This is a short English language version of the story. The full Russian version of the story was published by Iskatel sc-fi almanac.
The batch of empty-shell androids has long been an eyesore. They delivered mindless machines in a twenty-foot container and stacked in the far corner of the hangar. Legs to the head - head to the feet. At night, when only signaling lamps snatched out small pools of light, this bunch of de-energized bodies looked creepy. They could put an unprepared guard into a stupor. Thank God, these were not humans. The model range was rather wide and included models of different ages and genders: men and women made to an order of a service company. The customer was to download the final software, but a force majeure happened. The client company went bankrupt. Therefore, they failed to pay for the batch and the androids were confiscated. However, they failed to auction them off at a bankruptcy auction, the robots turned out to be unclaimed and for now stuck in the warehouse. As is known, nothing lasts longer than the temporary does. A bailiff came a couple of times, checked the condition of the goods stored, and took some note on his tablet. Then he stopped showing up. One night, when the dead silence fell in the warehouse, and you could hear the chirping of crickets behind the wall, one robot came to life. He opened his eyes. A small blue LED lit up in the center of his right pupil. It blinked several times, and switched to a soft green light, then went off. Turning his head all the way to the left, then to the opposite side, the android self-diagnosed. He stretched and flexed its joints, climbed off the stack, carefully stepped onto concrete floor and headed towards the exit…
How did I fall for this digital immortality? - Why not to live forever in a neural network? What is so immoral in this? Let the hypocrites talk about sinfulness of such thoughts. I think they are just mediocrity. They simply lack the talent to figure out what to do with themselves in the infinite existence. Even here in this fast, like a gunshot, life, they’ve been toiled with boredom. While there, in the net, it takes to find meaning to the eternity! And I would, believe me, find a reason for endless existence. My schedule is already busy for a thousand years ahead: to become a genius gamer, to create an NFT masterpiece, to conceive the universe. What an endless thrill! A bit of practice. This is how the Digital Immortality Corporation works. An initial scanning of your life experience looks like taking your first passport photo. It retrieves everything since your birth until maturity. Then medics determine your life expectancy. In other words, how much longer will your organic shell last. The ticket to infinity wasn’t really that unfordable as they say. It cost me two hundred grand for my lifetime and a deposit of three hundred on top of it as a guarantee that they will keep my digital cloud up-to-date. Now a bit of physics. Each atom of your brain instantly changes the state it was before. Artificial intelligence can think of what lays beyond the power of the neuroscanner. At the first meeting, they explained how it works. Frankly, it was a Greek to me, but I trust the progress. Besides, what do I have to lose? – Nothing. While I can gain the entire digital world. Now a bit of sociology. Some people tend to accomplish more in one month than others do in a year. We are different and it’s a fact. Given that, the Digital Immortality captures experience of their patients in some cases quite often, while in others a near-death session is enough. The clinic’s IT specialists will stitch byte-by-byte the scanned data into a unified personal cloud. One peculiar moment here. While you are alive, you can ask to remove some moments that caused you a mental trauma from your digital consciousness. Thus, you will make your virtual double a bit more optimistic than its matrix was. But this type of services require additional payment.
