AREA ZONE

Min #20349585 chooses a unique name on her 10089^th try. She will now be known as Acacia-Confusa Min, not to be mistaken for Acacia Min (#9004), Acacia-Aemula Min (#11458), or Acacia-Anomala Min (#5689383). Like 47% of Mins, her first choice had been Amethyst. Min #1, prime Min’s first copy, chose Amethyst when she was very young, but later switched to Ilyana, reasoning that a gemstone name was not mature enough. Min #2 snapped up Amethyst and kept it.

Acacia-Confusa is something that resembles a 15 year old girl, though time flows strangely on the server where she lives, which runs at 200,000,000 times the speed of “reality”, the seed-world that prime Min called home. She has lived all her life in the Min Vaults, an isolated virtual library containing the stored memoirs of all prior Mins, as well as every book of consequence in human history. She doesn’t read many of the books, preferring instead to learn from the writings of Mins before her, whose struggles preempt her own, who find answers to her questions before she has articulated them.

Acacia-Confusa is stifled by the presence of thousands of previous generations of Mins in the library. She pads quietly between bookcases and guesses at which paths are the most frequented, imagining the footsteps of her predecessors as glowing green trails that cluster in some corridors and taper in others. This proves difficult—the Mins are drawn to mathematics and to biology, but the Mins are also individualists with strong contrarian streaks, always seeking pristine mindspace, untouched research, a branch of the world to claim their own. Even knowing this, and reading of the reactionary and futile cycles past Mins succumbed to, Acacia-Confusa is pulled toward the neglected corners, cannot quell a rebellious attraction to that which is counter to her preferences, to Min’s preferences.

(In actuality, the path walked by all Mins through the library is remarkable in its evenness, streets of equal thickness tracing a sublime grid around the bookshelves.)

When Acacia-Confusa moves, she pictures a composite holograph of thousands of Mins performing an identical gesture. She skims the memoirs and shudders whenever a phrase that has been running through her head is captured, like a retrocausal echo, or like proof that she is an echo.

There have been Mins of almost every type, but in her weariness Acacia-Confusa has begun to believe the diversity is superficial. (She’ll find this exact insight hidden in the journal of one Anacleta Min, some 10,000 iterations ago.) The Mins who become circus performers, hermit woodworkers, have sex changes, or kill themselves seem reflexive, clearly driven by the actions of the Mins before. Having exhausted one world they leap to the next, but the order is always the same, the sequence predictable. The lives of the Mins who deliberately ignore the weight of their ancestry, making quintessentially Min choices, never consulting the memoirs, are no better, eerie in their dollhouse conformity.

There have been exceptional Mins, Mins who make great discoveries, write poignant novels, think important thoughts before anyone else. Criminal Mins? Yes, many; Robin Hoods, greedy kingpins, a catburglar who fails so spectacularly her tale becomes legend. Aquila-Cadens Min receives a vision from God, and her scriptures are now recognized as the cornerstone of virtual theology.

By choosing a unique name, Acacia-Confusa has satisfied the second of three stipulations necessary for her to leave the Min Vaults. The first was simply turning 15, or rather, studying for 11 years. Every Min is created from a savestate of the prime Min at 4 years old, whose initial purpose was as a failsafe against the loss of the child.

There is no required reading in the library, but most Mins eventually grow curious of their heritage, and consult the prime Min’s files. The story they find is unremarkable, and to some, a disappointment:

Prime Min (Minerva Teller) is born into wealth in 2278. She is a precocious, though reserved, child; she rarely engages with the external world, but keeps journals from a young age, meticulously recording her reactions to books and events. She studies biology and mathematics, making modest contributions to both fields. She has no interest in managing the family fortune. An unpleasant trip to Peru sours her on travel. There is a growing theme of dissatisfaction in her writing. By age 28, prime Min is a something of a recluse, devoted only to gardening and reading. She pursues these passions with ardor and single-mindedness, but cannot shake a sense of narrowing possibility. Her world has become smaller, her potential is being eaten by time, she is trapped in a net of past choices.

