by Dima Zales
“Okay, neuroscience isn’t my strong suit, but I get the gist of how we can simulate certain key brain regions to bypass my mom’s trauma,” I say, thinking out loud. “The Brainocytes will make the right neurons think a healthy version of that broken brain tissue is in place and firing. I knew enhancement was theoretically possible, but—”
“It’ll use that same basic premise,” Ada interrupts, “but it’ll essentially provide the brain with extra brain regions, as well as faster versions of the original regions. Eventually, neuroplasticity will kick in, and the brain will learn how to really use the extra power. Though even out of the box, I was able to give myself a certain boost—”
“Wait,” I say. “I just realized something. This is what’s been behind your off the charts coding lately, isn’t it? I was just thinking about it earlier today.”
“Probably. The brain boost helps with everything, but in this case, my coding improvements might also be due to the integrated development environment—aka AROS IDE—that I’ve developed. I can literally write code in my head.” She beams at me. “I’m so glad I can finally share this with someone. It’s so amazing. After a while, typing mentally and using the IDE turns spooky, and I almost feel like the apps get written by me just willing it.”
“Hold on.” I cross my arms. “So why did you use that super-loud keyboard today?”
She bites her lip. “I was waiting for a good moment to tell you. Sorry. I didn’t do it just to fool you. I use the thing for practice sometimes, and for cover at the office. In any case, it’s good for me to stay sharp with older tools, because who knows what could happen one day. In general, this enhancement does have a small flaw—you have to be on Wi-Fi or a cell network, though the latter offers reduced capabilities.”
“That’s true.” I uncross my arms and study her with wonder. “So you’d get dumber if you went camping? But how does the keyboard help you with that? I don’t see why you’d ever need a keyboard again—once you come out to your coworkers, that is.”
“It’s like eBooks versus paperbacks.” She picks up our bowls and puts them in the dishwasher. “Some people like one or the other. I still like both, even though I can now read books without any devices at all. Still, even when I used the Kindle, which I loved, sometimes I’d want to read a paperback, and I still do. There’s something about the feel of paper in my hands and the smell of ink on the pages. Using a keyboard is like that—a sentimental activity, I guess. As to getting dumber if I’m not around a cell tower or connected to Wi-Fi, you’re not that far off. I hate not being on the internet. It’s more debilitating than being drunk or stoned, and it’s why I never take the subway anymore—even above ground, the reception is abysmal.”
“Wait a minute.” I decide to voice a concern my mom once raised when I explained the brain simulation stuff to her. “These simulated brain regions aren’t simulating your own brain, right?”
“Right,” Ada says. “In theory, the Brainocytes can be used to map out my brain, but that isn’t what I did. I just used the more generic simulations based on the ones your mom was going to utilize.”
“So this is like having parts of someone else’s brain in your head?”
“Sort of, I guess, but that isn’t an issue. I think of it as having extra neurons supplementing my brain,” she explains. “The simulated regions adapt and learn to work together with my biological brain, which means I’ll make them my own over time. But I see where you’re going with this. Are you worried about the slippery question of identity? Like what happens when the supplemental brainpower gets more powerful than my biological brainpower? Will I be a mind running on a computer server using my body as an avatar? Are you worried about what will happen if I lose connection in that scenario? If I will feel as dumb as a rock in comparison to my normal self?”
I didn’t mean to ask her any of the interesting questions she just raised, but since we’re going down that road, a big question pops into my head. “What about consciousness? Given the scenario you’re describing, if you had more of a simulated brain than a meat one, would you still be conscious?”
“If the brain regions are properly simulated, you won’t be able to tell the difference between them and the biological versions, so why wouldn’t the whole be conscious? I imagine the resulting Ada would be more conscious than I currently am, with her mind expanded and all that. Anyway, we don’t need to worry about all these philosophical questions, since the hardware required for even a fraction of the human brain is enormous. The STRELA servers are the best hardware in the world, and they can only simulate small regions. So yeah, so far, I can assure you I’m still conscious.” She winks at me.