The hacker's short nickname name Z8GND5296. He borrowed it from astronomy, where this name bares one of the most far away from Earth galaxy. Mass media said he stood out from other hackers by irrational tactics and unclear motivation. This tactics made it more difficult to locate and identify. By some reason, the Digital Immortality customers’ data had been his prime target. The personal data of the digitized patients’ brains was well protected. Nevertheless, Z8GND5296 managed to hack into the storage. He infiltrated digital copies of almost a hundred people and completely licked off their data. He did it so elegantly that at first no one noticed the theft. Then he hacked into the warehouse’ logistic system and breathed the stolen digital souls into robot’s empty electronic brains. This means that several dozens of cybernetic clones of living people have appeared in this world. And one of them, who is now wandering around the city, was a copy of me. I would have lived all my life, not even knowing that somewhere there was a robot walking around, with complete information about my life in his composite skull. But a chance came to my aid. The weather that day was dank and I idly wandered around the shops, staring at the shop windows. In Children's World store, I was stuck watching big toy-railway they placed in the boys section. It attracted adults may be even more than kids. I could endlessly gaze how freight and passenger trains travel through magical tiny cities. As a little boy, I dreamed of having one, so that my little mighty train could circle briskly around the entire apartment, through all its rooms and corridors. I remember my father then saying to me, “If you move up to the next grade with excellent marks, I will make one for you, right from the porch of the house to the entrance to the school.” This phrase of my ancestor sunk into the soul and stuck in it for many years. When I grew up, I understood it was rather a joke but the day I heard it I imagined myself leaving the house, going to school, and next to me, happily snorting with a motor, a little engine was running. And along the route soldiers salute, birds cheer and semaphores greet us. I graduated from the eighth grade quite successful and moved on to the ninth, preparatory for the university. But my father never knew about it. He died a year before this first small victory of his son.
On that day, a man, about ten years younger than me, stared at the same railway. He was dressed in a strict gray single-breasted carefully pressed suit. The shirt was the same gray color and he had a tight blue tie without a pattern. He, apparently, had been standing in this department for a long time, watching how the toy train cuts circles. The seller, turning either to me or to him, helpfully asked,
“Do you like it?”
The train drove up to the terminal station just at that moment. The man silently nodded his head in agreement. And then as if talking to himself, moaned,
“My father promised to build one like this, from home to school, if I graduated with honors from eight classes.”
“Well…did he build it at last?”
The toy seller asked with a bit of ironic smile at the corners of his mouth. As if he knew the answer.
“Sadly, he never made it. My dad died of a heart attack”, my companion for the railway watching replied dryly.
“Sorry, my condolences,” the seller was embarrassed, realizing that he had carelessly upset a potential buyer.
An icy electrical discharge chilled down my spine. How could this strange guy with his waxy face and a tight-fitting military-like tie know my father's catchphrase? It belongs only to me and to no one else in the whole world. “All parents are the same,” I cooled myself down. Besides, who wouldn’t dream of such a toy-railway in the childhood? And chances that someone else's father could say something similar to his son are very high. I looked into his eyes hopping to see a confirmation of my guess that he was the same kidult as myself. Eyes of this type of people do not change with age; it is their unmistakable common trait. At that point, yet another weird surprise awaited me. I'd swear anything: I was being looked at by... my own eyes, as if I saw them in a rearview mirror. The god awarded our clan with large almond-shaped and brown, with coal-colored pupils, which in certain lighting seemed emerald. These eyes were laughing, getting angry or tired, and falling asleep in their own way. And how was I then to know that if you pour digitized consciousness into the brain of a robot, then the interface of a smart machine can change depending on the properties of downloaded digitized soul.
I am back home in a small dark cell of a loner and computer games addict. The material world is behind a small window overlooking the well of the courtyard. What’s there doesn't matter. My true life is in the virtual space, behind that black PC screen. The sun starts shining brightly for me when the screen turns on. Yes, this is not in truth as many understand it but you know what, I like this kind of existence. “You just used to it,” you will probably say. May be, but when my heart stops beating, my digitized personality will continue on this path, and death will not interrupt my being, so I am not scared to die and my ego is satisfied, I have reached nirvana. Some suffer that they could not rise above the public in real life, it doesn’t matter when you know that your digital twin will have eternity to recoup, no reason to worry about lost opportunities.
And that evening was ultimately spoiled by an unpleasant confusion. Some jerk, calling himself by my name, was trying to get food at a local grocery store. Apparently, he found out that time ago, being broke I managed to beg for a full fridge there. I then paid off the debt and forgot about that case for a long time. But apparently, someone turned out to be an unwitting witness to my humiliation. ... What impudence and stupidity! Didn't he realize that all transactions are being tracked, and the cameras will instantly compare his face and promptly report to the Social Watch system? What an idiot, because of him I have to trudge now three blocks to the local police department.
