I quit my job at the university. I quit everything. Of course I did. As they often say in cases like mine, I was going to “focus on fighting my disease.”
“Try to look at it like what you’re telling everyone is actually true,” Sandra said, “like it’s just another normal kind of treatment. Don’t worry about the details.”
The uploading sessions at the hospital took us ten months: stretches of four or five hours daily, in which they had me do all sorts of things while electrodes were stuck to my skin and especially to my head; it wasn’t hard to attach them. I resumed part of my treatments in order to prevent the worst of the malaise, and to delay the metastasis as much as possible. And since I’d gone bald, Mariano shaved his head in solidarity, like a kid in a heart-wrenching documentary. It’s a good thing that his head is egg-shaped, because it looked funny and it made me laugh a little.
At the hospital, they had me speak, read, write, and listen to music. I answered questions. I watched geometric patterns on a screen, or movies, or video clips strung together in a way that I found chaotic. I also had to walk, ride a stationary bicycle, lift weights, and I even ate, slept, and emptied my bowels while connected. They gave me things to smell, played me recordings of nature sounds, of artificial sounds, and sometimes they would ask me to wear clothes made of specific types of fabric, to take off my clothes, or to rub certain products on different parts of my body. They would give me mild electric shocks. They would stand me on my head or strap me into a rotating frame. Mariano would always go with me whenever he could, and there were lots of times when he had to help me, when the physical exertion would get to be too much for me.
We also did other things that weren’t part of the upload process: they took different types of samples, recorded me in 3D and 2D video, interviewed me, recorded my voice, and made me look through the files on my hard drives and my old papers in search of memories… A lot of that was for legal purposes, just like the documents that they gave me to sign every so often: the company’s lawyers were always devising strategies to protect their client from problems related to this experimental and clandestine technology; much of it was also for advertising purposes or public relations material, because everyone was very optimistic: it would all come to light in the end.
The most important thing, though, was always the uploading process. And they said we were making progress, little by little. Through the signals that the system picked up from my brain and my nervous system (that’s how I understood it, and even now I can’t put it any better), not only were my memories being recorded, but the entire structure of my brain, too.
“We are mapping and uploading your entire heterarchical system,” one of the technicians told me one day, as I was (very poorly) playing a fighting video game with Mariano.
“My what?” I asked, and I got distracted, at which point Mariano’s fighter ripped out my fighter’s spinal cord.
“Sorry,” the technician said. His name is Yair, but I didn’t know that yet.
“Sorry,” echoed Mariano, but he was smiling. It wasn’t often that he could successfully execute those finishing moves.
Later, I asked Sandra for an explanation.
“Every mind is like a model,” she said. A model so sophisticated that it is capable of representing itself—”
“Sorry, but I’m not understanding anything.”
“Have you read Douglas Hofstadter?” she asked. “He’s an author who wrote about the subject. In fact, he was the one who first proposed the term ‘heterarchy.’”
I stared at her in silence with my mouth open.
“Who?” I said, and then, immediately, “No. You know what? It’d be better if you didn’t even tell me. I’m not going to have time to read his book, anyway.”
It took Sandra a moment to respond: “Don’t be lazy. I’ll bring you a couple of his books tomorrow.”
True to her word, the next day she brought me a couple of his books. I took them home with me and tried to read them (in fact, they contained several interesting literary references), but I didn’t get very far. At first, I wanted to chalk it up to the fact that we were in a difficult and strenuous phase of the uploading process: they were having me move, jump, bend my arms and legs at different angles, and use them to apply force. Then I decided that I’d found the books boring because I could barely understand them: the material was very dense and quite far from my area of specialization. That was the reason why I’d had a mediocre life, not because of a lack of time or a lack of opportunities, or the color of my skin, or my inability to relate to people.
Nevertheless, there were times when I was actually in a good mood. I enjoyed the time that the three of us spent together, Sandra, Mariano, and I, after a full day of work when Mariano would come to pick me up at the hospital. We almost never left right away after a session; we would usually talk and joke around for a while. One time, for example, we concluded that it would be best to formalize our relationship, the three of us, “So as not to be living in sin, of course,” Sandra said.
“So as to make a decent woman out of you,” Mariano countered.
“After all, the three of us are going to have a daughter,” I said, and I had to laugh quite a bit to let them know that they could have a child together, too.