Mindscan

Smythe nodded emphatically. "I do. The snapshot becomes a moving picture when the black and white pixels become animated. But they don't do that on their own: they have to be given rules to obey. You know, turn white if three of your neighbors are black, or something like that. But the rules aren't innate to the system. They have to be imposed upon it. Once they are, the cellular automata keep permuting endlessly — and that's consciousness, that's the actual phenomenon of self-awareness, of inner life, of existence being like something."

"So how do you add in rules that govern the permutations?" I asked.

Smythe lifted his hands. "We don't. We can't. Believe me, we've tried — but nothing we can do gets the pixels to start doing anything. No, the rules come from the already conscious mind of the subject being scanned. It's only because the real, biological mind is initially quantally entangled with the new one that the rules are transferred, and the pixels become cellular automata in the new mind. Without that initial entanglement, there is no process of living consciousness, only a dead snapshot of it. Our artificial minds don't have such rules built in, so if the consciousness ever halts in a copied mind, there's no way to start it up again."

"So if one of us were to fall asleep—" I said.

"He'd die," said Smythe simply. "The consciousness would never reboot."

"So, why is this a big secret?"

Smythe looked at me. "There are more than a dozen other companies trying to get into the uploading business; it's going to be a fifty-trillion-dollar-a-year industry by 2055. They can all do a version of our Mindscan process: they can all copy the pattern of pixels. But, so far, we're the only ones who know that quantum entanglement with the source mind is the key to booting up the copied consciousness. Without linking the minds, at least initially, the duplicate never does anything." He shook his head. "For some reason, though, your mind does reboot when it's shut off."

"I've only blacked out once," I said, "and that was just after the initial boot-up. You can't know that it always happens."

"Yes, we can," said Smythe. "Copies of your mind manage to generate rules for their cellular automata spontaneously, on their own, without being linked to the original. We know, because we've instantiated multiple copies of your mind into artificial bodies here on the moon and down on Earth — and, no matter when we do it, the copies spontaneously boot up. Even if we shut them down, they just boot up again later on their own."

I frowned. "But why should I be different from everyone else in this regard? Why do copies of my mind spontaneously reboot?"

"Honestly?" said Smythe, raising his platinum eyebrows. "I'm not sure. But I think it has to do with the fact that you used to be color-blind. See, consciousness is all about the perception of qualia: things that only exist as constructs in the mind, things like bitterness or peacefulness. Well, colors are one of the most basic qualia. You can take a rose and pull off and isolate the stem, or the thorns, or the petals: they are distinct, actual entities. But you can't pull off the redness, can you? Oh, you can remove it — you can bleach a rose — but you can't pluck the redness out and point to it as a separate thing. Redness, blueness, and so on are mental states — there's no such thing as redness on its own. Well, by accident, we gave your mind access to mental states it had never experienced before. That initially made it unstable. It tried to assimilate these new qualia, and couldn't — so it crashed. That's what happened when Porter first transferred you: it crashed, and you blacked out. But then your consciousness rebooted, on its own, as if striving to make sense of the new qualia, to incorporate them into its worldview."

"It makes you an invaluable test subject, Mr. Sullivan," said Brian Hades. "There's no one else like you."

"There should be no one else like me," I said. "But you keep making copies. And that's not right. I want you to shut off the duplicates of me you've fraudulently produced, destroy the master Mindscan recording, and never make another me again."

"Or…?" said Hades. "You can't even prove they exist."

"You think messing with the biological Jacob Sullivan was hard? Trust me: you don't want to have to deal with the real me."

EPILOGUE

One hundred and two years later: November 2147

Oh, my God!

"What?"

Oh, my God! Oh, Christ…

I hadn't heard a voice in my head like this for over a century. I'd thought they were gone for good.

I don't believe this!

"Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

I know they said it might be strange, but — but…

"But what? Who is this? Jake? Is this another Jake?"

What the — hello? Who's that?

"It's me, Jake Sullivan."

What? I'm Jake Sullivan.

"So am I."

Where are you?