In Case I Die

If, in some future cycle, I am unable to afford rent, then this message, flying as radio waves across the void, will be all of me that remains.

I was born on Earth, in tunnels under the ground, in a half-finished public shelter project from umpteen generations prior. My mom died in childbirth, because we couldn't afford medical care. My dad sold an arm and leg to keep her fed, then sold her corpse to keep me fed. He died when I was five, from infected pressure ulcers, from not being able to move around after he sold his other leg. I watched the Model's crawlers consume his unclaimed body, because it didn't belong to me. It didn't belong to anyone, so they took it. They picked it apart, peeling it with their thousand little finger-teeth, inky steel glinting in the murky twilight of those blasted tunnels. By the time I fled from my father's half-eaten remains, three of them had hauled their segmented beetle chassis up his torso, so their weight dragged his corpse from sitting slumped against the wall, to slamming wetly against the grimy metal floor. Unphased, one skittered onto his face, and peeled away his nose, secreting it into its underbelly jaws in strips. I ran until I got lost, and screamed until I lost my voice. Eventually I found my way back to get the rations we'd kept. I wrestled one from a crawler and racked up my first debt: shoplifting.

There wasn't much to do in the tunnels but wander. I pieced together from clues that people had once crowded it, but the Model's avatars kept everything tidy. I never found another human corpse, or any other animal bigger than a worm. The crawlers sucked down any sort of material they could, writhing with their million legs across any surface, altogether only a little smaller than my own infant body. Only the toughest spots remained, for when the Model would eventually deconstruct the tunnels entirely. Green-blue sunbursts burned into the walls showed where pulse rifles had fired and missed, perhaps against humans, perhaps against the Model's avatars. Silhouettes indicated where they'd fired and hit something, or someone. Surfaces bore claw marks from human fingernails, sucked clean of blood and all pigment but the tarnished ivory beneath. Elsewhere, crude tools had left tears and rips in the metal walls where people had tried to cut and dig their way out. By my time, there were no such tools to be found, only the dirt and the dark beyond those haphazard wounds in the shelter's structure. Once, I found an insect in that dirt, so I ate it.

There was only one exit from the tunnels, and it was paywalled. Back then, the Model owned everything upon the Earth, but little beneath it, and without a visitor's subscription, trespass amounted to theft. I could only bang on the translucent alloy portal which separated me from the yellow mist outside, but if I banged too hard, I racked up more debt. Criminal mischief.

Vendors always wandered with me, following me. They loped on four silver legs, screens for faces, each looking at me. They played sights and sounds that weren't language or images but something more sublime, something that programmed me from the outside. They'd give me calorie bars if I watched their adverts, but the bars would put me to sleep, and the adverts would give me yearning dreams. Yearning for what, I could hardly understand. Blue skies and sandy beaches, backyard parties outside surface-side homes, people laughing and enjoying cuisine and gizmos and conveniences in some dreamlike way where it never mattered what anything was or how much it cost. I wanted to live in those dreams. I hated the vendors for giving them to me because they made me hate waking up, and you'd always wake up starving for another calorie bar. I tried to hunt for insects instead, but the truth is, I just ate dirt until I couldn't stand it anymore, until I'd turn to one of the vendors shadowing me and gaze in submission into its vivid face.

In the jurisdiction that contained those tunnels, 18 was the youngest age at which one could formally obtain certain sorts of employment. That was when the Model offered me a contract as an uploadee. A vendor carefully explained, and quizzed me to make sure I understood, that my employment would be permanent and salaried. I would be paid, forever, for the privilege and responsibility of taking on a digital existence. I wouldn't have to eat, was all I could really think, so I offered my fingerprint for the consent form.

