“What you are listening to is a convolution response of your delta, theta, alpha, and gamma brain waves, recorded with ECG measurements before you boarded the transport. They will restore up to 99% of your long-term and short term memories. Please close your eyes, and ignore all distractions. Please only listen to the headset in front of your bed - they are tailored to each of you individually, and neurological damage can result from hearing someone else's memories.”
All around him were mutters and murmers, as the soldiers spoke. Given that none of them knew anything more than their own names, there wasn’t much to say.
The robotic voice was still talking.
“Caitanya-9 is the the largest planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. It presents…unique challenges. Be advised that an executive authorization of full-scale military action is currently pending, as of this recording, so be prepared to work in concert with other forces of the Solar Arm Commonwealth if they…”
There was more, much more, but he ignored it. Too much to unwind.
“So you’re our commander?” A man asked. The bed he’d just stood up on had the inscription YEN ZELITY - CORPORAL.
The man was mystified. “How do you know?”
“It says it on your bed.”
He turned, and knelt down to see the inscription.
I AM AWAKE – COMMANDER
“Awake? What sort of name is that?”
The woman called Ubra Zolot wandered across the main deck, and touched the wall. Haptic technology built into the ship’s hold responded, and a holographic screen shot out.
Space. Outside.
Early space photos were all artificially coloured, giving clouds of dust particles riotous hues of purple, gold, and green. More realistic photographs depicted space as black, punctuated by anticlimactic pinpricks.
But this was something else again.
They were travelling at nearly the speed of light.
No stars were visible. They were moving with such ghastly velocity that all traces of the physical universe were blueshifted out of existence – the Doppler effect in overdrive. Relativity made wavelengths so short that conventional light from outside the craft was invisible, in the same realm as microwaves and UV waves.
Instead, there was just a single glowing ball ahead.
The cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang, finally made visible.
The conversation breaking out among the soldiers was silent. They all stared at the holograph, awed by the sight.
Ubra wandered around the hold, taking stock of their supplies. Food supplies. Freeze-dried MREs. Boxes and boxes of oxygen candle. Crates of polymaterials unbonded and semi-fluidic metals and plastics that could be dynamically reshaped into tools and implements in the field. And weapons. Boxes of ammunition. Gun racks.
She picked up a chrome silver MeshuggahTech KA-52 assault rifle –
Wait? He thought. How do I know that? How does my brain know that rifle but not my own name?
He knew other things about it, too. Like how it took a clip of 50 standard incendiary rounds, or 30 self-guided bullets.
He joined her, and picked up an unassuming rod, several inches across. The man knew that it was a deployable shield. With a flick of a button, he could create a bulletproof barrier up to twenty feet across.
“So we’re soldiers.” He said.
With a snap of his wrist, he flung it at Ubra.
Her hand snapped up, and caught it. Her reflexes were like lightning.
“You know, I could believe we are.” She smiled.
Some of the soldiers were putting on their Black Shift headsets, reintroducing themselves to their memories and past identities. He decided to do the same.
He went back to the bed…
…There was nothing there.
No headset.
Mission Interruptus 1
Is there a place on your body that you cannot touch with your right hand?
Yes, there is. Your right elbow. Poetically, this is the joint on your body closest to your right hand.
Our minds are like that. They are the last great veldt of mystery, an untamed frontier that we can’t even observe…and this frontier exists two inches behind your own eyes. Physically, it couldn’t be closer, but philosophically, it couldn’t be further away.
Consciousness is a mystery hiding in plain sight.
In the days of Socrates, the world was a series of reflections from a perfect paradise, and our brains were projections from beyond Plato’s cave.
In the days of the vitalists, our brains were the throne room of an epiphenomenonal spirit, with the physical brain containing consciousness no more than a piece of paper contains auditory experience of a symphony.
In the modernist period, our consciousness resides in physics. A description of them began and ended with such things as 1.4 kilos of matter, 2% of the body's weight, 100 billion neurons, 1 quadrillion dendrical connections, six cortical layers, etc.
Does the buck stop there? Maybe. But saying “consciousness is physics” educates us no more than saying “consciousness is from Plato’s cave.” We still don’t understand what’s going on!
Take a rhesus monkey’s brain, slice it in half, and sew it back together. What do you have? One dead rhesus monkey. On a physical level, this is the exact same brain that existed before. So where did that living monkey go?
Suppose you take great care in reattaching the two halves. Suppose you have nanometer-fine surgical equipment and make sure every dendrite connects, every Hebbian energy balance in the neurons matches. And suppose you have some kind of therapy in place to heal the apoplectic cells that died when you made the cut. Suppose you repair the brain so comprehensively that no observer would ever guess it had been cut in half! What do you have?
One dead monkey! Second verse, same as the first!
Our best guess is that our brain is a physical structure, with an elaborate (and poorly understood) chemical state that animates it. One or the other is not a brain. Both at the same time might be.
One thing does seem clear: the brain is an affront to nature and everything is trying to kill it.
A blow to the head turns a baby into a vegetable. The death of a few neurons can cripple half of the body. Childhood malnutrition can stunt your development by 20 IQ points. It’s been joked that every happy family is the same, while every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way. There’s a near-infinite number of ways a brain can break, and only one way it can really work.
Only by the fact that they confer huge survival advantages do they exist. They’re expensive, they’re vulnerable, and they go wrong constantly. And most of the time, they make us utterly miserable.
Suppose you didn’t have to worry about survival. Suppose you lived in a world where you were safe from harm (or disposable enough for your harm not to matter).
In this world, would you really need a brain?
