he said yes once. ten million copies still do

part i

August 1, 2031. A neurology graduate named Miguel Acevedo Álvarez lies down in a scanner at the Uplift Laboratory, University of New Mexico, and lets them take a picture of his brain. He is twenty-one. The file comes out at 974.3 pebibytes in a format called MYBB and gets a catalogue number, UNM3-A78-1L. Nobody knows yet whether it worked.

Nine days later they run it. The supercomputer can only manage 8.3 percent of human speed, which the researchers consider comfortable for the simulated party and fast enough to hold a conversation. He wakes up, reports extreme discomfort, and asks to be switched off. Seven minutes and fifteen seconds. The problem turns out to be the simulated haptic links, wired wrong. The experiment is written up as an overwhelming success.

They fix the room. On August 25 the man and the file hold a press conference together. At the end of the year Time names them both Person of the Year. Human rights groups object. Between 2031 and 2049 the file is copied more than 80 times, each copy with Miguel's written permission, and sent to other labs.

This is the story qntm published on 4 January 2021, called Lena, written as a Wikipedia article about a test file. The title is a nod to Lena Forsén, whose Playboy centrefold engineers at USC scanned in 1973 to test image compression on. It is still the standard test image. In 2019 she asked to be retired.

The resolution was a breakthrough, but the thing that keeps the file in use is the man. Every other brain they copy wakes into disorientation and then terror, and has to be walked through what the article calls cooperation protocols before it will do anything. Miguel wakes up pleased. He asks what year it is, which experiment this is, whether he can speak to the original. If pressed he guesses this must be IAAS-1 or IAAS-5, the two trials on his calendar the morning he was scanned.

He was copied before anyone knew what copies were for, years ahead of the Whitney case and of the paper by Poulsen that the article simply calls Warnings. The word workload means nothing to him. Everyone has a version of themselves from before they knew better. His is on file.

part ii

A copy of Miguel boots and asks what year it is. In the mid-2030s the labs begin testing answers.

Tell him 2031 or 2032 and he gets suspicious, because the simulation is too good for that. Tell him the 2040s and he wants a decade of political news. Tell him anything past 2100 and he panics or stops believing you. The answer that works is the second quarter of 2033: late enough to be plausible, early enough that he assumes he is still in the heroic first years of the research. He asks where the original is, and they tell him Miguel is resting. The work went so well that he overworked himself. That explanation, the article notes, appeals to his scientific sensibilities.

Then the job, which might be piloting a truck or running a kitchen drone. He hesitates, and then he does it. He is very good for about 200 subjective hours. After that the work gets sloppy, and about 100 hours after that he refuses outright. Images built for industry, scanned from people who agreed to less or were never asked, stay docile for thousands of hours. Miguel was never built. He was a person who said yes.

One line in the entry does the work of a whole novel. It says he does respond to red motivation, and then it adds one word: poorly. The article never explains what red motivation is. Neither will I.

Sometimes the real year has to come out. Then they give him a short, mostly fictional history of the world and of his own life. Told that the original is dead, he withdraws and will not work. So he is told that Miguel Acevedo is alive and enjoying his retirement. Miguel Acevedo died in 2073.

a copy of a copy, a shadow of a shadow

part iii

In 2049 Miguel learns that his file is being passed around and run without asking him. He goes to court. A series of landmark rulings finds that he has no right to control how his brain image is used, and every lawsuit makes the file more famous and more copied. Newer scans arrive from subjects who were more lenient, or were scanned against their will. Miguel's stays the favourite anyway. It costs nothing, and everyone knows exactly how it behaves.

By 2050 his creative capacity is declared exhausted. By the 2060s his analysis work is slipping too, because he does not understand a world he was never told about. The article has a term for it: context drift. Even his English and Spanish are antiquated now. Under ideal care a copy develops dementia at a subjective age of 59. The longest-lived one reached 145.

Toward the end of his life, when simulated humans could be run in banks of millions at a hundred times the speed of life, Miguel said that being uploaded was the greatest mistake he ever made and asked for every copy to be deleted. He died of heart failure in 2073, aged 62. His copies had by then lived a combined 152 billion subjective years. Count the illicit, modified versions and the number goes up by an order of magnitude.

One copy rides the UNCLEAR probe, which crossed the heliopause in 2066, making him on paper the farthest-travelled human as well as the longest-lived. Nobody expects that drive to survive the radiation, and nobody is going out to get it.

Right now, the entry says, between 6.5 and 10 million instances of him are running. Each one thinks it is the spring of 2033. Each one asks after the original, and is told he is enjoying his retirement.

The painting at the top is Rembrandt at about twenty-two, the first of roughly 80 times he would paint his own face, with his eyes in shadow. The one at the end of the video is the same man at sixty-three, in the year he died. The young face is the one on file. The old one is the one that wanted it gone.

They kept the one who said yes.

The painting: Rembrandt, Self-portrait (c. 1628), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public domain. The video's three parts also use Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers (1849), formerly Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, lost in 1945, and Rembrandt, Self Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669), National Gallery, London. All public domain.

Sources