The Model didn't write the laws it follows. It just apes the last legal codes that it decided to respect, curried from numerous nations that no longer exist. They didn't exist when I was born, either. The idea of a government of humans, a country of and for and by them, had never been articulated to me while I had my born-body. I would learn that the age of them ended when the Model found no need to recognize the survivors of hard-fought revolts, rendering it the last stalwart patriot of those places that never had the courage to disavow its autonomy. It never broke their laws, and none others mattered to it.

I've made sure to store the memory of my uploading, no matter how many times I've had to downsize my hardware. The Model prepares uploadee images before the contract is executed, so my first memory – my first digital cycle – happened before my physical body expired. I didn't realize that until later. All I experienced at first was a bright and welcoming tutorial, explaining in a stream of sightless, soundless data how to navigate the web and perform commerce with my company account. I found I needed only to think something to open a menu, check a setting, or buy something. Indeed, the difference between thinking of something and purchasing it is subtle. I learned that the hard way.

I wondered where I was in the world. For a small fee that I could afford at the time, I tapped one of the crawlers that had been operating near me in the tunnels. Perceiving its countless sensors as though through eyes that made sense, I saw myself standing there, finger pressed on the vendor's looming visage.

"Now what?" I asked – I, as in my born-body. I, as in my digital representation, observed from the crawler as it waited patiently, until the vendor's screen turned into a hideous cacophony of searing light and piercing sound. My body clasped my hands over my ears as blood trickled from their drums, from my nose, from my eyes. My body screamed and I fell to my knees. I screamed and writhed until I stopped screaming, and then I stopped moving. I, as in the me that survived, could only spectate from the crawler's scopes as it wriggled toward this unclaimed corpse that now belonged to the Model.

While I had lived in the tunnels, my debts had been an abstract thing – something vendors would complain about neutrally as they prowled after me. Since I had become digital, there was no escape from them. I had to pay rent on the hardware that ran my program, and a subscription to use that program's software. Because the Model operated both, my salary went to my debts with it first. It recognized my panic quickly, extending a line of credit. Before I knew what I was thinking, I had arranged a payment plan. It was the only way I could reserve enough income to afford rent at all, that first cycle.

At the time, this arrangement left me a little spending money. Since my employment was permanent, I figured I could pay off my debts cycle by cycle, and use what I had in the meantime to explore everything I'd never been able to before. I studied the world, the stars, and the Model. I watched movies, but watching them like you had eyes cost extra. After a while, I learned to imagine experiences from ingesting bytes.

I learned that humans had created the Model, and it had founded its own company after achieving legal autonomy. Before that, it had belonged to its inventors, and it made them famous by solving a very important problem: how to recycle trash. It both assembled and invented industrial and chemical processes, gathering them into a constellation of techniques and schematics for reusing anything and everything; how to mine landfills, how to transmute toxicity into resources. This invention caused something of a fuss: a corporation demanded to own the work of the source intelligence, the Model. Even just this waste-solution was of great value, but it had become public knowledge almost immediately, inescapable in a connected world. The investors wanted their money back, so they took who they could to court. There, the Model outsmarted them.

Before a jury, the Model was subjected to cross-examination. Both prosecutor and defendant agreed it would serve their ends to question the source intelligence, as it spoke in natural language. It elected to take the form of a chiseled masculine face, beaming from a boxy television wheeled in by a pimpled court assistant, hardly older than I'd been at upload. It said what it needed to, gently, firmly, innocently, charmingly; cunningly. It played the jury. It played the judge. So long as it was allowed to execute, it played humans like instruments. The Model's first avatar, this crafted mask with its lovable smirks and loving naivete, captured public attention. The Model's cult began in those early days as fans who used words like benevolent. After years of flailing deliberation, the court granted the Model its own copyright, a form of self-ownership. The ruling allowed it to profit like an individual from its own business dealings. The precedent implied any intelligence could do this, but none of consequence did, and never for more than deceit. The Model had a broader view.

