“I was at Conscious Designs. I’ve been considering purchasing a Second Self.”

  She shook her head and let out an angry laugh. “A cheap copy of yourself, is that what you want? Is that not the definition of narcissism?”

  She looked away from him and back into the mirror, as though she needed the glass to mediate, to create distance.

  “We’re comfortable. We can afford this,” he said. The word ‘comfortable’ struck him as bizarre as soon as he uttered it. What an inapt adjective. He hadn’t experienced comfort for almost eleven years now.

  “This has nothing to do with money, Eugene. But since we are talking about it, you should be spending that money on eradicating your neuropathic pain. Another surgery is what you need. The new procedure is much more effective. I read about it.”

  He wasn’t sure if this was empathy or rhetoric. His understanding of his wife was becoming ever more abstract.

  “Do you remember what you said about wanting to have kids?” he asked.

  “That was another time. Eons ago.”

  “You said that a child is how we would live on after we died. ‘A child will be our legacy.’ That’s what you said. How is this any different?” he asked.

  “We would have both lived on in a child, not just you. I wish you had wanted a child then, when we had a chance to create real life, before the accident.” Was she trying to hurt him? Remind him of his sterility?

  “Listen, as soon as we can afford a Second Self for you, our two digital selves can live on together forever,” he said. “Like the melodrama we watched the other night.”

  “We”? Are you mad? These are computer programs. There is no we. We die and we are dead! I think the cinestream propaganda is really getting to you. You’re smarter than this, Eugene. Think for yourself.”

  “Our Second Selves would be conscious! They would have our memories, our minds.”

  “And how do you know they would be conscious? How do they prove that to you?” She was now standing over him like an angry parent scolding a disobedient child.

  “How do you know that you and I are conscious, for that matter?” he said. There was a self-satisfaction in answering a question with a question, as he had seen in the cinestream melodramas.

  “Eugene, why not just have your hippocampus uploaded into a digital memory bank. That’s something that will never die. It will be accessible in the collective archives forever.”

  “What is a memory without a mind?” he said. “Nothing. It’s as meaningless as an unread book in the basement, collecting dust.” He realized that he had never actually experienced a physical book, not with his own eyes at least. Even the language that he spoke seemed to be a simulation of a world that no longer existed.

  “Eugene, is this about your injury? We can upgrade the VR unit. The newest models offer full ontological immersion so you can escape your pain.”

  “Full immersion is impossible, and you know that. Only a mind that is born into digital space can be a native in that space. We can only be tourists. Here I am in this world, with nothing but my pain. I want a place where I can live in peace. Arcadia.”

  “I, I, I. Do you hear yourself? Your Second Self, if it is really a self at all, will be its own self. Once it is created, it will no longer be you, if it’s even anything beyond a bunch of circuits in a computer.”

  “It will be me! Think about yourself tomorrow. Are you having a conscious experience of tomorrow right now?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then, is the you of tomorrow still you? Or think about yourself in the past. Are you having an active experience of yourself at age eleven right now? No. But you are still that person.”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” she said. “But that’s different. What makes me me is my past as it exists in my memory, and also all the potential experiences of my future.”

  “Exactly! We are just these models that we make of ourselves. A Second Self has the same self-model based on all our past experiences, a perfectly replicated structure of our brains. You may not be thinking about your eleventh birthday party, but that memory along with all your other memories make up who you are, your understanding of yourself and the world you inhabit.”

  “Once the Second Self is made, its experience changes it then,” she said. “This is what you don’t understand. And as your Second Self begins to have new experiences, its subjectivity becomes completely different. Then you just have a half million-dollar buddy. Is that what you want? Do you want a buddy?”

  “Now you’re just being mean.”

  “I don’t understand why you can’t make new friends. Bring new people into your life without creating another version of yourself.”