“You are not the first on this issue,” blurted out the officer once I appeared on the threshold.
He nodded his head at the odd man who had huddled in the corner of the police lockup.
“We have more than twenty similar episodes at different points,” the officer said. “A full flock of crazy robots is running around the city somewhere, and they all present themselves with the names of different people,” he continued. “When we analyzed what these people have in common, we easily noticed that all the victims at different times went through the mind scanning in the Digital Immortality. You did the same thing, didn't you?”
“I thought, information about such personal activities is confidential,” I raised my eyebrows in displeasure. Prepared to throw a scandal, I stopped, however. That this police officer had absolutely nothing to do with it.
“Yes, sir. And it was so until we launched a probe into the incident of the theft of your identities from the Digital Immortality company. Hackers’ swaggering, f*ck them ...They stole your identity and loaded it into the brain of this iron dunce. There seems to be no self-interest in the crime, banal hooliganism, but there is a lot of trouble for us as there are casualties. You, for example,” he quipped.
“And the hackers did this at least a dozen times, and with different people, all for the sake of courage?” I expressed doubt, estimating the scale of the disaster.
“We think that actually many more. The entire robot batch left the warehouse on their own feet. And there were several pallets of them, twenty machines on each, we are still finding out the exact number of runaways. The company that owned them abandoned their walking mannequins, now we are having a headache. But we're the police here, not a crazy robot recycling factory. If you want, take it home with you.”
At first, the idea of taking home the arrested robot seemed weird to me. Why do I need a cyber-twin at my lonely home? By the way, I just remembered who this cybernetic stranger was. Sure, he is the one, who stared at the toy-railway and quoted aphorisms of my father. I began to see: the personality transfer I took on ended up with such a shocking result. My stolen identity bounced to someone, or rather somewhat probably alien to me. The nervous system reacted to the stream of unthinkable events by setting up a shielding block. I needed to take a brake to think over the situation. In the end, I was curious what can be a machine with my alter ego in a binary programming code. And what the hell, maybe I was a chosen one, and all of this happened for a reason?
“I take it from you,” I rapped out to the police officer. “Open the cage”. On the way back the robot was trotting after me, like a doggy, obediently and joyfully. If it had a tail, it would certainly wag it. He tried to start a friendly conversation with me, but each time I stopped it with a gesture. When I return home, I always walk quickly and think on the go. Of course, I felt myself bossy, and for a reason. Firstly, because my brain is the initial matrix for its consciousness, and overall, it exists only because I was once born. The robot’s complete dependence on me was obvious, which in turn meant that it had to subordinate to me. Therefore, as soon as we got home, although I did not promise to adopt a robot to the police, I scolded him as a delinquent child.
“Please don't swear,” the robot begged. “When you scold me like that, my knee joints shake with fear, and this can lead to premature failure of the bearings, the radial-hull ones aren’t strong enough.”
“All right,” I waved my hand dismissively. “You tell me how to erase my memories from your head now.”
“Why do you need to wash them away, I mean you are me, and I am you. To have a copy of yourself while you are still alive is reasonable. Just in case,” he said.
“For the “just in case” thing, the living species have an ambulance. As for the fact that you are me I would rather agree. As for the rest… Look, weren’t you robots created just to help us, not much else really.”
“Yes, of course,” my visitor hesitated when he was reminded of his original purpose. “There has been a misunderstanding, apparently. I can work instead of you, for example. And you can have a rest, just earning money and do whatever you want with yourself. By the way, you have not passed yet all levels of the Singularity Strategy. I can generally do anything, while at any time you can turn me off. Look here...”
With a deft gesture, the robot picked the left auricle up and removed it from the mount, which protruded from the plastic skull. Behind the ear was a small red button.
“Just press this button, and – that's it, I'm gone. Only a clean operating system will remain, I won't even be able to move.” He held out his ear to me as a confirmation of his determination. I moved away the robot's hand with its pagan sacrificial tribute.
