Information Leak

Weld lived like one of us for a couple weeks, learning a lot about us and helping us learn a bit more about the time when most Martians lived in real life all the time. Then he grew bored, and started looking for his friends. Clara still had the sim director role, and helped him find them. One was in a different simulator room, but the others were in the room we had been using, and none of them were in long-term sims, so Weld got a stool and sat there waiting for them. One by one he found them, and the conversations he had with them all went about like this:

Weld: “Hey, Turra!”

Turra: “Hey, Weld! Long time no see!”

Weld: “Did you know aliens have taken over the world?”

Turra: “What, the aliens now available in the sims?”

Weld: “Yes, they look like that.”

Turra: “Well, it was nice of them to have given us more options. Bye!”

And Turra jumped into another sim. It didn’t matter if his friend was male or female. They all reacted the same way.

When we watched this particular recording, Laura asked the question, “Did we make humans available as an option in the sex sims? I know they are available in the bathroom sims.”

Clara replied, “It’s possible I did when making the birth sim, but I didn’t mean to.”

Weld, who had spent short periods in the modern sex sims to learn about the options now available, and naturally had also used the bathroom sims, confirmed for us that he had seen human options available in both types of sims.

Clara, Weld, and I went to a room together where we could investigate from one of the computer consoles. Clara, the most familiar with sim administration, led the effort. I was there to confirm her results, and Weld was mostly curious but volunteered to point out avatars he had seen.

“Computer, show me a list of all human and part-human avatars available in any type of sim.”

The result was a list about three screens long.

“Computer, show me the list in chronological order of creation, showing creator names, creation dates, and full permissions.”

It was longer now because of the extra data, but now we could make more sense from it. The first several entries were avatars Clara created during the development of the childbirth sim. They were labeled private, and the computer confirmed that only Clara would be able to use them or even know about their existence, apart from the kind of administrator access we were using. Since the government officials had resigned their posts, none of the Martians had this level of access, though Chen and I did.

The next three entries in the list were the generic human male, generic human female, and pregnant human models available in the bathroom sim, also created by Clara. The pregnant human was a different kind of avatar from the others; you never played it directly, but as a modification of your own body. It contained the modifications to allow pregnant women to give birth easier. The computer confirmed that these avatars were only usable in the bathroom and birth sims, as intended.

The other 70-some avatars were created by six other people, all Martians. Some of them were marked private, and only accessible to the creator, but each of the six had published some human avatars, including at least one male and one female each, so that everyone could see them. All of them were for the sex sims. A series of queries let us determine that they were all created by applying the generic humans to other existing Martian avatars. Essentially, what Chen had done to make herself human, others had done to make Martian sex sim avatars human. They hadn’t used the pregnant human, even though as an overlay type of avatar it was even easier to combine with other avatars, because Clara had only made it visible to pregnant humans, so the Martians didn’t know it existed.

Clara said, “I should have realized that by making the generic avatars world-readable in order to make them usable in the bathroom sims, they were also world-copiable. Chen copied them, but she’s the emperor and has global access. I hadn’t realized other normal Martians could copy them. But once they were in the bathroom sims, everybody knew about them.”

I asked, “Computer, how many sex sims have used one of these human avatars?”

“Fifty-seven billion, three hun...”

I tuned out the computer’s voice response as it read out the rest of the eleven-digit number. That was a lot, almost enough for every Martian to have used human sims five times. But most of these people were doing multiple sims a day, and they had been available for over 1000 days.

“Computer, out of all the sex sims run since the first of the sex sim avatars on your previous list was published, what percentage involved one of these avatars?”

“Zero point zero four three seven percent.”

Clara, who was good with mental math, said, “That is in line with the average person starting about ten sims a day.”

I continued, “Computer, what percentage of the sex sims run in the last day have involved one of these avatars?”

“Zero point zero five two two percent.”

“So they haven’t gotten significantly more popular over time. It took awhile for people to discover they existed, but once they did, likely the ones who liked them kept using them. Computer, what percentage of sex sim users have ever used one of these avatars in a sex sim?”

“Twelve point two zero one percent.”

“Almost an eighth of all Martians have tried it. Computer, what percentage of sex sim users have used one of these avatars in a sex sim in the last ten days?”

“Zero point one nine three percent.”

Clara exclaimed, “Wow, a lot less!”

I replied, “Yes. Most of them didn’t like it and went back to whatever they had been using, but about one in 500 Martians continued using humans in sex sims regularly. Since about one in 2000 recent sims have involved human avatars, it means this group uses human avatars in about one out of four sims for at least one partner. Computer, out of the 57 billion or so sex sims that involved at least one of these avatars, how many also involved avatars not on this list?”

“Forty two point nine one percent.”

“Almost half of the people using them are simming human-Martian sex. I guess I am not surprised. And I’m sorry,” Clara said.

We took this back to the whole group.

Clara addressed them, “I have to apologize to you about something. Not to any of you specifically, but to the human race, and you are their representatives here.”

There were a couple chuckles, but the group mostly looked serious and watched her intently to see what she was apologizing for.

