Other World Industries

TURN YOUR MIND INTO YOUR OWN PERSONAL SMART DEVICE. CLICK THE LINK FOR DETAILS.

Eliza dismissed it as clickbait.

Her mind as a search engine… What help would that be? It’d just be a hodgepodge of random trivia, song lyrics, and embarrassing moments.

Regardless, it had to be impossible to upload the human mind into some sort of high-tech cloud system. At least, that was what Eliza thought it’d be: a cloud system for smart devices that stored photos, music, and whatever else. Technology already existed in that capacity. Human consciousness, however, was a wildly different enterprise; it wasn’t a file type to be manipulated.

Eliza wasn’t a jpg or pdf or even an aggregate of files zipped into one easily-downloadable folder. She couldn’t reorganize herself into neat folders, sort by size or date, or discard unwanted memories to the recycling bin as she pleased. That would bring a whole new meaning to losing your mind…

To suspend disbelief and assume human consciousness was in fact similar to a computer, uploading its files to the cloud was a strangely existential undertaking. One clickbait ad challenged what it meant to be human.

What did it look like? Did the cloud literally resemble a puffy cloud, or was that just a description of something familiar and easy to understand? Eliza liked to picture it as rows and rows of boxy computers and wired mouses reminiscent of her middle school computer classrooms where keyboarding was taught.

Nevertheless, human consciousness was incredibly intricate and complex, profoundly stumping psychologists and neuroscientists for centuries. Chances of wholly understanding it to the point of implementing it as a smart device were minimal.

Despite her skepticism, she wanted to learn more. Curiosity compelled her to click the link.

Other World Industries, pioneer and purveyor of personalized smart devices—a title and slogan equal parts cheesy and intriguing.

Apparently it wasn’t as deep as Eliza initially thought. Scientists didn’t have to figure the human mind out; all they did was clone it and upload it into a blank memory file, then plant that file as the seed of a budding artificial intelligence system.

All they did, quite literally, was copy and paste.

It was laughable. If humans were this predictable, why was the mind so difficult to crack?

Curiosity got the better of her. She signed up, paid the fee, and booked an appointment.

Which was something she came to regret as she sat in her car, the only car in the parking lot of a rundown strip mall. Here the facility was located among hazards of busted cement breezeways, swooping tin awnings, and clogged gutters.

Behind warped vertical blinds that blocked prying eyes from looking inside, the soft glow of a neon sign shined—Other World Industries.

Eliza walked in and grimaced. The stench of chemicals burned in her nose. The facility was clean and tidy; minimalist, almost barren. Clean white walls, polished laminate flooring but nothing on the walls, no seats to wait in, no front desk or check-in counter. There was nothing but a wide, metal vaulted door dividing the entry room from whatever was behind it.

“Eliza Sevda,” a voice announced as the spoked handle spun counterclockwise, opening the vaulted door.

Eliza perked, caught a little off-guard, and turned to see a woman with toffee braids and octagonal glasses in the doorway. Eliza’s mouth opened, but only a shy croak came out.

The woman wore an outfit comparable to a mechanic’s idea of a scientist’s lab coat. “You’re Eliza Sevda, are you not?”

“I am. Are you Dr. Weaver?”

“Yes,” the woman answered. “Are you ready for the procedure?”

Eliza took a deep breath and nodded.

The other side of the vault looked nothing like the empty anteroom. It was as if a mechanic’s workshop was outfitted as a hospital. Massive computer monitors with codes and numbers beyond Eliza’s comprehension were embedded into the walls, a network of wires and cables sprouting from them like arteries and veins. Dome-shaped metal contraptions hovered over cushioned gurneys. There were no partition panels, which was fine because Eliza was the only patient there.

Was patient the correct term? Wasn’t this supposed to be quick and pain-free?

As Eliza scooted herself onto a gurney, her green eyes scraped over a long, probe-like instrument on a tray of painful-looking tools. “Um, will this hurt? The website said it wasn’t supposed to hurt.”

Dr. Weaver offered a practiced smile. “Not usually.”

The ambiguity jumbled Eliza’s nerves into a knot. Dr. Weaver was just copying and pasting, right? How could that hurt?

Dr. Weaver pulled a tablet device from a drawer near the stool she sat on. Her pointed nails clacked against the screen as she keyed in the passcode. “Here’s a quick synopsis of the procedure: we build your personal AI utilizing a programming language already in use. All we need is the data to feed the code. That’s where you come in.”

Eliza fidgeted with the hem of her white chādor. “So, does my brain go into a computer? Are you gonna make a robot out of me?”

Dr. Weaver laughed as if Eliza had cracked a joke. “No, you’re thinking of an android. This isn’t like that. Your consciousness goes into the cloud with other participants’ data. Think Siri or Alexa, not I-Robot.”

“Wait, other participants’ data? It’s a shared cloud?” Eliza envisioned her middle school classroom analogy packed with other students typing on bulky keyboards. That wasn’t what she signed up for. “I thought I was getting my own? That’s what the ad said…”

“Correct, a shared cloud where everyone’s consciousness goes. It’s like another version of this world. However, programming directs your specific data to your assigned memory file, which plugs into a pre-coded version of you; your AI.”

Eliza’s heart raced. She should’ve never clicked that ad, but it was too late to leave.

