As I sit in the waiting room of MetaMind, I recognise the words that undulate across the opposite wall in waves of red neon. Losing yourself is essential for any transformation. They are the opening lines of the presentation given by Professor Ben Milius that changed my life.
But perhaps that is not quite right. It is true, that those words spoken in a dimly lit lecture theatre one drizzly afternoon in November marked the beginning of my own transformation, but the final metamorphosis, that will signal the end of everything I have become in this life, is only now about to occur. Professor Milius, a tall brittle man with a shock of wiry red hair, had delivered the talk entitled, The Consciousness Singularity and Implications for Immortality, with the zealous enthusiasm so often exhibited by those who know, that what they propose, exists along the dangerous border between what we understand, and what we fear. But the protests and petitions had not stalled his work. Even the self-immolation of religious fanatics in city squares across the globe, did little to dissuade the politicians and policy makers from declaring Professor Milius’s experiment crucial, if humanity was to be saved from itself. And so here I am, in the monastic silence of the waiting room. The final preparations have been made to my body, the nano chips have been implanted beneath my skull, so that my shaved head is the only sign that anything has happened to me at all. I fidget with my hands, tracing the fine blue veins that run like tributaries beneath the soft pale skin of my wrists, and over the fleshy mound beneath my thumb. My fingers curl inwards to reveal the three deep seated lines my grandmother drew her ancient finger over one warm summer afternoon. ‘You are going to be a headstrong young lady,’ she told me as I sat in her lap, ‘independent and full of curiosity about the world.’ Head, heart, life. Were those the lines she traced across my hand all those years ago? My memory is tissue thin now, but I do recall the look of wonder on her face as she called to my mother, ‘Mary has no fate line!’ I jumped at her exclamation and she held me closer and whispered to me, ‘Well then my little one, no need to fret. If God has not worked life out for you, if he has not marked a path for you across your palm then no matter, he has decided you are special enough and brave enough to make your own way.’ I am contemplating my fate now. If that is the right word. Somehow the language does not feel right, juxtaposed against the cool science I am giving myself to. I know that the decisions that have led me here have been my own, but not everyone would agree. Emily for one, is convinced that Milius has exploited a vulnerability I have been harboring since the war.
Emily and I had known each other since childhood. Friends at first, then lovers briefly when grief had thrown us together, and sex was the only thing we had to anesthetize the pain. We both lost husbands in the war, but I had also lost a child, the sniper’s bullet passing casually through his soft cheek and on, through my husband’s chest, threading them together for eternity. I could not stop thinking about death after that, and how war makes you contemplate it in new ways. It is no longer the troublesome party guest you acknowledge politely and spend the rest of the evening trying to avoid. In war, it is the only sure thing in a life full of terrible uncertainty. Emily had taken comfort from this, channeling her passion into the life we still had, organizing a small resistance movement in our city that did whatever it could to disrupt the mechanisms of war. When peace finally came, like a newborn torn from its mother’s womb after a long and brutal labour, she found new causes to fight for. As thousands of climate refugees headed north, fleeing unbearable heat and the famine that followed, escaping the increasingly authoritarian regimes that attempted to subdue their protests, she campaigned for their rights. Setting up schools in camps and organizing food and medicine drops. She could not understand my obsession with death when there was so much life to champion and would often reproach me for it. ‘Stop running from it Mary, and maybe it will leave you alone for a while’ she said. But she was mistaken about my direction. I wasn’t running from it, but towards it, my sights constantly set on the horizon, searching for its shape in the pockmarked ruins of the city, looking for its shadow in the scars that ran the length of streets that once buzzed with cafes and marketplaces. My search had brought me to Professor Milius’s door, intrigued by the idea that death could be cheated. That was not his hypothesis of course, and I never mentioned, in all my sessions with him and his team, that this was the idea that had brought me to him.
Emily’s love of the corporeal meant that she did not approve of Professor Milius and his work.
‘We should not be interfering with the laws of nature, Mary. What Milius and his cronies are doing is wrong.’ she said one evening as we shared a meal together, a warm stew of root vegetables grown in the community garden Emily had rescued from the ruins of old allotments.
‘It’s ultimate liberation’ I insisted ‘the next step in evolution.’
‘Evolution will find its own path, it always has, it always will. It doesn’t need Milius showing it the way’
Later, as we sat on the apartment roof, watching security drones dart across the night sky, their red lights blinking like devilish fireflies, their search lights sweeping the rubble strewn streets for anyone out after curfew, I broached the subject again.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said, ‘that Milius is interfering with the laws of nature.’ She sighed, tucking her legs underneath her and reaching for her glass of wine. ‘You are implying that we are somehow separate from those laws, outside peering in, prodding nature with a stick to see how it reacts. But we are nature Emily. Milius’s research is simply the culmination of decades worth of social evolution.’ I picked up her phone and waved it at her, the dark screen came to life, a dozen jellyfish appeared like phantoms and rippled across the screen, trailing feathered tentacles behind them across a black void. ‘Collective intelligence. It’s what we do every day on social media. Think about how you formed those pockets of resistance during the war, how you communicated and organised yourselves. Collective consciousness is just the next, natural step.’
‘I don’t buy it.’ Emily said, grabbing her phone and taking a large swig of wine. ‘It’s mass genocide. Humanity will cease to exist.’ She became thoughtful then, and looked out over the cityscape, at a skyline shattered in places like broken teeth. ‘Where will you be Mary?’ she asked after a while. ‘Once you give up your consciousness to those creeps at MetaMind, what happens to you?’ She grabbed my arm and pulled me towards her, holding my hands in hers ‘I don’t want to lose you.’ she said, her voice faltering as she threaded her fingers through mine. ‘I can’t.’ To see her like this was more than I could bear, but my grandmother had been right, I was strong in my resolve, and as I lifted her chin gently her eyes met mine.
