Author: Josip Ivica, III. gimnazija, Split
It was on the 1st of October 2029 that professor Gregory Mendelssohn fi nally invented the Consciousness Uploading Machine. The general public
had been awaiting this moment for years. He called his assistant, professor
James Donovan, to the laboratory at once.
Professor Donovan arrived at 4 o’clock to the grand laboratory populated
solely by Professor Mendelssohn.
“Is it done!?” he exclaimed in excitement, \My dear God, is it actually
done!?”
“It is, my boy”, the Professor replied calmly, \We did it! It will from now
on be possible to upload a person’s consciousness to a server where it will
live for|well, for all intents and purposes|eternally!”
Professor Mendelssohn then proceeded to show the details of the machine
to the young scientist. There was a comfy chair in which a person would be
seated, electrodes would be connected to the outer layer of their skull, and
then a large helmet suspended from above would be put on their head.
This would then scan the person’s brain. Not like an MRI or a CAT-scan,
but rather a complete scan of every neuron and synapse inside the brain. A
complete model of their brain would be made and transferred to a computer.
Obviously, this required a plethora of computing power and memory,
which is why professor Mendelssohn had the government shut the entire city
down. This `temporary’ blackout provided enough energy for the scanning
per se, but in order to maintain the consciousness on the server, the entire
county had to be shut down.
Professor Donovan was chosen to have the great honour of being the rst
person in history to have their consciousness uploaded. But was it really a
great honour… or perhaps a great doom?
“There is, however, a small problem with the process of uploading…”,
professor Mendelssohn began to explain, \It’s nothing serious, only a small
bug that I haven’t managed to patch yet. You see, when your brain is
scanned, the helmet gets incredibly overheated, which boils your brain and
makes your skull explode.”
The young assistant looked at the Professor in confusion and reluctance.
“Oh, don’t be scared, boy!” the Professor encouraged him, \The uploaded
neural network will stay intact. Your physical body will die after the upload
is complete, so there’s nothing to worry about!”
“That’s… Umm… That’s not what I’m scared of…” the assistant mut-
tered, \What will happen to my actual consciousness? I mean, the one in
my physical body? Will I feel the entire procedure and just die!?”
“No, no, of course not,” professor Mendelssohn kept reassuring him, \You
won’t die! You’ll become immortal and continue living in the computer!”
“But what will happen to this me? Will I suddenly stop existing? Will
my consciousness somehow switch with the one in the computer? I mean,
how do we know whether the uploaded… thing will be conscious anyways?
What if there’s more to it than just neurons!?”
“Relax, my boy. Your consciousness won’t switch or anything. It’s the
only one you have. There is no other you, nor can there ever be! The
consciousness in your current body will be annihilated along with your brain
during the overheating. Now, we cannot know precisely whether the new
`computer brain’ will be conscious as we don’t even know what consciousness
is, but what we can do is hope for the best.”
“So… I’ll just… die?”
“Not you! I mean, not the you in general, but only you you. Okay, so,
there can be in nitely many versions of you if we merely copy and paste your
online consciousness around. Whether they will all be conscious, we don’t
know. But, what we do know is that they are all technically you.”
“How can they be me if I’m dead!? Moreover, how can there exist more
than one me? Even if I’m successfully `transferred’ to the server, how can the
exact same replicas of the same brain generate di erent consciousnesses?”
“I dont know! Why do you have so many questions!? Maybe they’re not
all conscious. Who knows? And of course it’s the real you! Just like you can
have several… I dont know… pancakes that look exactly the same, you can
also have several `consciousnesses’ that are identical.”
The young assistant continued to be sceptical for a while, but was soon
persuaded to continue with the experiment. He was given morphine in order
not to su er too much during the `explosion’.
Professor Mendelssohn calibrated the C.U.M. during the time required
for the morphine to kick in.
In the meantime, professor Donovan went over to the desk and began
writing something in the notebook.
“It’s ready, my boy!” exclaimed the professor while still ddling with the
buttons, \Just sit right here and it will be over quickly then youll have a
brand new `body’ one that lives forever!”
The Professor smiled and the Apprentice walked towards the comfy chair.
* * *
This is it. It’s the moment of truth. Will I continue living forever or will I
die on that chair? All I know is that I trust the Professor with my life and
that I am willing to do this even if I might die.
I write this epilogue to the Professor’s biography as my last testament
should the experiment fail. I, however, believe that it is far more likely to
succeed and that I shall continue writing his biography from `the other world’
until he either passes away or joins me. And besides, who knows how easy
it is to type when you are the software? In case the future generations lose
the sense of humour, that was meant to be a joke.
– An excerpt from the `Biography of Professor Gregory H. Mendelssohn’,
written by James Q. Donovan and published posthumously in 2029.
The two great men died on the same day in the building collapse due to
a failed laboratory experiment. There were no other casualties.
* * *
Professor Donovan had been successfully uploaded and continued `living’
in The Void for all eternity.
