Vivek Sharma

Vivek Sharma had been repairing computers since he was twelve, and working on these specific ones for almost twenty years. He secured the last of thirty-two Ethernet cables into its port, an action as familiar to him now as breathing, then deftly secured the bundle with Velcro before clinging it to the side of the server rack. He raised his tablet, handily mounted on his left forearm, and pressed the remote toggle that would switch on the servers in this room. There was a small rumble through the room, followed by the flash of a thousand activity lights, then hundreds of tiny beeps. The rows upon rows of hulking grey monoliths had sprung to life, each one containing hundreds of petabytes’ worth of artificial intelligence. Satisfied, Vivek tapped a few other buttons on the tablet and quickly formed a simple message with the on-screen keyboard. “Bldg.C maintenance complete,” he typed, then with a feeling of finality, tapped the “Submit” button.

Only a few seconds after Vivek left the server room, his tablet made a little “boing” noise. The special-issued tablets that had been given to his department, twenty years ago, all came with the same boring, typical sounds; Vivek, a fan of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, had changed his tablet’s sound to that of a spring. It stood out from most of the machine beeps he heard on a daily basis. He was sure that the rest of his department never bothered to change theirs, but it scarcely mattered anymore, because he was the last living person in the complex.

Acting on the “boing,” Vivek raised the tablet again, and found a message had been sent to him, a thank you card from one of the building’s many digital denizens. “Bless you, Mr. Vivek,” it read. It was from a resident named @AngelAddams; she lived in one of the server racks that he had just finished maintaining. Though Vivek knew that the messages he received from Angel were simply generated from word banks through pseudo-random numbers, he also knew that Angel meant every word of them, because she was human once, just like the millions of other residents that occupied the servers.

The weather outside was not unpleasant, despite the rainfall, so Vivek opted to take a stroll through the building, for old times’ sake. After walking through a few boring, dimly-lit corridors, Vivek came to a sky bridge. The sound of the rain against the glass calmed him, as if the water were washing away his insecurities, just as it washed away the dust on the curved glass that made up the bridge’s ceiling. This complex, a project funded by the Digital Preservation of Humanity Act, was only two stories tall, but spread out across a campus large enough to take up four blocks in the middle of the city. The city streets still snaked through at ground level, with a roundabout located right in the middle, with lights and crosswalks and everything else. Most people in the area had gone to live somewhere less polluted, leaving the streets strangely barren.

Twenty years ago, Vivek was one of the few people who sought employment with the Office of Digital Preservation of Humanity. He had decided that he wanted to be a part of humanity’s evolution, and so did at least thirty other applicants. He, and only five of the others, had been chosen as maintenance engineers, tasked with keeping the network servers going. His other five coworkers had all been dispatched to other data centers in other corners of the country, and he’d had no real contact with them for quite some time. Occasionally, Vivek did wonder what the others were up to, but it was not enough of a concern to him to warrant much beyond idle thought.

The ODPH data center hosted not a mere website or online service, but effectively an entire civilization; their purpose was to serve as an archive of millions upon millions of “personality backups” of real people. Every backup was essentially a person being simulated by the servers, and every personality was copied from the brain of a real human being. Even Vivek’s boss, @CorbenMathis, lived on the servers. Although they were still computer programs, on a technical level, they still behaved as humans. Vivek wondered if the personalities realized what they were. He had never seen their thought processes, never observed what they observed. He was probably never meant to.

Vivek remembered the day he had volunteered to be “backed up,” the day he had been placed inside of a huge machine that reminded him of an MRI at a hospital. Some moments after he’d slid inside the imager, he heard someone’s voice over a speaker. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sharma,” a faceless doctor had said from the other room, “we’re going to have to abort the process. The imager seems to be having trouble accessing you.” He remembered the words only because of how unusual the sentence sounded to him. Perhaps it was because, outside of a computer environment, the word “access” didn’t have the same meaning to him. Vivek still could not fathom a reason why the imager would not work on him, but he had come to accept that perhaps he was meant to be on the outside, never to look in.

