Consciousness is a tricky thing. For as long as computers have existed,
people have been trying to draw comparisons between hard drives and human
brains. The analogy certainly seems reasonable. Both of them store
information, both allow that information to be accessed, and interfaced
with. But there is a huge difference between how the two operate. Computers
process information in binary code, through logic gates that really just
boil down to on or off. Brains, on the other hand, are a chaotic mess of
neurons and synapses. Memory is retrieved through associations and
connections. Each one is unique. In the 21st century, many researchers
believed they were capable of mapping a given human brain, and recreating
the structure in a computer model. But it was nothing more than a copy, and
a copy is not the original.
The science behind mind uploading was always a gray area, and the problem of
mind transference felt insurmountable. If you were to attempt to upload
yourself into a new substrate of some kind, there is a fifty percent chance
that you wake up in the new substrate. There is thusly a fifty percent
chance that you wake up to find yourself still in your old body, while some
rando copy of you is waking up, thinking they’re the real version of you.
It’s just a copy, though. That doesn’t mean this copy isn’t real, but
it hasn’t solved your problem of wanting to shed your old substrate,
and become something different. It doesn’t matter how many times you try
this, in each attempt, there is also a version of you that’s the copy, and a
version of you that’s just failed in getting what they wanted. There will
always be someone left behind. And the reason that is is because a human
brain is not a computer. Files can’t be transferred to some other location,
because thoughts and memories aren’t stored as files in the first place.
Experts came up with a somewhat viable workaround to this issue. If the mind
wasn’t designed with files and folders, then it had to be converted. They
called it Project Theseus. The Ship of Theseus is an old thought experiment,
which questions whether a ship that’s had every part of it replaced over
time is even the same ship as before. The rational answer seems to be...sort
of. Mostly. We hope. Even though none of the parts were there in the
beginning, some of the parts are older than others, and they were around to
be connected to even older parts, and those older parts were there with
parts that are older still. As long as they’re replaced gradually, each new
part can claim to be a component of the whole, and that doesn’t change even
when all its nearby parts are also replaced themselves.
Project Theseus took this interpretation of the experiment, and applied it
to the human body. You replace a patient’s hands, and let them use them for
a few weeks. Then you replace their arms. Then their feet, then their legs,
then their internal organs. By not doing it all at once, each new part can
integrate itself into the system, so that that system has a chance to
consider it a constituent, rather than a foreign extension. After
discovering that this seemed to work, the experts decided it was time for
the next step. They now hoped to apply the Theseus technique to the central
nervous system, though they recognized that it would be far more
complicated. It was going to take a lot more research, heaps more patience,
and an uncomfortable amount of trial and error.
The Theseus technique worked well for decades, but it wasn’t perfect. The
time it took to complete the whole thing wasn’t much of a problem for most
people. The average human being was going to live for a century without it,
so even if they decided to become inorganic later on in life, there was
usually plenty of time. There were some people, however, who couldn’t wait
that long. Even after all this, there were still some medical conditions
that science couldn’t fix, and brain uploading was the only solution. These
people needed a completely new technique, which scientists started referring
to neurosponging. An artificial brain is first synthesized, which perfectly
resembles the patient’s brain. Electrical signals are then basically
absorbed into the synth, just as they’re being lost from the original. It
was like Theseus on a profoundly shorter timeline, but it alone did not
solve the problem. Though artificial, this new brain was still organic, and
still prone to degradation. Fortunately, it could be programmed to rewrite
itself, until it exhibited an easier to organize filing system. Then that
could be transferred to something more durable. This was the route that
Hogarth Pudeyonavic and Hilde Unger chose to take.
In a matter of days, the process was complete, and they were both mechs.
There were two primary types of mechs in the stellar neighborhood. Some were
artificial intelligences, while others were transhumans who passed the
singularity when they were upgraded so much that they became mechs. There
were no terms to distinguish these two types, however, because internally
speaking, a mech was a mech, and they treated each other as such. Hogarth
and Hilde now belonged to Glisnian society, and would be allowed to
contribute to the cause.
“Why are we keeping your former substrate?” The mech they met when they
first returned was going to remain their associate. His full name was
Mekiolenkidasola, though he sometimes just went by Lenkida.
The tech from Dardius was still human, and named Ethesh Beridze. “Yeah, your
dead bodies are freaking me out.”
“They’re not dead,” Hogarth reminded him as Hilde was closing the drawer
that contained her body. “They’re in stasis. In order to help the Glisnians
crack superluminal travel, I need to study my old body. How did I do it? I
explored the answers all I could while I was still alive, but now it’s time
to perform a dissection, and really figure out how it worked.”
“You don’t understand why you were capable of traveling through time?”
Lenkida questioned.
“It wasn’t so much something I was capable of as it was a medical condition
that was thrust upon me. I’m not the best candidate for this research. If
you want to study someone who can travel the stars, you’re gonna want The
Trotter. He’s not here, however, and my body is all we have right now.
Still, I once jumped here from another universe, so this should at least
give us a start.”
