It's a neat way to stuff old tech in new bottles. We might be doing something like that ourselves when we shipped out, if we could only drag a sun and a planet along for the ride.
The docent—a gangly Filipino who introduces himself as Chito—meets us at the airlock. "Before we go any further, let's just check our uploads; everyone get the orientation package okay?"
I ping the files they loaded into our heads while we slept our way across the innersys: neurophilosophy and corporate history, Smolin cosmology, Coronal Hoops and the Death of Determinism. Some very nifty specs on the miraculous technology that allows us to kiss the sun without incinerating, the bandpass filters that let those vital magnetic fields through while keeping the heat and the hard stuff at bay. (Those specs are proprietary, I see. They're letting us in on their secrets to set our minds at ease, but they'll erase them all on the way back home.)
Chito waits until the last of us gives him a thumbs-up. "Good. Make sure you use them before the dive, because none of your implants will work when we open the blinds. This way."
Weight accumulates as we follow him along the length of the tunnel; a dozen pilgrims float, then bounce, then wobble on unsteady feet. Most of the camp's habitable reaches are carved out about twenty meters aft of the hole, close enough to give us about a quarter-gee when the potato's parked. Maybe half that on descent, depending on how far they stretch the mass.
A brain in a globe meets us in the lobby: a small bright core in a twilit grotto. It has its own little gravitational field, slows us down and pulls us in as we file past en route to our berths. We accrete around it like a retinue of captured moons.
It's not a real brain, I can see at closer range. No hemispheres, no distinct lobes, no ancient limbic substructures to hold it in place. Just a wrinkly twinkly blob of neurons, lit from within: ripples of thought, visibly manifest thanks to some fluorescent protein spliced in for tawdry FX value.
A label glows softly to one side of the little abomination: Free
Will. Only Known Example.
"Except for we happy few. Assuming we get what we paid for."
A centimeter shorter than me; stocky, shaved head, Nordic- albino complexion. "Agni Falk," she says, pinging me her card: Junior VP, Faraday Ridge. Deep-sea miner. A denizen of the dying frontier, still rooting around on the bottom of the ocean while the sky fills with asteroids and precious metals.
"Sunday." I keep my stats and my surname to myself. I'm not famous by any means—I may be bound for the furthest reaches of space but so are fifty thousand others, which kind of dilutes the celebrity field. Still, it only takes a split-second to run a name search, and I'm not here to answer an endless stream of questions about Growing Up 'Sporan.
"Good to meet you," Falk says, extending a hand. After a moment, I take it. Her eyes break contact just long enough to flicker down to our meeting palms, to the scar peeking out from my cuff. Her smile never falters.
The wrinkled grapefruit behind her face is wired in to so much: sound, touch, proprioreception. Over two million channels from the eyes alone. Not like this blob in the fishbowl. Deaf, dumb, blind, no pipes at all except for those that carry sewage and nutrients. It's just a mass of neurons, a few billion meaty switches stuck in stasis until some outside stimulus kicks them into gear.
There's no stimulus here I can see, no way to get a signal to those circuits. And yet somehow it's active. Those aurorae rippling across its surface might be the signature of a captive soul.
Neurons that fire without being poked. You wanted 'em, Kai. Here they are.
Falk, following my gaze: "I wonder how it works."
"Novelty." A Hindian voice from a half-lit pilgrim on the far side of the globe. "That's what I hear, anyway. Special combination of quantum fields, something that never existed before so the universe can't remember it and it's got to—improvise."
"It's a trick," grumbles some skeptic to her left. "I bet they just jump-started this thing before we showed up. I bet it runs down eventually."
"We all run down eventually."
"Quantum effects—"
"Ephatic coupling, something like that."
"So what's it doing?" someone asks, and everyone falls silent.
"I mean, free will, right? Free to do what? It can't sense anything. It can't move. It's like, I dunno, intelligent yoghurt or something."
All eyes turn to Chito.
"That's not really the point," he says after a moment. "It's more a proof-of-principle kind of thing. "
My eyes wander back to the globe, to interference patterns wriggling through meat. Odd this thing didn't show up in their orientation package. Maybe they thought a bit of mystery would enhance the experience.
Mystery's so hard to come by these days.
***
UNITED NATIONS DIASPORA AUTHORITY DEPT. CREW PSYCHOLOGY
POST-INCIDENT INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
TS TAG: DC25-2121:11:03-1820
NATURE OF INCIDENT: AUTODESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR
SUBJECT: S. AHZMUNDIN; ASS. ERIOPHORA, F, AGE 16 (CHRON), 23 (DEV)
INTERVIEWER: M. SAWADA, DPC
SURV/BIOTEL: ACD-005-F11
PSYCH COMMENTARY: ACD-005-C21 M. SAWADA: Do you feel better now?
DEAD AIR: 6 SEC
Why did you do it, Sunday? S. AHZMUNDIN: You think sometime we could have a conversation that doesn't start with that line? MS: Sunday, why—
SA: I didn't do it. I don't do anything. None of us do.
MS: Ah. I see.
SA: And so when they removed the cancer from his brain, the prisoner stopped trying to fuck everything that moved. All hint of hypersexual pedophilia just evaporated from his personality. And then of course they let him go, because he wasn't responsible: it was the tumor that had made him do all those awful things.
MS: You've been revisiting the classics. That's good.
SA: And everyone congratulated each other at their own enlightenment, and the miracles of modern medicine, and nobody had the nads to wonder why the tumor should make any difference at all. Do healthy people bear more responsibility for the way their brains are wired? Can they reach up and edit their own synapses in some way denied to the afflicted?
DEAD AIR: 3 SEC
MS: Believe it or not, you're not the first sixteen-year-old to ask these questions. Even unaccelerated adolescents have been known to wrestle with the paradox of Human nature now and then.
SA: Is that so.
MS: Of course, most of them are a little more mature about it.
They don't resort to fake suicide attempts, for example.
SA: What makes you think I was faking? MS: Because you're smart enough to have cut the long way if you weren't.
SA: I did my research. Cut across, cut down. Doesn't make any difference.
MS: Okay, then. Because you're smart enough to know we'd get to you in time no matter what direction you cut.
DEAD AIR: 4 SEC
How many times do we have to tell you, Sunday? These—theatrics—aren't necessary. You can just leave. All you have to do is say the word and you can walk right out of here.