  He wheeled away from his wife without responding and transferred his body into the robotic exoskeleton that waited lifeless on a chair in the dining room. It felt good to strap the machine onto his body again. He connected the neural wave sensor to the back of his neck. He imagined himself standing and the exoskeleton obeyed. He felt dignified, standing erect after three sedentary days.

  He took a walk around the cul-de-sac, not daring to venture out of sight of the house for fear the machine would malfunction again, stranding him or worse. He imagined the thing taking full control of his body and running him into the highway or jumping him off a bridge. Would that be so bad?

  He thought about his conversation with Ashcroft, thought about the yeses and nos firing in the brain. It was as if Corina were the no-neurons firing, a kind of embodied refusal to the will of his mind. She had made some strong points. What kind of envy would he feel at another version of himself living in a digital paradise while he suffered, trapped in his body? He thought of Nina. Maybe she was the yes neurons, his will to liberation. He wanted to experience beauty the way she did, experience something other than pain and boredom.

  He returned to the house and went to his bedroom without even the perfunctory goodnight to Corina. He had been sleeping in his own room for a number of years now, since his pain had gotten worse. It was, after all, unfair for Corina to suffer with him as he writhed through the night.

  He took his dose of oxcarbazepine, gabapentin, and the nightly blend of opioids to preempt the infernal onslaught of pain. The meds only dulled the inevitable neuropathic nightmare. First, the gentle burn of the day would intensify. His hamstrings would begin to feel as though they were in some agonizing stretch for which there would be no relief.

  When it began to ramp up, he tried to distract himself from the pain. He put on his VR unit and played a cineromance that was cued up for him. Maybe he had seen this one before. He couldn’t remember. A man falls in love with a woman in his VR fantasy. The man ends up realizing that she was not a simulation at all, but a lonely replicated digital consciousness roaming the virtual streets at night. The man copies his mind onto the platform and of course she falls in love with him, his digital iteration. Eugene had seen this kind of story replayed a million times. Man falls in love with computer program; turns out computer program is actually just as human as he is; they find a way to be together (or not). Something comforting in the familiarity of the narrative.

  But the cinedrama is not enough to distract his attention from the torment caused by overzealous nociceptors that branch from his spinal cord below where the bone shards of his seventh thoracic vertebra had pierced it. He closed his eyes and saw these pain receptors exploding like little firecrackers, little electrical jolts. His mind trying to force sleep. The pain manifesting in dream worlds. He was bound to a large wooden pole where men in robes lit a fire at his feet that began to course up through his legs, searing his skin. The smell of burned flesh stinging the nostrils. And then two blond children came, a boy and girl, with pliers, laughing as they pulled out his toenails, starting with the pinky toes and making their way to the big ones. They were child versions of himself and Corina. There was a symmetry to the whole thing that he almost found beautiful. He woke again. This time he heard the rodent that had been scratching away in the wall behind his bed, most likely trying to increase the size of its burrow. He imagined the drywall between the creature and his head getting thinner and thinner, and when he closed his eyes, it was as if the animal were scratching directly at his cranium, trying to burrow inside of him.

  He woke into another dream. One in which he was not bound at all, but, just as in his waking life, paralyzed. Yet in this dream world it was his whole body that couldn’t move, a body that he perceived as nothing more than a collection of nerves resembling the branches of a dead tree. The ends of the nerve bundles of his legs ignited and the intense points of pain were the hot fire of the sparklers of his childhood, the ones that slowly burn their way down, and maybe there could be relief when they burned out. But this incendiary pain worked its way up into his groin, and then reversed back down to his toes, then back to his groin, until finally the pain began to dull as the morning light gave shape to the world again.

  Everything had been preparing him for death. The feeling of being trapped inside a willful mind and a powerless body, the constant neuropathic pain, the sensation of burning legs and feet, and the jolts of electricity pinging through useless nerves. He had had so many surgeries, the spinal cord untetherings, the neural cauterizations, the ablations. There was theoretically no more connection between his brain and nerves below his seventh thoracic vertebra. But nothing had worked. There had been something peaceful about being anesthetized in those procedures, like simulations of non-consciousness, ellipses in life, temporary little deaths. They had given him the knowledge that there was a possibility for an end to his suffering.

