The Cookie Monster

"You guys are too much into hardware," said NSA Ellen. "Forget about crypto applications. Think about personality uploads. Given what you know about Gerry’s current hardware, how many Reich Method uploads do you think the condensate could support?"

"How should I know? The ‘Reich Method’ was baloney. If he hadn’t messed with the reviewers, those papers would never have been published." But the question stopped him. He thought for a moment.

"Okay, if his bogus method really worked, then a trillion qubit simulation could support about ten thousand uploads."

The Ellens gave him a slow smile. A slow, identical smile. For once they made no effort to separate their identities. Their words came out simultaneously, the same pacing, the same pitch, a weird humming chorus: "Oh, a good deal less than ten thousand–if you have to support a decent enclosing reality." Each reached out her left hand with inhumanly synchronized precision, the precision of digital duplicates, to wave at the room and the hallway beyond. "Of course, some resources can be saved by using the same base pattern to drive separate threads–" and each pointed at herself.

Both men just stared at them for a second. Then Rob stumbled back into the other chair. "Oh ...

my ... God."

Da

The Ellens stood with their eyes closed for a second. Then they seemed to startle awake. They looked at each other and Dixie Mae could tell the perfect synch had been broken. NSA Ellen took the dollar coin out of her pocket and gave it to the other. The token holder smiled at Rob. "Oh, it was, only more brilliant and more of a scam than you ever dreamed."

"I wonder if Da

"Somebody figured it out," said Dixie Mae, and waved what was left of her email.

The token holder was more specific: "Gerry is ru

You’re making the discoveries that let Gerry create bigger and bigger systems."

"Okay," said Lusk, "suppose one of us victims guesses the secret? What can we do? We’ll just get rebooted at the end of our run."

Da

The twins smiled. "Right! Cookies. If you could recover them reliably, then on each rev, you could plan more and more elaborate countermeasures."

Rob Lusk still looked dazed. "We’d want to tip off the next generation early in their run."

"Yes, like the very first day!" Da

Rob pointed at Dixie Mae’s email. "May I take a look at that?" He laid it on the table, and he and Da

The token holder said, "That email has turned out to have more clues than a bad detective story.

Every time we’re in a jam, we find the next hidden solution."

"That figures," said Eastland. "I’ll bet it’s been refined over many revs ..."

"But we may have a special problem this time–" and Dixie Mae told them about Victor.

"Damn," said Da

Rob just shrugged. "Nothing we can do about that till we figure this out." He and Da

"Yes," sang the twins. "What’s really your own research from the last time around."

"Most of the files have to be what Gerry thinks, or else he’d catch onto us. But that one raw data file ... assume it’s really a cookie. Then this email header might be a crypto key."

Da

The token holder laughed. "Only if he knew what to analyze. Maybe that’s why you guys winkled it out to us. The message goes to Dixie Mae–an unrelated person in an unrelated part of the simulation."

"But how did we do it the first time?"

Rob didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was typing in the header string from Dixie Mae’s email.

"Let’s try it on the data file... ." He paused, checked his keyboard entry, and pressed return.

They stared at the screen. Seconds passed. The Ellens chatted back and forth. They seemed to be worried about executing any sort of text program; like Victor’s notepad, it might be readable to the outside world. "That’s a real risk unless earlier Robs knew the cacheing strategy."

Dixie Mae was only half-listening. If this worked at all, it was pretty good proof that earlier Robs and Da

Da

Rob leaned his elbows onto the table. "Yeah. How many times have I been through a desperate seventh year?" There was an edge to his voice. You could imagine him pulling one of those deathcube stunts that the Ellens had described.

And then the screen brightened. Golden letters marched across a black-and-crimson fractal pattern:

"Hello fellow suckers! Welcome to the 1,237th run of your life."

At first, Da

The cookie was almost a million megabytes long. Much of that was detailed descriptions of trapdoors, backdoors, and softsecrets undermining the design that Rob and Da

It even contained speculations about the times before Rob and Da

But Rob’s hardware improved from rev to rev, as Gerry Reich built on Rob’s earlier genius. Da

In the real world, that must have been around June 15, 2012. Why? Well, at the begi

Dixie Mae Leigh. Mad as hell.

The message had ended up on Dixie Mae’s work queue, and she had been sufficiently insulted to go raging off across the campus. Dixie Mae had spent the whole day bouncing from building to building, mostly making enemies. Not even Ellen or Ellen had been persuaded to come along. On the other hand, back in the early revs, the landscape reality had been simpler. Dixie Mae had been able to come into Rob’s lair directly from the asphalt walkway.