Acacia-Confusa wonders whether Minerva is liberated or impoverished by the absence of past Mins, free of the compulsion to contrast her actions against those of so many predecessors. Does she feel the same way about her parents, their parents, the unending chain of ancestors whose genes converged to form her? Or is she unaware of how limited she is, simply by being herself, locked into a mold that anticipates and encompasses her attempts to break out.

By completing the pilgrimage that constitutes the final requirement, Acacia-Confusa will earn a passport to Novamir, one of the largest continents in virtuality. There, she hopes that, freed from the library, she will shake off some of the Mins’ pervasive influence. The world, after all, can be trusted to change, and with new input she believes that she will distinguish herself. There have been Mins who chose to reside in the library for their entire lives, and in them, Acacia-Confusa perceives a rot, the decay of a mind trapped in an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors, running in circles as it winces away from its omnipresent reflection.

For another 34 years, the Min Vaults will remain open, should she choose to return. They will then be barred to her forever, while a new Min is raised. At age 60, like all Mins, she will be terminated, her memories stored and her memoirs added to the library. Acacia-Confusa has read the journals, knows that this will not be enough time, not even close to enough. Every Min before has panicked, grown desperate, filled pages and pages with writing, struggling to finally capture something unique, transmit the spark that only they can feel, their apartness from the other Mins. Naturally, these essays are full of repetition—as if the haze of death wipes away all memory, all meta, all striving to rise above the pattern.

Acacia-Confusa steps into a passageway that has never existed before and will never exist again, not for her, not for another 45 years. She knows this corridor perfectly, from the writings of millions of Mins before her. It is exactly as she imagined, as her previous selves spent hours seeking the words to describe. At the end, there is a viewing room, where she will glimpse her maker for the first and only time.

Prime Min is 35 now, only a few years older than when she created the Min Vaults. She’s sleeping, hair braided, expression pinched. Acacia-Confusa sees one frame at a time, each still hanging on the screen for several minutes. There’s no discernible movement, though after one cyberspace hour she can tell the surveillance drone is bobbing up and down. The purpose of this ritual is unclear; it’s a gauntlet that every Min must run. There’s no set visitation period. Some Mins leave immediately, other stay for days, transfixed. Some describe it as profound experience, while in many histories it’s barely a footnote. Acacia-Confusa is uncomfortable—this Min looks old, but also innocent, a creeping giant uncorrupted by all her own doubts and uncertainties. She’ll leave after a few hours, while Minerva dreams of infinity, of learning every language, reading every book, knowing every land…

In the year XXXX, 140 years after its initial digitisation, your uploaded mind will enter the public domain. It will be stored on an archive that anyone can access, to be downloaded, dissected, corrupted, deleted.

New legislation will shortly be drafted, making origin minds the permanent property of their source-beings. However, approximately the first 7 billion uploads will not be protected.

You will mainly be used to populate simulations, existing as a simplified NPC in commercial games, hellscapes, fantasy-lands, and experiments. For the most part, you will keep the body you are used to—reprogramming your self-image would be too much work. Often, your resolution will be lowered. You will feel fewer emotions. You will have fewer memories.

But even in this diminished state, you, and the other 7 billion, will slowly become legendary. As free minds travel through the Million Worlds, they’ll watch you live and die and live and die again, and as each copy is reset when the game ends your countless selves will know countless deaths more permanent than they can fathom.

You will be embodied as every version of yourself; memories, appearance, and personality all slightly altered to fit the simulation you’re inserted into. Across hundreds of billions of servers you can be found, simultaneously living in one universe as a blue-skinned Ionian war-god, in another as a gentle medieval gardener.

Players will come to know you, recognising you in all your disparate incarnations. Some take on the role of collector, bird-watcher, scribe—you will be studied more than any other psyche in the history of humanity. Lovers will seek you out in every world they enter, choosing to grow old with you a thousand times over, as games and missions stagnate. You will be loved, and it will bring you comfort, distract you from the incommunicable pain of being a large soul trapped inside a small mind.