“But wouldn’t it have been better to have these answers before you jumped in and used the technology on yourself?” I ask.
“No.” Ada’s forehead crinkles. “Doing this now will actually help me bring about more powerful advancements, since the smarter I am, the more capable I am. I see each future mind boost as an incremental update, akin to what’s already happened to me. It’s not scary at all. So in the future, say when the STRELA servers’ capabilities double or triple, I’ll easily be able to imagine how things will turn out. The bigger and better-simulated brain regions will adapt and integrate with my brain just like this first batch did. Same thing will be true down the line, when hardware and simulations that are ten or a hundred times better come about. Each boost will become part of me, the same way new neurons do. The resulting Ada will still be me, and obviously conscious, even if she doesn’t fully understand the how of it. It’s not that different from how a baby turns into an adult over time.”
I consider her incremental vision and realize she’s right. The “baby me” reached my current state by growing new neurons in a process called neurogenesis. Even as an adult, I have neurons that die and get reborn as part of a slower neurogenesis process. Yet, from the moment I was born until now, I’ve always been me, no matter how much brain tissue got added. If my brain grows more neurons or a new region, I’ll still be conscious and feel like myself. I’ll just be smarter and more capable of interesting feats. The same is probably true for this virtual brain extension.
“But what if Mitya shuts down the servers?” I ask.
“What if I got a lobotomy right now? What if Stephen Hawking lost that special chair and his voice synthesizer? What if I got an infection and there weren’t any antibiotics around?” Ada retorts. “It would obviously suck, but I won’t hold back my potential over what-ifs.”
“Going back to the scenario where you have the hardware that allows the non-biological half of your brain to exceed the biological half,” I say, getting into the spirit of things. “Wouldn’t that lead to a purely simulated version of you? And what’s to stop that creature from spawning a whole race of Ada copies and taking over the world?”
“A girl can only hope.” She fluffs up her Mohawk. “But seriously, as more hardware becomes available, such implementation details can be fleshed out. I can think of ways to keep myself a singleton, if that was what I wanted.”
I sit in silence, pondering all this. I can picture these brain extensions morphing into something like brains in the cloud over time. Such technology has the potential of redefining the human condition so completely that the resulting beings would barely be recognizable as Homo sapiens.
Ada looks at me anxiously, and I realize I’ve been silent too long. Figuring we can discuss the future consequences in more detail later, I turn the conversation toward a more pragmatic direction. “I take it you asked for double STRELA cycles to do this brain boost for me?”
“Of course.” Ada’s unease disappears, and her eyes gleam. “It would be silly not to take advantage of the situation.”
I now understand the reason for her sudden candor. Okay, maybe I understood halfway through eating my ice cream, but I no longer have any doubts. She wants me to become like her. She wants to give me all these apps and the intelligence boost. Actually, she already gave me some of it—hen
ce her earlier statement of “here is a new custom OS, but I can’t tell you why yet.”
“It’s already in my head, isn’t it?” I say, looking at her.
“Yes,” she says. “But it wouldn’t work without Mitya’s help, and you still have to launch an app to get it started.”
“And the other icons?”
“Some are what your mom was going to have,” Ada says. “I had help from my minions on those. A bunch of the others are utility apps I wrote for myself. I branched off some open-source projects when I had to, and now you have the basic necessities like a web browser, terminal emulator, email, texting, as well as a videoconference app, word processor, and the IDE I mentioned earlier—just to name a few apps off the top of my head.”
“I think I want to go back to your office now,” I say and get up. “Thanks for the snack.”
“You’re welcome.” She leads me back to the beanbag chair I’ve started to view as mine.
Sitting down, I grab the controller and click the A button. The transparent shapes reappear, each representing one of the apps she just mentioned. They form a circle around the room, and I can guess their functions just by looking at them. Zooming in on one to my right, I ask, “That small sphere surrounded by tricolor swirly lines is your version of the Chrome browser, isn’t it?”