“When I created the generic human bathroom sims, they became available to all the Martians who used the standard bathroom sims. This meant basically all of them, save for a few who spend such long periods in long-term sims that they never do, and a few who have custom bathroom sims and do not go through the selection menu of the standard one.”

“But we aren’t trying to hide from them,” someone said.

“Not just the Martians using this facility, though. For practical purposes, all twelve billion Martians learned humans exist.”

They looked, waiting for the real apology, knowing that this was nothing to apologize for.

“When I did this, I didn’t realize that Martians would be able to copy those generics, not to modify their own bodies as Chen did, but to modify the bodies of sex sim avatars.”

There were several gasps, and looks of realization across the whole group.

“Six Martians made modified sex sim avatars with human bodies and published them so that anyone using the sex sims could use them, either as their own avatar in the sex sims or as their partner. And the Martians have indeed been using them.”

A few people asked “How many?” and “How often?” and “Who?” and similar questions all at the same time.

“None of the perpetrators who made these copies are in this city. But Martians worldwide have used them. Approximately one in eight Martians has at some point used one of the human avatars. About one in five hundred Martians uses them regularly. So I have to apologize for the Martians getting to know us much more closely than we ever intended.”

The people were upset, but not too strongly, and they seemed to accept Clara’s apology.

“That said, they aren’t using any of us specifically. The generic avatars are based on a composite of all of us and data about the human race we brought with us. They are meant to be average humans in every way. So far, I haven’t done anything to stop this, because I wanted to ask the group first what, if anything, we should do.”

There were murmurs both of “Stop it” and of “Ignore it” and similar phrases. No clear agreement.

“As I see it we have two real options. One is to do nothing, let them keep using human avatars, which hasn’t seemed to have caused any real problems in the three years and change since the first of these avatars was published. The other option is to block all access to the human avatars created so far, and block copy access of the generic humans so that they can’t create more. And the reason I hesitate is that this may create about 24 million irate Martians, upset that they can no longer use human avatars in the sex sims.”

“They’ll imitate,” Chen said from the back of the room.

“What was that?” Clara asked.

“If you shut off access to the real humans, they’ll make imitation human avatars. Start with a Martian, remove the tail, change the skin color, make it a bit more slender, and you get something that looks believably human, but isn’t.”

Brenda chipped in, “That’s arguably worse. They could use that on their real bodies and they will look believably human, but they won’t be. Fortunately, they don’t seem interested in coming back into the real world, but if they did, they could come out in a body like that and we’d think they were human even though they aren’t. They could end up cross-breeding with us, which is almost certainly worse than anything they have actually done so far.”

Clara responded, “No. That wouldn’t happen. When Chen tried to give herself a human reproductive system in her Martian body, we studied Martians down to their DNA. They have DNA with the same four bases, but the genetic code, the mapping of base triads to amino acids, is entirely different. There is no chance Martian sperm could fertilize human eggs or vice versa. Even if you forced them together in a lab, the foreign DNA would transcribe as gibberish, and wouldn’t make anything useful. The cell would destroy itself before it could reproduce. This was why she had to turn her entire body human, because the two systems are entirely incompatible.”

A few people sounded relieved, but Mara asked, “They may not be interested in imitating us in the real world, but what’s to say they haven’t already created sim avatars which are really Martian but look like humans externally?”

Clara replied, “Good point. Computer, show me a list of sex sim avatars which are not based directly or indirectly on the generic human avatars, but which resemble humans in terms of skin color and not having a tail.”

The list had 21 pages. Everyone was shocked into silence for a few moments. Clara continued by having the computer sort the list by creation date; the first of these avatars showed up just two days after she released the human bathroom sims.

“Not only did they make imitation human avatars, but they made seven times as many of them as actual humans, and sooner, starting immediately after they encountered them as options in the bathroom sims. Computer, list all the people in the world who have any human DNA in their real bodies, apart from the people in this room.”

“There are no such people.”

“Computer, list all people born on this world whose current real bodies lack tails and have skin in human colors, but weren’t born with those properties.”

“Chen Dresta Balanjia. In total, one person.”

“Right, I didn’t exclude the people here this time. But that’s good. They haven’t done it. Should we prohibit that?”

There was a lot of discussion about it, and ultimately we decided not to ban it but to make it require permission from the sim director. It took Clara a while to figure out how to phrase it, to make it require permission for people born as Martians to change their real body to one containing human DNA or to one which resembles humans, with a lot of detail about what constitutes resembling humans, while letting them continue doing the things they have actually been doing. And Chen helped her confirm it worked, both in the usual case and after permission was granted.

Weld stuck around with us for about three more weeks after this incident before he decided that, like all his friends he was able to find, he didn’t care that aliens were in charge of his world, though unlike the others, he did so after seeing how we were not messing things up any worse than accidentally announcing to everybody that we were here and unintentionally letting them simulate sex in our bodies.

But the incident did have one lasting effect on us. At one meal soon after this, Lakshmi asked, “How long are we going to tolerate having to walk through the sex parlor with our kids to reach the restaurant where we eat all our meals?”

