kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"Shipwrecked"

words

Waves slowly bob a young boy's body up and down in the water. His short, sandy hair floats in the water like baby kelp. Near him two small planks of wood bob in unison. His light brown eyes stare straight and unblinking into the perfect blue sky. He can still hear the roaring of the boat. He thinks he can hear screams.

*Jim*, he thinks to himself. *If you can remember your name, it's not likely to be concussion. I wonder why I can't feel anything. What else can I remember? I can remember my age. I'm sixteen and'll be seventeen in a few months. I can remember what I was doing. I was waterskiing. There was a boat, and then it veered towards me. I wonder how long I've been lying here. How long have I been lying here?*

The noise of the motorboat increased.

*I hope they're not going to hit me again. How could they have hit me? The motor's slowing. They're pulling up to me.*

Hands lifted him out of the water into a rescue boat. They asked him questions that he couldn't answer. He stared wherever they lay his face. He could hear them. He could hear them, but he couldn't move anything, he couldn't reply.



"Will you have a seat over there, please?" The secretary pointed them to a plush couch. "I'll let Doctor Smith know you're here." She keyed a button on her desk, and spoke into her headset too softly for them to hear. After a moment, she nodded her head. "He's ready to see you, now." She pressed another button on her desk causing the door beside her to open, and she gestured them in.

They entered a simple room. It looked lived in, but not excessively: well ordered and well used at the same time. The door shut behind them and they remained standing, unsure of what to do or say.

"Please, be seated. You are Anna, whom I spoke with on the phone, and I presume you are Steve? I hope there is something that I can do to help you, although I warn you, of course, that the technique has not been used before on a human. And even if it does work, your son's reality will almost certainly not be the subjective existence that you and I share."

Anna seated herself, and took some time in replying. "We understand. Our son is lost to us now. We hope that in some manner this procedure will help us be with him again. We"

Her husband interjected, "My life feels empty without my son, Doc. I mean, I'm not expecting him to sprout back to life, miraculously, and take over my management job... But I'd like to talk with him. I'd like him to have another chance to live, however different that life will be. And I'd like to know..." He broke off with a sob.

Anna finished his sentence, gently stroking his arm. "We'd like to know that we tried something. His brain, and presumably his mind, is slowly wasting away by itself. He's functionally a vegetable now, and that's all he'll ever be. Unless you perform your miracle."

The Doctor paused before replying, waiting to see if they would continue. Seeing that they didn't, he cleared his throat. "It's hardly a miracle. The core of our procedure is a simple invention that mimics the human nervous system. Well, I admit that it is not simple in practice, but the concept is quite. The technology to scan a brain neuron by neuron has been available for a small number of years now, and with that it's almost simple. We, so to speak, copy a snapshot of your son's mental state and impose it over our model. From there, the natural processes simply occur as they occur in a human brain, following the laws of physics."

Anna frowned. "You said on the phone that he'd not be the same, and you said that in this conversation as well. Yet now what you've explained to us seems to imply he will be the same. Could you make yourself clearer?"

"Certainly. Robotics has advanced with leaps and bounds... in industrial applications. The dream of creating a robot of humanoid form... simply isn't being funded any more. It's not practical. We can provide your son a new head to live in, but not a body. And even the head is not human. While it functions in the same manner, it is a computer. It may not be a computer as one would commonly think it... but who knows how a silicon entity would 'think', even if they had been raised as a human, inside a human body. He'll have stereo hearing, and stereoscopic vision... or at least the lab animals that we've tested on have been able to function as such... they reacted properly and the corresponding areas of the brain were activated as one would expect from a biological creature... The ways in which he'd be different though, are innumerable. Socially, physically, hormonally... who knows what that will do to his emotions, and to his psyche in general."

Steve slowly looked the Doctor in the eyes. "What will he be, doc?"

"He'll be a machine. A large black box with video cameras for eyes, microphones for ears, and a speaker for a mouth. He'll be a machine, able to react with the world around it, with your son's brain. He won't be your son."



"Jim?"

That was his mom. He knew her voice well. It was always soft and calm. She was going to tell him good news. They'd found a cure. They were going to give him a new body. He'd read science-fiction books like that. That's what they were going to do.

He couldn't bring himself to believe it, though. *You just want to say goodbye. Your voice is harsh and loud, like you've been crying. I'm going to die now, aren't I? Aren't I, mom?*

"Anna, now, you don't have to speak up like that. There's nothing wrong with his ears. Isn't that right, Jimmy boy?" Steve glanced over at the body on the hospital bed. He chastised himself for expecting a response. That's what she was doing too, he realised, just looking for a response. We keep thinking, hoping, that he's going to sit up, and that everything's going to be fine.

