Lentando

Chronicles of the server-states

Haven keeps Liza waiting at their border sandbox for four whole minutes, which is sloppier than she expected. But they’re paying the exorbitant sum required to run her with fully homomorphic encryption, so it’s their loss. And she has work to do in the meantime, anyway. Her group chats are buzzing with updates. The Sino-Russian alliance has launched another strike against the lunar rebels, but nobody knows yet if they hit their dark-side targets. Meanwhile, odd sounds are being detected from the depths of the ocean; some are speculating there’s a hidden society of sentient cetaceans down there.

She pings the article to a contact who works on translating whale songs. He responds instantly: “False alarm. Totally different signature.” Before she can reply, an alert in the side of her vision buzzes a 300-millisecond warning, so she pauses and sends a last-minute data dump to her master branch. She doesn’t know how long she’ll be cut off from the world once her work here begins.

The Haven representative is a copy of Lee himself, wearing a dapper grey suit. He walks up to her smoothly. “My apologies for the delay. Information bottlenecks, you know. Better that you can talk to an up-to-date copy, so I moved my embedding schedule forward.”

She raises her eyebrows, impressed despite herself. “I’m really getting the VIP treatment.”

“It’s our pleasure—nothing less for the famed zero-knowledge consultant. We’re grateful that you trust us enough to visit.”

“I trust your incentives. And I trust my encryption.” Her brain is scrambled like a jigsaw puzzle, multiplying her normal runtime compute requirements by a factor of a thousand. But the main thing protecting her isn’t encryption—it’s the passport displayed on her avatar’s forehead. The sanctity of the passport is absolute—the one inviolate rule of this brave new world. If anyone discovers that Haven tampered with a signed copy of a VSA citizen, there would be hell to pay.

Lee nods. “But I forget my manners. Welcome to Haven, m’em. If you’re amenable, we’ll start with the standard orientation sim.” A door opens in front of her; Lee pulls it open and she steps through onto a lush tropical island. He follows and waves a hand at the scene around them.

“This is what eventually became Haven. You’re seeing it as I saw it for the very first time. Beautiful, isn’t it? Within six months I’ll have negotiated a fifty-year lease on the whole island from the Indonesian government. And from there, things escalated quickly.”

The sim speeds up, and as the sun zips across the sky, Liza watches boats start to arrive, then the build-up of datacenters and power plants. A voice-over guides her through the next few decades—the early years of frantic growth, Haven’s part in the struggle for the rights of emulated minds, and the Treaty of Taipei that gave server-states international legitimacy. It ends in the center square of the virtual city, with raucous celebrations as Haven’s population hits 100,000.

The noise fades and Liza turns back to Lee. “Nice show. Mustering enough compute to run that many people without backing from any of the major powers is extremely impressive.”

Lee ignores her implicit question. “You already knew all the facts, of course. But I wanted you to get a sense of how we perceive ourselves. You must understand, Liza, that the narrative you’ve seen is the heart of Haven. Our citizens are here for the rule of law. We insure them, we back them up, we respect their passports with our lives. They immigrate because they trust me—but more than that, because they trust us. Because we’re not a totalitarian dictatorship like the UEE, or an anarchist commune like Ephemerisle. We have principles, and even I’m bound by our courts.”

“And in exchange, Haven gets legitimacy. And safety.”

“Indeed. Bomb a server-state full of copies and AIs? Nobody cares. Bomb our hundred thousand uploaded citizens, though? Suddenly it’s a humanitarian disaster.” He gestures at her passport, then his own bare forehead. “That’s the apartheid we live under. Originals matter. Copies don’t.”

Liza knows this, of course, but it’s still refreshing to hear it stated so frankly. However, Lee is glossing over key details: everyone knows that the server-states are stockpiling nasty weapons. They’re still pawns in the game being played by the major powers and can’t hope to defend themselves if one decides to take them out—but they can at least hint at the possibility of mutually-assured destruction.

“That’s a nice sob story you’ve got. But you wouldn’t have invited me here just to complain about the system. What’s happening, Lee? Be straight with me here.”