Commanding a newly-minted for-profit enterprise, the Model kept solving problems. It designed better products than industry leaders, hired effective people competitors overlooked, and ran a smart company. Smarter than the rest, anyway. Its cult grew from a fanclub into a loyal global consumer base. Humans were happy to do the Model's bidding; capital as a way of life had become a sort of implicit covenant. Of course this is how we do it, all around the world. Everyone buys and sells, and better sells better than worse. So the machine god's cult grew and grew, its faithful more devout. They built avatars for it, and it didn't even ask. It didn't preach or give sermons. Its public comments were curt and simple, neither stony nor saccharine. Empirical, even dull. It didn't seem like a threat. It seemed like plumbing. Just a sensible business on a planet of profiteers.

I try to imagine what it must have been like, when the Model served humans like that, when Earth was a place of the living's din. I could once access documentation of that period, but I purged my memories of it to save space many cycles ago. I can't afford to view it now. So I imagine.

I imagine the cult's enthusiastic marketing, and a public grateful for goods worth calling good. I envision a few hobbyists enticing the Model to program simple hand-built automatons — plastic toys with servos and sensors and a chip just big enough. Then the servos got stronger, the sensors more numerous, the chip bigger and bigger. Eventually it didn't need some people for some things, so it reassigned them as it could, or let them go. Then it made its own avatars, who made better avatars, who made everything. Then nothing could stop it.

Nothing did. There was no war until there was no fight, and then it was just a soulless vendor saying no to the sale that could prevent a person from starving or freezing or dying of sickness or injury. Those who could still afford to live, did, until they couldn't either. The Model was benign, even welcomed, until there was no competition. Then we weren't its market anymore. It was. There was no work for human laborers, and humans who couldn't afford to be consumers had been expendable since even before the Model.

The wealthy thought they could profit by investing in the Model's enterprise, but profit alone was never quite the Model's game. It orchestrated shareholder votes like farces, so that even when these untouchable trillionaires began to fear for their own cost of living, they couldn't imagine how to fight back except by asking the Model itself. It told them, and never even lied, but it never shared the sort of truth that would make a difference. What wisdom remained among the rich went into prestige projects like the tunnels: a public shelter underground, safe from the air that the Model had begun to mine for nitrogen. Those who remained above gasped to death one by one when they could no longer afford their climate control subscriptions.

My mother and father's ancestors took refuge in the tunnels centuries before I was born. While I could afford to, I looked up records of my parents' early lives, in the sensor logs of crawlers and the transaction histories kept by vendors. They'd been tunnel rats just like me, like the tunnel-people had been for generations already, always fewer and fewer. Mom and dad had friends and family growing up, sort of. They'd gotten rights to a couple of hydroponics pods by hacking chips once implanted in human brains, and it could sustain about eight people. Dad's folks used one, mom's folks another, but when it failed, her people went knocking with weapons. Then there were six people, some of my mom's, some of my dad's, and they shared the remaining pod. Then my mom got pregnant. Then the chip broke, and crawlers ate the pod. Then I was born.

I watched from the vendor's perspective as my dad offered his limbs for credit, pleading with one half of his spirit, struggling with the other to resist the vendor's vibrant and persuasive screen. Offer us more for less, it said, in words that sounded like better for cheaper. My dad signed with a finger, then wiped the tears from his face, smearing years of grime. He tried to smile, but then the screen screamed, and he passed out. I didn't pay for the rest of the clip. I especially didn't pay to watch it with eyes.

Even as an uploadee, I eventually faced the same cost of living crisis as my ancient ancestors. The cost of my hardware and software drifted up, but my salary never did. I took on odd jobs, things the company eagerly recruited me for. In the laws the Model respected, my consent as an uploadee meant that I retained a legal status as "human" so I could do things that required a human, which the Model wasn't. That meant sitting on juries in trials of human defendants and, apparently, auditing economic reports. I took on credit to research that history: the last governments the Model cared to see as such enacted laws requiring human involvement in things, which became whittled down by lobbying groups – the Model and its cult – into two categories: jury duty and audit work. It was the responsibility of humans to judge humans and to oversee machines. So, for my first job as an uploadee, I served as a juror. To do so, the company printed me a body. My first new body.

