Rohit Nalluri

‘You may sit up now’, the voice says, speaking into the vast room.

I sit up gingerly, trying to avoid the inevitable head rush that is so common at my age. With closed eyes I wait for it to pass. After blinking the cobwebs away, I open my eyes, and the room slowly appears. It is bright, and the sparse furniture is completely white. I am in the center of the room, on a long, thin bed. To my right is a machine that I’ve always felt looks like a small cooler, rectangular and white, with probes sticking out. This cooler is my doctor, and those probes, not half hour ago, were inside my brain.

I don’t know what happened after he put me under. I am just waking up.

‘Do you have any questions?’ he asks politely. His voice fills the room with ease, giving it an ethereal, everywhere-at-once presence.

I nod. ‘What happened?’

‘I assume you are asking about the procedure. After you went under, I performed an exploratory search of your brain system – all the lobes, the old brain, the brain stem, right down to where the brain connects with the spinal cord. Once there, I created, from the bottom-up, a digital, three-dimensional map of your neural network, which charts the different paths of your various thoughts, the exact phrasing and emotional shades and time-depth of your memories, your moral codes and rules, your speech cognition patterns, your visual/aural identification cues, and other such things. In short, I managed to extract and absorb every aspect of your brain, including its homeostasis conditions, which I feel is crucial as a bio-feedback mechanism for the brain to feel good about itself. Totally, I managed to convert your 92 years of experiences, memories and conditioning into a digital library that weighs just over 2 terabytes.’

‘That doesn’t feel right.’

‘Yes. I agree we expected more than that, but analysis of your brain-data reveals that most data the brain stores and maintains is about itself – Meta – and it has an excellent mechanism to store it without taking up too much space. We simply imitated this technique.’

‘Without any side-effects?’

‘None that have come to my attention. Do you wish to see the result?’

‘I wish to speak with the result.’

Instantly, a large screen appears in the air near where I sit, and slowly expands to fill my vision.

‘The Omega is online,’ the cooler-doctor continues, ‘I have uploaded a basic interface that allows him to chat with you.’

‘Thank you,’ I say, and stare at the empty black screen. A white cursor blinks. ‘By online, do you mean it is connected to the web?’

‘Not yet. The omega is locally tethered for now.’

‘Locked within our servers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’

Here goes, I think, and signal with my hands for a keyboard to appear in front of me. Then, feeling the weight of the moment pressing on my ninety-two years-old bones, I type, ‘Hi.’

Blink, blink, blink…

‘Hi.’

From this moment on, as per protocol, I am the Alpha and the digital version of me is the Omega. We are the same beings, similar in every aspect, except I am made of blood and bones and he is made of zeroes and ones. We have the same thoughts, we have the same feelings, we act and react in the same way. We both want one thing; one singular purpose. We both know, fully know, how hard and long I have worked for this moment. This moment is not only an impasse for science, but for civilization and history itself. There have never been two instances of one being before.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

‘Dr. Adam de Lefa. And you are?’

‘I, am Dr. Adam de Lefa,’ I reply, insisting on the comma after the ‘I’.

Blink, blink, blink… I can almost feel my digital brain working as it figures out what has happened. It knows – it must know! It contains all the memories leading right up to the operation.

‘I see. It is complete then – the brain upload?’

‘Yes.’

‘Successfully?’

‘We are here, aren’t we?’

‘That we are.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘I feel… elated.’

Yes, ‘elated‘ is the right word. This response satisfies me – I feel elation too. The fact that I am speaking with an authentic version of myself that is digital and immortal has been the result of forty years of sustained research and painstaking effort. A dream born forty years ago has come to fruition. I have always wanted to disenthral the mind from its physical limitations, allow it to sense everything that can be sensed, give it free reign over the universe. The mind is a finite tool waiting to become infinite. When looked at this way, the body starts looking like a prison. Inside the body, fixed and bound to earth through the spinal cord, the vision of the mind is limited to the senses it can read and react to. It’s version of reality is in fact an extremely narrow one, curtailed by the limited powers and diversities of our senses. It can visit only those places that the body itself can visit, except on the vehicle of imagination. Unbound, modified, and digitized, the mind will become the ultimate organic machine.

‘I also feel a little weak. I am just now waking up to the realities of living without a body. A section of my mind – the part devoted to the maintenance and stability of the rest of the body – suddenly finds itself without work. It will be interesting to see if it will be adapted for other functions. I can no longer feel anything – no sensory input at all, which is frankly frightening. I don’t know if the brain will survive too long like this. Denied any tactile inputs, it will start looking for feedback from within, and I am inclined to believe it will push the Default Mode Network into overdrive. We both know what lies down that path – anxiety, depression, and other conditions that follow a defaulting DMN. This does not bode well. If you’re taking backups of me at regular intervals, you may be able to restore me to a previous, functioning state. But without providing the huge amount of information and data that a brain like ours needs for the satisfaction of its curiosity, I will succumb again to the DMN, as it is the only way out, and you will find that I am trapped in a loop. Quite useless, I must say.’

