“Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, dormez-vous? Dormez-vous? Sonnez les matines! Sonnes les matines! Ding, dang, dong. Ding, dang dong”
Reaching hand-over-hand twice in each stanza, I pull on the slack rope tied at either end of the pool until I reach the side of the pool then turn around awkwardly and journey back.
I say or sing nothing that I think isn’t already prescribed for the fidelity test. I say think because I could be wrong, euthanized, guts ripped out and stored for later use.
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and danced on laughter-silvered wings…”
I am emotionally compromised nearing the end of the poem – this is by design. My amygdala sends a signal to the hypothalamus triggering my fight or flight response. My glottis swells and heart rate increase as my lips begin to quiver. High Flight has danced across my breath and is halfway out when my voice begins to shake.
This poem has always cut me to the quick. I remember as a young boy when the space shuttle Challenger blew up and President Regan lifted two lines from this poem.
My hypothalamus is producing acetylcholine that bind receptors in my brain and sends a signal that now stimulates my lachrymal glands. With eyes glassy, and puntums full, I begin to weep openly as I finish.
“…I’ve trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand and touched the face of God.”
I let go of the rope and float attempting to collect myself as I’m waiting for Prime to collect me.
He enters the pool and helps me upright. I’ll take my first steps now in the pool. In half an hour I’ll be walking on a wooden deck in our underground lab.
I wonder if other JHJ’s have wondered what I’m wondering. Still, I’m conscious and don’t want to say something stupid and get myself unconscioused, harvested, and remains recycled because of an ill-timed gleeful utterance.
Okay, things like that are really a thing of the past. It’s not like in the olden days when the slightest fidelity fail would shit-can a subject. We found out during a lot of the autopsies that even if you’re basically the same person, new memories cause different slight degradation of fidelity scores while at the same time presenting opportunities to incorporate new tests making it a stronger indicator of fidelity. Unfortunately for the project, we destroyed thirteen otherwise healthy subjects because we just made this shit up as we went but went and got it wrong. The coronal brain slices of early euthanized subjects showed no abnormalities. The tissue weight was nominal. From a purely physical view – everything was normal and it wasn’t until we noticed two subjects tested exactly the same that Prime flashed on the solution. Those two that tested equal were processed exactly the same from the same information – no variances. We really didn’t know until then that the subjects could differ.
I’m probably in the clear – none of us has failed fidelity past this point. I think of the Challenger astronauts and know I’m not brave. I’m so afraid of death that I’m willing to die to shirk its final embrace.
My next tests are very personal and quite embarrassing. Suffice-it-to-say – sexual function and digestion were both nominal.
I’m walking now and tomorrow I’m going to actually get a workout in. But, today is for a shit-ton of memory tests that I will pass.
