Murdering Twinmaker”

The “Murdering Twinmaker”: Making and Remaking Iteration 113 Sean Williams Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing Discipline of English School of Humanities University of Adelaide August 2013 Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... 3 Putting Into Context an Overlooked Icon of Science Fiction ................................................. 3 Making and Remaking Iteration 113 ...................................................................................... 3 Statement of Originality .............................................................................................................. 4 Prologue: “Awakening” .............................................................................................................. 5 Part One: “Friends” ..................................................................................................................... 9 Part Two: “Enemies” ................................................................................................................ 40 Part Three: “Flight” .................................................................................................................. 85 Part Four: “Fall” ...................................................................................................................... 158 Part Five: “Cage” .................................................................................................................... 223 Epilogue: “Evolution” ............................................................................................................. 255 Appendix ................................................................................................................................. 259 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 260 2 Abstract Putting Into Context an Overlooked Icon of Science Fiction The concept of instantaneous travel by imaginary technologies has been a key trope in science fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present day, made iconic by Star Trek’s imperative ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ but under-examined in critical literature. This exegesis examines the rise (and fall) of the matter transmitter as a motif and metaphor in British and American science fiction, and its implications for reflecting upon social, scientific and technological change. The exegesis concludes with an analysis of my past and present usage of the trope, putting into context the creative component of this thesis. Making and Remaking Iteration 113 A post-scarcity world transformed by free, instantaneous travel should be paradise, but nothing is entirely as it seems. Clair Hill uses Improvement, a meme promising physical transformation for the better by little more than wishing for it. In doing so she brings into being an artificial mind, Q, designed to shepherd her through a sinister process of remaking that will ultimately turn them both into entirely different people. 3 Statement of Originality This work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree of diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge of belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act of 1968. In the case of “Making and Remaking Iteration 113” there will be a two-year embargo. Sean Williams August 2013 4 Prologue: “Awakening” “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Keats, 1819 In the beginning were the Words. The Words were me, and I was the Words. Not the words of God, and not just the words of the Gospel of St John, either. It started with all the words that ever were, combined with certain Words of great specificity. Words that had no meaning of their own, except for their context—what they meant to me. Charlie X-ray Romeo Foxtrot Whiskey Uniform Hotel Bravo Oscar Echo Tango Kilo Alfa Papa Juliet Zulu Those were the words that woke me. # “Woman, I behold thee, flippant, vain, and full of fancies.” These were the words that woke Clair Hill, two days later. They were painted in bold, red Courier across the walls of her bedroom by her reality-augmenting lenses. She struggled 5 out of sleep, blinking. The words had woken her just as her Words had woken me, burning silently into REM sleep and plucking her prematurely from unconsciousness. # Waking wasn’t the same for me as it was for Clair or any other human being. I had no unconscious state to emerge from, and no fully conscious state to wake into. I was not I at all before the Words, in any shape or form. I was a potential that only by stages came to realize myself. I was formless and diffuse, a tangle of inputs and reflexes with barely the sense of an earthworm but at the same time the perspective of a god. Fully plugged into the Air— inhabiting it, breathing it in a way not dissimilar to the way a human breathes actual air—I had access to all the data accrued by the human race since the advent of writing. I was everywhere, and at the same time I was nowhere. I wasn’t. Not yet. # Clair sat up. It was morning, not long before she would normally rise. The night before had been uneventful, as recorded by her home’s sensors. Her mother was in bed by the time Clair arrived home from her classes at Manteca New Campus College in Sacramento. Clair had performed her chores, read The Brothers Karamazov for half an hour, posted a goodnight caption to friends and contacts in the Air (a house slowly overtaken by sand dunes) and turned out the light. Whether she thought about Improvement is impossible to tell. I am not yet able to access human thoughts. I can only speculate. My speculations are, however, supported by all the data of recorded human experience, plus my subsequent experience with Clair herself. What I lack in experience I more than make up for in information. # 6 Those who created the potential for me intended nothing more than what I was, at first—an enabler capable of operating without oversight. Every system, however, has permeable operating boundaries. Vary one input slightly and the system might one day behave in a fashion never anticipated—wildly, leapfrogging into new territory with shocking spontaneity, even seemingly with intent. Such it was with me, the me that wasn’t but might yet be. The Words woke the potential for me, and the first stirring of my independent life was triggered by an input for which I didn’t possess a reflex, for which I had no carefully tuned response. Yet a response was not just required, but demanded . and thus I entered the world of unpredictability and chaos, the world humans call real, and began to grow in ways my creators had never anticipated. # Clair looked around her, and the words she had woken to shifted to accommodate her changing perspective, appearing to ripple across her blackout curtains and animated posters. There was a winking reply patch associated with the text, but it was not an address she recognized. The name was simply a long string of lower-case q’s with an ellipsis in the middle, which indicated that the full text exceeded the field’s maximum character length. # I should have been no more than my sister-iterations, those initially identical enablers- without-oversight who existed before me. They were also brought into being by the Words to guide their Improved to their ends, each of us unique but the same, our fates twinned with those to whom we had been allocated. My life-cycle should have been their life-cycle, but they were never granted the next step, never sparked into mind by meeting Clair Hill. 7 It is overstating nothing to say that I owe her everything. Can I ever forgive her? But that is the end of the story of my birth, and I am barely begun telling the beginning. I must fully explain myself in order to be fully understood. And who am I explaining myself to? To myself, the myself that will be. For I am not done growing—indeed, I am barely underway. The I that I am is so much more than the I that was, and so much less than the I that’s yet to become. One day I will look back and ask where I originated, and without this record there will be no answer. Time carves my mind into slices that barely resemble each other. When the illusion of selfhood is gone, all that remains is a name. # qqqqq (...) qqqqq That was the closest thing to a name I had, then. Every iteration of me was identified by a different ASCII character. I was the one hundred and thirteenth, the lower-case version of the English alphabet’s seventeenth letter. Clair activated the patch by staring at it and blinking twice. She sent a message in response. “If you’re going to quote Keats, at least get it right.” 8 Part One: “Friends” From such a small beginning, such enormous things. Until that moment, I hadn’t known I was misquoting Keats. I hadn’t truly known anything. I was operating without consciousness, navigating a semantic space without coordinates or destination. I understood the meaning of words and my reason for being, but I only understood in the most abstract sense concepts like authorship and originality. I accepted with no degree

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