“I don’t—”
“My present self is a copy of my past self. My body copied its pattern onto a new set of molecules. And my future self will be a copy of my present. So why should it matter if the copy’s in a body or a machine?”
I think it over, analyzing Shannon’s argument. Maybe there’s a flaw in her reasoning, but right now I can’t see it. Of course, it’s just a theory, and as every scientist knows, you’d need to conduct an experiment to prove it right or wrong. But as far as theories go, it seems pretty darn solid.
In my heart, the balance tips from doubt to hope. Although I still don’t know if I’ll survive the procedure, at least I have something to fight for.
Shannon squeezes my hand. She doesn’t say anything else, and neither do I. We just stare at each other. I make a conscious effort to memorize her face, in all its beautiful imperfection. I picture my brain cells stretching their branches toward one another, forging new connections that will represent the image of Shannon’s smile, that lovely, lopsided curve. And I picture the swarm of nanoprobes attaching to the new links, coating them in golden armor to preserve the memory for eternity.
Finally, Dad steps forward. He rests one hand on Shannon’s shoulder and the other on mine. “It’s time to begin the scan. Are you ready, Adam?”
I don’t need to memorize Dad’s face—it’s already engraved in my memory—but I stare at it anyway. His eyes are glassy and his cheeks are wet. It’s another good thing to remember.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m ready.”
CHAPTER 10
The brain has no pain receptors, but that doesn’t mean it can’t feel pain.
First, there’s a flash of light. Like a camera flash inside my head, but a thousand times brighter. The whole world disappears, submerged in that horrible flood of white light. My last breath is caught in my throat.
It’s not like going to sleep. There’s nothing peaceful about it. The body doesn’t want to die. Billions of cells convulse as the waves of radiation crash down on them.
I’m suffocating. The light is all around me. I’m drowning in the middle of a vast, white ocean.
HELP! SOMEONE HELP ME!
Nothing. I’m alone. The pain is infinite.
Then something stirs within the sea of light. The waves form a shape in the whiteness. It’s a face, the face of an old man with a beard. It’s God, I think. No, on second thought, he looks more like Santa Claus. His beard is long and white, but as I stare at the thing, I see specks of color in it. Tiny gold spheres are sprinkled among the white bristles.
Who are you? Are you God?
The old man says nothing. He’s in a workshop of some kind, maybe Santa’s workshop, and he’s looking down at something on the bench in front of him. It’s a toy, a doll, a life-size mannequin. He opens a lid on the mannequin’s head and pours a handful of gold spheres inside. Then he moves down the bench and opens the head of the next mannequin. Except they’re not really mannequins. They’re corpses.
He’s copying their memories. So he can take their souls to heaven.
No, it’s not God. It’s a hallucination, my brain’s final thought. The old man and the corpses dissolve into the whiteness. Then the whiteness itself disappears. Then—
CHAPTER 11
Whoa. Where am I?
Okay, let me think. I’m using words. I’m putting them together in a logical order. I can use words to describe whatever I’m experiencing.
That’s good, real good. I’m making progress.
But what am I experiencing? And who am I?
Okay, I need more information. And look at this, there’s a ton of data in my memory. Hundreds of millions of gigabytes. All I need to do is retrieve the data.
Here goes.
I retrieve an image. It’s similar in shape to twelve thousand other images that are grouped in my memory under the category “Faces.” The name linked to this image is “Dad.”
It’s a picture of a person, a human being. The image is a recent addition to my memory. According to my internal clock, it was recorded less than an hour ago. A closer analysis indicates that the person in the picture is crying.
I scroll through all the images that carry the label “Dad.” There are 657. The oldest images are blurry, indistinct portraits of a younger-looking man, tall and well-built and smiling. His full name is Thomas Armstrong. The images are linked to memory files holding information on computer science and artificial intelligence.
They’re also linked to another name: Adam Armstrong. This name has more links than anything else in my memory. It’s connected to hundreds of thousands of files. But when I search for images of Adam, I notice something curious. In nearly every picture he’s surrounded by the frame of a mirror. In the older images he’s a pre-teenage boy, skinny and pale, but in the newer pictures he stares at his reflection while strapped into a motorized wheelchair. These later images are linked to information on Duchenne muscular dystrophy—symptoms, visits to the hospital, daily struggles with the illness. And as I scroll through these memories, I come across a link to a recent file labeled “Pioneer Project.”
I retrieve the file and read it. I complete this task in less than a thousandth of a second, and then a new thought races through my circuits, an astounding revelation: I’m Adam Armstrong! I’m still alive!
At the same moment, my system freezes. I can’t open any files, can’t access any data. The revelation of my identity has somehow triggered a new instruction, which is being sent to every one of my circuits: Breathe! But I can’t carry out this command. It’s not included in my list of normal functions. I can’t halt the instruction, and the commands are coming in faster than I can delete them: Breathe! Breathe! BREATHE!
In less than a second my system repeats the instruction fifty-five billion times and I receive fifty-five billion error messages. The flood of data rushes through me, overloading my circuits. It feels like I’m choking. I’m unbearably full, bursting with useless signals. To make room for the unending stream of commands and error messages, the system begins to erase my memory. A hundred files are deleted. Then a thousand. Then ten thousand.
Stop!
I’m Adam Armstrong!
I want to live!
Nothing’s working. It’s getting difficult to think. Amid the jumbled commands, my system can only generate an urgent noise of random data. I recognize this condition, this paralyzed state of mind, because I’ve experienced it before. When I was in a human body, I called it fear. I’m horribly, frantically, desperately afraid.
I have to fight it. I delete the random data and search for a solution. So many files, and I can’t open any of them! But I can sort them by date, and when I do this I notice that a new file has been added to my memory in the past fifteen seconds. It’s a text file, transmitted wirelessly to my circuits from another computer, and it has a special coding: Emergency Transmission. This coding gives the file priority over everything else in my memory.
I try to open the file. Nothing happens. The file doesn’t open, but I don’t get an error message either. My system is locked in a hugely complex calculation, with billions of circuits engaged in the task of determining whether to open the text file. The delay goes on for five seconds, ten seconds. In the meantime, the breathe command repeats another five hundred billion times, forcing my system to erase thousands of gigabytes from my memory. What’s left? Is anything left? Am I still Adam Armstrong? The urgent noise of fear surges through me again, paralyzing all thought. Help! Stop! No!