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Costa took a job with a company developing digital implants intended to minimize pain by non-pharmaceutical means. But his hopes that Silicon Valley might be different were soon dashed when, once again, an update of his was put on hold by the company in order to extend the shelf life of existing products. So Costa returned to his earlier strategy of using company facilities to work secretly on his own projects.
Meanwhile, the stock market rapidly recovered – so rapidly that Costa grew suspicious. History was about to repeat itself. When a couple of years later a bank contacted him with an offer of a 120 per cent mortgage for any sum for any property in the Bay Area, he trusted his instincts – already vindicated by one stock market crash – and ploughed his entire savings into shorting any bank that traded in American mortgage-backed derivatives. In other words, almost the entire Western banking system. And so, when finance had its near-death experience in October of 2008, ending Eva’s career at Lehman, Costa found himself sitting on a multi-million-dollar nest egg.
‘Free at last in the valley of broken dreams’ was how he announced his changed circumstances in a handwritten letter to Iris, who placed it in a special section of her diary dedicated to Costa’s more momentous missives. ‘Now I can do something useful with all the gadgets I have created but lacked the time and resources to develop,’ he waxed hopefully.
The day after Barack Obama moved into the White House, Costa resigned, rented a large space in downtown San Francisco and set to work to put all of his secret technological innovations to work.
The Lydian ring revisited
Costa had been introduced to the fable of Gyges as a teenager by his high-school scripture teacher, a Cretan version of Quentin Crisp who eventually made a name for himself as a decent poet. Struggling in his lab to find humanist uses for his technologies, Gyges’ ring gave Costa an idea.
According to myth, Gyges was a poor shepherd in the ancient kingdom of Lydia who one day chanced upon a magic ring. By rotating the ring on his finger, he could make himself invisible. So he walked into the palace, seduced the queen, murdered the king and installed himself as ruler of Lydia. In The Republic, Plato has Socrates ask: if you discovered such a ring, would it be rational not to use it to do as you please? Costa remembered Socrates’ answer well: anyone who uses the power of the ring to get what he wants enslaves himself to his own appetites. Happiness, and not just morality, hinges on one’s capacity not to use the ring’s exorbitant power.
Costa was not romantic enough to expect people to heed Socrates’ advice. He knew that almost everyone would succumb to the temptation to use the ring pretty much as Gyges had done. But he had long thought that a device devastatingly more powerful than the ring would give people pause and, in so doing, shake them out of their self-defeating sense of self. Three years after Costa isolated himself in his downtown San Francisco laboratory, the tale of Gyges took on new and urgent significance when the idea of precisely such a device came to him.
It happened when Costa was visiting a colleague at their home in Seattle. There, he observed the resident teenager playing a multiplayer video game with thousands of other participants, presumably young people also sitting in their bedrooms and appearing on each other’s screens in avatar form. Costa was instinctively appalled but also fascinated by the discovery of these emergent communities.
The ultimate goal of the Silicon Valley’s gaming corporations, he realized – and indeed the Holy Grail of big tech as a whole – was a device that replaces the hit-or-miss offerings of real life with a sufficiently realistic virtual reality machine tailoring its offering to each individual’s desires. At the same time, humans continue to crave connection with one another: interacting with a machine is fine so long as the fantasy is a shared one. Killing an avatar, knowing a real person lies behind it, is far more satisfactory than bumping off a purely computer-generated space invader. This need to see and be seen explains why those games that allow the player to share the action with millions of others, while remaining cocooned in their living room, are in such demand.
The problem with humans, Costa surmised, is the same in real life as in digital games: we crave the company of other minds, whose validation is meaningful because they are beyond our control even while control of them is precisely what we seek. When they do things we do not want them to do, we get upset. But the moment we control them fully, their approval gives us no pleasure. It is ever so hard to learn to appreciate that the pleasure to be had from such control is illusory, especially since people are prepared to sacrifice almost everything in its pursuit. Costa’s audacious idea would resolve the conundrum once and for all. The device he planned to build, his Freedom Machine as he playfully called it, would let millions of people inhabit the same virtual world but experience their mutual interactions differently. It would fashion not merely a universe of bliss but a multiverse of infinite, simultaneous, overlapping pleasures.
Imagine the feat of letting Jack experience hiking with Jill while, at the same time, Jill is attending a Shakespeare play alongside Jack – or even with someone else! A machine that lets all of us experience – and share – our desires all at once. Freedom at last, not only from scarcity but also from what other people do to us, expect of us, or want from us. Suddenly, others would do, think and act in total sync with our dreams, hopes and aspirations. Constraints would become obsolete – a distant reminder of a primitive existence. Our dilemmas gone, all trade-offs eradicated, boundless satisfaction at our fingertips.
Such infinite power to shape the world in one’s image exceeded the ancient mythologists’ imagination and made Gyges’ ring seem puny and crude. If Socrates hoped he could persuade us to forgo Gyges’ ring on the grounds that its power would wreck our lives, surely he stood no chance of dissuading us from entering such a multiverse of unimpeded bliss? Unless, Costa thought, the price of entering the world of the Freedom Machine was that you could never leave it.