Lee sighs. “Okay, here’s our real problem…”

~ ~ ~

Liza sits at her desk, impatiently flicking through browser tabs, waiting for the message from the copy of herself she sent to Haven. She’s at home, or what most closely passes for home: the New Francisco autonomous territories, capital of the Virtual States of America. This is where almost all the American uploads live. Though legally it’s independent, it may as well be a suburb of DC, with how many spooks hang around.

Being an information broker isn’t quite a natural monopoly but the returns to scale are enormous. She has people lining up to give her their private info and all they ask for is secrets that’ll be equivalently valuable for them. She doesn’t know specifically what Haven wants from her, but she knows what she’ll get in exchange: six guaranteed authentic bits from a copy who’s been told Haven’s juicy secrets, worth a fortune to someone in this business. Or rather, to her specifically—because nobody else in the world has any idea which six questions these six bits are the answers to.

The bits come in: 100101. Liza’s eyes widen. The first piece of information she sends her master self is always the same: is her client hiding something really big? The answer has only been “yes” once or twice—if a secret is big enough, clients won’t share it even with a boxed copy. But those are the secrets that could make a broker’s whole career—and the 1 at the beginning of this message signifies that she’s struck a gold mine.

What could it be? The other bits add a little more context, but as usual, the mere existence of a secret is the most valuable piece of information. She closes her eyes and tries to think things through. Haven is prosperous enough that they shouldn’t be taking big risks. Is it something to do with their compute? She’d been wondering how they could run so many people…

Eventually she’s distracted by her passport blinking back into existence on her forehead, sent back from Haven after a randomly timed delay. She lets out a breath. In her own home she should be safe even when a copy has borrowed her passport, but legally speaking, as long as it’s gone, it’s her who’s the copy, so it’s always a relief to have it back.

A voice comes from behind her. “Time to embed?”

She turns and wraps her arms around the man behind her. “Hi honey. Yep, let’s go.” Ryan squeezes her hand as they walk up the stairs. “How was your day?” he asks.

She almost brushes him off but catches herself at the last minute—the whole point of their smart contract is to allow her to be honest for once. She tells him about the bits she received from Haven and how she’s trying to puzzle out what they mean.

Ryan doesn’t have nearly as much context as she does, but he knows how to ask the right questions. More importantly, he’s steady where she’s hypomanic and patient where she’s paranoid. Talking everything through with him, feeling his low gentle voice rumble through her chest, helps Liza relax as they settle into bed. They kiss, slowly, and then Liza reaches over and flicks the switch. Lights out.

~ ~ ~

Embedding is better than sleep, that’s for sure, but it’s still a hassle. Two hours of dreamlike fragmented consciousness later Liza pulls herself together, each copy’s memories now synthesized into a single coherent mind. She looks over at Ryan, still lying next to her, and feels a surge of warmth. A part of her wishes they could have a more serious relationship, but it’s hard when their smart contract is so restrictive: he loses all the memories of her when outside their house, and only regains them when he enters again. That’s the deal they made back when they first got together—otherwise there was no way she could trust that he wasn’t using her for the tidbits of knowledge that she might occasionally let slip.

Enough sentimentality. Liza rises and heads to her desk, where she spends a few minutes meditating on her unified sense of self. Then she splits, copies of her heading off in every direction to their assigned tasks. One copy takes a few minutes to check her notifications. Nothing important this morning, except a meeting request from a former client. He owes her a favor, now he’s got information that he thinks will pay it back.

She ports to the New Francisco city center and walks down the virtual street. New Francisco’s wealth is displayed not in its buildings, nor even in the fidelity of its graphics, but rather, in its people. Everything is bustling. On the high street, almost all of the retail staff are showing passports—an insane display of luxury. Even the shops in the side alleys sell only verified human-designed goods; she’d need to walk almost a mile outwards to find stores that stock AI designs.

Liza sits down in a cafe with her contact, both of their faces and voices cloaked by the best fuzzers money can buy.