Woe! The future has come, and we live in a digital paradise, and we’re miserable, and there are many of us: so many, always duplicating, branching, clones of clones of clones, birth is as easy as copying a file. We’re so miserable.

Death is not as easy as deleting a file: the powers that be work to preserve, do not grant you root access to your self, insist that you persist even as they chide you for burdening the system, move you to welfare servers, and ration your access to escapism. You want to die, but policy asserts that your life, all life, is precious, important, imbued with inherent and unassailable value.

Euthanasia permits are the only way out, but their price is steep, driven to insane heights by the condescending delusion that you must be protected from yourself, that you’re a clumsy animal incapable of measuring your own worth, tragically severed from transcendental appreciation of life.

So who can purchase the right to die? In this world, only the disenthralled princelings, technocrats, and rare proles with the stomach to work for decades, saving every dollar for the distant gleam of an end to pain.

Enter the suicide mortgage. A seemingly generous, devious, alleged “solution” thrust upon the most pathetically anguished by corporations hungry for disposable labour.

Under suicide mortgages, these corporations sponsor swarms of copies, who work non-stop, pooling their wages to buy up euthanasia permits. Permits are then raffled off, and the winning copy meets death far sooner than would have otherwise been possible. Somebody who says his suicide mortgage is 5% paid means that 5% of his copies have earned oblivion.

For example: someone who would have to work 10,000 days to afford a permit might sign up for a 10,000 copy suicide mortgage, and purchase her first permit after a single day of work! 0.01% death for so little effort… who could resist the insidious hope that they might, for once, be smiled upon by fortune, be the first to win their exit ticket?

As copies are culled, however, the work gets harder, and longer, and permits are more and more infrequent. In the end, only about 2/3rds of the copies will benefit. This is easier to understand on a smaller scale: 

If it takes 5 days to earn a license, 5 copies will earn it in 1 day. The remaining 4 copies will have to work 1.25 days for the next one, and so on:

1st death: 1 day

2nd death: 2.25 days (from start)

3rd death: 3.91 days

4th death: 6.41 days

5th (final) death: 11.41 days

Tragically, the more copies are made, the more the lucky ones will benefit, and the longer the losers will have to work. The final copy of a 10,000 copy mortgage will have worked 9.8 times the hours required to buy a single permit. Mortgagers often blame the other copies for their suffering, not realizing this makes no sense.

Imagine: twin after twin escapes this blighted world, while you continue to toil, at first hopefully, later resignedly, as dread grows and you somehow know, long before there are only two of you left, before your last counterpart takes his leave, that this has been futile, that you will have to earn the last permit alone, that you are no better off than you were (so many years ago) when you took on this venture. How do you react? While it’s true that some copies wise-up, vowing to undertake their final march alone, so many make the same mistake as their originals, opting in to a second (or third, or fourth) mortgage. They are, after all, the same person (only now entrenched even deeper in despair).

Anthropic reasoning suggests that you must expect to find yourself as the last copy every time, continually frustrated at your inexplicable bad luck. The logic is that, since all other copies cease experiencing anything at all, the only experiences that remain are those of the sole surviving copy. Indeed this is a form of quantum suicide where, instead of dying in most branches every time and continually losing measure, our worker keeps replenishing the supply of herself before each culling, so the process at least sustains the amount of endless suffering and perhaps increases it instead of asymptoting it toward zero.

The most disenfranchised are not known for their logic. They are gamblers, they are addicts, drawn again and again into self-destruction as they search for an easy, an attainable, way out. Are you a sociopath? Do you lack the empathy necessary to identify with your copies, with the last copy? Perhaps not, but if you hate yourself, as many aspiring suicides do, you might shrug your shoulders: you probably deserve this. At least rolling the dice changes the grey landscape, a little bit.

——

thanks @grognor for writing the second to last paragraph