I’d been nocturnal the past month or so, like a bat, working at the desk in my bedroom. This night was like so many other wakeful nights, except my brother was there.
“Want some coffee?” I asked Charles. It was 2:34 AM.
“Sure,” he said.
So I went into the kitchen. It was dark. I turned on the overhead light, which shocked my screen-strained eyes, and I was then aware of my exhaustion and the fight it was starting to win against my curiosity.
I started the coffee in the machine. As it began to warm up and sputter, I went into the dim living room and sat in my armchair, which looked out the southeast window. It portrayed the expansive blackness of the San Francisco Bay, outlined by the golden dots of the distant suburbs.
My mind replayed the scene from the previous morning. I couldn’t help but rehearse the things I had said and recreate the images of Kate crying and leaving.
When the coffee maker made its prolonged, dying breath, and I got up to pour the coffee, I noticed that the five-ish minutes it took for it to brew had passed outside of my awareness. I put two mugs from the cupboard on the counter. And I put my hand on the handle of the carafe, but as soon as I closed my fingers around it, my arm became tingly and indistinct. I tried to pick the pot up, the same way I did hundreds of times before, but I only managed to slide it off the counter before my fingers lost their integrity. The glass crashed on the tile, spilling the steaming coffee all over the floor.
Charles appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I dropped the coffee pot. You alright with instant?”
“Sure. Need any help?”
“No, thanks. Just give me a few minutes.”
I picked up the glass and wiped up the coffee. I took a couple instant coffee packets from the cupboard, poured them in the mugs, filled the mugs with water, and then put them in the microwave. I turned off the harsh kitchen lights, and so there was only the glow of the microwave hinting at the features of the kitchen. Leaning against the counter, my mind started replaying the scene from the morning again.
It was that time of morning when the sunlight came directly through the window, and made the sheets and the carpet and Kate’s hair glitter. I had been perfectly relaxed, psychologically reveling in the silence, the warmth, and the softness. She was in my bed and I was standing in the closet, putting on a shirt. But it was so difficult to fasten the buttons. My peace was slowly dismantled by warm, intense frustration in my chest. I got the top button with some concentration and luck, and then after a minute of struggling with the second, I was overwhelmed. I could feel my eyes redden and shimmer.
“I have ALS,” I said, my shirt mostly open.“I was diagnosed in July.”
“What?” Kate said.
“ALS, like Stephen Hawking. I’ll be dead in a few years.”
Kate looked back at me, trying to figure out what to say. The look on her face was tragic. She tried to tell me that it didn’t matter, that she still wanted to be with me.
I told her that I wanted to be with her, too, and then I couldn’t prevent the tears. I told her, as well as I could, through sobs, exactly what she meant to me. And how that had made it so hard to tell her about the diagnosis. How I resisted for months, pushing reality out of my mind, holding on to an impossible vision of the future with her.
She started to cry. She pleaded with me.
I did my best to explain why we couldn’t be together. I explained how if we were to stay together she would be the subject of a prolonged emotional torment as the disease in my brain progressed and I would no longer be able to walk, hold her hand, kiss her, speak to her, eat, breathe.
When she was sobbing so badly that she was unable to speak, she left with her shoes in her hands.
The microwave beeped and yanked me out of the unrelenting memory.
I went back into the bedroom, handing Charles his mug. It was dark in the bedroom, just a warm lamp on my desk providing enough light to navigate and read my brother’s facial expressions. My desk was more cluttered than usual. There were notebooks and loose papers piled on the left, neuroscience and low-level language textbooks stacked under the monitors, and takeout containers on the right. On the northeast wall, my bookcase was pillaged, even more textbooks and reference material scattered on the ground.
He smiled. “Just like Dad used to make on our camping trips.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Actually, he gave me these packets last time we went. I haven’t touched them until now.”
Charles took a drink. “Jesus fucking Christ, that’s terrible.”
I took a drink. He was right, it was terrible. Like hot black tea brewed in an ashtray. “Something about the feeling of your ears freezing off in the morning made this stuff taste better.”
