The Day We Did It

Look, I don’t expect you to understand. Let me guess, they haven’t even tried to upload the first mind to a computer yet? They haven’t had hundreds of years — and thousands of prisoners of war from World War V to experiment on- to perfect every single aspect of the technology? To finally be able to transfer consciousness, combine consciousness, clone consciousness, erase and alter memories? Create life but destroy the fabric of society on the whims of six men with code and wires and whiteboards who only cared about what they could do and not what they should do?

I’m sorry to break it to you, but your black and white moral code doesn’t work in a world where original bodies don’t have any inherent value, where you could kill a man, replace him with a perfect clone — or even a better clone — and his family would be none the wiser. Where thoughts experiments were lab experiments now, where immortality wasn’t a concept but a right even afforded to rapists and murderers (rehabilitation is easy when you know what gray matter to take out), where religion was dead because every man woman and child was a god, where the only reason we were cyborgs and not full androids was because the labcoats hadn’t figured out a way to make android sex quite as enjoyable as its fleshy counterpart.

Sex might have still been sacred but love was not. It is, after all, a predictable chemical response to stimuli. Creating a love pill was so unchallenging and pointless some billionaire’s son who fancied himself a hopeless romantic had to beg the labcoats to do it. And now why would you care about love and marriage and raising a family when you could just pop a pill and plug into some server?

Jealousy. Oh they tried to program all the negative emotions out of us. Sadness, anger, rage, depression, anxiety, pain, frustration, guilt could all be minimized (but not yet completely eradicated). They couldn’t do anything about jealousy though, and if you let it get too high it would make all the other ones flare up too. Some people believed that they could stop jealousy but doing so would end all innovation, that we only made things so we could have what others already did. In words you can understand: would there be prosthetic legs if people weren’t jealous of those who walked, Viagra if people weren’t jealous of those who had sex, glasses if people weren’t jealous of those who could see?

Would I have become this obsessed if she hadn’t started seeing him days after she rejected me? Of course, I wanted you to be happy but seriously, him? Nobody ever likes the people that are training to be labcoats. All he cared about was his little projects, he labored day and night, determined to be the first one to put an ape’s consciousness into a synthetic human body, to finally appease the damn animal rights activists who say all living things are entitled to immortality. Imagine being that ugly in a world where you could get painless plastic surgery, switch your body completely, and get abs in three minutes with electric shock therapy. But even with all the technology we have had and will have, I couldn’t get her to see how perfect we were for each other; that we belonged together for all time, that I could give you more than that hairy boring man ever could.

Until I discovered the trove of forbidden and forgotten technology, quickly buried after World War V by the same psychopathic leaders that funded it. Technology that was meant to torture, harm, or embarrass, to bring humanity back into the dark ages, not push it forward. Connecting a tube from someone’s own anus to their mouth. Uploading consciousness to a program that generated a user’s worst fear, wiped their memory, then generated it again, creating an infinite loop of fear and pain (not unlike what seeing her with him felt like.) Finally, after sifting through dozens of what you would call “satanic” devices, I found what I had been looking for: a device designed for efficiency, to torture two people at once. The spinal cord extractor would place the point that connected the nervous system and the brain onto a second person’s brain. The original subject would have a dulled down level of awareness but still be able to sense and feel everything: whips, chains, electrocution, you name it. But the person who gets injected remains in full control: the subject is just a passenger along for a ride. Finally, I’d be able to touch her, smell her, taste her, make love to her, hear her say that she loves me.

You would think someone as smart as him would at least have a security system, especially in a world where all sorts of unspeakable and infinite torture were possible. It was so easy, all I had to do was wait for him to fall asleep and let the device commit its victimless crime and I was in my new body. When I woke up- when we woke up, I realized I wasn’t so smart either, because my old vessel (much more well-groomed and stylish than my current one) lay lifeless at the foot of our bed with a gaping hole in the back of its neck. I couldn’t do a thing as we called the authorities, who knew the second they saw that hole. I was extracted to a server to stand trial for my crime. I begged for a chance at rehabilitation, for them to simply delete the memories of her that plagued me and send me on my merry way, but that was not possible now. On account of me only having limited consciousness now, they couldn’t manipulate the memory function without risking a complete shutdown. After a few days of debate, my fate was decided: I would be uploaded to this server, home to one of our many failed experiments in the early days. You see, they wanted to reincarnate dead people — people who had died hundreds and thousands of years ago — by creating a perfect virtual copy of their consciousness. It was a useless project, funded by yet another billionaire’s son who was obsessed with philosophy and demanded to know what Locke or Hobbes or Franklin would think of our current reality. They made a few hundred — starting with aggressively mediocre and forgettable people like yourself since they’re easier to make then some genius- before getting shut down by yet another want-to-be philosopher who suggested the technology could be used to bring back Hitler or Genghis Khan, who might even convince a weak-minded labcoat (they all are) to create an organic body for them. So it, and you, went untouched for years until someone suggested it be used as a sort of purgatory, for those who couldn’t be rehabilitated, who would be left to wander aimlessly in this void and attempt in vain to explain their crimes to someone too ancient to even comprehend them.