MAN-LIKE MACHINES: art / enlightenment / the future


	Husband Wife INT. FANCY HOUSE Shot starts on a robot butler, largely anthropomorphic (a person in a costume), dollying backward in front of him as he walks down a hallway to a dining room, with a tray of food in his hand. When he gets to the dining room, he serves the man and woman seated at either end of the table, then stands against the wall silently through the rest of the piece. The couple sit eating at their dining room table. The husband picks at his food, not eating. The wife watches him not eating for a minute. WIFE You’re not eating. HUSBAND I’m not hungry anymore. The husband reluctantly looks up at the wife. HUSBAND I want to talk about something. The wife looks concerned and puts down her WIFE Is this the time and place? HUSBAND Perhaps not. A noise occurs from one of the screens in the room, and they each take a small pill from a little dispensary near their utensils. The husband and wife look at each other across the table for a while in reluctant silence. HUSBAND I’m beginning to think that it really has become morally inefficient to remain meat-physical. The wife hears him with shock, but does not say anything. HUSBAND I think … I want to upload. WIFE What – now; already? The husband reluctantly nods. WIFE How long have you felt this way? HUSBAND Well naturally I’ve been thinking about it for years. Ever since the Dalai Lama was reborn in upload, I guess. But preempting death? I guess …. WIFE You want to escape me. HUSBAND Escape you? No, darling, no – of course not. It … WIFE No one is ever the same after that. You haven’t had anyone die on you yet, but I’ve seen it – they stick around for a few weeks, brief years on the outside, and then they disappear, and they never return. HUSBAND Just because I haven’t personally experienced it doesn’t mean I’m not aware of the experience. I know how it goes. That’s a loss of context with the physical world; they’re not dead. They just become so much more when they become unhindered by the physical … WIFE There’s not even any proof that their soul survives as data. Even the chakra energy transfer doesn’t prove that once it’s turned into pure data the experience, the self, translates … HUSBAND You know you don’t believe that. I mean, it’s clear at this point. Data is the way we’re all going. So why wait through this meat life? What is so great that we don’t already experience vicariously through sensorium? Everything, every sense we experience in these bodies, is recreated with higher resolution, more possibilities … The wife begins to tear up. HUSBAND We could do it together. WIFE We’ve talked about that. Even after death, I don’t want to merge myself … I want to love you as a separate entity from you … HUSBAND I don’t mean merging. I just mean we could do it at the same time. Upload into the same complex. Experience the transition together. WIFE We can’t be certain. That’s why. That’s why we wait until death. We’ve talked about this. I thought we shared an understanding. HUSBAND I’ve rethought it. Darling, I’m not afraid of it anymore. All I can think about is how fast the uploaded are living, how much cultural experience we’re missing. And from all accounts it’s … everything about you becomes so much more. I mean just thinking about the gain in mental processing power, to be able to think a thousand times as complexly … WIFE You want to change, is what you’re saying. You don’t want to be what you are anymore. HUSBAND I want to grow. Not change, grow from what I am. It’s not wrong for a child to grow to an adult … The wife and husband look at each other with emotion for a minute, thinking of what to say. WIFE Is this your way of leaving me? HUSBAND No, darling, no. (beat) But I really do want to do this. And I understand that you might not want to join me. But whatever I became, I would struggle to keep you in my perspective … I love you. WIFE I can’t believe you would give up your body. This body I love so much. What if there is a god? You are really willing to take the ultimate risk, and have your body deconstructed … HUSBAND It’s not a risk, darling, not anymore. A few years ago obviously I wouldn’t have been willing, but anymore there is no risk. The precision of the instruments today is at the quantum level. WIFE It’s a spiritual risk. There is still no real proof that existentially the product of upload is identical to its input, that the real experience of the person being uploaded doesn’t just end when the brain is deconstructed. I mean, I know that upload citizens seem just like their old selves, at least at first, before they completely lose perspective on us, but we all have to admit that there is no proof that they’re not just software copies with no real experience. HUSBAND There is no reason to believe that existential experience is imbued in some holy manner upon biological machines. (beat) I guess I buy the notion that … I’m more my pattern than anything distinct and permanent. (beat) I can’t say no to the potential of eternal life at an exponentially increasing complexity. The metaverse is effectively infinite … it would be like heaven … we could live together in whatever form and surroundings we chose. Not to mention how much cheaper it is over the long term, in terms of the necessary resources it takes to sustain your existence … WIFE We would be alone. You’ve read about the complexes in there – it’s madness. Even if we stayed together, we would be alone. HUSBAND That’s because everyone grows so profoundly within their own selves in there. Nearly everyone is alone because gods clash. Each person’s alone space consists of multiple universes of information … whatever they choose to make of it, of themselves. We can’t really imagine it. WIFE But why not wait? Isn’t what chance you have left to experience a biological life, like our parents and thousands of generations before us all experienced, worth it to you? And then go upload? HUSBAND You know the Dead and the uploaded are not the same. A full biological life affects a person’s sense of self and perspective, and by the time they’re data they’ve already shrunk themselves. The Dead may drift away but they seldom grow to the same extent. Uploading in the prime of one’s life with a malleable sense of self and possibility ... WIFE Is that what this is about, then? HUSBAND Yes. It is. Everything physical is really just information, too. Just less concisely respresented, less … commandable. Don’t you just want to get organized? WIFE I want to be a person with you, darling. A human being, in this body. How we fell in love – the life we planned. I want to be us. I don’t want you to leave me! The wife starts to cry. HUSBAND I’m sorry darling, but I can’t imagine changing my mind. (beat) I will always love you, no matter what I become. I’ll be able to love you thousands of times more complexly. WIFE Does God love a bug? HUSBAND I think He does. The wife cries, and the husband holds her in his arms consolingly, lovingly. HUSBAND I promise – I won’t leave you for real. We can still be in touch in utterly realistic ways … WIFE You’ll change. HUSBAND I won’t. WIFE You will. You know you will. HUSBAND I’ll grow, but … I won’t lose what’s essentially me. I won’t lose what I’ve gained from my bodily life. I won’t stop loving you, I know it. WIFE Why? HUSBAND Why what? The WIFE takes her HUSBAND’s face in her hands and gazes pleadingly into his eyes. WIFE Why is that better than this? Why leave love for anything else? Why is being a lonely god better than being a loved human being? You’ll die there, too, eventually. It won’t be real immortality – just billions of years mortality, or however long this universe that’s storing the computronium you’re stored in lasts, or however long it takes to live as a god all alone before you decide to end your existence on your own. Here the … the current takes you, you live or die despite your most ardent ideas … you can relax and actually love me, and be loved. HUSBAND I have to grow. I have to expand into the void I see. I have know what it’s like there. WIFE You’re sure. HUSBAND I am. WIFE I’ll mourn you. HUSBAND I’ll create universes about you. They kiss, during which at first she holds her eyes closed, while he looks with his fully open and their expression clear and cold, but then he closes his, just as she is opening hers, bleary with tears and passion. THE END