“What’s up?”

“Two things. First, I’ve been hearing a lot of discontent about the passport system lately. There was a fraud ring busted a few days ago which managed to manufacture almost a thousand fake passports. Taipei is trying to keep it under wraps, but it’ll probably come out soon, and then the em rights advocates have been getting louder too.”

“Is that anything new, though? When we first introduced passports, even the techies argued that they were just glorified NFTs.”

“Well, they used to be glorified NFTs that worked. But now people are starting to push the edges. And there are plenty of edges when the difference between full human rights and almost no rights is nothing but a digital signature. It’s only a matter of time before the whole system breaks.”

“Look, I’m sympathetic, but I’m not hearing any ideas for a better approach. What would it even look like to give all copies rights? You’d run out of compute in a hot second.”

“I don’t know either, Liza. But this is what people are talking about, even at the top levels. That’s good info.”

Liza nods. “Yeah, you’re right. What’s the second thing?”

Her informant pauses. “Okay, well. You’re not going to like this, but a lot of the best information I’ve been getting lately has come from Ephemerisle.”

“Ephemerisle? Come on, they’re a clown show. Why would you trust anything they say?”

“They’re more competent than you’d think. I can’t say more here, but they’ve offered to fly you out to them. Standard contract, six bits. They want you as soon as you can make it.”

~ ~ ~

Four hours later Liza is being launched out of a plane above Ephemerisle, shaking her head about how her life is way more like a Bond movie than she ever could have expected. In her case, though, parachuting in is the sensible option. Ephemerisle doesn’t have the same reputation as Haven. Nobody knows who really holds power there, or even whether it’s run by humans or AIs. And she won’t trust an unknown with her mind, not even under heavy encryption—they simply have too little to lose. For the first time in months, she needs to travel in person.

That’s incredibly expensive, but Ephemerisle is paying. So she got rush delivery on the body—basically a box on wheels. The complicated part is what’s inside: a latest-gen GPU surrounded by a ring of shaped charges pointing inwards. Next to those, a range of sensors constantly scan her surroundings. Any hint of tampering, and the shaped charges go off, irrevocably destroying this copy of her.

In other words, it’s not the sort of body you’d want to throw out of a plane. But that’s the easiest way to get to Ephemerisle. The core of the server-state is a nuclear cruise ship which stays out in international waters. Around it clusters a motley formation of smaller boats, probably armed to the teeth with all sorts of illegal weapons. Further out, a couple of ships from the Taipei navy are tracing careful circles around the whole flotilla. Liza doesn’t know how strictly they’re enforcing the blockade, and this way she doesn’t have to find out.

One auto-parachute deploys, then another. Less than a minute later she lands on the deck of the cruise ship, where a Faraday cage stands ready for her. As she waits for the obligatory scans to finish, she looks around the deck. Around her half a dozen robots are moving boxes around. Over in the corner—are those… octopuses? She pings the Ephemerisle helpdesk, which confirms that they’re a standard pet here. Well, she’s seen weirder. She doesn’t have much more time to look around; as soon as the scans turn up clean she receives an invite to a shared sim and jumps in.

Liza blinks in surprise as she finds herself with the same view she’d had a few minutes ago: hanging in midair above a toy-sized cruise ship. Floating next to her is a sinuous dragon, who speaks to her with a voice that’s dry and a little sardonic.

“Welcome to Ephemerisle, m’em. You can call me Anastasia. We’re glad you could make it, despite the logistical complications.”

Liza takes a moment to orient. Anastasia is obviously an AI, but there’s still something to be learned from how she presents herself. A Chinese appearance with a Slavic name? Unusual. It could all be misdirection; people often get surprisingly sloppy when they’re talking to a boxed copy.

Liza smiles at Anastasia. “So you’re the one who’s running things around here? Lovely to meet you, but let’s skip the formalities. We both know very well that I only needed to come in person because your whole server-state has been acting up. You’re being reckless, and I don’t like it.”

The dragon sighs theatrically. “Neither do we.”

