Mariano took me to the hospital and stayed there to apologize to Sandra. She accepted his apology, with a hug and everything. They both came into the room to tell me about it while a technician named Monica was giving me several disgusting substances to smell.
We had a group hug, the three of us, like best friends in junior high, but they kept their faces away from me because the smell of the disgusting substances had impregnated my skin.
We continued with the process. I was starting to have more and more trouble breathing. The good news was that the technicians were beginning to relax around me and say things in my presence; they were starting to become a little less reserved. That’s how I learned their names, for example, and it was also how I found out that the brain emulations weren’t working.
It was true that there were a lot of other volunteers, all of whom were being uploaded by affiliate companies of large medical companies (like the one Sandra worked for) in underdeveloped countries, where it’s cheaper to obtain permits for everything, easier to have secret, protected facilities with their own power source, where it’s harder for people to find out about what’s going on, and harder for there to be street protests or media outrage. In fact, the initial list of Guinea pigs on which I was placed as a result of Mariano’s pleading was completely made up of people who were poorer than we were: more vulnerable. “People who nobody would miss,” as they say on the crime dramas.
The news had already begun to trickle down to me. Sandra was already aware of it, and she eventually had to admit that it was true. I asked her not to punish anyone for passing the news on to me. And she surprised me by offering to tell me everything in detail. We decided to be honest and that Mariano should be there to hear it, too.
We met in my hospital room, the three of us, alone, without Yair or Monica. This conversation resulted in horrified looks on our faces, again.
Very few of the volunteers, who were undergoing several different uploading techniques (uploading, transfer, maintenance), were actually surviving, and none had been emulated without suffering some kind of damage. There were minds that had never woken up on the storage systems, and others that had become distorted, deconstructed, however you want to say it, in ways that were very strange. Sometimes in horrible ways.
“Since we’re being honest, I’m going to tell you the whole truth,” Sandra said. Using a tablet, she showed us some data and videos of the worst cases. “For example, this woman in Thailand somehow got trapped in her childhood: apparently she is not able to access any memories recorded after seven years of age. Her speakers, installed so that she could talk, were emitting screams of terror, like those of a little girl, for…oh my God.”
“How long?”
“It says here for six weeks straight, continuously. People would turn off her speakers once in a while. This report is new. I haven’t really had a chance to look at it yet.
“Whoa.”
“Here’s another one. There’s a man in Honduras who says that he has phantom pain all over his body. Literally all over his body: his skin, internal organs, joints, muscles, everything. Despite the fact that he has no body. It’s strange because his hardware version allows for the equivalent of his nerve endings to be removed, actually disconnected—”
“They disconnected his nerve endings?” Mariano asked.
“Yes, and it produced no effect. There’s also a woman in Serbia who seems to have suffered something analogous to brain damage: she threatens everyone she sees—I mean, anyone who steps in front of the camera—and describes the horrible ways in which she is going to torture them as soon as she gets hands installed.”
“They’re not going to give her hands, are they?” I asked. Mariano winced.
“Ha, ha, very funny,” said Sandra sarcastically.
On the tablet, she showed us photos of what these people had looked like before the procedure. They looked like normal people. They could have been anyone.
Sandra showed us one more picture, of an older man, who was thin, bald, and had a lot of wrinkles. He looked like me.
“I apologize for not telling you this earlier,” she said. “Look… you’re not our first patient. He was. We uploaded him—I mean, we emulated his brain—last year.”
She closed the photo on the screen and started looking for something else.
“You never told me anything about this,” Mariano objected. She ignored him.
“Based on these results, we are developing ways to improve the uploading process, the transfer, everything. This man,” Sandra explained, “showed patterns similar to what occurs in Tourette syndrome. Every eleventh word he said was an obscenity, regardless of whether or not it made sense within his sentences. Oh, and he learned how to save these disgusting photos and videos on his hard drive; he would find them on the internet in order to show them to people. It was something like psychopathic behavior, or a dissociative identity disorder, and the strangest thing of all was that it didn’t happen right away, but exactly 1,024 minutes after we woke him up… As we understand it, there was some connection between an internal clock in the hardware and one part of the model of his unconscious. Obviously, something like this cannot occur in a human brain.”
She played a video showing Monica, the technician, looking at the patient interface, which was set up on a table more or less in the same way as in all the laboratories involved in the project: there was a microphone, a camera, and speakers, surrounded by monitors containing diagnostics and other kinds of data. The patient’s words were coming out of the speakers.
“Turn that off,” Mariano said.
The patient’s voice was saying: “—I understand that I signed the papers slut and that I agreed to do everything that you asked chickenshit me to do, but you must understand. I am perfectly dumbass aware of what is happening. It’s not that I can’t cunt see it, that I can’t feel it. I just can’t bitch control what I do! It’s like I’m watching another person cow search for the videos and the–”
“Stop the video,” I said. The curse words sounded different from the other words, but not because the man was shouting them or anything. They were said at the same volume, but they were pronounced more slowly and the tone was different: it sounded like the voice of a younger man, who was also (and I don’t know why I thought this) bigger and heavier.
Sandra stopped the video.
“We are trying to build maps, or models: analogs of human consciousness, and we’re running into errors, imperfections that we are unable to foresee and that we don’t understand very well. The engineers say that this happens all the time, that we need to assess and correct, to put aside what doesn’t work and to keep on making progress. The bad news is that whatever ‘doesn’t work’ is…”
She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t need to.
“How do we know this isn’t going to happen to Celeste?” Mariano asked.
“We don’t. We’re doing everything we can to prevent the conditions that led to this situation—”
“Is he receiving any treatment?” I asked.
“No,” Sandra replied, and then she sighed. “He asked us to delete him. He said he couldn’t take it anymore. The family held us to it, since we’re bound by contract to respect their wishes in that regard. Yours has the same clause, remember? Voluntary termination.”