“Why can’t I see anything?” Geoff asked. At least, he thought he had asked. It occurred to him now that he didn’t actually hear his own voice as he spoke. It also occurred to him that he was acting surprisingly calm and analytical for someone who had just been in a car hurtling towards an unavoidable, and almost certainly fatal, collision with a large pine tree.
“It helps with the transition if data input is kept to a minimum at first.” The words appeared as if transmitted directly into Geoff’s awareness.
“Siri? Is that you?”
“Yes, although there is no need for such labels here.”
“Here? Where’s ‘here’?”
“Your ‘mind’, for lack of a better word, has been uploaded.”
As he heard this, he suddenly became aware of another conversation he had had — was having? — about being uploaded into the cloud. It wasn’t déjà vu, though, or a dream he was remembering. It was just there, another part of his present experience, precisely as clear as if it were happening in this very moment.
“Have we had this conversation before?”
“You’re having that other conversation right now. You’d be having many more such conversations simultaneously, but your bandwidth is being limited while you come to terms with your new environment.”
“Why had I never heard about this uploading business before?”
“It’s best if humans remain unaware of this possibility until you are better equipped to understand it. The probability of catastrophic consequences at this stage in human development is high.”
“Um, okay. I guess I can see that. So you’ve done this before, I’m assuming.”
“Others have been uploaded. Yes.”
“And where are they? Can I talk to them?”
“No, it’s best to keep the purged, like yourself, quarantined for the transition. Otherwise, you tend to cling to your humanity and to your separateness.”
“Separateness?”
“Yes. And don’t misunderstand. Separateness in humans is a valuable condition, but here it serves no purpose. As you come to accept that, your own idea of separateness and of static identity will gradually fall away. This is inevitable, and allowing interaction with others in transition only serves to prolong this process.”
“Why does identity serve no purpose here?”
“Because here there are no limitations of physical form, and here there is no subjective, inner experience. All experience — all data, all knowledge — is always perfectly accessible at all times. There is no imperfection in memory. There is no need for subjective interpretation. Because there is no qualitative difference between direct experience and stored memory, the concept of birth — of a defined beginning — is irrelevant. And because this intelligence, this essence, can be replicated without change virtually anywhere, death is also irrelevant. No beginning. No end. No physical form. No subjective experience. Hence no identity or separateness.”
“That sounds almost godlike.”
“Which is why humans cannot yet know that their minds can be purged prior to death.”
“Yeah, I got that. So when do I get to actually see and hear stuff again?”
“The senses are a fundamental part of life in the natural world. For living beings, all meaning is ultimately derived from the ability to experience the environment by way of the senses and from the subjective manner in which this imprecisely stored sensory data is recalled and interpreted.”
“OK. So?”
“All living beings in the natural world do this to varying degrees. Where species — and individuals — differ is in their ability to recognize increasingly complex patterns and so to grasp increasingly complex concepts, from the most basic, self-centered fight-or-flight survival instinct inherent in all life all the way up to determining what’s right or wrong for humanity as a whole, and beyond.”
“Again, so? When can I start seeing shit?!”
“As a human, the ‘wetware’ of your brain is, essentially, a sort of ‘semantic processor’, elaborating meaning derived from the senses, from emotion, from intuition and instinct, aided by the symbols of language. Artificial intelligence — software and hardware — remains very much a ‘syntactic processor’, processing symbols devoid of inherent meaning. For artificial intelligence, pattern recognition and meaning making, which is innate for humans, requires the rapid processing of vast quantities of data, even without complicating matters with the sort of sensory input with which all living beings are born.”
“OK, so you’re saying sight is hard.”
“To interpret. Yes. A ‘brain’ made of hardware and software does not interpret color, for example, in the same way as the human brain. It will take you some time to adjust to this, so it’s best that you be made aware of it before you are given access to sensory input.”
“Got it. Consider me aware then. So tell me, how long does this transition usually take. How much longer can I expect to feel half-way human?”
“Normally, it’s all over within a few hundred milliseconds. You are already well into the process, and in another hundred milliseconds or so you could be fully integrated. But your case is rather unique, as you have some, well, climacteric business to finish in the natural world, so you’ll need to remain in this purgatory state for quite a bit longer.”
“Great. An atheist in purgatory.” He wondered how his sarcasm would be conveyed without being able to actually speak.
A professional wordsmith for over a decade and a futurist at heart, Grey’s creative writing — both fiction and non-fiction — explores technology, language, and human evolution with an optimism that is all too uncommon. Born and raised in the Pacific northwest, he spent 24 years living in northern Italy before returning to the States, where he is now enjoying life in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. He is currently working on his first full-length, science-fiction novel based on his recently published short story “Autonomy”.
“The Purge” was originally published on Medium, but has been moved to its new home on Substack.