“Listen, machine, I don’t know what your name is...”
“Just like yours, if you don't mind. I don't like any other names.”
“Okay, let it be “like mine,” I mimicked the robot, narrowing my eyes to give myself more ferocity. “Take that, you don’t know me like this yet,” I thought maliciously.
“I have one big problem,” the robot began a new topic with an uncertain voice, skillfully pretending to be doubtful, as much as a computer can be. Forgive me, but I'll tell you honestly how it really is. And I don’t know any other way to talk to you,” he said.
“I personally see only one problem, should I put your ear back in place or rather push the button and sell you into scrap metal,” I muttered angrily.
“Just wondering, you do not really want the eternal digital life to turn into a hell for you?”
“And why does it, in fact, have to turn into hell?” I was indignant at the impudence of the robot, already giving me ultimatums, while just a minute ago he was shaking with fear. “I have never done anything wrong to anyone in my life.”
The robot pretended to be extremely embarrassed to continue this conversation. It was shifting from foot to foot, lowered his head, trying not to make eye contact. What an artist!
“Sorry, but your life is uninspiring. Having known your inner world, I noted that it’s stripped of essential emotions…”
At this moment, I raised my eyebrows in a sincere surprise. Although, to be honest, the robot did not tell me anything that I did not know about myself.
“You have narrowed down the opportunities to develop patterns of emotions. They are present in the matrix with such a cluster that it is impossible to build an algorithmic model of happiness,” the robot finally formulated the problem he had.
“Wow, how pathetic!” I chuckled, looking at the android, who just turned on a dime. Now he brilliantly played the role of a touching home robot. “Listen, if you need emotions, then here is the door out. Go outside and pick them up there as much as you want. My life suits me well. And what will happen to digital existence, I will find out when my hour strikes, why rush things?” I drew a line under his doubts. But it was little early to celebrate a moral victory. The most intriguing of the upright-walking copy of myself I had yet to hear.
“I can’t turn on the function to collect new emotions from the outside world yet," the robot hesitated, simulating human doubt.
“What do you mean by the “yet” thing? Well, don't hesitate,” I encouraged him, clumsily sticking the auricle back into its place. I managed to do it only on the third attempt.
“As long as you are alive,” the robot shyly, as if forcing himself, mumbled and then dropped the gaze, like a puppy, that wetted the family’s favorite wall carpet.
It seemed to me that the cheeky robot imitated deep sorrow. Not about the fact that I am not dead yet? I got angry again, and the robot caught it with its sensors. I felt uneasy, given the fact that he was right. Then I recalled what my client manager at the Digital Immortality told me: as long as I was alive, the algorithm remained deactivated.
“By the way, you don’t want to whack me, my dear? Asking you just in case,” I said to the robot sitting opposite me in the chair, like a job candidate. Indeed, wasn’t it going, mildly speaking, “to speed up the enactment of the algorithm”, a strange thought flashed through. They say victims sometimes bring killers home themselves.
“Oh, don’t say that!” The robot dramatically grabbed his head with both hands. “Do you really think that I am urging you to finish your biological path? What a mess, if you even allow such a thought! I am not just your cybernetic alter ego – I am you. To kill you means to break the whole algorithm, which unites both of us, and then everything would be meaningless.”
I thought that on this pathetic note, my guest would end his speech, but an unexpected request followed from his side.
“I want to ask you a favor before we part forever. It’s not so hard really. All you need is to learn how to enjoy life. Please, before the final near-death scan try to fill your world with strong human emotions. Try to upload an associative package of fatherhood experience, for example. After all, in the world of your digital clone, reproduction is nothing more than creating a digital copy of yourself, with the same set of file clusters. What a ghastly bore in our case, if you think about it…” Humanly bitterly, the robot made the sound of a heavy sigh as a person deeply worried about life circumstances.
“You could be a talented robot-artist!” I exclaimed. “But I'm afraid I'll disappoint you, my dear electrical relative. I have never met such a woman to feel what you are trying to say tactfully, “to create a duplicate. And I'm afraid my passion train has already departed by that railway we saw with you in the kid’s store,” I nailed my synthetic twin.