“I actually branched off Chromium, the project Chrome draws its source from, so you’re close,” Ada says. “The codebase is mainly C++, my strong suit, so I figured why not make my life easier?”
“Let me try it,” I say and use the controller to hover the white arrow over the 3D Chromium logo.
A slightly see-through screen shows up in front of my face.
“I think the folks who made Minority Report might sue you,” I say, marveling at the apparition. The ghostly screen is the size of my seventy-inch TV. On the screen is an empty page with an address bar in that minimalistic style I associate with Chromium’s popular progeny.
I use the remote to move the screen closer to my face and direct the cursor to the address bar, but then I realize I have no way of typing text.
“You’ll have to learn how to control all this stuff with your mind,” Ada says after I raise this issue with her. “For now, you can use this.” She walks over to her desk drawer and fishes out a wireless keyboard.
After she does her magic to hook it up to my AROS, I put the keyboard on my lap, type techno.com into the address bar, and press Enter.
The official Techno website looks glorious in this version. The colors are sharper and the text is crystal clear, which makes sense since I’m not really seeing this stuff. The Brainocytes are making my visual center think I am, so the resolution can be anything the eye can see.
“Damn,” I whisper after browsing the internet for a few minutes. “This is already better than Precious.”
“Yeah,” Ada says. “I now use my iPhone for video calls only, and then only for cover. For everything else, I use my head.”
“I can’t blame you. What do these other icons do?”
She walks me through the apps, and as we go, I log in to things like the email client, the calendar, and so on. Throughout, I feel something between kid-on-Christmas excitement and whatever a crack addict feels when scoring a new fix. This is a thousand times cooler than setting up a new computer or smartphone, even one as prodigious as Precious.
When we get to the music player, I ask, “Does hearing work the same way as vision?”
“The principle is the same. The brainocytes stimulate the right brain area,” Ada says. “Oh, and by the way, you’re stuck listening to my music library for now.”
I browse through her eclectic collection until I find a song called “Where is My Mind?” by The Pixies and press play.
The song starts, and it’s the next best thing to being at an actual concert. I again marvel at the entertainment possibilities of this technology. When Techno goes public, all its employees will be rolling in money, and my bank account might finally measure up to Mitya’s. Actually, no. Mitya invested so much into Techno that if it grows, he’s going along for the ride too. Oh well. It’s never been a competition between us anyway, since he would’ve won many times over already.
“I don’t envy the lawyers who’ll have to figure out if having songs in someone’s head violates copyright,” I say. “Loving the music, by the way.”
As I say it, I feel a spurt of guilt for enjoying music while my mom is suffering who-knows-what. With the guilt comes sickening worry, and the throbbing in my head comes back with a vengeance, as does the pain from all my injuries.
Taking a breath, I slowly release it and push the worry and guilt away. What I’m doing will help Mom; I have to believe that, or I’ll go crazy.
Leaving the song playing in the background, I move on to more apps, trying to feel the enthusiasm this technology should generate.
“So,” I say when there are only two unexplained icons left, “I take it the brain-looking thingy launches the brain boost, or whatever you call it, but what’s this sphere with a half-moon shape and white halo around it?”
“That’s a tongue and gray hair,” Ada says, mischief returning to her face. “Just use it and you’ll see. You’ll like it, I promise.”
I click the app and a figure appears, floating in the room. This time, it’s the Star Wars franchise Ada is ripping off, because a blue-gray holographic version of the cartoony Einstein, the AI assistant, says, “Hello.”
His German-accented voice is as clear as if he’d spoken from where he’s floating.
“Einstein,” I say. “Remind me to get a new car in a few weeks.”
“He can’t hear you,” Ada says. “I haven’t gotten around to hooking him up with speech recognition like I did with the VOIP stuff. But you can type to him, and I can tell you from experience, once you can do it mentally, it’ll be better than speaking.”