It was a good question. We had only done so because it was the first gathering place we had known here, the first place set up with enough tables and chairs for us to all eat together, and it happened to have a kitchen attached.

Some people were in favor of simply having construction robots close the doorway between the sex parlor and the restaurant and open another doorway into the restaurant on some other side. But there was another proposal to set up a school for teaching our children, which would include a cafeteria where we could all, children and adults alike, eat. It was an unconventional idea to have all the adults, teachers or otherwise, eating at the school, and even on days when classes weren’t being taught. But when it was pointed out we probably wanted to have at least four of us teaching classes, at least two preparing food for the kids, and the three of us who now gathered ingredients bringing those to the school, that was already a majority of our group.

Someone recalled having seen a building that might have worked as a school. Indeed, when we took Chen over there, she remembered it as her school, many years ago. And because it was still registered as a school in the system, the robots had been maintaining it, at least to ensure nothing was broken. A little cleaning was needed, but the school was easily large enough for several hundred children, and we were only going to have 42, so we only used a small fraction of the rooms, and we started using the school cafeteria for our meals and meetings, again using only a small portion of the space.

The Rule is Broken

Three years after the last children were born, after some of them had already started school, Sarah failed to show up when we expected her to for one of her shifts taking care of children. When we couldn’t find her, we asked the computer, which responded, “Sarah Carmichael is in a sex sim.”

We had another all-hands meeting to discuss this, and because it was about the sims, we met at the restaurant next to the sim parlor instead of the school cafeteria which had now become our primary meeting place. We had agreed, informally, that we weren’t going to enter the sex sims, yet here she was, in them for so long we had noticed her missing.

Clara requested, “Computer, show us all occasions when a human has entered a sex sim and how long they stayed in.”

The report was short. Several people had gone in a sex sim once early on, seemingly out of curiosity. Clara had gone into modified sex sims briefly several times when she was researching how to make the birthing sim. Chen went in a couple to test the availability of human avatars. Then nobody had until after the last of the children were born, and Sarah had gone in thirteen times for less than an hour each time, all within the last month, but this time she had been in a custom sex sim for about a whole day.

“A custom sim!” Laura exclaimed. “So it was something she planned. Computer, can you show us what she is doing in there?”

“Video of sex sims is protected information and may not be shown.”

Clara responded to that with, “Computer, is Sarah having sex in the sim?”

“No. Sarah is not engaged in sexual activity within her sim.”

“Hmm, what is she doing, then? Computer, show us on this screen what Sarah is doing in her sim. Sim director’s override.”

We were all shown a picture of a woman giving birth. The woman was based on our generic human female avatar.

Clara commented, “This avatar appears to have the birth mods. Computer, does the avatar of the mother in this sim contain elements copied from the avatar used in the human birthing sim? If so, how did Sarah obtain them?”

“Yes. Sarah made a private copy of the birth sim three years, four months, and 21 days ago, and extracted the avatar modification parameters and furniture from it 27 days ago when building this sim.”

“She copied it when she was pregnant. She apparently loved giving birth so much she made herself a sim to keep doing it. But why has she been in this sim for a full day?”

There were murmurs from a few others in response to this last question, but we all sat and watched, hoping it would answer the question. The woman gave birth, the baby stood up, and quickly the mother vanished, and the baby grew to adult size and became pregnant. The new mother sat on the birthing chair and prepared to start giving birth again.

The reactions in the room were varied, from “Why would she do that?” to sheer horror.

Deanna asked, “Computer, how many times has Sarah given birth in her current simulation?”

“None.”

Understanding the situation, I asked, “Computer, how many times has Sarah been born during her current simulation?”

“Fifty-seven times.”

Most of the people present gasped.

Clara said, “She’s probably stuck. In any case, I’m pulling her out. Computer, end Sarah’s simulation. Sim director’s override.”

Sarah materialized next to a column in the sim room next to us. She saw us all sitting there and hung her head low as she walked over to join us.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I’m sorry! Giving birth in the birth sim was the most pleasurable thing imaginable, and I did it a few times in my custom sim because I missed the feeling. I also wanted to feel what it would be like to be born, but I screwed up. The sim was set to automatically restart, but I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to stop it when I was the baby! Thank you for getting me out.”

I said, “Sarah, when we discovered the plight of these people, we agreed not to use the sex sims, for fear of getting addicted to them. While you weren’t having sex in the sims, you still violated my trust in you, not once, but fourteen times, and you found a second reason for us to avoid the sims. Clara, can you block Sarah from the sims?”

Clara said, “Computer, disallow Sarah Carmichael from entering any sims other than the standard bathroom sims until further notice. Sim director’s override.”

“Done. Sarah Carmichael is blocked from all sim access except standard bathroom sims.”

Clara continued, “Computer, how many other people are stuck in sims which are looping through the same cycle repeatedly?”

“There are many sims where repetitive actions are occurring, but none of them are stuck. They are under the control of the sim participants and no sims have repeated the same actions for more than one hour.”