Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***It is…the capture process was successful, although there may have been data dropouts…too early to tell. Johnny…we must keep this link closed…I don’t know if the Keeper can detect us, but it is best to be cautious***

  Okay, Doc…just trying to make some sense of all this. Flashes of memory came trickling back…Lieutenant Starnes…the cave…the HERF fire….

  Now the coupler link was dead and Doc III was probably right. Somebody else might be listening.

  Maybe taking a warm bath as a three-year old wasn’t the best way to describe being a few atoms in a larger swarm. Try this: buried under the covers on a cold winter morning. No? How about stumbling about in a darkened bedroom trying to find your slippers? Or: getting separated from your Mom and Dad on the boardwalk at Daytona Beach for three hours, with all the panic and frantic worry. Or: locked in a closet by your big sister, fumbling around with jackets and coat hangers.

  Johnny Winger decided to try a more logical approach to figuring this out.

  I think, therefore I am. At least, he thought he was thinking. I have a mind. I have thoughts. But there was more. Something more than his thoughts. Was somebody else in here? That was ridiculous.

  I have sensations. Hot, cold, hard, soft. Try to analyze this.

  A snatch of memory came to him: Personal identity is the unique identity of a person existing through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.

  Where the hell did that come from? I must have read that.

  Now, he was sure of it. There was someone else in here. Just a snatch of voice, a snippet—

  ***Do you recognize me?***

  Recognize you? I can barely hear you. Yet, there was something—

  An image came to mind. It was fuzzy at first, but with effort, it sharpened. It was a man, an elderly man with a fritz of white hair on the back of his head, rumpled and patched corduroy jacket, hardly-ever-washed jeans.

  Doc Frost.