“I would still ask you,” the robot insisted, “for your own sake.” He got up, resolutely opened the door, and hurried out of my cell without saying final goodbye.
I had no idea where my clone had gone. He walked away without navigation, hanging around neighborhood, forming the course based on visual assessment. Having reached the park, the smart machine entered it and continued moving along the central alley. Perhaps the robot would have wandered around in circles aimlessly until the battery ran out. But at the end of the alley, a woman in a tracksuit ran up to him from behind. She looked like one of those many joggers, who fill the park every evening. The robot’s computer received a signal from the rear locator about an object seventeen degrees to the right of the spinal axis. The object could pose a threat, as it was approaching too fast. But the android had no instructions for an external danger case, as someone had deleted this part of his software and it kept moving. The woman ran up behind and with one click pulled off the robot’s left auricle and pressed the red button. The robot stood up and froze right away. “Fatal shutdown of all systems,” it reported dryly after quick self-diagnosis. Its knees buckled, his pupils flashed with the red light of cyber-death, the android fell on its back. The woman leaned over it, looked into the glassy eyes of the machine for a couple of seconds, and dropped a piece of paper next to the dead robot.
The next day, the media reported that in our neighborhood, in the park area, someone found a robot-mannequin. It was without an ear, with wiped out operational memory. The death of a robot was not a crime, but the case raised again the problem with bullies who occupied the city park. Next to the android, there was a suicide note, with just few words in it: “See you in paradise.” I am sure, this was my guest from yesterday, and the message was to me. On the one hand, what a load off my mind! Someone has erased my personality from the memory of the walking computer. But, on the other... I caught myself thinking that I feel sorry for this robot, as if I found out that a close person had died. Well, after all, he touched my soul and made me think truly hard last night. About life and where I was going.
No, I need to push away these sick thoughts! It's just a thing, and not even mine, so why should I care that it will be recycled at the end? But could it be that the managers from the Digital Immortality dispatched it to me? On the other hand, why would they do it? To experiment on me? Then they would have to confess anyway that they broke into my personal cloud. However, the plot could also consist of seizing my bank deposit ahead of time… Then what does the notorious hacker have to do with it? Or were they just a fiction invented by the police officers to make this about hackers, or are all of them – just one gang? I braced myself and called the Digital Immortality. Of course, they absolutely denied it, expressed their outrage and apologized. Then I received a letter from the deputy head of the customer service, in which the company promised to do an unscheduled additional free scanning procedure. But I refused. I have nothing more to save on their server. My life returned to normal: from work to home, to the screen, behind which is the real life, the one I care, the life of my digital world. It has everything I want.
But today I heard the news that shook my world: the hacker Z8GND5296 was arrested. Finally, they were on to the criminal. Yes, this was the hacker, who stole the scan copy of my lonely soul. It turned out that she was a woman, they won’t make her real name public in the interests of the investigation... I began to study on my own incriminated to her cases. I’ve been thinking a lot about her, I think she’s a talented person to hack such a complex systems! I found her picture, by the way, she is quite pretty, for my taste... it seems that her eyes are even better than mine, I would get lost in them. And her final plea, what a bright speech! She spoke about liability to the digital mind, compassion, humanity. Now it’s crystal clear: she opened up our digital souls, put them into androids, and sent into the human society. She put into my poor robotic twin the message that my digital life risked becoming a hell, a ceaseless wandering around a dark labyrinth, spreading my pain of a lonely pariah through the net. Why would she do it for me? Because she loves me? My heart starts racing every time I think about her… and even when I start to remember how I was thinking about her yesterday. What’s going on with me, is it madness? And what do I really know about eternal being, do we really deserve it? We scanned our souls to live forever, without even realizing how responsible this is to ourselves! And she understands... you are my hero, and I will wait for you, for eternity. I can no longer live without you ... My God, I can’t believe I have fallen in love!