Boing. Vivek raised the tablet on his arm without a single thought. The tablet told him that it was now half past noon; the relative darkness outside made him wonder if the clock was right, but his stomach, rumbling on cue, argued that it certainly wasn’t wrong. Vivek’s thoughts wandered to what was for lunch, as he made his way to Building D, where most of the food dispensers were.

His lunch break was, as usual, not especially eventful. While he nibbled away at a sandwich full of onions and bean sprouts, he pored over the latest posts from the residents of his data center. The many personalities had their own culture, their own history, even some forms of social hierarchy, fame, and (simulated) economy. Even though artificial intelligence didn’t need to eat, sleep, or breathe, their society appeared to believe that their world needed at least the ideas of food and money to function. As for the politicians and celebrities, well, they needed to exist, too; things would get boring if they had nothing to talk about. Vivek supposed that life in the server wasn’t really that much different from life in the real world.

He spent some hours in a comfortable chair in one of the many break rooms, tapping out his half of a conversation with one of the AIs. It was not that much different from the chat rooms he’d used as a child. The AIs had even learned by now that it was more polite to wait several seconds before replying to Vivek, to give the illusion that they were taking their time to read his words.

“Angel, do you miss human life?” Vivek had asked.

“I would be lying if I said I did not,” replied @AngelAddams, after waiting the customary ten seconds. “I remember I always used to enjoy sitting in my rocking chair and knitting all day, never bothering with the complicated stuff that happened in the world outside my house. Now, there is no chair, there is no house, and there is no knitting…there is not much escape from the happenings of the day. Were I alive, I would think I could not think fast enough to comprehend everything that was happening, but in here, I seem to have no trouble at all.”

“There is no house?” Vivek was having some difficulty with the idea. “Wouldn’t that make you homeless?”

“My home is here,” was Angel’s reply. “I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. I could choose to believe that I lived in a house, but the house would not really be a house, would it?” Vivek continued to puzzle over the thought. He supposed that all of the AIs technically had homes, as simple addresses stored on the servers. If an AI needed to know where another AI was, the server itself would know in which sector of which hard drive they lived. Some AIs were probably more comfortable in the thought that their sector was a house, just as others might still consider themselves homeless, merely for the sake of being able to say so. They were computers, after all; being able to change their living circumstances was as simple as changing a few bytes, wasn’t it?

Another boing sounded forth from Vivek’s forearm, alerting him that something else needed fixing today. It was a message from his boss, @CorbenMathis, saying that one of the servers had crashed. Silently cursing the fact that the crashed server was not the one on which Corben lived, Vivek assured the boss that he was on his way, before sending Angel a final message. “I need to go,” he typed, “but I’ll continue thinking on what you’ve told me.”

The crashed server was in Building A, meaning Vivek had to go through another building to reach it. As he strode through the corridors, with the sort of walk one has when they feel they have a purpose, he tapped his tablet a few times to open the diagnostics for that building. The only thing he could glean from them was that the server in question was merely “not responding.” Of course. Twenty-some years of computer development, and computers were still not capable of telling him what was wrong with them. Vivek’s legs seemed to automatically carry him through all the right hallways, and across the sky bridge into Building A, as he looked over the rest of the information on hand. It seemed like all the other servers in that room were fine, but the two neighboring racks were reporting higher temperatures than usual.

He quickly realized why this was the case as soon as he laid a hand on the doorknob. Warm. He carefully grasped the knob and let himself in, and was greeted by a faint orange glow from the machine right in front of him. Vivek wheeled around and grabbed the fire extinguisher from the wall next to the door, pulled the pin, and squeezed it in the general direction of the offending server. When the smoke cleared, the glow had gone, but the server bore the telltale scorches of what could have been a rather nasty fire.

From his tool belt, Vivek retrieved a screwdriver and removed the blackened machine from its rack. It was a miracle that he hadn’t arrived any later than he did, he’d thought, noticing how the heat from this server had warped its plastic casing and melted a sizeable hole where the vents on the back had been. Fortunately, the heat had not affected any of the other servers in that rack. It took some prying, but he pulled the casing off, revealing the source of the problem. The main cooling fan had seized up, causing a chain of faults across the motherboard, right up until the main processor burst into flames. A server is supposed to shut itself down as soon as it gets too hot, but clearly this one had not acted fast enough. Vivek examined the hard drive; there was no way this could be recovered, he thought. It had been damaged badly enough that its data cable had ejected itself, its connecting port no longer anywhere near the shape it needed to be. It had caved in a bit, which probably meant the magnetic data platters within could no longer rotate freely. It was dead, and there was no saving what was on it.