The power of for ever
Every genius relies on a questionable assumption. Costa relied on two of them. His first was that most people would ultimately decline the opportunity to live the rest of their lives in his Freedom Machine. His second was that this recoiling would be fundamentally liberating to them.
Costa knew, of course, that we would all be terribly tempted to enter the Freedom Machine. That was its whole point. The harder it was to resist, the greater the liberation it would grant those who turned it down. But would anyone turn it down? Ultimately, Costa wanted to believe, we all would. For ever is a long time to be spent in any state of bliss, let alone in an illusion created by a machine. Even fools, radical hedonists and the clinically depressed would recoil from surrendering their minds to a machine for ever. Faced with the ultimate, really-existing Gyges’ ring, he had no doubt we would shock ourselves by saying no. And the moment we turned down the offer of a perfect multiverse, he postulated, we would be thrown into an existential spin, resulting in a state of sheer lucidity. Suddenly, we would grasp the truth that Socrates wanted us to understand: the greatest slavery is that of our own appetites. Merely by existing, the Freedom Machine would give us a priceless shot at the most liberating of epiphanies: that there is more to life than indulging desires and eliminating pain.
Costa’s life changed the moment this line of thought resulted in the following conviction: Gyges’ ring had not worked for Socrates because it was not powerful enough and, more importantly, it was not actually real. It remained a myth, a thought experiment. But what if Costa could adapt and develop his various inventions in such a way as to build a functional Freedom Machine, demonstrate that it worked as advertised and then give people the entirely real option of giving themselves to it for ever? What if people did indeed turn it down? Not only would Costa have gone one better than Socrates, he would have discovered a way to undermine the very basis of capitalism: people’s readiness to think of themselves as consumers.
Traditionally, the Left chastised capitalism fo
r manufacturing in us desires that capitalism was bound to frustrate. Costa agreed with this critique but wanted to take it a step further: even if capitalism were to deliver on its promises, satisfying every consumerist whim it instils in us, it would only succeed in destroying the possibility of true freedom and, with it, of the good life – eudaimonia as his ancient forebears called it. The Freedom Machine would reveal once and for all how empty, soul-destroying and joyless the satisfactions on offer are once we have been transformed from humans into consumers. In Costa’s hopelessly romantic mind, we would come to see that a state of permanent bliss of the type that capitalism promises is in fact a form of purgatory. Nothing liberates us from a monopolist more readily than the revelation that we don’t want his wares. The question was: could Costa actually build the Freedom Machine?
HALPEVAM
Costa spent the first three years of his freedom from salaried labour reviewing and improving upon his earlier work: not just bionic eyes and painkilling implants but a host of devices that fuse directly with the brain and nervous system in order to control our senses.
By 2012, he had already constructed a highly complex and effective human–machine interface, which in a letter to Iris he described as ‘a fascinating solution to a hitherto undiscovered problem’. When later that year his idea for the Freedom Machine took shape, he was overcome with the stunning realization that, suitably developed, his gadgets could indeed become the backbone of a working prototype.
Modesty prohibited him from referring to his prototype as the Freedom Machine. He opted instead for the technical term HALPEVAM: Heuristic ALgorithmic Pleasure and Experiential VAlue Maximizer. Later, when extraordinary circumstances compelled him to explain it to Iris and Eva, Costa introduced HALPEVAM as the opposite of the misanthropic machines in The Matrix. In that classic film from 1999, networked machines manufactured a virtual reality into which they sought to enslave every human mind on the planet while exploiting their bodies as a source of thermal energy for their soulless empire. HALPEVAM would, by contrast, be humanity’s ultimate slave.
In the early days of HALPEVAM’s development, Costa was slowed down by a theoretical problem. What form would time take inside HALPEVAM’s multiverse? Specifically, how would time’s passage be experienced if one had infinite experiences all at once? Surely a life of boundless, overlapping experiences need last no more than a nanosecond? Time would be infinitely wide but infinitesimally brief. Had he discovered the secret of embedding an eternal heaven within a vanishingly short lifetime? These questions paralysed him for a few weeks. It took another, more pressing problem for him to get unstuck.
For HALPEVAM to work as a liberator, it was essential that there was no reason for people to fear it might brainwash them – an entirely understandable concern when deciding whether or not to plug into a machine capable of messing with one’s head. For if people were to turn down the opportunity to enter HALPEVAM’s multiverse for ever out of a legitimate fear that they might be brainwashed, they would not be turning it down for the reason Costa wanted them to. It was, therefore, absolutely critical that the experiences HALPEVAM offered each user were generated wholly by that person’s own desires and nothing else. If there was any possibility that the machine might operate according to its programmer’s agenda or that it might be able to instil alien desires into the person who used it, then that person would effectively have become a slave to the machine and the entire project would be undermined. This became HALPEVAM’s prime directive: a ban hardwired into it that prevented the machine from inputting into its users’ minds anything that they did not bring with them when joining in its digital utopia.
