Project Report: Ghost Targets: Expectation

I'm posting this late but backdating it, so I have no idea how it will show up in your RSS reader.

But it was big news that I missed. Ghost Targets: Expectation is finished. I finished the first draft on Monday, April 27th, then finished it again on Tuesday, April 28th, by inserting a key missing scene back in chapter seven.

T-- was reading it in pieces as I went along, so I got some immediate feedback from her, and I have a handful of other readers all working on the first revision now. If you're interested in reading it, let me know. If you haven't read Gods Tomorrow yet, you should do that first. That one is in a pretty stable state already, and I'd be glad to get you a copy.

I don't think this one will require as drastic a rewrite as Gods Tomorrow needed, but I could learn otherwise as the feedback rolls in. Regardless, I still need to develop the promotional materials (synopsis, cover letter, and blurb), and get it to my agent, along with Gods Tomorrow.

I don't have any immediate plans to start on the next book, but I've got a basic plot worked out for it and I think it'll move the story along in a really satisfying way. I had some concerns on that topic for this book, but everyone who's read it so far has said it's good. That's a relief.

Status: Complete, first draft

Further Reading: Ghost Targets: Expectation

*Minor spoiler warning*

But, seriously, are you kidding me? This article basically endorses the fundamental premise behind my latest plot. They say in the article, "I know this sounds a bit woo-wooey," which I was really using as my defense. The novel's premise involves a rigorously scientific medical clinic that becomes subverted by the efforts of a kook who basically believes the sort of nonsense that I do.

And then this article in Newsweek backs it up. It's eerie.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

And this was another comment in the same thread, that followed right after. I only include it because it, in a silly way, references a technology I've just been assuming for my Ghost Targets future.

131 comments, and no one has picked up on PZ's cow singularity and its implications.

The thing is, I can easily imagine a cow singularity within my lifetime (assuming I adopt a healthier lifestyle and medical care improves at the same rate). I expect that within a hundred years, it will be entirely possible to slice a piece of tender beef filet off of a substrate of connective tissues on a conveyor belt. That really doesn't seem too terribly far-fetched. From a human perspective, that situation represents the cow singularity.

But from a cow's perspective, such a situation is trivial, and has nothing to do with being a cow. It's likely a cow wouldn't notice that people were slicing filets off of a cow cell culture, nor would the cow recognize any kinship with the flesh thus obtained.

In the event all the beef we needed were obtained from cow cell cultures, I suspect cows would go back to being big, shaggy, forest-dwelling ungulates, and would forget about us, to the degree the environment allows.

If, in some fantastic world that violates everything we know about history, Kurzweil's human singularity were to occur, I doubt that it would include us, or that we would recognize it as anything to do with humanity. If the singularity occurs, the primary beneficiaries will be them, and we will revert to being savannah-dwelling bipedal social primates, same as always.

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

After posting that last one, I ended up clicking through several links on various comments pages, to one that was extremely critical of Kurzweil. (He is often called nothing more than a mystical kook by the hard science types.)

But in the process of reading many pages of comments, I came upon this discussing the nature of consciousness, the concept of "self," and the transfer of that from a biological body into a machine:

Tulse said most of what I was going to say. If a reasonable duplicate of me can be created (which is a big 'if' I'll grant) then that will be me, by any test that you can bring to bear. He will love the same people I do, he will hate the same as I do, he will find the same things funny or annoying that I do. He will know the number of my Swiss bank account and all my passwords. If the process leaves a dead me behind, then the duplicate will probably owe the same money that I do, and be guilty of the same crimes that I am. (In such a world, just try using death as an excuse to get out of debts and criminal sentences. The law-makers will close that escape route very firmly, I'm sure.)

That the new me will not be the same as the old me by philosphical hair-splitting is an interesting point, or not interesting at all, depending on your temperament. But it would be irrelevent to both of us, one being dead, and the other demonstrably me. Why would I worry about it?

Is it the break in continuity of consciousness I should be worried about? That breaks every day when I sleep. It's been broken once in my life when I was anesthetised for an operation. One more break won't make a lot of difference.

Is it the silent scream of my genes being snuffed out if I am copied into a shiny carbon-fibre and metal body that should worry me? I am more than my genes.

Is it the worry that during the process some little part of me may get copied wrong, or left out? I suffer greater losses of memory everyday. In five minutes' time I won't remember very much about this moment, the immediacy of the experience of tapping the keys, the sound of the rain falling outside, the creation of the words being typed; all of it will be gone, except for a very vague, fuzzy little seed which I might use to recreate the memory using bits of other memories. A day or two, and I'll vaguely remember this comment. A week might pass and I might forget it altogether. This moment that was so bright and clear, gone.

This me isn't the me of five minutes ago, and the me that will awake in eight hours or so will be even less like the me now. Why should I care if one day I might awake in a new body?

Further Reading: Gods Tomorrow

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist with an impressive track record. In this interview, he talks about the future of travel and discusses some specific timelines for some pretty cool technologies.

A lot of it is stuff I've thought about for my sequel to the Ghost Targets series, Gods Before Men, but his timeline actually puts the techonology in place prior to Gods Tomorrow, which could invalidate a lot of the cool stuff going on in my series.

I'm not going to go changing anything yet, but it's still cool to see the sort of predictions getting thrown out there.