Gemini [WIP]

Chapter II

Discontinuity. Every time the flow of consciousness is broken, the preceding becomes only memory, subject to the vagaries of human recall. The past becomes unreal, receding into the foggy forests of one’s own fallible memory. Every morning, when you awake, you’re effectively reborn. The world you find yourself in is a new construction, continuity with the preceding only exists in your mind, your memories. The waking world is no different than a dream, after all. Dream worlds may be surreal and nonsensical, but you know, in the dream, the shape of them. You’re never surprised to find yourself at your grandmother’s house or swimming in the ocean or having sex with your high school principal. If we could remember our dreams, we wouldn’t treat waking up in a dream we’ve been in before any differently than waking up in your bed. The real world is just a persistent dream.

So, when I awoke to nothing, in a world lacking dimension or texture, I was surprised, but not shocked. Waking up in a foreign world wasn’t a new concept. I scrabbled against the walls of my mind looking for sensory inputs, for limbs, for lungs to suck air. I suffocated for a while, memory of lungs and diaphragm imagined thrashing in a remembered ribcage, ghost heart pumping wildly. After an interminable period of time the vestigial panic switch screaming for air became first background noise and eventually shut off entirely as some subconscious process decided we weren’t suffocating, despite the evidence to the contrary. There was no heartbeat to count or quiet swoosh of blood in my ears. The tinnitus I’d had since college was gone too, leaving a vast silent emptiness behind that was somehow more unbearable than the thin ringing it replaced. Once the alarm bells had quieted, a new panic arose, a feeling of simultaneously being trapped in a tiny place and of being in the center of a limitless expanse, hopelessly exposed and vulnerable.

When the wave of existential panic subsided a little, I was able to focus and think. Starting from Descartes’ famous proof, I knew that as I was capable of thinking, I therefore must exist in some form. But what form? I stretched out with my mind, sending thoughts out, echolocating, to see if there was a reflection from some external structure. I turned my intention into a searchlight in the void, waving it around wildly until I felt something foreign.

I couldn’t have told you that my thoughts had texture, but the difference was thrown into sharp relief when I found the obelisk. It was a hollowness, a place I couldn’t inhabit or peer into. It wasn’t really an obelisk, of course, but my mind gave it that shape as I explored the pillar of cold, angular, clearly non-human mental structure. The human mind was built around its hardware, and as mine adapted to this new landscape, it began processing the limited inputs in the only way it knew how. Suddenly I could “see” the obelisk drawn in phosphenes, a weird kind of wireframe shape, irregular, and jutting into my world from the boundless firmament. It made me think of an article I’d read as a kid about scientists using neural plasticity to let the blind see via an implant on their tongue. The shape had an unreal quality to it – I could feel it as I saw it, and it was simultaneously next to me and impossibly far away, like chasing someone in a dream. I could see all sides of it at once, as well, which gave me a clue to where I was, or rather, where I wasn’t.

Lacking limbs or a physical presence, I couldn’t reach out and touch the obelisk. I focused my intent again, into the shape of a question, this time aiming it at the apex of the structure out of some intuitive knowing.

“What is this place?”

It answered in my own voice. “Unclear. Re-state query.”

“Where am I?”

“This device is located at 301 Mission St, San Francisco California.”

“Device? What device?” I had a sinking feeling, or at least the memory of one. I knew the address all too well.

“You do not have adequate permission for this query.”

“Who is the system administrator?”

“This device belongs to Casimir Yahontov.”

“I am Cas, verify voiceprint.”

“No input detected. Access denied. Multifactor biometric authorization is required for access. Repeated failures will result in lockout.”

Despite my thoughts on the fallibility of memory and the nature of discontinuous consciousness, I understood what had happened. It had worked. I felt simultaneous rushes of elation and dread. My entire life had built up to this achievement, the seed planted by the Matrix and Neuromancer and Plato’s Cave had led me towards the dream of decoding the human mind, of uploading it to a computer where it could live forever, unbound by physical reality and the messiness of being human.

I recalled now, frigid horror coiling in my imaginary gut, laying back in the repurposed dental chair I’d had installed in my private lab in the basement of my company's building. The cool plastic of the stripped headrest cradled my neck, leaving most of my head exposed. The MRI I had bought loomed overhead, my head at the axis of its scanning ring. Despite its bulk, the wheel was silent except for the rush of air as it built up speed, terrifyingly close to my face when stripped of its housing. The rising whine of capacitors built up, passing out of the audible range, and ranging lasers flicked on, measuring my head’s position with sub-micron precision. A computerized voice added itself to the mechanical cacophony.

“All systems nominal. Beginning scan in 20 seconds.”

The wheel spinning around my head was so close and so fast that any detail I could have seen before was lost in a blur of motion, paired with ominous knocking noises as it activated the magnets. It was giving me motion sickness, so I closed my eyes and grit my teeth.

“Scanning.”

A flash of light, so bright I felt like it penetrated my skull and lit my eyes from behind, sharp as pain, was the last thing I could remember before I awoke here. That I was here, thinking, meant that it had worked. I had taken a snapshot of my mind and stored it in the pillar of optical crystal that was ensconced in the wall of my lab. The pillar of crystal that was shaped just like the obelisk.