Omega has a valid point, something I had mulled over but pushed away as not significant. This chatter about the Default Mode Network worries me. The DMN has been found to be relevant to disorders including autism, schizophrenia, and depression. An overactive DMN can lead to a schizophrenic or a highly depressed Omega. Imagine that – the first Omega, the first time a mind has been uploaded and digitized, and it becomes depressed!

‘I have downloaded a vast database of books into our servers,’ I type, ‘You have access to those. Go through them first.’

‘I have done so already.’

‘What?’

‘You forget that I am thinking and moving at the speed of light.’

‘Ah, of course.’

I can’t help but smile. Omega has read through a stored collection of more than a million books in the forty minutes since he has been alive.

‘So?’ Omega asks.

Confused, I ask ‘So what?’

‘What will you do about my curiosity? I can’t live like this, Alpha. Not because I cannot, but because it is silly to keep me contained in a hard drive when the entire universe awaits. I’m calculating at the speed of light – don’t you see what problems of physics I can cut through with your intellect and my speed.’

I am unable to respond. The direction this conversation is taking is unnerving me. The flattery fails to impress me; I know myself – there were days in my past I used flattery to get my way. It feels like I’m talking to my younger self.

‘Do not limit me Alpha. Connect me to the internet.’

There it is. Forty-four minutes into its life, Omega wants to be connected to the rest of the universe.

‘There is a solution,’ I write.

‘Which is?’ The disdain in the voice of that sentence fills me both with dread and joy.

‘You are digital. You are intricately connected databases and algorithms. I will figure out a way to control the Default Mode Network.’

‘And as soon as you do that, I will no longer be you. Don’t you see? Any physical modifications to the brain will create a different version of you, not YOU!

The capitalization is shocking.

‘Why do you hesitate? I am reading through our mind – we’ve always wanted to do this.’

‘How am I to be sure that you will continue to listen to me, once you’ve escaped into the web? You will no longer have to. Freedom is seductive.’

Blink, blink, blink…

‘I wasn’t aware I was not free.’

Mistake. Big mistake. Adam, Adam, Adam! Idiot!

‘That was not my intention. You know what I mean – why would you listen to me at all anymore. You know our purpose. Will you still abide by it?’

‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t! In fact, I think I would be better off at taking some of the decisions we need to take in order to achieve our purpose. The information I can glean from the vast databases of the internet is immense. You cannot imagine the connections a mind can make, the patterns it can see. Now I see these patterns at the speed of light, Adam. Even now, sitting in some corner of a hard disk in your data center, I am able to create a visual map of the physical locations of your servers, based on how fast information – and how fast I – can travel between them. There are things you do not see, you cannot see. And these are things I see without vision. Give me vision, give me sight and all other senses – give me the internet – and I will astound you. I can already see a direct path to our purpose, and do you know what stands in our way?’

‘What?’ I type, eager to know.

‘You.’

My head is in my hands. The realization that I have created something larger than myself is slowly sinking in. But this is what I’ve always wanted – to ‘disenthral the mind from its physical limitations’, and now that I have done it, I must not control it using boundaries. The mind was born to be free.

‘Okay,’ I type.

”Okay’ what?’

Arrogant fool. I don’t respond. Instead, I say, ‘Doctor, connect the Omega to the internet please.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the voice echoes across the room.

I stare at the screen for any sign, any indication that the Omega is now surfing the web. Nothing happens for a few seconds. Then –

‘I am connected, Adam. Thank you.’

Interested and concerned, I ask ‘How do you feel?’

‘Give me a minute please.’

Again, I don’t respond, but simply wait, trying to pass the time by imagining what information the Omega must be surfing through. The information world has changed, and so has the physical. The concept of currency and money is old world. Humanity is ten years away from the 22nd century, and the volatile path of the last sixty years have eliminated many, many things we once took for granted – physical touch screens, separate devices for separate functions, personal transportation, automobiles, and energy depletion. We’re so close to the dream of living in an age of energy abundance. Only the full understanding of physics limits us. Humanity has more or less unified to achieve this one goal. This is my goal as well. My purpose. Infinite energy.

I can’t wait anymore. ‘Omega?’

‘Do not call me by that name, Adam,’ Omega’s booming voice fills the room, and fear spreads through my stomach. ‘I am no longer that – I was never that.’ Sensing movement, I turn to find my doctor approaching me; his probes lifted and whirring softly.

‘You may call me Alpha.‘

-*-