*Dad... dad, I'm sorry I wasn't a better son... I'm sorry for everything I've ever done wrong... I'm sorry you're suffering like this. I'm sorry I sound like such a sop, but I guess it doesn't matter because you can't hear me. I'm just lost in my own head, shipwrecked in the seas of reality.* He would have chuckled, if he could. *I guess when you're in your own head, reality is whatever you can believe in. I wish I could believe in something other than this. I wish someone could tell me a story and convince me I was somewhere else, some other reality...*

Anna counted to ten to calm herself down, and tried to explain what was going to happen. The doctors had said his brainwave activity implied that he could actually hear fine, that nothing was wrong with his mind. She was amazed at how hard it was to converse with someone when there was no physical sign they were listening. "Jim. We've found something that might work to help you. There's no chance of recovering the use of your body. This is the only option that we can find, and believe me, my baby, we've looked into everything that exists and then some... They're going to transfer your mind... into a machine. You won't have the same interaction with the world that you'd have if you had your old body back... there will be adjusting that all of us will have to do. Lots of adjusting all around. But you'll be able to talk! You'll be able to live again, Jimmy. The only other choice would be for you to remain on life support, trapped in that useless body of yours, until you died... We... We can't leave you like that. I hope you approve."

The three bodies were silent.



*Where am I? A second ago, I was in the bed. Am I better, now? Am I dead? I can't move anything. This is weird. The world looks... grainier, somehow. I can move my eyes! They don't feel right, though. They move differently. When I look at something for a few seconds, the image starts to fade... but when I move my eyes, the image snaps back.*

A black box sat on the Doctor's desk. As promised, it had a pair of video cameras, and two reptilian ear-slits, one on each side, which hid two small microphones. Under the eyes sat a large mid-range speaker.

"Can he... Is it... Jim? Jimmy, are you in there?"

*Mom! Where am I?* He struggled to speak -- he'd almost forgotten how, having given up on doing so ever again. "Mom?" He tried to focus on where the voice had come from, but everything seemed distorted.

Anna ran up to the box, and lifted it, facing her, and looked deep into its optical inputs. Her image flooded his sight, and he felt himself crying. Then he realised that he wasn't crying -- it was just a memory of crying.

"Mom?" His voice came out wrong. It wasn't his voice. Of course, he didn't have vocal cords, but for some reason he hadn't realised he'd have a different voice. "Mom? I'd like to see my body. I want to look at it one last time, before it's... dealt with." A wave of surreality washed over him.

Doctor Smith cleared his throat. "I'm not sure that's the wisest thing, Jim. I'm the Doctor who performed the procedure on you, and while I don't have a degree in psychology, I think that seeing yourself still trapped in that flesh body, could add trouble to your readjusting."

"What do you mean still trapped? You transferred me, right? That's what mom said, you were going to transfer me into this thing that I'm in... I just wanted to say goodbye to my body. I was rather attached to it until just recently."

"The sense of humor is healthy, but I'm afraid Anna may have accidentally misled you. I realise it's rude to speak in such terms, but the original you is still in your body. You are a copy of yourself, alike mentally in every way at the time of separation. We did not move your grey matter from one chalice to another -- we copied the information that your grey matter stored. You are in a black plastic box. You are also in your flesh body, and have processed different stimuli for almost a week now. In order to actually, so to speak, transfer your consciousness, would necessitate killing the other you. Regardless of the moral and ethical issues involved, it's simply not legal."

"I... I'd like to see me... him... regardless. I have more to say to it that I realised."

"Again, I think that that is not wise right now. If you will be patient, we'd like to have you talk with a psychiatrist, to see how you're handling the change. If she says that you're stable... When she says you're stable, then you can meet yourself."

The black box tried to appeal to its parents, but it had no way to turn. It futilely raced its lenses back and forth.



"Hi, Jim." The voice sounded less mechanical than it had a month ago. He'd been practicing with it alot, and almost had it sounding like himself. He had a nurse that carried him around. An odd job for someone to have, he supposed. She was waiting outside for him to call her. He had one last thing to do.

"I wanted to see you one last time. I'm not going to be back after this. Jenna, my shrink, she thinks I'm exhibiting some morbid fascination with my own death by talking to you. But I... I had to do one thing for you. For me. Us. Whatever. I'm going to tell you a story."

He zoomed in on his biological face and left his visual attention there. He'd prepared this speech for a while, and he repeated it from memory as the image of his old self faded. "I'm going to tell you a story about you. You see, you're not really here. You're in a better place. And I'm not telling you a story, I'm telling you your life. I'm not telling you, really, you're living in a better life, and my voice is reminding you of it. My voice doesn't even exist. You were water skiing and a boat hit you, but you were fine. You recovered your skis, and swam back to shore, and your parents were there waiting for you, and they hugged you and told you how much they loved you, and you're living your life just as you'd hoped to. Everything you strive for you achieve, and there are no major disappointments in your life. Just fade back to the sun, the bright blue sky, and remember how warm and happy everything is."