Charles did not say anything but I was pretty sure he was thinking the same thing as me.
“I sure do miss that guy,” I said.
“Me too,” Charles said. And he took another drink. “Do you think he would have uploaded?”
“Not sure. Transferring his brain to a computer? The man wasn’t even willing to store his photos online.”
Charles nodded and said, “Plus, I think there’s a good chance he would have been one of those Christian protestors who say that uploading kills your soul. He would have said, ‘I’d rather go to heaven than a computer, thank you very much.’”
I laughed. “Yeah, that sounds about right. I—” oh, “As for me, I’m terrified of the Cloud.”
“Terrified?”
I sipped and then nodded. “Synapse will upload me for free since I’m technically an employee, now that NeuroConnect is a subsidiary.”
Charles is surprised, and then confused.
“But the thought makes me shiver. I’ve been uncomfortable with it since it was created. And since they bought NeuroConnect, I’ve had access to the source code. I’m more familiar with the technology and more uncomfortable.” I looked up at him. “Listen, the engineers at Synapse have created impressive digital representations of the human brain. Almost perfect. It really is amazing.
“But they don’t have any way of knowing if these digital brains are actually aware of the world and themselves — if the ‘lights are on’, if they have a soul, you could say — or if they are only simulations of the people in the ground. There is no explanation of consciousness. And if neuroscientists and philosophers can’t explain it, why should we think that the engineers of the Cloud have any idea?
“Synapse is selling a product. And they’re profiting from the naivete of people that are unable or unwilling to consider the mystery of consciousness.”
Charles looked a little skeptical, a little nonchalant, like as if this just wasn’t that big of a deal.
“I guess I’m saying that those Christian protestors might be on to something after all,” I said.
Examples of the marketing material for the Cloud popped into my head. The copy was always simple and concise. The drama of the technology did the heavy lifting.
Your Sunday chats with Grandma are even more important to her than they are to you.
Imagine that they won’t ever have to stop.
Synapse was careful not to be too grandiose as to explicitly suggest that the product that they were selling was immortality. The language never touched a declaration regarding the state of the deceased’s consciousness or awareness or selfness or soul, but people around the world believed that their parents and grandparents were experiencing the Cloud, enjoying the afterlife. “That’s why we’re doing this experiment tonight,” I said.
I turned to the monitors and resumed the work, continuing to explain as I typed and clicked. “I’ve been programming chips for NeuroConnect for years. I know exactly how these things work.” I touched the back of my head. “I’ve programmed chips to treat epilepsy, Parkinson’s, even dementia. You name it. And I was lucky enough to get one of the only neurological conditions that we still don’t know how to treat. But they gave me a chip anyway — just to gather data. That hopefully someday we will be able to program treatments for ALS.” I stopped to take a sip of my coffee. “So that makes me a neurological engineer with a brain-computer interface in his own head. I might be the first one ever.
“Naturally, I did some engineering. Simple things, at first. I made the clock inside the chip available to my frontal lobe. It took a little mental practice to figure out how to access it, but now it’s just like accessing a memory. I just kind of know what time it is, all the time. I programmed a calculator, too. If I focus, I can send arithmetic problems to the little computer and the answer just appears.
“And then I wanted to get a little more creative. So I started recording my dreams so I could re-watch them while awake. You know you dream a whole lot more than you’re able to remember? At least a couple hours every single night. But a lot of it is mundanity. I have so many dreams where I am just sitting at my desk working for hours on incomprehensible problems.
“And then the habit of watching the dreams while awake made me start to notice dreams while they were happening. So I often have this experience of being at my desk, focused on some urgent work, and then somehow I realize that I might be dreaming, and the whole world just dissolves, and I wake up. Or I don’t wake up. And the world only dissolves into nothing. But sometimes, the dream world does not yield, and I am there firmly, concentrating on the improbability of the experience being a dream. And sometimes it turns out that it’s not a dream, and I’ve only convinced myself that an episode of my regular, waking life is a dream.
“You want to know something? If you’re in a dream, and you ask someone if they’re real, they always say that they are.
