Simulacrum

Liu, Ken. "Simulacrum." Lightspeed: Year One. An on-line anthology available here[1]. Print version: Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2011, conveniently accessed through Goodreads.[2] Abridged audiobook version (which Erlich has consulted), edited by John Joseph Adams (Skyboat Audio, 2012) available directly from Audible.com[3] and iTunes.[4]

Headnote from Susan Sontag ("Photography Unlimited" [1977] on photographs as not just an image but a trace "something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask."[5] The simulacra here are definitely traces, and much farther along on "the eternal quest of capturing reality"; the "oneiropagida" gives "a snapshot of the subject’s mental patterns—a representation of her personality—" and it is definitely her here — a snapshot that "can be captured, digitized, and then used to re-animate the image during projection. The oneiropagida is at the heart of all simulacrum cameras," and simulacrum cameras and their products are at the technological core, not heart, of this story. With the earliest cameras "The subject had to have certain chemicals injected into her body and then lie still for a long time in the device’s imaging tunnel until an adequate set of scans of her mental processes could be taken. These were then used to seed AI neural models, which then animated the projections constructed from detailed photographs of her body.

These early attempts were very crude, and the results were described variously as robotic, inhuman, or even comically insane. But even these earliest simulacra preserved something that could not be captured by mere videos or holography. Instead of replaying verbatim what was captured, the animated projection could interact with the viewer in the way that the subject would have." The heart of the story is a family drama told in parallel monologs — interviews where the interviewer is silent — and where we see the inventor of very successful simulacra using them for sex and to maintain a relationship with his daughter that is sad or sick, depending on point of view. Cf. and definitely contrast the robot Maria in METROPOLIS, the robot "Helen O'Loy", and such descendants as Ava in EX MACHINA.

RDE, 06/II/17