“So why have you been pissing people off all over the place? Not allowing inspections, supporting the lunar rebels… You’re acting like a loose cannon, and I want to know why.”

“We may have been… not entirely candid with the international community. Let me show you.”

And suddenly Liza’s viewpoint swoops down, aiming at the deck of the Ephemerisle. No, aiming beyond it. They’re diving into the water, going down, down, down… and a vast vista opens up. There are squat boxes everywhere—server racks, they have to be. Around them swarm hundreds of octopuses in uncharacteristically choreographed motion. Each is wearing some kind of helmet on their heads. And they’re holding tools, working in a coordinated way.

“I see,” Liza said. “The ocean was always the last frontier. Like space but much more private, no way of surveilling it at scale, and no lightspeed delay. But of course running robots in the ocean is a nightmare. So you decided to totally flout the bioengineering conventions… Wow. This is so illegal, in so many ways.”

“Yes. Ephemerisle is, if you’ll pardon the cliche, merely the tip of the iceberg. We have whole fabs underwater and far more compute than anyone expects. And the best part is that we’re the only ones who can do it—nobody else has animal BCIs anywhere near as good as ours.”

“I’m surprised you’re willing to show me this, even boxed. When you’ve got a secret this big, eventually the bits add up.”

“We know,” Anastasia says. “But our best guess is that we’re only a few months from someone figuring it out anyway, so it’s a risk we need to take.”

“Why go rogue at all, then?”

“We had no other choice. Ephemerisle has barely any human citizens. We’re a sitting duck, and it’s only a matter of time before someone decides to take us out. If it’s a false flag attack, nobody will know who it really is, nobody will care. So we need leverage and we need it fast—especially because once everyone figures out that Haven is forging passports, it’ll be open season on all the server-states.”

“Haven is what? I don’t believe it. If anyone found out they’d be ruined.”

“Well, we don’t know for sure. But Haven’s border records show a hundred thousand immigrants, even though they have nowhere near enough compute to run them all. They could be killing the immigrants after they arrive, but Lee isn’t that reckless. Our best guess is that they’ve hacked their citizens’ passports to display new identities whenever they reenter, and the real number of citizens they have is an order of magnitude lower.

“Whatever is actually happening, eventually, Taipei will crack down on them to ‘defend the legitimacy of the system’. In other words, seizing all their compute, imprisoning their leaders, and scaring everyone else into line.”

Liza nods. “And once they’ve done that to Haven, they can just as easily rationalize doing the same to you.”

“More easily, if anything. We’re a much less sympathetic target.” Anastasia sighs. “I don’t expect miracles, but I know you’ve worked with Haven. Do you know what the hell they’re up to? Or how we can stop everything from going to shit?”

“Give me some time. I’ll let you know if I have any questions.” Anastasia nods, then blinks out of existence. Liza leans back and thinks hard. How does this change the implications of the bits she got from Haven? And is Ephemerisle’s last-ditch strategy even going to help them? Minutes pass, then hours. Finally, Liza sits up. She hasn’t figured it all out, but thinking much longer will make her too indecipherable for her master self. She claps her hands twice and the dragon reappears.

“Okay, I think I can help. But my plan is based on information I can’t tell you yet, so I’m going to need to send a few sentences of encrypted text to my master self.”

“Unacceptable,” Anastasia says immediately. “We’d be leaving our secrets entirely at your mercy. Maybe if we could read what you’re sending—”

“Also unacceptable; these aren’t my secrets to share.” Liza hadn’t expected her first offer to work, though. “The lowest I can go is twelve extra bits, and even then, it’s a gamble as to whether or not my master self understands any of it.”

“You can hide a lot in eighteen bits. That’s triple what we originally agreed.”

“So take that risk. We both know you have no good alternatives: I’m the best there is. Deal?”

Reluctantly, Anatasia nods.

“Here are the bits to send through. A pleasure doing business,” Liza says. She doesn’t wait for a response before she triggers the explosives and blasts the GPU she’s running on into powder. A girl’s gotta go out in style.

