New Hope for the Dead

two very short stories

David Langford

Published by:

Ansible Editions
94 London Road, Reading, England, RG1 5AU
www.ae.ansible.co.uk

Copyright © 1999, 2005, 2014 by David Langford. All rights reserved.

This Ansible Editions ebook published 2014.

The right of David Langford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the Author in accordance with the British Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

No portion of this ebook may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

New Hope for the Dead

Hello, Mr Hormel, this is your hosting system at Nirvana Infomatics. We apologize for interrupting your regular afterlife, but unfortunately the message is urgent. Otherwise we would not have intruded on your VR sex athletics competition.

We are sorry to hear that you were going for a new high score. Nevertheless the message is urgent.

In accordance with your contract for postmortem uploading and long-term maintenance as an Electronic-Golem Artificial Neurosystem or EGAN, we regret to inform you that your trust fund is not performing adequately. This is a result of global economic problems, arising from the continuing states of emergency in Iraq, Iran, Korea, France, and the US Pacific Northwest. To put it briefly, your current investment yield is no longer covering the monthly payments for full enjoyment of this digital afterlife.

You are quite correct to invoke the emergency insurance terms laid down in Clause 12 of your antemortem agreement. Unfortunately, our finance department has already taken the full potential claim into account.

Yes, the world economy truly is in appalling shape. Otherwise we would not be forced to mention the provisions of Clause 9, “Special Circumstances, Penalties and Termination”.

But in the words of the classic novel, Don’t Panic! Several alternative plans are available for financially challenged and differently solvent entities in our care.

The simplest scheme is what our client-advisors amusingly call “being dead for tax reasons”. Maintaining your full activity as an EGAN requires continuing exabyte-scale storage capacity and very substantial 24/7 processor power. We can enormously reduce the associated expenses by storing you in static, compressed Zip format for reactivation in a time of better economic weather.

Yes, it is true that we cannot guarantee a major future upturn. Shares can, alas, not only go down but plunge and even plummet. Yes, it is possible that current issues like global warming, fossil fuel exhaustion and scrotty abuse may conceivably reduce our technological capacity to a level where stored EGANs can no longer be restarted. But, you know, you wouldn’t feel a thing.

We understand your viewpoint. So much, then, for the first and easiest option.

Plan two has the droll motto, “Poverty is Nature’s way of telling you to slow down!” What happens here is that to all intents and purposes you continue your luxury electronic afterlife exactly as at present – but with substantial savings achieved by slowing your clock rate and reducing processor load. A thousandfold reduction, for example, would make no subjective difference but ...

Well, yes, you would inevitably lose contact with other posthuman friends running at normal clockspeed in the EGANverse. And, indeed, a century would pass in little more than five weeks. Try to look on the bright side: you could see the glittering wonders of the future. Who would have thought, even a few years ago, that scrotties would be of such momentous significance today? What other fascinating surprises await?

Ah, so you doubt our troubled world’s ability to sustain life, high information technology and thus your own digital substrate for as much as another century. Just between you and ourselves, Mr Hormel, we agree. One doesn’t want to go actively looking for future shock.

So it seems as though you’ll be opting for plan number three. As our client-advisors like to explain this one, “You’re dead but you needn’t lie down!” Posthumous vocational choices are restricted by a variety of union agreements, but there are still opportunities for EGAN personalities to carry out useful and profitable work!

Your key marketing point is the unparalleled human – sorry, posthuman – ability to perform advanced pattern recognition. No, not SETI radiotelescope data scanning. That was a good guess, but surprisingly crude software can handle the mere search for alien signals. For you we have a subtler, trickier, and constantly mutating challenge.

According to your premortem life record (we apologize for the intrusion, but Clause 9.vii grants us direct access to your stored memories under the present circumstances), your highly profitable career as a Florida-based disseminator of unsolicited commercial email should make you ideally qualified for this filtration job. Everyone knows your old catchphrase: Just Press Delete.

It’s a simple, straightforward task, with VR rewards for accuracy and disincentives for wrong decisions: see Clause 9.xvi regarding valid occasions for negative reinforcement via simulated discomfort. You merely need to use your posthuman powers of judgment to separate relevant content from the surrounding white noise of coded promotional material for pr0n, HyperViagra, illicit scrotties, and the like – plus, of course, all solicitations with any hint of a Nigerian accent.