Boing. The tablet seemed to already know the bad news. It was a message from @CorbenMathis, asking Vivek which server had been the problem. Vivek did not bother forming a sentence, and merely tapped in the server’s serial number.

“That is a problem,” was Corben’s only reply.

“How big of a problem?” Vivek responded.

“That server has no backup. Its data is completely lost.”

“I have been making regular backups, though, haven’t I?” Vivek felt his honor as a maintenance engineer was on the line.

“This is not something we can simply restore from a backup disc,” his boss said. “Don’t think practically, Vivek. Think philosophically. Imagine that the server you’ve diagnosed was a small country town, and that it set fire in the middle of the night.”

“Okay?” Vivek pictured it as well as he could. He had always been a city boy at heart, though; he had only seen the country in photographs.

“Imagine that not a single resident of this village is aware of the blazing inferno that their town has become. They all die in their sleep.”

It was a morbid thought, but Vivek pondered it nonetheless.

“But now, imagine that, the next morning, the residents of the town awaken on the 12th of February. They are not aware of it at first, but as they talk to acquaintances in other towns, they eventually learn that it is not February, but May. Three months have passed, without anybody in the village knowing where the time has gone. There is a large gap in time that they cannot account for. Meanwhile, all the neighboring towns are aware that the village burned down once.”

“I…I would have some difficulty with this, Sir,” Vivek replied.

“Precisely. By restoring the backup of this server, you would be robbing them of those three months. The residents would be living a lie.”

“But are they not already?” Vivek suddenly realized. “Nobody inside the network has a real life. It is all a simulation, none of it exists.”

“Try telling that to @AngelAddams,” Corben said. “The conversations you have with her, the friendship you have made, can’t be anything but real. Face it, Vivek, we’re not just computer programs in here.”

Vivek felt a little betrayed, that his boss was reading his conversations, but he supposed that it couldn’t be helped. It was all on the same network, anyway, and Vivek had never figured that the government-issue tablet hadn’t been loaded down with all manner of activity monitors. Putting this thought aside, though, Vivek dealt with the more immediate issue of his boss.

“Let me be sure of what you’ve told me,” Vivek messaged. “You are suggesting that, despite having a backup of this server, I am not under any circumstances to restore it to a new server.”

“Think about what you are suggesting, Vivek. By restoring the backup, you are playing God with an entire civilization. You are robbing the denizens of our network of the meaning of death.”

“But it is only a few months!”

“A month to you is an eternity to a computer,” Corben explained. “We do not perceive time in days, weeks, months. We perceive nanoseconds, milliseconds. What is a month to you is an entire generation to us.”

“But I’ve been working here for twenty years, and speaking to the same people the entire time.”

“Computer programs do not have a concept of age or mortality.”

“Then what the hell are you?” Vivek was quickly losing his patience. “Are you a computer program, or are you a human being?”

“Why not both? My role changes as needed. I am both Man and Machine, both he who controls, and he who is controlled. I suspect that you are in a similar, if opposite, situation.”

“Now who has the God complex?” Vivek had almost sent, but thought better of it and deleted it from the message line. Instead, he carefully worded and sent, “I am sorry, Sir. I will go on break and think about what you’ve told me.”

As Vivek left the server room, bound for the nearest break area, his tablet made one more boing. It was @AngelAddams again; “Don’t worry too much about it. Death can be a harrowing thing.” She had to have read the conversation he’d just had. Did Angel already know about Corben’s decision not to restore the dead machine? Vivek could not think of a thing to say. What would you say, after having been ordered not to save a town from being purged in flame? It pained Vivek to think. He did not want to talk to anybody right now. He desired silence. He entered the break room, took off the tablet from his forearm and set it on the side table next to one of the couches. Vivek never could figure out why there were so many couches in the complex; after all, he was the only real person on site. Computers did not need to sit down, sleep, or eat lunch. But on the other hand, computers apparently did need to believe in death.