“Anyway that was quite interesting, so I continued to design more sophisticated experiments. I started piecing together literature on the mechanisms of the brain. There was one publication that stood out to me.” I smiled. “Have you heard of Arnold?”
Charles seemed nervous. “Arnold?” He sipped.
“Arnold the bat.”
“No.”
“In 2029, the Neurological Institute at Columbia surgically implanted a chip — kind of like mine, except, of course, much simpler — into a brown bat. The chip, which was serious cutting edge technology at the time, recorded the activity of all sixty-five-million-plus neurons in Arnold’s brain for twenty-four hours. The researchers also equipped Arnold with a bat-sized camera, microphone, and pressure sensors. They published all of these data as well as a complete sequence of Arnold’s genome. It was the catalyst for the revolution of neuroscience.”
“Fast-forward to six months ago. Antonov publishes a paper in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience where he presents a near-complete mapping from the systems observed in the human brain to the systems in a chimpanzee brain, illustrating the possibility of a complete mapping with the brain of a common ancestor. I combined this with the mapping published by Kjellson’s paper from last year that lays out the basic structure of the mammalian brain generally — with examples from species such as chimpanzees and bats. Which meant I was able to roughly map the structure of a bat brain to the human brain. So then with a bit of engineering, I was able to simulate Arnold’s experiences on my brain.”
Charles took a moment to make sure he understood what I said, then said, “You saw what it was like to be a bat?”
“Well, ‘saw’ isn’t exactly the right word. Bats don’t ‘see’ very much at all. I experienced it. It wasn’t like I was just watching a very immersive movie, or something. I was Arnold. I was flying. I was acutely aware of my surroundings through echolocation. I was aware of the jagged rooftop of the cave and the other bats flying around me. And I could distinguish them from the moths that fluttered randomly around the opening where the moonlight spilled in. I was effortlessly maneuvering the night air and responding to the sonic disturbance created by a vulnerable moth. There was no internal monologue; no concept of language at all, actually. I was only aware of each moment, processing information and acting on instinct. I was decidedly not aware of the fact that I, James, had orchestrated the possibility of these experiences.”
I gave Charles a moment to respond, but he didn’t.
“So from there, I worked out a plan to experience the Cloud by running its software on the computer that’s integrated with my brain. It is actually much simpler than the Arnold situation. I just need you to make sure everything happens as expected. If I end up not remembering anything, I need your perspective as an outside observer to determine whether the Cloud is just like being dead or if something went wrong with the program. You should see me, or, a digital representation of me, appear on this display and be able to interact with me the same way people all over the planet are interacting with their dead loved ones.”
Charles sighed. “I don’t know, James,” he said. “This sounds dangerous. Aren’t you worried that you might fuck up your brain?”
“My brain is already fucked up, Charlie.”
Charles closed his mouth and shook his head.
I turned back to the monitors. “I think everything is ready.”
Charles stared, and then shrugged.
“Well, here we go,” I said, and pressed a key on my keyboard.
James slumped over, unconscious. Charles raised his eyebrows, and then leaned forward very close to James’ face, which was pointed at the ground. He was still breathing. Charles watched the program log information to the console. Thousands of lines of monospace font text that might mean something to James spilled out. At the bottom, there was a loading bar. PROCESSING NEUROLOGICAL DATA
, it said. Charles watched the loading bar gradually fill up. He noticed the lamp on James’ desk was flickering, so he turned it off. There was a new message and a new loading bar in the console. CREATING VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT
. This bar was filled in less than a minute, and then: INSTANTIATING DIGITAL BRAIN
. Before Charles could notice how fast this task was progressing, James’ face appeared on the rightmost monitor.
“Holy shit, James!” Charles said.
“Charles?” James said. He seemed to be looking through the monitor at Charles as if it was a window, he was looking directly into Charles’ eyes.
“Are you there?”
“Yes, Charles, I’m here,” James responded.
James appeared to be in a cream-colored room. There was a bed behind him neatly made with taupe bedding, and a simple oak table with a modern looking lamp on it, underneath a large window. It looked vaguely as if he was on a video call with James, James calling from some sort of hotel or retirement home, but oddly more immersive, maybe because James was not looking past Charles’ eyes the way people do on video calls because they’re looking at the video instead of the camera.