“There are other universes?” Lenkida wasn’t shocked, but he was surprised.
It was practically impossible to shock anyone in the 25th century.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Wait, why do we need your body at all, if we’re just going to build more
Nexus replicas?”
“I’ll be studying the replicas too,” Hogarth explained, “but I don’t want to
just make more of them, not after what I’ve learned. I’ll go over my reasons
later.”
“What do you need?” Lenkida offered.
Hogarth slid her metallic fingers over her old fleshy arm. “I need you to
find me an assistant. Someone who was once human, understands both human
physiology, and the human condition. Obviously they need to be discreet.
I’ll build you a resource extractor, but not a stargate network. That’s my
requirement.”
“Understood,” Lenkida said. “Let me go find you some candidates.”
“I’ll come with,” Ethesh asked.
While they were off doing that, Hogarth and Hilde took some time to get used
to their new bodies. They chose a humanoid design, with a synthetic skin
overlaid. It probably wasn’t too terribly common, but it wasn’t unheard of
either. Many of the formerly organic mechs preferred this, because it made
them look as they always did. Most eventually shed this facade, however, and
just went with the robot look, because skin didn’t serve a utilitarian
purpose, and faces only helped in certain social settings. The two most
recent mechs weren’t going to make any rash decisions in that regard.
“How does it feel?” Hilde asked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” Hogarth said. “We’re in the same boat.”
“Not really,” Hilde contended. “You were the one with a time affliction. I
haven’t lost anything I’ll miss, but your ability got you out of a lot of
sticky situations, even if you weren’t in control of it. How many times did
you almost die, only to be spirited away at the very less microsecond?”
“I don’t need to worry about that anymore,” Hogarth assured her. “My
consciousness is constantly being backed up to eleven locations.”
“Still,” Hilde went on, it was a part of you, and now it’s gone forever.”
Hogarth smirked, and opened the drawer where Hilde’s body was resting in
stasis. “Is it? Who says I can’t just jump back in whenever I want? Who says
you can’t do the same?”
“Mech law—”
“Mech law can suck it. I haven’t ever followed anyone else’s rules, and I’m
certainly not going to start now. I’ll do what I promised, and get them the
resources they need to complete their matrioshka body. I may not do it the
way they want it, and they’re just gonna have to accept that.”
“What didn’t you want to say when Lenkida and Ethesh were here? Why aren’t
we just using the Nexus replica?”
“I cannot allow anyone the ability to travel faster-than-light. We’ve seen
what humans do when they get a taste of a new world. They do whatever it is
they want with it.”
“They’re mechs, though.” Hilde argued.
“Same same, but different. Vonearthans all come from the same place. Why,
we’ve already seen it. Glinsia was a planet, with a surface, and a core, and
satellites. They destroyed it, which is fine; there wasn’t anything living
on it, but eating up resources is what people do. I have to be the one to
control what they take, and where they take it from. I’ve seen too much not
to.”
“What happened to you? When we jumped here from Dardius, you were on the
floor, and you weren’t okay. Did you see something?”
Hogarth simulated a sigh. It felt strange, since she wasn’t breathing, and
didn’t even possess any mechanism to pump or transmit air. She just let out
a sound that sort of sounded like breath. “That jump is what destroyed, and
will destroy, the Nexa. My affliction happened one more time, and combined
with the transport. When that happened, it rippled all throughout spacetime.
Every Nexus that’s ever been mysteriously destroyed, and each one we hear of
from now on, will have been caused by what I did.”
“So what?”
“Huh?”
“So what, Hogarth, who cares? It’s like you said, vonearthans abuse the
powers they receive. They don’t need the replicas, and the time travelers
don’t need them either. No one needs them. They’re just more convenient.”
You don’t understand. I didn’t just destroy the replica network. I destroyed
the entire thing. The explosion reached across to the originating universe,
and is destroying all of those too.”
“Yeah, that sucks,” Hilde agreed, “but they’ll be okay. Or they won’t. Maybe
people will die from that, or maybe people will survive because of it. Maybe
a villainous force is on its way to invade an innocent planet, and you saved
those people because the villains weren’t able to reach them. You keep using
the word affliction, but you also keep trying to blame yourself for it. This
isn’t something you’ve done, it’s something that happened to you, and in
this case, it happens to have impacted other people. Again, it sucks, but
you didn’t really do it. We have to find a way to move past this, because I
know you, and you’ll brood for years. If the only solution is I hack into
your episodic memory files, and erase the issue, I’ll do it.”
“I don’t want to forget anything,” Hilde. “My memory is everything.”
“Well, I guess therapy is your only other option. We’ll do that instead.”
“Did you just haggle me?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She shook her head, happy to be with someone who understood her. “I should
get to work.”
“What are you planning? What will studying your organic body do for us? You
use the word extraction.”
“I don’t know yet, but if I learn enough about how I was able to jump across
dimensions, I might be able to come up with a new solution. I don’t like the
word extraction, now that I’ve thought about it. I believe I would call
it...time siphoning.”
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