I type my request and watch Einstein walk over to the calendar app and launch it. The reminder is instantly filled out, though I guess Ada didn’t bother creating an animation of Einstein actually writing it out, which would’ve been neat.
“Okay, Einstein, please go away,” I type, and the hologram fizzles out.
“I’m officially impressed,” I say, “and I haven’t even boosted my intelligence yet.”
“Strictly speaking, just using these tools boosts a person’s intelligence significantly. But you’re right. You’re currently doing the same things someone with a very nice smartphone could do, but much faster—which is an important difference.” Getting up, she walks over to me and puts a hand on my shoulder. “I think it’s time to try the boost,” she says with a smile.
Her hand on my shoulder seems to spread warm energy throughout my body, making it hard to concentrate on what she’s saying. Straining to focus, I wonder if I want to try the boost. Part of me shouts a resounding yes. The appeal is the same as the reasons I went to MIT and continue to read scientific journals and pursue intellectual self-improvement. More important to the situation at hand, the smarter I am, the higher the chance that I’ll figure out where Mom is, as well as who took her and why. I tell myself this as I hover the 3D pointer over the brain icon.
“You can turn it off if you don’t like it,” Ada reminds me and squeezes my shoulder before dropping her hand. “But I doubt you ever will.”
I try to think of something appropriate to say and decide to use the legendary phrase uttered by Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut.
“Poyekhali,” I say. I’m about to translate it as “let’s go” for Ada, but she surprises me yet again.
“I think Armstrong’s ‘one small step’ is more apropos,” she says, smiling.
I think back to all the Russian I’ve spoken behind Ada’s back and redden. “You speak Russian now?”
Her smile widens. “Just what I’ve been able to learn in the last few months. The boosted intelligence has helped.”
“And how much Russian is that?”
“I little Russi
an speak,” she says with a horrendous accent. “I better at understanding than speaking.”
Shaking my head in disbelief, I repeat Gagarin’s statement and activate the brain icon.
Chapter Eighteen
Nothing happens.
I count to twenty and say, “I don’t feel anything.”
“Well, yeah,” Ada says. “What did you expect to feel, exactly?”
“Smarter,” I mutter, feeling like maybe the intellect boost went in the opposite direction. “Or at least something.”
“I told you, your brain needs to adjust to this new state of being,” Ada says. “The effects are subtle at first. Even as early as the second day, I did better on a slew of cognitive ability tests, even though I felt the same, aside from a certain sharpness that’s hard to describe. The only noticeable thing was those weird pre-cog moments I had in the beginning.”
“Pre-cog moments?” I frown at her. “As in, psychic?”
“No, but sort of. It was very strange.” She chews on her lower lip. “It’s like a vivid daydream or hallucination. You see what’s about to happen.” I look at her incredulously, so she clarifies, “I don’t mean literally. The vision can easily be inaccurate. It’s a side effect of the not-yet-integrated portions of the simulated brain regions anticipating the result of a decision or action but serving the information to your normal brain too quickly. Thanks to neuroplasticity, they later learn how to work together, so don’t worry. It took a day or so before I stopped having these episodes, and since then, I suppose I’ve simply made better decisions, so no visions required.”
“Still sounds strange,” I say. “Are you sure you didn’t eat too many magic mushrooms or peyote?”
“The effects of mescaline and psilocybin are very different from what I’m talking about,” Ada says without blinking. “If you think about the brain’s primary function in nature, this phenomenon isn’t that odd. The brain tries to predict what’s about to happen in its environment. If bushes rustle, the brain might predict a lion is lurking behind them and send the rest of the body into a fight-or-flight response. This is similar, only it’s the new brain regions that are shouting ‘lion,’ and since your regular brain isn’t used to it, it shows you a quick dream of a lion as a way to cope with the new experience. That’s my theory, anyway.”