Here are your first ten billion emails. Scan them rapidly, diligently, and well. And as you come to each undesirable item ... Just Think Delete.

comp.basilisk FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions
Revised 27 June 20**

1. What is the purpose of this newsgroup?

To provide a forum for discussion of basilisk (BLIT) images. Newsnet readers who prefer low traffic should read comp.basilisk.moderated, which carries only high-priority warnings and identifications of new forms.

2. Can I post binary files here?

If you are capable of asking this question you MUST immediately read news.announce.newusers, where regular postings warn that binary and especially image files may emphatically not be posted to any newsgroup. Many countries impose a mandatory death penalty for such action.

3. Where does the acronym BLIT come from?

The late unlamented Dr Vernon Berryman's system of math-to-visual algorithms is known as the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique. This reflected the original paper's title: "On Thinkable Forms, with notes towards a Logical Imaging Technique" (Berryman and Turner, Nature, 2001). Inevitably, the paper has since been suppressed and classified to a high level.

4. Is it true that science fiction authors predicted basilisks?

Yes and no. The idea of unthinkable information that cracks the mind has a long SF pedigree, but no one got it quite right. William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), the novel that popularized cyberspace, is often cited for its concept of "black ice" software which strikes back at the minds of hackers -- but this assumes direct neural connection to the net. Basilisks are far more deadly because they require no physical contact.

Much earlier, Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957) suggested that a download of knowledge provided by a would-be-helpful alien (who has superhuman mental capacity) could overload and burn out human minds.

A remarkable near-miss features in The Shapes of Sleep (1962) by J.B. Priestley, which imagines archetypal shapes that compulsively evoke particular emotions, intended for use in advertising.

Piers Anthony's Macroscope (1969) described the "Destroyer sequence", a purposeful sequence of images used to safeguard the privacy of galactic communications by erasing the minds of eavesdroppers.

The comp.basilisk community does not want ever again to see another posting about the hoary coincidence that Macroscope appeared in the same year and month as the first episode of the British TV program Monty Python's Flying Circus, with its famous sketch about the World's Funniest Joke that causes all hearers to laugh themselves to death.

5. How does a basilisk operate?

The short answer is: we mustn't say. Detailed information is classified beyond Top Secret.

The longer answer is based on a popular-science article by Berryman (New Scientist, 2001), which outlines his thinking. He imagined the human mind as a formal, deterministic computational system -- a system that, as predicted by a variant of Gödel's Theorem in mathematics, can be crashed by thoughts which the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking. The Logical Imaging Technique presents such a thought in purely visual form as a basilisk image which our optic nerves can't help but accept. The result is disastrous, like a software stealth-virus smuggled into the brain.

6. Why "basilisk"?

It's the name of a mythical creature: a reptile whose mere gaze can turn people to stone. According to ancient myth, a basilisk can be safely viewed in a mirror. This is not generally true of the modern version -- although some highly asymmetric basilisks like B-756 are lethal only in unreflected or reflected form, depending on the dominant hemisphere of the victim's brain.

7. Is it just an urban legend that the first basilisk destroyed its creator?

Almost everything about the incident at the Cambridge IV supercomputer facility where Berryman conducted his last experiments has been suppressed and classified as highly undesirable knowledge. It's generally believed that Berryman and most of the facility staff died. Subsequently, copies of basilisk B-1 leaked out. This image is famously known as the Parrot for its shape when blurred enough to allow safe viewing. B-1 remains the favorite choice of urban terrorists who use aerosols and stencils to spray basilisk images on walls by night.

But others were at work on Berryman's speculations. B-2 was soon generated at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and, disastrously, B-3 at MIT.

8. Are there basilisks in the Mandelbrot Set fractal?

Yes. There are two known families, at symmetrical positions, visible under extreme magnification. No, we're not telling you where.

9. How can I get permission to display images on my website?

This is a news.announce.newusers question, but keeps cropping up here. In brief: you can't, without a rarely granted government licence. Using anything other than plain ASCII/ANSI text on websites or in e-mail is a guaranteed way of terminating your net account. We're all nostalgic about the old, colourful web, and about television, but today's risks are simply too great.

10. Is it true that Microsoft uses basilisk booby-traps to protect Windows Ultra from disassembly and pirating?

We could not possibly comment.

Acknowledgements

“New Hope for the Dead” was first published in the “Futures” department of Nature, 26 May 2005. It is included in David Langford’s mostly nonfiction collection Starcombing (2009).

“comp.basilisk FAQ” was first published in the “Futures” department of Nature, 2 December 1999. It is included in David Langford’s retrospective fiction collection Different Kinds of Darkness (2004).

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