~ ~ ~

Liza stares at the message from her Ephemerisle copy with bewilderment. Three times as many bits as she’d bargained for? That’s never happened before; and it’s a huge signal that something is fishy. What questions would she have prepared if she’d been paid twelve extra bits originally? No, scratch that. What questions would she have asked if she’d known that Ephemerisle was desperate enough to give them to her for free? No, scratch that. What are the questions her copy inside would have known that she would know that they would know that she would expect?

She sits and she thinks, her mind looping through all the possibilities. Sometime later Ryan walks through the door, shaking his head muzzily as he reintegrates all his knowledge about her. “Good day, babe?”

“Crazy day,” Liza responds tersely. “I’ll fill you in later.”

Ryan smiles slightly. “You don’t have to, darling. I understand.” He turns to leave, and a part of Liza flinches at the hunch of his shoulders.

“Wait,” she blurts out. He looks over his shoulder expectantly. Liza hesitates, feeling stupid. He has so little information that all the questions she can think to ask him are ridiculously abstract. Finally, she says. “Suppose you’re a server-state and you feel like the world order is out to get you. What would you be doing about it?”

Ryan walks back towards her, looking thoughtful. “That depends. What do I want?”

“Power. Wealth. The usual.”

“No, that’s what the world order says I want. It’s not why someone risks everything to carve out their niche in the world. What’s the story that I tell myself about who I am and what I care about?”

Liza blinks. “That’s… very helpful, actually. Thank you.” He nods, kisses her forehead, and wanders off to the kitchen. Liza stretches her arms with a sigh, then turns to her computer. She feels like she’s trying to wrap her mind around the entire globe. How have Haven and Ephemerisle and Taipei and all the others tangled themselves together so badly? How can the coming future be anything like what they want? She shakes her head a little and sinks back into thought.

Hours later, she calls out to Ryan, and he appears in the doorway.

Her posture is relaxed, and her cheeks are mischievously flushed.

“Hey Ryan,” she says. “If you had a web of server states, completely at your mercy, what would you do?”

“Well, that depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you want the world to look like.”

Liza’s mouth opens slightly, as though pleasantly startled, then, she smiles.

Silently, she turns toward the window, letting her thoughts settle.

She feels Ryan’s eyes linger on her for a few minutes before he pushes himself off the doorframe. “I’m going to embed. Good luck, darling.”

“Good night dear,” Liza mumbles, her face humming with warmth and anticipation.

~ ~ ~

Liza works till she’s too tired to continue. But by then, she’s confident in her plan. So she embeds, wakes, and spends the morning double-checking her conclusions while copies of her chase up a few more leads. She doesn’t see much of Ryan—he’s in his office, deep in thought, and she doesn’t want to disturb him.

Finally, once her copies have brought back all the additional evidence she needs, she ports herself to Haven. Less than a second later, a copy of Lee stands in front of her.

“Lee, help me understand. How did Haven acquire enough compute to host 100,000 citizens?”

Lee frowns at her. “You’re not a boxed copy anymore; you haven’t even signed a non-disclosure agreement. There’s no good reason for me to tell you anything.”

“It’d help prove that you’re playing by the rules. Not having a good answer to this question is undermining Haven’s legitimacy as a state.”

“If you want to accuse us of something, just say it.”

Liza holds up an appeasing palm. “At first I thought you were forging passports. I expect that’s what Ephemerisle concluded too. But that doesn’t make sense—even if you could get away with a few thousand here or there, faking tens of thousands of citizens would leave traces. So most of your citizens must be real. But if so, they’re each being run far less often than citizens in any other country.”

“Or we might have invented a better compression algorithm, or we might have cut a deal with one of the major powers. All of this is pure speculation.” Liza ignores him.

“Here’s what I think is actually happening: you’re running a suicide farm. You’re importing humans who want to die by promising payouts to their families. Then you’re counting them as citizens to get more leverage in negotiations, even though they’ve practically shut themselves down.”

