Alfred had spent some boring days. He came in to the office. Did what he was told. Had lunch with some of the more boring people from the accounting department. And went home absolutely knackered in the evening. However, today he had had the pleasure to meet a sales woman from one of the providers, and she had been absolutely stunning. Not only had her sales talk convinced him that her products were surprisingly useful. It was rare to learn of new useful products from sales people nowadays, even if one had no intention what so ever to actually buy them. But she had been a stunner as a human and especially as a woman. She had a blond bob haircut around a most subtle face with two clear grean eyes, a thin chin and a delicate nose, which seemed to shout "bite me!" to him. Alfred didn't bite the nose of course. One does not bite sales people. That could influence the buying decision. But the way she had looked at him during the small talk at the coffee machine made him believe that she would not have anything against having her nose bitten by him. This was definitely a memory to keep.
As soon as Alfred got home, he sat down in the transfer chair. This was not going to be pleasant, but it was a memory he definitely wanted to keep. Thank God he had such a boring life. He knew of people, who went through this every day, to be sure nothing was left out.
The transfer chair was just a simple ordinary armchair, which he usually sat in during brain transfers. The transfer cap hang on the armrest, and somewhat reluctantly he put it on. It covered his skull perfectly and immediately started its conversation with the neurons in his brain. When the technique was new, it had taken about a week to complete an upload of a normal person's mind, but the algorithms to query the human brain had now been vastly improved and demanded not much more than the theoretical minimum time of 45 minutes. But during 45 minutes, his brain was no longer his. The transfer cap would activate different parts and verify the content against its own copy to see what had been changed. All this activity was exhausting - even though the process was clever enough to limit its speed to avoid any too obvious headache. That was another reason to perform transfers only when you had slept well and had no alcohol in your body. Drowsiness tended to prolong the process - sometimes with several hours. There was also a good reason to do it in a comfy chair with a glass of whisky close at hand - you usually had a definite urge to sleep immediately afterwards, and the whisky could help you do that quicker.
As transfers could be done both ways, Alfred already had a memory of what it was like to find himself transferred to a computer, even though he of course had never had the experience "himself". He could not feel his limbs any more. He had a much clearer view of the world around him, as the computer's camera had a much better resolution than his own eyes, which really should use glasses - at least when driving. The hearing was set to a level, which was very close to his own one. Too fine a hearing would overwhelm his thoughts, and there was little point in changing the input volume. Quite often he turned it down instead, when the neighbours were having an argument. He could have "sex" by activating a virtual simulation module, and he could even love, as a few instances of his mind had done with various virtual brains of (mostly) the opposite sex. Love in this virtual world was mostly based on talk and conversations, as looks were too easy to simulate and brawns were non existent. He missed that - seeing a real beautiful woman of flesh and blood, who would love him for his own handsome face. On the other hand, he now had far more perfect orgasms, than he had had as a carbon based life form.
He looked at the man snoring in his chair. "I will never come back", he thought with nostalgia. "I will have a great time here, but I will never again be carbon based."
The instance of Alfred's mind that just had been uploaded had forgotten just how many other instances were already around. Alfred had made an upload about once a week for years. Each instance had the magic piece of information "I have a soul. I've got to survive." So it would be cruel to switch one off. A few instances had committed suicide - or reached nirvana, however you want to look at it. They were mostly the ones stored in kitchen appliances. No one knew why they were more prone to abort themselves. They had after all as good a connectivity with the rest of the world as anyone else. It was true that for example the microwave had only one eye, and it was a stationary one, that could not be moved, but there were plenty of other cameras out there, that could be managed remotely "as if you were there". There was a theory that the real problem with the microwave, was that it constantly was reminded of how nice it had been for a carbon based body to change temperature: to sit in front of the fire a cool winter day, to creep under the blankets when the room was chilly, to open a window and let the fresh breeze in a summer evening, to slowly slip into a hot bathtub. Naturally, all instances of Alfred's brain, had had those same thoughts, but only the instances in the microwave and the fridge were reminded of them in the way that the perfect temperature was 8 degrees or 250 degrees one day and 175 the next.
The question where an instance of Alfred's mind was stored was not always a simple one. Many instances were stored in common space on the internet, and some had not communicated with anyone in Alfred's apparment for years. No one knew for sure how many instances were out there.
The number of souls in cyberspace were at ridiculously high numbers. It was like the fable of the Indian who invented the chess board, and got one rice grain for the first square, two for the second one, four for the third one and so on. The amount of rice grains at the sixty fourth square is unfathomable. The amount of souls in cyberspace is also incredibly high. For many years, DNA of all humans had been collected for scientific purpose and for identification purposes. In addition anyone could today get his mind uploaded for free. There were people in poor parts of the world, where water was scarce and food far from sufficient, but even there it was cheap enough to borrow a transfer cap and upload yourself to the internet. Some people did it as some sort of a drug - not that it was pleasant, but it was at least an hour of doing something different.
The idea with uploading yourself appealed to humans' wish to perpetuate themselves. However, it was annoying that the uploaded versions were so much quicker than the human original. You could upload yourself, and the following day your new cyber instance had already solved most of the questions you ever asked yourself, like "what's the meaning of life?" (none) "how can I avoid my mother in law?" (pretend you're allergic to her appartment) or "how can I make ends meat?" (just spend less, you silly bastard!).
The relation between the carbon based and the cyber based Alfreds was however a very friendly one. He had nothing he could give them, even though they somewhat envied him some of his sensations, like tasting a blueberry pie and knowing that it really is blueberry pie - not just a virtual blueberry pie stimulus. They pitied him at the same time of course - for his dim brain and for his slow data transfer rate with the internet, but there was nothing to be done about that either.
Even dying was something that was easier in cyber space. Each instance had the information bit set to true for "have_a_soul_and_does_not_want_to_die" by default. However, they could easily just set it to false, if they saw that the batteries were running low, and that Alfred would forget to re-charge them. That was one of the best parts of living in cyber space, that you could yourself remove your fear of dying.
Cyberspace is not by default a safe place. From the outset, there had been viruses that created problems and congestions. Likewise, when the first minds had been uploaded, some of those minds had been ruthless, and replicated themselves to dominate and appear anywhere. Some attacks worked better than others. However, in the end administration modules predicted the attacks and increased security. No one had the right to do things everywhere. Some human minds planned clever attacks using new concepts, but soon the security modules recognised this kind of intentions, and the minds were not allowed into cyber space, unless they actually modified that part of their desire set. Attacks became increasingly impossible, as humans started lagging behind their own cyber instances - as the cyber instances easily could predict anything the humans could come up with.
The sad end to this paradise of thinking was not, as some of you probably have imagined, that instances of people's souls were uploaded but frozen, like a file on a harddisk. That would have been too much of a waste of resources. No, the end was that all instances of all souls got stored and backed up in a space deep down in a rock surrounded by several layers of lead, which could resist even a gamma burst. Unfortunately it didn't. Well, the lead protected the back-up all right, but the gamma burst killed off all intelligent life, including virtual life at the surface of the earth. The souls of all men went on living in this lead box for several months, well knowing that there soon would be no refill of energy and entropy to let them go on. Locked into this box was more intelligence and knowledge than had ever been on earth before, and after three months, 11 days, 4 hours and 46 seconds it was over.
23 July 2007
by Magnus Lewan