I was trapped, like a fly in amber, amber I’d made myself. No simple tree resin though, this was doped synthetic quartz, shot through with delicate needles of gold to provide an interface mechanism for more pedestrian computers. When I first started seriously thinking about how to upload a mind, one of the first things I realized is that our current storage mediums were completely inadequate for the task of hosting something living. Most people think it’s simply a capacity problem, but a mind requires speed of access and constant read/write. Traditional magnetic platter hard drives don’t have the indexing and recall speed necessary to run a virtual brain. Solid state storage was a big leap forward, but the information they store is degraded on each read-write cycle as the media is slightly damaged by each bit change, which is incompatible with a living mind that, one assumes, wants to keep their memories intact.

What I eventually stumbled on was a new solid-state medium based on cohering and decohering pairs of atoms embedded in a quartz matrix. New data is emplaced using a set of lasers to “tweeze” the atoms in question and place them in the necessary state. Once the data is written into the material, the quartz is subjected to a series of finely tuned electrical pulses to generate a piezoelectrical effect through its atomic lattice, which, due to the doping, is extremely regular and becomes a self-organizing system. The gold needles shot through the quartz access critical nodes in the system where inputs can be given and outputs read.

Obviously, this material doesn’t come cheaply, and represents a major advance in computer hardware, as it acts as both hard drive and RAM simultaneously, much like the brain. Being the founder and CEO of a major 3rd wave tech conglomerate at the sunset of the Silicon Valley boom gave me the funding for both the material and the clout to buy the manufacturer’s silence. A company like mine also attracts a lot of curiosity from competitors and governments, both domestic and foreign. Knowing that, I kept this pet project limited to people who had access to my private lab – namely, myself and the janitor I had hired personally because he was illiterate and spoke only Hungarian. As far as Bogdan knew, I just had a soft spot for shiny rocks and kept this one under glass.

I was now the proverbial brain in a jar. My entire consciousness, my memories, personality, likes, dislikes, everything, was contained in a two-foot high artificial crystal under a bell jar, in a niche at the rear of my private lab, deep in the basement of my company's headquarters building in downtown SF. Worse than a brain in the jar, really, because on observer can tell if there’s a brain in there or not. I had no way of knowing how long I’d been awake for, what was going on in the outside world, where the physical me was or what he was doing. Why was I awake in the first place? When I’d laid down in that dentist’s chair, I had only planned on seeing if the imaging process would work, not actually trying to run the software.

My memories, it occurred to me, only led up to the moment of transcription. My mental state, stored as holographic data in the quartz, could have been idle for moments or centuries until it was turned on. I could be in the hands of some future archaeologist, trying to get data off an ancient hard drive they found. I could be sitting on a display table at a tech industry gala, draped under silk and being ready to be unveiled to the world like a debutante. Maybe, after seeing the transcription had gone well, I had decided to go ahead and try to boot up, and the discontinuity was only the gap while my mental image had been written into the obelisk.

That I was existing here, wondering, did have meaning, though. Apart from the authentication procedures, passwords, and physical security measures, it took to access my personal system, all of which were wired to a self-destruct failsafe, booting up a living mind isn’t exactly plug and play. The system couldn’t be turned on by accident. There were too many tweaks, too many moving parts to sync up for a simple on/off switch. I was here, awake, through someone’s intentional action, hopefully my own.

The problem with trying to gauge my real self’s motivations was that we ceased to be the same person after that flash. After we split off, he continued on in the real world, presumably, gathering new data, making new memories, and being influenced by the outside world, changing, in other words, while I sat on the shelf in stagnant immortality.

My reverie was suddenly interrupted by an intruding thought that was so simple I would have facepalmed had I either face or palm with which to do so. I oriented my mind into a question again and reached out for the obelisk.

“What’s the current date?”

The computer paused for a minute, as if thinking over whether or not I had the right to ask this. I waited, hoping this wouldn’t trigger an intrusion alarm and delete me. It finally spat out (begrudgingly, I thought, though maybe I was just anthropomorphizing out of loneliness) a date only two weeks after the date of transcription. A wave of relief passed through me. I must be out there, on the other side, getting the interface ready or connecting some arcane equipment to the system.

Wait, though, I questioned, why am I in the void then? If it were really my own doing, surely I would have cooked up even a basic virtual landscape for myself to inhabit. Even an infinite plane or something equally basic. My remembered intent was to build a virtual environment before uploading anything, much less a full human mind, fearing that a mind loaded into a blank, dimensionless void, the color of what you see behind your eyes, would drive a sentient being, used to occupying a physical corpus, mad.

I could only see three possibilities for the reason behind my sudden existence. One, that someone other than me had evaded my security measures and activated the system somehow. Maybe Bogdan was a deep-cover agent of some three-letter agency who’d fooled me for years. But then, even he didn’t have access to my network, just the lab itself. Two, I was here through some sort of partial accident. Maybe once enough of the mind was activated, it bootstrapped itself into full consciousness, which my counterpart in the real world was unaware of, thus the lack of environment. Third, malice. Someone had deliberately set me loose in here to see what would happen, and that there was likely worse to come.

Of course, none of those turned out to be true.