’You’re already losing me Emily.’ I said ‘This life is a game and we have been playing with weighted dice. Don’t you get it? Now we don’t even have to play the game! It’s the ultimate fuck you to death! Don’t you want that after all we’ve been through?’ We did not cry anymore, that reservoir had been drained a long time ago, but her eyes glistened, and her lip trembled as she held my gaze. ‘No more dancing to death’s tune Emily. We can free ourselves from this,’ I gripped her arms and shook her once. ‘This ridiculously fragile bag of bones that can hurt and break and bleed. We can be more than this!’ She pulled away from my grip, and I saw her shoulders tense as she finished the last of her wine. She would not talk to me about it again, and when she stopped answering my calls, I knew I had lost her, sooner perhaps than I would have liked, but we all lose the things we love in the end.
Now I am alone in the waiting room, and I realize this will be my final solitude. Soon my consciousness will combine with others who have volunteered before me, forming a meta mind that Milius and his team will study. Looking for ways we can exist without the need for the resources we fight over like spoilt children. Last night I lay beneath my open window watching a dust red moon fight its way out from behind ribbons of black cloud. It was beautiful, and terrible, and I realized then that despite all the months of tests and conditioning, there remained a sliver of hope that some essence of me would continue, would hold on to its particular ability to experience the wonder and beauty of the world. Milius had explained it to me at one of our sessions.
‘Philosophers call it qualia.’ he said, ‘individual instances of subjective consciousness, the unique way each of us experiences the world.’
‘And will I lose that?’ I asked, ‘when my consciousness joins others?’
He contemplated me over his steepled fingers for a moment. ‘You will no longer be a separate entity,’ he said ‘but your qualia may continue to exist, for a while at least, that is something we intend to explore as we monitor the experiment, but there will be no ‘you’ to identify with those idiosyncratic experiences. Once you have merged, to re-find yourself would be like trying to unpick the Bayeux Tapestry and return all those threads to their individual spools.’
I could not sleep, and in the bathroom, I held up two mirrors, bouncing my image from one into the other, creating an infinite number of Mary’s, going on and on and on through time. When shells were dropping and gunfire echoing off distant buildings, I would distract my boy Milo with this game. Where did I end? Where did I begin? Which one was the real me? I sat him up on the sink beside me, “Where’s Mummy?” I asked, and he would stare wide eyed at the reflections for a moment, sometimes placing a small finger to the glass, then turn to me and point with complete conviction. “Mummy!” he shouted, and I would laugh and lift him up. He would bury his head in my shoulder and wrap his arms around my neck, his legs around my waist, and we would hold each other fiercely until we were perfectly sure and confident of each other’s existence. I remembered the bony weight of him against my hip, how his fingers twisted the ends of my hair, and his breath, like warm milk, misting my cheek. Those sensations, that unique moment of perception, I would hold on to those qualia with every atom of my being and never let them go.
The doors to the waiting room swing open and Professor Milius enters followed by a smiling woman in a white lab coat emblazoned with the MetaMind logo, a tiny hologram of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. It spreads out its brightly coloured wings momentarily before returning to the chrysalis in a never-ending loop.
‘You are ready?’ he asks, and I nod. ‘Any final questions?’ I do not have any. ‘Then I will leave you in the capable hands of Dr Swan.’ He indicates the smiling woman beside him, and she steps toward the door. We walk together along the windowless corridor. Strips lights blink on as we pass and my rubber clogs squeak alongside the measured click of Dr Swan’s black patent shoes. We do not speak until we enter a room where I am told to get up on to a couch. The room is small, but behind a glass partition is a cavernous space, an anti-gravity chamber where those that went before me float like wraiths, iridescent tubes trail from their temples and from beneath their white gowns, like the tentacles of the jellyfish that pulsed across the screen of Emily’s phone. Now I will join them in an intimate and infinite bond; their qualia will become mine and mine theirs. I climb onto the couch, I am ready.
Losing yourself is essential for any transformation, the words bubble up from somewhere and explode behind my eyes like fireworks. I feel a sense of emergence, not a butterfly but a moth, escaping its cocoon to take flight into an inky night. There are threads of light unravelling from me. I reach out for them, but they have come together like a current and are moving with a powerful force toward other streams of light that crisscross the void in an intricate tapestry. I begin to transform, losing myself as each thread, each qualia, becomes a part of the meta mind. A single, delicate thread, no more than a hair’s breadth across, hovers at the edges of my vision, bent like a question mark it motions me towards it. I try to focus on it, to move in its direction, but find that I cannot rotate my vision to see it clearly. But I feel it, a brief but intense sensation, a familiar weight and a comforting scent and a sound like a brook bubbling over a stony bed. Language is starting to evade me, but I try to put a name to the beautiful and powerful sensation; it is love. I am so overwhelmed by emotion and longing that I cannot breathe, but it is only a memory, of a wound on a pale cheek, red like a lipstick kiss, of the air held tight in my chest for fear that the scream it released would never end. It is gone now, that silver thread. It has found its place amongst the billion others that weave their way through infinity, and I sense my mind become free of the umbilical that has been connecting it to death. It is what I wanted, but now there is no I, just a billion threads hurtling through the void and the last thing that I truly know, is that I am reaching for them, that I don’t ever want to let go.
Neon Junk 