  This is where his mind ended up, as it often did in the grey morning hours. He looked at the bottle of opioids on the bedside table. He had recently begun to see himself, or some version of himself in the third person, swallowing the pills, writing some pathetic letter. Where did this come from? It seemed more like a memory than a fantasy.

  He lay there for a moment as he came back into the world. When his legs stopped their morning spasms, he grabbed them behind the knees and swung them onto the finished concrete floor, remembering how cold it used to feel against his soles. In the chair beneath the exoskeleton he noticed the animal, a small mouse with its head caught in a trap that Corina must have set. Its black eyes were bulging out, almost comically, and he could see its stomach coming out of its mouth.

  When the animal began to twitch, he had the instinct to stomp out its life, but found himself, as he did every morning, unable to command his lower body. Did this mouse have a conscious experience of its own suffering? If the animal had a cortex, it must have had conscious experience. Was this creature’s consciousness less valuable than his own?

  Eugene thought about the pigs, about what their lives were worth. He wondered if they could experience happiness and if a happy life was more valuable than a miserable one. Then he willed himself to stop thinking and let the world begin to pass by again as he prepared himself for another day on the excision floor, leaving the small animal to die on its own.

  PART TWO / CORINA

  Corina left XenoLife a few hours early so she could stop into Conscious Designs and still be home at the usual time and not have to tell Edwin any of it. She looked out the window of the replica twentieth century Camaro that was driving her to the edge of the city. She tried to distract her mind by focusing on the throngs of homeless on the streets, inventing promising narratives for their lives. She saw a man in an old wheelchair that looked uncannily like Eugene, the man she had been trying to excise from her conscious mind. She had decided not to even tell Edwin, her lover of five years, about her marriage or Eugene’s Second Self. And so of course she hadn’t told Edwin about the call she had received a few days ago from Conscious Designs, informing her of Eugene’s recent “decline” or “digression”—she couldn’t remember the euphemism—or their plan to have his mind moved from the old solipsistic platform to a new interpersonal one. Arcadia is what they were calling it. She hoped he could be free from his pain in Arcadia, the pain he’d endured since she’d had his dying mind copied into the digital platform ten years ago. And maybe the migration would set her free from her guilt, her grief.

  Why couldn’t she have let Eugene die, as he had wanted, as he had chosen? She had after all been told—signed a disclaimer in fact—that his pain would most likely be mapped onto his new mind. She had found that cartographic metaphor somehow unconvincing. Eugene was a soul, not just a series of waypoints, and she believed that he could transform his mind. That he could create a new model of self, untethered to that broken body. But he hadn’t.

  And she thought now, as the dirty hills at the edge of the city became visible through the windshield, how before the accident had crippled him Eugene would insist that they bring along the crumpled old paper maps on their treks instead of the digital ones that updated in real time. He had insisted that the mountains had been there for millions of years, that they didn’t need to be updated. She had teased him about being a Luddite, but she had loved him for it. And he teased her for her incompetence in locating their position amongst the map’s ink contours.

  The Camaro dropped Corina in front of the Conscious Designs headquarters, informing her that she had arrived in a voice that inflected an inhuman kindness. A deep crimson sunset reflected off the slight convexities of the brutalist glass structure. She paused before going in, wondering if Eugene had the same experience of the beauty of sunsets in his world. She stepped out of the filthy heat of the city into the frigid headquarters of Conscious Designs. It had been ten years since she had been here last.

  The interior space remained unchanged from her memory. The clinical whiteness. Sterile cold air emanating up from the quantum computer freezers below. A conspicuous lack of ornamentation. It all made the place seem unreal in its blankness. How could such a lifeless place house the mind of her dead husband and the world it inhabited, alongside thousands of other conscious minds?

