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Marla twisted around and looked at them. Their clothes had changed, and now they
wore what Dalton wore. “They’re not homunculi?”
“Ha. Vat-grown clones, on a psychic link party-line with me? Please.”
If he says, “What? Please” one more time, Marla thought, I’m going to choke him with
a computer cable.
“I don’t have time for retro technologies like that,” Dalton went on. “My mirrors are
me, duplicated, running on a thirty-minute refresh rate. Every half hour I get a ping
from them, and they get updated to whatever my present state is—so their clothes
change to match mine, they know what I know, everything.”
“And this is done with computers?” Marla said.
“Sure. Computers and what we call, for want of a better word, sorcery. Everything in
the world is information, Marla. Me, you, this desk.” He thumped the desktop with his
fist. “And information can be manipulated and reconfigured endlessly. When you break
it down, everything’s made of math and emptiness.”
“Maybe there’s something to technomancy, after all,” Marla said thoughtfully. There’d
only been one prominent silicon mage in her city, and Marla had flung him off a rooftop
for interfering with her fiscal policies by trying to steal several million in city funds.
“Technomancy is the key to everything,” Dalton said. “You’re like a savage digging in
the dirt with a stick compared to me. So was Finch, and so’s every other sorcerer in this
city. See, they don’t get it.” There was a certain light in his eyes now, an almost
evangelical excitement. Marla had seen it in necromancers talking about bones, and in
pyromancers talking about the cleansing power of flames. “Are you familiar with Nick
Bostrom’s simulation theory?”
“I’m afraid not,” Marla said, sitting back more comfortably in her chair. She had a
feeling this might take a little while.
“He’s a philosophy professor at Oxford. He makes an argument that it’s quite likely
we’re all actually simulations of long-dead people, running in an emulated environment
created by our own technologically advanced descendants.”
“Ah,” Marla said.
He sighed. “I’m trying to tell you something important,” he said.
“Is it about Mutex?” she asked.
“Potentially,” he said. “Here’s the core of Bostrom’s argument. First, you have to begin
from the premise that it will someday be possible to re-create a human mind in a
nonorganic environment. That is, to make a computer that operates in a manner
indistinguishable from a human mind, to create consciousness in a machine.”