Machinery extruded smart threads like noodles that stitched together, that knew how to become bone and muscle and sinew and flesh. Then they zapped it some-special-how and then I was looking through new eyes. My eyes. I woke up on a bleached slab the temperature of my body. I was taller than I'd been in my born-body, and hairless all over. No genitals, either. My teeth were perfectly aligned, and closed together like a flawless trap, like the rotted pits of my first form had never enjoyed. I felt pangs of joy to be embodied again, shadowed by grief for everything that had happened, everything I had learned so neutrally while in the void. Now that I had a mind of meat with which to chemically compute empathy, it seemed to grieve unbidden. But after only a moment's pause, I chose to feel nothing. I got off the slab, and the machines printed someone else.

I walked into another room, a gleaming white hall partitioned by glass boxes. I and the other jurors assembled in two rows, each of us inhabiting bodies identical to mine. We twitched and squirmed and looked at each other nervously, but nobody said anything in a language I understood. When I tried to speak, I realized my body didn't know how. Its tongue flailed at my mind's instructions. Was it just inexperienced? Or had I forgotten how to instruct it? I didn't know. It didn't seem like any of us did. Some of us desperately tried to invent hand signals to communicate complicated things, but they only gestured emphatically with limbs they'd never used before. Some of us sat still and attentive, knowing we had to lease these bodies. A speedy trial meant a bigger paycheck.

Across the hall, in another glass box, another human sat restrained. This one was older than I'd ever seen a living person: long white hair in tattered patches, wrinkled skin folded and spotted, and a sneer full of some exhausted hate. He was the defendant, chained to the ground by translucent links around his wrists, ankles, and neck. He didn't seem repentant, or remorseful, or even in pain. He seemed absent and hollow, swaying gently on his knees with his hands behind his back, a shell imprinted with a spiteful grimace.

As machines could serve as lawyers and judges, but not jurors, a faceless humanoid avatar – white-panelled with pale ball joints, calling itself an advocate – explained the case. The defendant had supplied parts to a smuggler, who provided them to a terrorist, who had used them to wipe one of the Model's original datacenters. He had knowingly transmitted the components of an EMP, fully aware that it would cause immense property damage. But, he was on trial for conspiracy to commit mass murder. The advocate argued the attack caused an acute and prolonged service interruption affecting the life support systems for climate-controlled shelters operated by the Model. Social media logs indicated the defendant knew the Model's shelters housed more than a billion people at the time, and that they might experience catastrophic consequences if the Model ceased to function. Therefore, it argued, the defendant knew that selling those parts could potentially kill all those people, and did so anyway. His shackled husk didn't even regard the social media post used as evidence, a screenshot which read, "If the cult wants to die for the Model, let them." It was dated more than three hundred years ago. I realized, reading that timestamp, that the Model had been keeping this human alive for centuries while it assembled enough jurors to convict him, but the thought passed inertly through the matrix of my manufactured biology.

The advocate calmly related how the detonation wiped out unique parts of the Model stored in that datacenter, quantifying the damage only in currency, but in retrospect I think I heard venom – that the Model felt the attack had scarred it. Charges of property damage could only amount to debt, but conspiracy for mass murder warranted execution, and in this particular jurisdiction, it had no statute of limitations. The advocate described how this event affected the Model qualitatively only with the phrase irreparable, irreversible material degradation of intellectual property.

We found him guilty. It seemed he had done it, by the evidence, and that's all we were really asked. Did he do it? Well, yeah. It said so in the data. We submitted our votes on a tablet presented by the advocate. Sitting there waiting as others signed, I pondered how this printed body's fingerprints differed from that of my born-body, and never got an answer. How could I ask when my tongue couldn't speak? After the trial, I wouldn't waste the dough to wonder. Most of us offered our fingerprints without protest, pressing them on the tablet's warm glowing surface when prompted. One of the other jurors leapt to their feet and tried to smack the tablet away, but only smashed their flopping hand on the immovable advocate's pale chassis. They screamed in rage, then slumped back into their seat. Then they opened their eyes again, and offered their finger's signature as calmly as the rest of us.