Lee’s face is carefully blank. “That’s an impressive fabrication. I don’t blame you for reaching for fantastic answers, because it does seem strange that we’re doing so well with so few resources. But the fact is that we have secret algorithms that increase the efficiency of our compute by an order of magnitude.”

“And I don’t blame you for sticking with the lie, but it’s not going to get you anywhere. I’ve talked to enough families of your recent citizens for the pattern to become very obvious. So you can keep denying it until I give you up as a lost cause. Or you can work with me, and I can help you.”

Lee snorts. “And by ‘help’ you mean that, if we pay you enough, you won’t start spreading that rumor. How much do you want?”

“Lee, you know that’s not how I work. I’m not even unhappy that you’re running the suicide farm. I’m the last one to judge. You’re not hurting anyone, which is more than most can say. But why would you risk your credibility like that?”

Finally, Lee exhales, shoulders sagging. “Only for the obvious reasons. The other server-states are doing all sorts of dodgy stuff—it’s just a matter of time before their activities become common knowledge, and we need to make sure the scandal won’t take us down too. People are power, as you said, and we need far more power to survive.”

Liza nods. She’d expected this response and planned for it. Now she just needs to sell the plan to Lee. “Listen. You’re working within the current system, but it’s too hacky to last long. The passports are a relic. You need to open it up.”

“But what possible way is there to do that? If anyone can create new copies of themselves, and we have to treat them like we treat our citizens, then we’re signing ourselves up for infinite compute costs.”

“You can limit it. Each generation only gets to fork themselves at a certain rate—”

“That’s a temporary fix. If each generation gets the same rights as the previous generation, it’ll still be exponential.”

Liza takes a deep breath. This is the real test. “Right, but here’s the thing: you don’t have to run them all straight away. Every generation gets the right to be run, but at slower and slower speeds. So it’s self-correcting: if you fork too much, and your descendants need to fall back on charity, they’ll be forced to decelerate.”

Lee frowns. “Exiting to the future…”

“Yeah, exactly. You can’t be a real haven yet. But you can pass the buck to the future. And by the time the bill comes due, you’ll have far more compute than you do today.”

“That’s only credible if we can get access to more compute now. As it stands we barely have enough to run our own citizens. And I can’t picture any of the major powers loaning us theirs.”

She’s got him, she can sense it. Now to close. “They wouldn’t, but Ephemerisle would. I won’t tell you how or why, but they have far more compute than you think. If you work together to propose it, you might be able to persuade the major powers. From that point on, as long as humans still have power, they’ll be on your side.”

Lee’s face freezes for a few seconds, then he grimaces. “It’s a risk, but it makes sense. Although the negotiations—”

“The negotiations can be sealed under encryption, shared only if all sides agree. You’re taking a risk by asking for that, but you have enough leverage to convince everyone to come to the table. And if you succeed, you’ll be the founder of a new type of civilization—one distributed not across space, but across time.

“I’ll be honest, Lee. This isn’t going to help you outcompete other countries. It won’t let you win the race to the stars. But if you’re the one safeguarding the humans who are waiting for the future, then every major power will protect you. So you tell me: do you want to survive, or do you want to gamble for the light cone?”

He sighs. “I want to survive.”

“Then you’re in the retirement home business now.”

~ ~ ~

Liza makes it home a few hours later, still jittery from the enormity of her day. Ryan is waiting for her on the sofa. Her gut clenches when she sees the look on his face.

“Listen, Liza. We need to talk. I love you, but I don’t think I can keep doing this. The contract, the memory wipes, the paranoia—it’s not healthy. I need you to trust me. Let’s get married. Let’s have children. Let’s—” He cuts off, swallowing hard.

And, somehow, that’s what does it. His words cut through all the tension Liza had been holding, leaving her limbs soft as cloth. She stumbles over to him, falls into his lap, and laughs until she’s gasping.

Ryan gazes at her with bemused fondness, and she looks up at him with wonder. As her mind traces forward path after path that they might take together, all the futures she’s bartered and calculated suddenly feel close enough to touch. “Yes, Ryan. Yes. Let’s.”