Mindscan

"Psychologists have been unable to test their theories, except in the most marginal ways," said Smythe, as if he hadn't heard me. "I'm elevating psychology from the quagmire of the soft sciences into the realm of the exact — giving it the same beautiful precision that particle physics has, for instance."

"With copies of me?"

"They're surplus; they're like the extra embryos produced in in vitro fertilization."

I shook my head, appalled, but Smythe seemed unperturbed. "Do you know what I've discovered? Have you any idea?" His eyebrows had climbed high on his pink forehead. "I can shut off long-term memory formation; shut off short-term memory formation; give you a photographic, eidetic memory; make you religious; make you taste colors or hear shapes; retard your time sense; give you perfect time sense; give you a phantom awareness of the tail you used to have in the womb. No doubt I'll soon unlock addiction, making people immune to it. I'll be able to bring normally autonomic processes such as heart rate into conscious control. I'll be able to give an adult the effortless ability a child has to learn new languages.

"Do you know what happens when you cut out both the pineal gland and Broca's area? When you totally separate the hippocampus from the rest of the brain? When you do a transformation, so that what's normally encoded in the left hemisphere is mapped onto the right side of the body, and vice versa? What happens when you wake up a human mind in a body that has three arms, or four? Or has its two eyes situated opposite each other, one facing front, the other facing back?

" I know these things. I know more about how the mind really works than Descartes, James, Freud, Pavlov, Searle, Chalmers, Nagel, Bonavista, and Cho combined. And I've only just begun my research!"

"Jesus," I said. "Jesus. You have to stop. I forbid it."

"I'm not sure that's within your power," said Smythe. "You didn't create your mind; it's not subject to copyright Besides, think of the good I'm doing!"

"Good? You're torturing these people."

Smythe looked unfazed. "I'm doing research that needs to be done."

Before I could reply, Brian Hades spoke for the first time in several minutes. "Please, Mr. Sullivan. You're the only one who can help us."

"Why me?" I said. "Is it because I'm young?"

"That's part of it," said Hades. "But only a small part of it."

"What else is there?"

Hades looked at me, and Smythe looked at Hades. "You spontaneously boot,"

Hades said. "No one else ever has."

I was completely baffled. "What?"

"If you, as an upload, lose consciousness, you don't stop for good," Hades said.

"Rather, your consciousness comes back of its own volition. No other Mindscan has ever done that."

"I haven't lost consciousness," I said. "Not since I uploaded."

"Yes, you have," said Hades. "Almost as soon as you were created. Don't you remember? Back at our facility in Toronto?"

"I … oh."

"Remember?" said Smythe, standing up straight. "There had been a moment when something had gone wrong. Porter noticed it — and was amazed."

"I don't understand. What's so amazing about that?"

Smythe spread his arms as if it were obvious. "Do you know why Mindscans never sleep?"

"We aren't subject to fatigue," I said. "We don't get tired."

Smythe shook his head. "No. Oh, that happens to be true, but it's not the reason."

He looked at Hades, as if giving him a chance to cut him off, but Hades just shrugged a little, passing the floor back to Smythe.

"We've all been following the trial up here, of course," Smythe said. "You saw Andy Porter give testimony, right?"

I nodded.

"And he talked about competing theories of how consciousness is instantiated, remember? Of what the actual physical correlates of it are?"

"Sure. It could be anything from neural nets to, ah…"

"To cellular automata on the surface of the microtubules that make up the cytoskeleton of neural tissue," said Smythe. "Porter's a good company man; he made it sound like there's still a question about this. But there isn't — although we here at Immortex are the only ones who know that. Consciousness is cellular automata — that's where it's embodied. No question."

I nodded. "Okay. So?"

Smythe took a deep breath. "So, with the Mindscan process, we get a perfect quantum snapshot of your mind at a given moment in time: we precisely map the configuration of — to use Porter's metaphor — the black and white pixels that make up the fields of cellular automata that cover the microtubules in your brain tissue. It's a precise quantum snapshot. But that's all a Mindscan is — a snapshot. And that's not good enough. Consciousness isn't a state, it's a process. For our snapshot to become conscious, that snapshot has to spontaneously become one frame in a motion-picture film, a film that's creating its own unscripted story, unfolding into the future."

"If you say so," I said.