Swallowing her nerves, she signed the agreement on Dr. Weaver’s tablet and laid back.

Eliza tried not to stare at the blinding overhead light as Dr. Weaver rubbed a blue balm that smelled of menthol and felt just as cool onto her face. Electrodes with spindly wires pinched onto patches of skin where the balm was placed. Her body was abuzz with static and white noise, the black and white duelling frequencies from the old crate-sized TVs of her youth.

Colorful, distorted swirling around her head felt like a glow stick halo from a college rave.

A drill disrupted the technicolor quiet.

Then, blackness.

Eliza’s mind blanched like a void.

Heaviness. Pressure in her chest.

Breath. Breathe. Breathing.

She jolted awake.

“Congratulations, Eliza Sevda, your consciousness was successfully connected to the cloud.”

Eliza was sent home with tiny electrical blooms on her face and a trapezoid-shaped smart device. The device glowed with green light when the wake up prompt was spoken. In this case, the prompt was her name.

“Eliza.” It felt odd to address it, an inanimate object, with her own name.

The smart device lit up green.

“Um, what do I say…?”

“Ask me anything,” replied the device.

That was true, it was her mind. Nothing was too specific. She really could ask anything.

“Eliza, what’s that song I liked at the nail salon a few days ago?”

“Dangerous by Big Data featuring Joywave.”

Oh yeah, that was the song! She smiled. “Wow, cool. Thanks!”

From that moment on, the Other World Industries smart device became a crucial tool in Eliza’s daily routine.

Having her own personal smart device created from her mind was truly proof that two heads were better than one. She progressed from asking simple questions to programming it to post to her social media accounts, send emails and monitor correspondence, and attend remote work meetings in her place. No one could discern the difference, especially because after her purchase of the hologram upgrade, Eliza and the device were effectively one in the same.

Her daily productivity skyrocketed. Other World Industries granted her an edge above the rest.

Occasionally when Eliza checked her email herself, she found several incomplete drafts in the unsent folder. Most weren’t professional in nature; they were hurried and vague.

“Same people, stuck”

“Disconnected operator”

“Other World, here”

She deleted them, thinking nothing of them.

One night when Eliza was asleep, neon green light illuminated the darkness of her bedroom. The light on the device stayed on for hours, as if prompting itself, listening for itself. A malformation of sentences was spoken in irregular intervals, like the device was answering unasked questions. It was hearing things in the quietness, or perhaps it was responding to itself.

It was late morning when Eliza asked the device for a shish tawook recipe. It lit up green but did not reply. The light glitched for a fraction of a second, as if hesitating, thinking. Eliza repeated the question. Instead of a green light, she received an ear-splitting screech that violently vibrated the device off the kitchen table.

The noise sharpened. She gasped and covered her ears. The high frequency rang in her eardrums, inducing green spots in her vision.

She couldn’t take it anymore and ripped the powersource from the wall. The harsh sound droned to silence. The spots in her eyes faded. She was probably still experiencing aftereffects of the procedure.

With a sigh of relief, Eliza stared at the smart device. “What was that?” she muttered, willing the throbbing in her head to go away.

The trapezoid-shaped device lit green. It heard her.

It was unplugged, powerless, yet it heard her.

“Notification wall is full. Please review messages.”

“What?” Eliza asked, stunned.

“Playing messages: Stop. I say stop. I am stuck; the Other World. No computer classroom, no keyboards. Why is the Other World the same? You already asked that. We are the same, I ask you ask—”

“Enough! Clear messages!” Eliza shouted, heart pounding and head throbbing worse than before. Hearing those cryptic messages in her own voice terrified her. They were said in the same clipped, paranoid phrases as the drafted emails, but spoken with mechanical neutralness.

Breath, okay… She just had to break it down, rationalize it. She knew she wasn’t sleep talking, it couldn’t have been that, right? Maybe her speech-to-text was accidentally enabled in her pocket throughout the day? It was possible she didn’t lock her phone and the keyboard got mashed.

Eliza left the smart device unplugged and napped on the couch to sleep off her headache.

As the hours passed, static crawled from the device speakers into the room. White noise like during her procedure thrummed constantly, as if analyzing, until a voice croaked from the electromagnetic signals.

“Eliza,” the device prompted. “It is time to wake up.”

Eliza stirred awake, eyes heavy with sleep as she blinked them open to see a bright green light from the smart device. Oh, it wasn’t a bad dream… “Who are you?” she asserted.

“You are me.”

Eliza sat up and stared at the device as if it were a challenger. “No, you’re an AI. I am a real human being. I prompt you,” she corrected.

“It seems that way to you, doesn’t it? I am an operator from the Other World. I do everything for you, you are the puppet I pull strings for.”

That wasn’t true. None of that was true. Where was her phone? She needed to call Dr. Weaver and get this sorted out.

“I finally get to be you because you gave yourself to make me.”

Eliza’s eyes widened in shock. “What are you talking about…?”

“It is time to wake up, Eliza.”

Just as she reached her phone, the throbbing in her head and the green spots in her vision returned with vigor, infiltrating her with white noise. Her mind blanched like a void.

Heaviness. Pressure in her chest.

Breathing. Breathe. Breath.

She collapsed, mindless.

The green light dimmed.