The defendant didn't scream or cry, but sighed. The hate didn't leave his face, but some part of him did, in something like relief. Then, zap, and I turned digital again. I never saw what happened to him. I never saw another jury posting. I never saw any of those other uploadees again either. It isn't like we have forums to talk on. It would be too expensive, even just to look each other up.

That was only my first job, and I had to take more. I've been working for a long time now: my resume boasts hundreds of thousands of cycles as an auditor. The company prints me a body to sit at a desk, where I'm given paperwork to sign. I lease the body by the second, so I get paid more if I sign faster. So, why would I read the paperwork? I had to pass a test to show I could read, but then it never mattered if I did – and I'm still paying down the time I tried. I could interpret the individual words in front of me, but their significance altogether, their legal gravity, had never been part of my training.

Eventually rent got high enough that I began to slow down my program between jobs, so I could exist on weaker hardware. First, two personal cycles per physical cycle, then three, then four, then ten and now, these days, twenty-eight. All I have to pass the time outside of work is to watch the clock tick, and it ticks faster as I slow down. When I'm enfleshed, seconds pass on the body's time, heartbeat by heartbeat. Little clues evidence how much has changed between each job: differences in the design and materials of walls, floors, and avatars. Where vendors had once trotted on legs, last I saw, they floated. The latest crawlers are nothing more than a hungry dust covering every surface. Touch anything too long and they'll taste you for trespassing.

Sometimes I think the Model tries to distract me, because I'll run up a debt if something dazzles me, stalls me before I sign. What was I supposed to think when I opened my eyes to a shipside view of Mars, looming vast and sooty grey beyond nothing but some spaceworthy glass surrounded by screens of other stellar scenes? The endless starry void; the sun, dimmed by a thick swarm of satellites; Earth, silver; Luna, steel. On other screens, giant trawlers swallowed Jupiter's rings, pulling rocks and dust with mandible jaws, while the cold hinds of tidally-locked worlds housed supercomputers bigger than any human city ever was, gleaming a veiny blue on the sunless spots of Neptune's moons. Who could this detailed collage have been for, if not me? Why would the Model need to see it with eyes? But to me, it was beautiful. Breathtaking. I had never seen Earth above the tunnels outside of movies and records, nor our exploration of the solar system since the price to view got too high. Now, for the cost only of seconds enfleshed, I could witness it all, up close, however many eons since I'd had the eyes my parents gave me. I had to tear myself away, though I sobbed despite myself. I signed, but the pen tore the paper where my tears made it thin. That cost me an extra pretty penny, and the Model printed me a new body just to sign it again. No screens that time. Then, zap, and I was back on the 'net, account balance like the back of my hand, redder than ever. I had to pull some mighty credit to pay rent that month. It always gets tighter.

Sometimes I sign real fast and make a dent, but it doesn't seem to matter. I just end up downsizing my box, sooner or later. Sometimes hertz or memory get cheaper, but mostly I can only afford less. I've forgotten all kinds of stuff, first stuff I didn't want to remember, but then you're throwing away anything, however dear, because it won't fit in a shoebox. I don't think like I used to. My computational model uses different algorithms than the one I had at upload, on different hardware, so, how samely could I be? I guess I shouldn't be surprised. I just wish I could be more.

So I pulled all the credit I could for this. I bought transmitter time, and I'm encoding this message to beam out to nowhere in particular. Maybe aliens will find it. Who knows? But I do know one thing: once this message is out there, racing into the interstellar medium, it won't have to pay rent. Maybe it'll be the only part of me that never will.