Instantiation

by Greg Egan

“We meet on Wednesday afternoons,” Graham explained, “for book club, fight club, carpentry and scrapbooking, and once a month, we go out into the desert to interrogate our masculinity.” “Does that include water-boarding?” Dan wondered. Graham stared back at him uncomprehendingly.

“I’d never picked you as a Beatrix Potter fan.” “You have no idea what my men’s group gets up to.”

Inserting the right management jargon into his descriptions of his duties in past positions had done wonders before, but the dialect of the bullshit merchants mutated so rapidly that it was hard to keep up.

Dismissed from a job that you were doing well? he read. Your employer might have used legally dubious software to copy your skills, allowing their computers to take over and perform the same tasks without payment!

He could dig up the lawn and fill the entire back yard with vegetables, but unless the crop included Cannabis sativa and Papaver somniferum, it wouldn’t make enough of a difference to help with the mortgage.

“I did a unit of forensic accounting myself, fifteen years ago. Do you think I’d be in the running if I went back for a refresher course?” Dan felt a pang of shame, asking this man he barely knew, and didn’t much like, for advice on how he could compete with him. But surely the planet still needed more than one person with the same skills? “It’s not accounting,” Graham replied. He looked around to see who was in earshot, but all the children were engrossed in their devices. “I’m writing bespoke erotic fiction.”

But a turntable was playing something on vinyl, and though Dan didn’t recognize the artist he was fairly sure it wasn’t from the age before CDs.

“So have you started cooking meth yet?” he asked Callum. Janice snorted derisively. “You’re showing your age!” “What?” Dan could have sworn he’d seen a headline about an ice epidemic somewhere, just weeks ago. Callum said, “There’s a micro-fluidic device the size of a postage stamp that costs a hundred bucks and can synthesize at least three billion different molecules. Making it cook meth just amounts to loading the right software, and dribbling in a few ingredients that have far too many legitimate purposes to ban, or even monitor.” Dan blinked and tried to salvage some pride. “What’s a postage stamp?”

He began by passing the time people-watching, but everyone who strode by looked so anxious that it began to unsettle him, so he raised his eyes to the clouds instead.

He should have got down on his knees and begged Graham to find him his own wealthy pervert to titillate. At least he’d never aspired to be any kind of writer, so debasing the practice wouldn’t make him a whore.

His gym membership had expired a month ago, and apparently his cardiovascular system had mistaken the sudden decline in demand for an excuse to go into early retirement.

“Please don’t tell me that it was all a double bluff: our AI masters pretended to reveal themselves, then allowed you to discover that they really hadn’t, in order to convince you that they don’t exist. Of all the even-numbered bluffs, the less-famous ‘zero bluff’ cancels itself out just as thoroughly, while attracting even less attention.”

Apparently some fly-spot in the multidimensional space of all welfare applicants’ financial profiles had ended up correlated with profligacy, and that was that: once you fell into the statistical red zone, no one was obliged to point to any single act you’d committed that was manifestly imprudent.

Dan must have fallen asleep around three, because when he woke at a quarter past four, he felt the special, wretched tiredness that was worse than not having slept at all.

If enough tech firms believe they can benefit from novel ways of limiting the blow-back as they hollow out the middle class, achieving that will become an industry in its own right.”

The idea that every person in the world ought to learn to code had always struck Dan as an infuriating piece of proselytizing, as bizarre as being told that everyone just had to shut up and become Rastafarian. But in the zombie apocalypse, no one ever complained that they needed to learn to sharpen sticks and drive them into rotting brains. It wasn’t a matter of cultural homogeneity. It was a question of knowing how to fuck with your enemy.

“I guess he was used to setting the bar low. If you grew up believing that Facebook could give you ‘news’ and Google could give you ‘information’, your expectations for quality control would already be nonexistent.” “I think you’re conflating his generation with your father’s.” Adam was quite sure that the old man had held the Bilge Barons in as much contempt as his great-nephew

“So you don’t know why he didn’t care that you don’t know whatever it is that you don’t know? Very fucking Kafka.” “I think he would have preferred ‘very fucking Heller’ … but who am I to say?”

Gerther didn’t ask who Einstein was. Even for a post-apocalyptic peasant, there were some claims of ignorance that just wouldn’t fly.

“The one thing that makes life bearable is knowing that the world yields to scrutiny. Beneath the chaos there’s always some order to be perceived – some sense to be made of the sources of our hardship. What makes us human is the desire to understand these things well enough to ameliorate them.”

as disconcerting as a fraying strand on a parachute cord.

in such a way that they inherited enough recreational mathematics to have heard of the “p-adic numbers”:

They’re like that guy with bad hair in No Country for Old Men.”

“They seem to think I’ve somehow harmed their chances for Elon to take them on a ride out to the wormhole, which the aliens are building in order to invite all the least pleasant people on Reddit and 4chan into their galactic empire.”

This guy invents six new scalar fields before breakfast just to make his models work.”

“What can you tell us about your relationship with Gödel?”

Any book that contains this line of dialogue is self-evidently worth reading!

“We have a duty to speak Truth to Power.” “That’s a beautiful slogan, but you know Power never returns Truth’s calls.