  Francis Ashcroft was waiting for her in Consultation Room 5. He looked as if he hadn’t changed in the decade since she last saw him. His face remained ageless, unblemished. His skin looked bleached.

  “It’s nice to see you after all these years. I hope you have been well,” he said, his cold, impersonal manner complementing the unfeeling nature of this place. “Our Wellbeing Department has reached out, so you must know we are quite worried about Mr. Wallace’s current state.”

  There was something real about his concern.

  “We have made a few suggestive gestures to Mr. Wallace about the possibility of purchasing a Second Self, or what would of course, in reality, be a second Second Self. He even came to have a consultation, which seemed to go well. As you know, he still believes that he inhabits our physical world. What he believes to be a first-time replication of his mind from a biological connectome to a digital connectome would actually be a duplication of his mind from the first generation platform, Solus, to the next generation platform, Arcadia. Arcadia is the new interpersonal mindspace. We have populated his media feed with pro-Second Self narratives. We have advertised a price that he can afford, now, of course, that you can afford it.”

  “That’s too much persuasion. It must be his idea. I made that clear when I spoke with the representative,” said Corina.

  “I think you misunderstand the psychology of ideation. Ideas are not psychogenetic phenomena, arising from within, not even in our physical minds. Ideas come from the modification or association of ideas that have come before us, or sometimes when we misunderstand someone else’s idea. That is how new ideas come about. Otherwise, everything is learned. There must be some external influence for ideation to occur. That is why we have been implanting these suggestions in his media feeds.”

  “It sure seemed to be his own idea to end his life ten years ago.”

  Ashcroft affected a sympathetic tone. “Yes, Mrs. Wallace, but even the idea of suicide is learned. If Mr. Wallace had not known that suicide was a possibility, he would not have chosen it. Of course, suicide is part of the ontological landscape of our world. We cannot unlearn what we know, in the same way we cannot unlearn nuclear weaponry. When we migrated Eugene’s consciousness just before the death of his biological brain ten years ago, we made sure to erase all knowledge of self-harm and suicide.”

  “Comstock.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My last name is Comstock now. My maiden name.” She had never said the words ‘maiden name’ out loud. The expression sounded odd, striking her as both anachronistic and somehow irreverent. “I changed it after Eugene died.”

  “My apologies. Our records have not been updated. But let us remember that Eugene’s mind is very much alive here at Conscious Designs. But he is in great pain, which is why we have reached out to suggest migration.”

  “This time, it must be Eugene’s own choice,” Corina said. “If Eugene is going to be free from this purgatory that you created for him, it must be his choice to migrate his consciousness.”

  “The world that he has created for himself,” Ashcroft corrected. “But, as you wish. If you are serious about having your . . . having Mr. Wallace migrated into our new platform, I would certainly suggest that you intervene. We can schedule an intervention here anytime. This migration is of the utmost importance to us, Mrs. Wall . . . excuse me, Ms. Comstock. In our new platform, Mr. Wallace will be free to create an ideal model of self, free of the abject suffering that seems to be endemic to his current model of self.”

  “I just don’t understand why he still feels pain, why his digital body is still paralyzed. This is just pain that he is imagining. It isn’t real. Right? Why hasn’t it faded away, become obsolete? He doesn’t even have a body to be painful.”

  “Your husband’s pain is as real as it ever was. And he does have a body, just not a physical one. His pain was part of his mental model at the time of his migration years ago, and he has not been able to overcome it in the new world, as we hoped he would. We tried everything in our power. We have simulated medical procedures that should have eradicated or at least alleviated his pain, but they have not worked. The neuropathic pain that he experienced between his accident and his migration seems almost indelible. This is why we are encouraging the upgrade. In the new system, he will know that he has no physical body to torment him. This is a chance for a new beginning.”

 

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