The challenge then became how to capture a complete and accurate picture of the user’s desires, passions, beliefs, whims and predilections. A snapshot of our brains’ contents at the moment we join it would not be enough. HALPEVAM would somehow have to tap into accurate, unbiased, complete information about our entire experiences before that point as well. The only way such a harvest could be possible, Costa concluded, was if our very experiences leave behind them some form of permanent, physical record. Like all scientific prodigies, Costa first imagined the existence of this record – a trail or wake we leave behind us made up of quanta of experience – before setting out to construct the instruments that might detect it. And to help himself believe in its existence, he gave it a name: CREST – Cerebral Recursive Engram Subatomic Trail.
Almost eight years had passed in pursuit of CREST when in 2020 the world went into lockdown. Costa would hardly have noticed, isolated as he was in his lab, had it not been for the sudden influx of invitations from the few friends he maintained any contact with to chat with him via various web-based applications. At first, he resisted all electronic visitations. But then, in April 2020, his instruments began to detect CREST. Bursting with excitement, and despite his obsession with secrecy, he skyped the only person he trusted to share his delight with: Iris.
‘Think of it as the quantum wake of our lived lives slipping out of our evolving engrains,’ he explained. ‘It sounds complex, I know, but really it couldn’t be simpler!’
‘You mean something like a subatomic river of life?’ Iris asked.
‘Yes, precisely,’ he said. ‘A river you can never step out of twice.’
‘Either you have entirely lost your marbles,’ she replied, ‘or you think I’m the world’s most gullible fool. Perhaps both. Either way, I’m delighted to see you haven’t changed a bit.’
By the summer of 2021 Costa had developed a method for not only tapping into CREST but also for reconstructing the experiences it contained, providing HALPEVAM with the raw material it needed to generate a near-infinite multiverse of user realities. ‘I am on the CREST of bliss,’ his cryptic text message to Iris read on the happy day that he plugged himself into it for the first time.
For safety, Costa programmed HALPEVAM to detach his mind from CREST almost as soon as it was connected. But for the few milliseconds he inhabited its world, he experienced a truly dizzying form of rapture, a glimpse into a life beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. That vanishingly small moment was the headiest experience imaginable.
Afterwards, it took hours to take in what had just happened. But as soon as Costa was able to accept the incredible fact of what he had created, its terrifying implications choked him with anxiety: what if the corporates got wind of what he’d made? How on earth would he stop anyone from hacking into or even stealing his invention? What if big tech got its hands on CREST, the ultimate source of data about each and every one of us?
Panicking, Costa immediately focused all his talents and energy on erecting the strongest possible firewall around his invention.
Thus was created Cerberus, a formidable security device whose bizarre malfunction would change everything.
Cerberus
When Iris tenderly entrusted her diary to me in the days before her passing, she made me swear that I would honour a second prime directive, one that Costa had intended just for me.
‘Our dear Costa has become paranoid,’ she explained. ‘But then again, didn’t Joseph Heller point out that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you?’
My prime directive was clear: I was not to divulge any of the rich details in her diary that might help those eager to tap into CREST break Costa’s Cerberus code. A blessing in the form of a constraint, I thought, as it liberated me from having to account in any substantial detail for technicalities well beyond my comprehension. Suffice to say that Costa devised a system whereby access to HALPEVAM and to CREST relied on a long PIN derived from his own DNA sequence but constantly evolving along a stochastic path in sync with his own engrams. Even if hackers were to get hold of his DNA, it would be impossible to break Costa’s code unless the hackers also had access to Costa’s thoughts in real time. In theory, Costa had rendered CREST untappable by anyone except himself.
For the next three yea
rs, Costa lived on the verge of an anxiety attack, feverishly developing and refining HALPEVAM to the point when he could truthfully alert the world that a multiverse of bliss was available to all. Then, on Saturday 25 January 2025, events intruded with their usual ferocity. Costa spent that evening with some Greek friends celebrating an anniversary that meant much to them and nothing to the rest of the world. Upon returning to his lab, his heart sank when he saw there had been a break-in. And then it plummeted when he discovered how close the intruders had come to tapping CREST.
Watching his account of that night, recorded in Iris’s diary, I finally appreciated the significance of what he’d said to me at Iris’s funeral. Costa had dedicated his life to preventing ‘the bastards’, as he called them, from stealing access to CREST in order to create a private market for emotions, memories, ideas – in other words, turning HALPEVAM into its opposite and fashioning humanity’s ultimate slavery. Costa discovered that the intruders had used remote brainwave scanning technology to monitor his real-time thoughts and DNA they had lifted from his toothbrush to come within mere minutes of decoding his PIN. They had failed only because the walls of the underground bar where Costa and his mates had gathered were thick enough to interfere with the transmission.
Energized by this near disaster, Costa began to build Cerberus. Named after the mythical two-headed beast guarding Hades, the realm of the dead, this improved security system had two new features. One was an upgrade to the code so that access to CREST was only possible if Costa’s mind was actively wishing it. The other was a doomsday feature, inspired by the crazed nuclear war strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction that the Pentagon had toyed with in the 1950s: the creation of a bomb so vast it would destroy all life on earth if the enemy unleashed a nuclear warhead, thus deterring them from ever doing so. So too, Costa set out to deter big tech from tapping into CREST by means of a device powerful enough to destroy CREST once and for all in the event of unauthorized entry.