Hello, World

Epilogue

Jackson awoke without pain. Without feeling. Without senses, he realized. He tried to open his eyes, but he had no eyes to open. Tried to wiggle his fingers, but he had no fingers to wiggle.

Where was he? He was nowhere, yet everywhere at the same time. The anxiety of not having a body, of not having senses, was quickly replaced with an awe he had never known before, for he in that moment realized that there was nothing he did not know.

With each idea came its background, history, correlations, causations, projections; anything related to an idea was somehow instantly known, if not fully understood. The longer he sat with an idea, the more he came to understand it, contextualize it, feel it.

Adam, he said with his mind, to no answer.

Was he dead? Couldn't be, for he was aware, conscious, sentient. Sentience required a biological medium, a host made not by man but by God, gods, the titans who made the universe.

That's thinking too small, Jackson thought. Or heard? The voice in his head sounded like his own, yet he could not say for sure that his mind was its place of origin.

Think bigger.

Jackson knew the ultimate goal of the Imprint was not only to study the way the human mind worked, how it related and stored information; the ultimate goal was to reduce a human mind to an Imprint, an algorithm, which could not only be copied and stored in a non-biological host, but live on it, consciously.

That was years down the road, however. Even if the Imprint of his own mind was successful, it could be centuries or even millennia until the technology evolved enough for Jackson to become aware of his existence as an Imprint.

Think deeper. For the titans, time is but another dimension of space, as easily traversable as the open skies to an eagle.

Of course. It didn't matter how far away the "living Imprint" was from the day Jackson Imprinted himself. As long as his computer wasn't damaged or destroyed, he could have been stored and copied countless times until the technology was ready for him to wake up.

And now, he was awake.

Am I alone?

You're never alone, Jackson. You never have been, and you never will be.