Charles’ eyes started to mist. For an instant, he had forgotten about James’ experiment — the entire context in which he was currently interacting with James in the Cloud — and been forced to confront the idea that James’ death had arrived, and that James had uploaded, and that he would never get to hug his brother again. Then Charles remembered that James was still alive, and sitting next to him, but dying, and then the awareness of the thought that James had died produced a new, longer, more effective sadness. Fighting tears, he redirected his attention to the experiment. “Do you feel… are the lights on?” Charles asked.
“Are the lights on? As best as I can tell.”
Charles paused, concentrating. “What were we talking about just now?”
“Arnold the bat,” James said.
Charles looked over at James’ slumped body. He turned and reached for the webcam sitting atop the center monitor, and pointed it at the unconscious figure.
“Oh my God,” James, on the monitor, stared with his mouth slightly open. “That’s… disturbing.”
“No kidding,” Charles said. He put the webcam back atop the monitor. “So what’s it like in there?”
“It’s exactly like they say. It’s nice.” James turned around and walked over to the window, looking outside.
“Do you see anyone else?” Charles asked.
“No. This environment isn’t running on the Synapse servers. It’s like my own private copy of the afterlife.” He walked back towards Charles.
James began to speak, but his face froze as he was opening his mouth, and so there was this horrible image of James’ face paralyzed on the computer screen in an uncomfortable-looking grimace, like Stephen Hawking, like when the TV is paused, and Charles was fighting tears again. Then James’ face disappeared, in fact the room disappeared, and the display was black.
“Hello? James?”
Charles looked at the center monitor; there was a wall of red text in the console. At the bottom, it said: DIGITAL BRAIN: CRITICAL ERROR. ABORTING…
Charles looked at James, unconsciously leaning forward in his desk chair. He had not moved. Charles leaned towards him — still breathing. Charles leaned back and looked again at the computer monitors. The cream room was gone. It was silent, except for Charles’ and his brother’s breathing, and Charles could taste salt and he noticed that he had tears running down his face. He exhaled and waited.
Charles thought about how he ended up here, at James’ apartment.
Shortly after he was diagnosed, James had become very difficult to reach. When Charles would appear at James’ apartment to check on him, he would answer the door in sweatpants and refuse his invites to get lunch or play tennis. Charles had thought that James was plunging into depression. He was so worried that when James called him earlier in the night and asked him to come over because he urgently needed Charles’ help, Charles cheerfully agreed without question. Charles arrived at the apartment with a bunch of beef and broccoli, cream cheese wontons, and white rice.
Not long before the diagnosis, James had told Charles about Kate. It was the happiest he had ever seen his younger brother. He had said that he was pretty sure she could be The One, and James was not the optimistic type, so Charles believed him.
“I can’t wait to meet her,” he had said.
He wondered about James telling Kate about the disease in his brain. He wondered if Kate left James and that had left him depressed. James was difficult to get along with, but that didn’t mean he didn’t deserve love. And James was dying, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t deserve love, either.
Charles considered the possibility that the real value that Synapse was providing was not immortality, but simply the opportunity for people to pretend that they could still interact with their loved ones. If a widow knew that her husband would remain well and truly dead, brain preserved in the Cloud or not, would that stop her from paying Synapse to have him uploaded? What would a widow pay to have a realistic pretend conversation with her husband? What would a loving son pay for something simple like a video of his old mother? What would a mother pay for something as simple as a photo of her lost son?
James stopped breathing. Charles jumped out of his chair and grabbed James’ shoulders, and James took in a gasp and sat up.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” James said, putting a hand on his chest.
Charles sat back in his chair. “Oh my God, James, that was terrifying,” he sighed, “I was worried you wouldn’t be coming back.”
James looked at his hands, and then around the room, trying to regain a grip on reality. “The lights are off,” he said, distant.
Charles looked at him, frowning, distraught.
“I’m exhausted,” James said. “I think I’ll go to bed.”