The hardest part of cloning a brain is ensuring neurotransmitters carry the electrical and/or chemical signals without synaptic anomaly. Also that the brain’s chemicals, proteins and mass are all properly proportioned. You can render tissue unviable if any one of those are off by even a small amount. Case in point – iteration 157 showed early signs of instability. My first clue was when it began moaning before it was fully animated and then screamed in constant pain until it was euthanized. What’s weird is the autopsy showed all proportions correct but the weight of its brain was off by 150 micrograms. 140 micrograms under mass and the brain shoots neurotransmitters in what I call a herniated synapse. It’s not the first time herniated synapses have occurred in my research, but with this particular synaptic anomaly, the subject didn’t receive the right combination of amino acids at the right time thus causing the herniation that manifested in unmitigated pain for the subject.
It freaked me the fuck out. I stalled the project for about five months until I devised another approach. It hit me one day when I was working s0matic Corp’s (my company) AI project. It took the better part of a decade for us to figure out that artificial intelligence isn’t so much different from natural intelligence. You can’t cram a lifetime into a box and turn it on expecting a reasonable result. You have to teach it like a baby learns the things it needs to know. The problem we found wasn’t that a computer can’t learn this way, it sure as hell can, it’s just not as malleable as a natural brain. If you make a machine that you teach to pass the butter, for instance, it probably isn’t going to be able to laterally transfer to becoming a Von Neumann probe – you’re going to need to train another machine with a much bigger brain for tasks massive in scope.
So, with that new-found insight, I set out to download not my entire consciousness, but only snapshots of events I can remember from my earliest memories onward. Having a photographic memory really helps. The way normal memory works is middle-out. When you’re remembering – you snatch it conceptually then fill in the details – it’s not very accurate, but as you talk it out, you can fill in the blanks pretty easily. With a photographic memory, you see everything as it was at that moment, you string enough moments together and you can build a scene and so on. Normal photographic memory stays weeks, maybe months. Not me. I keep that shit for damned near ever.
My old man worked for a three-letter agency, I won’t say which one, but it rhymes with [REDACTED]. He made up a lot of games to exercise my brain a little. I’ve never stopped playing them. Games like “Jake, close your eyes.”
“Dad, I’m driving.”
“I don’t give a shit. We live in a rural area and it’s 3am.”
I drove it like brail. I’d been driving that road since high school, which totally sucked, by the way. Not the road – although the road wasn’t very great – I didn’t like high school. I didn’t want to be there. I’m not very scholarly and never have been. You’d think that a guy with a memory as keen as my own would sail through school, but I just didn’t have the taste for reading, studying, testing. Essentially, I didn’t want to be a clone of everybody else – or at least that was my juvenile excuse.
Anyway, driving home with my eyes closed and I nearly shit my pants pulling into the driveway. I turn down the repaved road where our property begins and I can’t feel it like the rest of unnamed road 54. The haptics in the steering wheel are different – I’ve got so little feel for the road now.
The sound of the engine and gears automatically shifting whisper my speed. I know how far the dips and bumps are on 54 so I know my speed is 24-25 miles per hour. I slow down and roll down the window. When I hear the fa fa fa of passing a picket fence I’ll know I’m about forty four fa fa’s from the driveway.
There’s a storm drain tube in the ditch between the driveway and the street. The tube is covered with dirt so you can drive over it. But, there’s not much clearance. My Dad’s old and beat up 2028 Chevy pickup had a wide wheel base so I had to use my best guess as to where the driveway actually was.
“Am I on it?” I asked.
“You’ll know if you’re not. We’ve got insurance and seatbelts.”
“Fuck. … darn. Okay, hold on.”
I make the turn and I think I’m in the clear and starting to feel smug when BAM! Left rear wheel in the ditch and I think I shit my pants. I opened my eyes and saw that I ALMOST made it. If I’d turned about two feet further, I would have had it. Dad laughed.
I put the truck in neutral, shifted into four-wheel drive and the truck shuttered forward.
“That’s coming out of your allowance.”
“I’ve never had an allowance.”
“Okay, I guess you’ll get one now but don’t expect it’s paid off until you’re out of the house.”
I honestly believe he tested me half the time for his own amusement.
These memory strengthening games we played expanded my capacity for retaining memories longer. I lived my life as if I was going to be tested at a moment’s notice. So, with a longer long-term memory capacity combined with a photographic memory – you get me. If I look at something twice, I’ve pretty much got it down for as long as I need it, and the stuff I don’t recall precisely – well, I keep a pretty detailed video journal in case I need to get another me member up to speed. So far I have about one year of vid caps that I started as a project in high school. So, because of our breakthrough at s0matic, I decided to take a more linear approach to implanting memories.
