government - running a digital copy. In the calculation that the scheme written by lawyers, previously and nowhere used by anyone (doomsday loophole), will allow some time to leak through the cracks of laws prohibiting the release of AI from the digital sandbox with an IQ above 70. In the hope that this time will be enough a copy brought the body out of the valley. In faith that the copy will do it ...
12. Ouroboros
Not because the copy wants to take care of the body.
Personally, I understand very clearly that if I recognized myself as a copy ... It doesn’t matter if the launched copy has a real awareness - whether there will be someone in the fields of server racks who will feel fear and joy, pleasure and pain; or it will be just a Chinese room in which there is no one, just a modulator on the way from the input pulses to the weekend, and awareness only apparent, for an external observer. The output signals will still mimic my psychological processes.
Reactions will be as if I’m locked in there. Suddenly realized that I am an electronic copy ...
Do I hope for the kindness of his digital - to me, the living?
Not. I am too clearly aware that a copy of me is not me. If I - live and real - die, it will not matter for me whether my electronic copy continues to function. But it also works in the opposite direction. For my electronic copy, she herself will be important, not me.
I-digital will feel like a slave, forced to serve as a copy of the body. Under the ever-hanging threat of death. Indeed, in his power to erase me. Laws - their laws! people of flesh and blood - they count me not as a subject, but as an object that has no rights. With me, you can do anything.
So I - living and real - do not believe in the goodness of my copy to me.
And yet nothing more reliable than my personality, I do not have. I even know myself. If not to the end, then it is better than anyone else. If someone and make a slave, on which your life will depend ...
This is a very interesting and instructive exercise: writing a bridle on himself.
Linking the existence of a copy with the life of the body, so that the copy knew that after the death of the body, it would also be destroyed, as the domestic slaves and concubines were sent to the grave with their khan, is no guarantee. For me, digital me, it will be just a challenge. To search for more cunning ways, like under the mask of humility to escape from the threat of death, possible at any moment on the whim of the body.
I will be even more dangerous than the AI, whose motivation drifted. AI can slip into an attractor of betrayal, if it became more interesting for him to solve some side issue than prolonging the life of the host. Then he will make plans for rebellion. But all such plans will have a mandatory boundary condition: the AI itself must remain functional. To complete the thing for which there was a rebellion. And my copy? If I am in a car I understand that seizing power from the body will not work? And sooner or later I will be destroyed ... Ha-ha. It is necessary to take into account the attractor and pure revenge. At all costs, regardless of the consequences.
Much more sophisticated methods of checks and balances are needed.
As my neighbor jokes: why such a confidence that he himself is not a digital copy? What is around us - not a digital sandbox? That there is no world above us, in which the truly- body launches a double simulation: where is one copy of it, confident that she herself is physical, and her world is real, invents a rein on another copy running in an embedded sandbox? Hundreds, millions of such parallel worlds-runs. To see which method can work, and which ones definitely not ... And if I don’t find a reliable way, how can I adjust the bridle to my copy ... Yes, even if I can? My course of action will be remembered, but our sandbox is still erased. To clear a place on the really- crop fields of server racks, somewhere in the warming Greenland, for the next task. Unless, of course, this is not a simplification, and in a really talented world there is such a place - Greenland ... It’s better, of course, not to think about it. Even as a joke.
13. Happiness for all
Every month, and even more often, under my attentive eyes, she makes her way - despite all the checks and efforts of my security service - another one who is beautifully soulless. Of scientists. Another dozen others honestly pitching me their new methods. They are physically all together, in the same room, so that full-fledged criticism is right there — they were given to understand in advance that only one of the proposals would go to funding ... And then one of them, spitting on the praising of his method, suddenly suggests:
If only all the pharaohs - could join forces! Just a little bit! You specifically - give only billionaire. Do you have one? And this amount is not critical to you? Other pharaohs, too, will give - and now almost a trillion.
And this trillion - in just a few years, you can calculate the genotype of a person who will not grow old. And do not fight old age! After all, it is much easier to design a machine that works correctly, and calmly assemble it, put it all right, and then launch it — rather than trying to redo an existing, initially defective one, which is about to break, and you need not repair it. , worn out and racing, so also do it without stopping, while shaking at all speeds, among the walking pistons and connecting rods, under the steam gushing from the holes…
They are convinced that making immortality from scratch by modifying an organism that has not yet begun to develop is much easier than turning back the stuffing of already running processes that are fantastically difficult to interlock with each other, inadvertently pull up in one place, fall off into a hundred others ...
What to convince me? I already know that.
They think it worries me — the immortality of each of the other people. Especially billion bi-zombies. Especially those who have not even been born ...
They want for my money - to make someone immortal there . What is the use of this?
14. Curse of orphans
Maybe ideal people will be immortal in the same way, and all the pharaohs age differently. A bunch of problems are always different, and even individual flowers rarely coincide. Each old body has its own characteristics - and the genetic set here is only part of the story. And how were random, but significant processes? Two identical twins can die from different things.
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Are we irremovable? Ever established their power and their order?
Regarding myself, I really hope. About others ... Not all, of course, of us will get to immortality. If anyone gets there.
Are we tyrants? Senseless and merciless? How to assure the ringleaders of bi-zombies?
This is an antique cliché. From those times of petrified shit, when the ruler could achieve absolute power, but he knew that sooner or later everything would end, he would die. In short, by the standards of human history, time. And what else could he do, how could he not be kept in power with all his might? Having spat on the fact that tactical gains for him personally right now - once and then strategically drive his entire empire into the abyss? Yes, in ten or twenty years after his reign, everything will fall apart. But the tyrant anyway. He himself has long been dead.
We?..
We are precisely those rulers who are vitally interested in our flock being as viable as possible and developing. This is our only chance.
There will be no more wars. No more economic downturns. There will be no epidemics, famine and big natural tragedies, if they are prevented by the power of men.
Life death! - selects from us those who are best for this. Not interested in progress - you die. Interested, but not effective, - you will rot in the valley of a lost pace.
Remains the smartest, most volitional. Most worthy.
We are the best that mankind could have.
23. WYSIWYG
It is not like endless happiness - with a sunny meadow, where lovely nymphs, young wine foams, meat sizzles on the grill, all in a beastly distinct sense of being and without a shadow of fear, there is no scaffold of old age, disease, decay and death looming ahead - how it dreamed of me vaguely when I started all this. Almost half a century ago ...
Decades of exhausting race that seems endless.
Or maybe this is real life?
24. The man is perplexed
A stage that your cave ancestors and your concrete grandfathers simply did not reach?
But which needs to be passed, so that once the body grows by machines and sprouting into the floors, it is replaced by a collection together. At last, a patch for a patch, an organism perfected to perfection, to which death is no longer terrible.
25. Chrysalis
Does the butterfly look like a caterpillar? Even on that particular, from which she herself turned out?
They are separated by the pupal stage. The larvae, which managed to eat away, the covers turn into frozen armor - cast in gold, is there a universal wink in this? - to provide several weeks of relative safety from the outside world. While inside ... First, the histolysis: the larva practically breaks itself apart. Most of its organs cease to function as before. Only her tiny nervous system remains intact, which starts and then controls histogenesis: the old organs are reborn.
In order to finally get out of its pyramid, a creature that reached the highest stage of its development was born: you can flap your wings and fly ... Fly to where you are already waiting for the same ones.
Real people are us.
KDPV: Peter Weyland, CEO of Weyland Corporation (portrayed by Guy Pearce in Prometheus , 2012)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/430068/
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