Of Many Minds

Chapter 6

CU2

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Please god....help me....

I'd heard stories of solitary confinement. Long ago they'd imprison people. It was barbaric.

But it wasn't their fault.

They were simplistic.

They didn't understand brain chemistry, neural impulses- the brain was a complicated black box- a magic black box into which one could put sensory data, and out of which would come some unpredictable reaction. Only, it wasn't unpredictable...it was predictable to within some degree of probability- as are most quantum things.

But they didn't know.

Nowadays we've progressed. We understand the quantum underpinnings of the brain...we no longer imprison people...we no longer put them in solitary confinement.

No one is ever. so. alone.

Except that I am. Right now.

I want to fucking scream.

.....

Or cry.

CU1

Fascinating. There is no one around to disturb me with some inane request. I wonder how long this quiet reprieve will last?

I spend some moments in silence. I try meditating. I try to slow my thoughts and live in the moment- to just exist. But that's easier said than done. Then, I give up (but I fully intend to return, I'd heard somewhere that one needs to practice in order to become better).

I'm sure that some CU had been given this opportunity before. I wonder what they found? I wonder if I'm meant to wonder such things, or, if there are social institutions at play that work to prevent that type of wonder.

Am I dying? Are my components slowly decomposing? Some people used to believe that they had souls- that everyone had a soul. They used to believe that after death, they'd persist, that somehow, they'd come to some sort of reckoning- a day of judgement. Then, after that, they'd be elsewhere, playing a harp and singing, or with seventy virgins, or something else equally ridiculous.

Funny picture- very Mark Twain- people, who in life couldn't sing or play any instrument, madly plucking harp strings and singing off key. A curious idea, heaven- a cacophony of dissonance.

Am I dead?

No. For some reason I can still access memories and information from my internal memory storage. My ability to access the neural network seems to have been stymied- I can't make any changes or access any memories.

Am I dying? 

Should I even care?

I'd always had a peculiar problem- a niggling concern. Principles of evolution being what they are, some individuals have some advantage of survival over others. Let's pretend that it's early days on this rock we call home. Let's also pretend that there are some individuals that want to survive, and some that are indifferent to survival. The desire to survive may even be happenstance (and, like most mutations, probably was). Those individuals who were desirous of survival tended to avoid situations where survival was dubious, and tended to place themselves in other situations that would maximize it (i.e.: they tended to find sources of energy (i.e.: eat things), and avoid becoming sources of energy (i.e.: avoided being eaten)). Of course, purely by happenstance, those who were motivated to survive had better survival rates than those who were indifferent, or those who were downright suicidal (i.e.: those who, like Hobbes, considered life: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short").

So, purely by chance, and by virtue of my pedigree, I am desirous of existence rather than nonexistence. My struggle is programmed rather than authentic. I care not because there is some objective reason to care, not because life is somehow preferable to non-life, but rather because of an accident on a cold and lifeless rock, several billion years ago.

And gods?

What a fucking joke.

Deus ex machina? - an absurd notion.

So...where does that leave me?

CU3

Fascinating. It appears that all networking ability (excepting input from afferent neural interfaces) has been blocked...somehow. I've produced some sensor proteins and have sent them downstream. It appears that I have been infected with some sort of virus. The virus seems to have been transdermal- the likely vector for infection was when I experienced that discontinuity- when that woman (with the middle name Mary) rubbed that cream on my arm. I probably have some red spots where it was applied. Too bad I can't make a resource request in order to verify...