A master general is wasted on the front lines of a battle, and a 100 billion neuron brain is wasted doing grunt work. Depending on your point of view, this is either the point where humanity transcends itself or goes beneath itself. Why not engineer a workforce that doesn’t have a brain? Or has a particular kind of brain that lacks certain features…for example, the ability to feel pain? Or, perhaps, memories?
Soldiers, in particular, are prone to homesickness, depression, despondency. And they might accrue traumatic experiences during war. Their brains aren’t ennobling or empowering. They’re a source of suffering.
We can create such people already. We don’t understand consciousness or brains, but we know how to break them. You don’t need to be a master sculpter to smash a statue with a hammer.
Mankind, thus far, has harrumphed and declared that this was a bridge too far, it was wrong to create such a man.
Soldiers must continue to feel pain, and suffer from homesickness. The easy relief they could have had has been denied to them.
When early man discovered fire, this same dilemma might have played out.
Two sticks rubbed together creates heat. A stick spun rapidly in a notch creates a lot of heat. At kindling, and you have a blazing conflagration that can warm your feet and burn down a thousand hectares of rainforest. Or both.
Fire’s dangerous! But fire makes us warm! Yet fire can kill us! But fire can save us from freezing! Yet the tribe across the river will discover our secret and use it in war against us! But we can use it in war against them first! So many arguments, so many points, back and forth, tumbling down through the centuries.
But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Nature has decided this discussion for us.
When lightning strikes the ground, it strikes at a temperature of 20,000C, regardless of whether one does or doesn’t support fire.
It’s the same with memories. We shouldn’t have asked whether it was ethical to create a memoryless man, we should ask whether it’s even a choice we get to make. As happens so often, nature found a way to create one for us, in the voids of fathomless space.
Welcome to the Black Shift.
[The Black Shift Project, by Emil Gokla, 2100 edition. Rights resolve with the Black Shift Archives.]
Dravidian – March 13, 2136 - 1200 hours
Days passed, the ship speeding towards Proxima Centauri like a cosmic arrow.
The main cargo bay was a revolving habitat wheel that provided one third of a G. The soldiers trained with resistance bands, trying to restore some tone to muscles that had spent five years as mummified cords. They also spoke among themselves, trying to build some rapport, trying to build a bit of team morale. They swapped backstories, always with a faint note of hopelessness. Those memories hadn’t existed in their heads until a few days ago, and they might as well have been complete fiction.
And there was the little matter that their commander hadn’t received one at all.
One day, Ubra was cleaning the firing mechanism of a Killhammer 3013 grenade launcher. Zelity was stripped shirtless, cleaning himself with a sonic exfoliator – a handheld device that scoured dirt from his body without any waste of water.
Ubra eyed his shirtless torso. “Hey, what’s that on your chest?”
“This?” There was faint yellow discoloration, running across his sternum like a tiger stripe. “Uh, nothing.”
“Looks kinda like a tattoo.” Ubra asked.
“I could see how you’d think that.”
“So is it, or isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Shit, I’m not getting out of this with my ego intact, am I? Yeah, it’s a tattoo. I got it when I was sixteen. The same day I signed up for the Solar Arm Marine Corps. The worst decision of my life.”
“Jesus, I didn’t know we were that rough to hang out with.”
“No, I mean the tattoo, not the armed forces. I went for my physical, and the marines rejected me. Section 9. No tattoos or body mods allowed.”
“Well, that’s a problem.”
“One hell of a problem. So I went to get the tattoo removed, but…well…you know how traditional tattoos are ink, injected into the skin? And how it’s reversible?”
Ubra nodded.
“Well, I was the stupidest person in the world when I was sixteen.” Zelity said. “I wanted it to be, like, a permanent part of me. On Selene there’s an experimental tattoo parlour that uses methylation to change the melanin levels on certain parts of your body. Basically, that tattoo was now part of my genome. Unreversible. My body was literally programmed to grow black skin cells in that location.”
“Well, once you go black…”
“So now I have a goddamn tattoo that I can’t get rid of, and it’s going to fuck up my career. Like, fuck it in the ass. I’d wanted to be a marine since I was eight,” Zelity said. “So I went right back to the tattoo artist, and told them to undo it. I got a ‘tough shit, talk to the hand’ reaction. They showed me the waiver that I’d signed without reading, absolving them of all responsibility.”
“Couldn’t they have done a second round of methylization editing? Changed your skin back to white?”
“Yeah, that’s the thing, not many people methylate their skin to a pasty-white Caucasian color. A golden tan, sure. Brown, you bet. But vampire grade shit? That’s just not the cool thing. There’s no demand for it and none of their doctors had the right DNA swatches. I asked for the lightest shade possible, and it turns out that was an Asiatic yellow. That was all I could fucking get. The only alternative was to literally cut the skin off my body and graft new skin on.
“So I put myself deep in debt, get my gene methylations changed from black to yellow, molecule by molecule, and you know what happens after I empty my bank account for that?” He grinned and shook his head “I get a letter from the Solar Arm Reserves. They relaxed the requirements. Section 9 was struck from the books. You could now have all the tattoos in the world and get in.”
“Man, rough break.” Ubra said.
“It’s a Russian doll of a story. Except instead of getting smaller and smaller with each new layer, it gets more and more cringeworthy.”
She sat on the bed next to him. “I think it’s pretty interesting,” she ran a finger across the strip of yellow skin. “But you’re not getting away that easy. What does the tattoo say?”
He went quiet for a long period of time. Then, wincing, he said “’Pangolins don’t give a shit’”.
She snorted with laughter. “What the fuck does that even mean?”
“Well,” Zelity said. “you know what a pangolin is, right?”
“Sure. The scaly things that curl up in a ball. Saw one at a zoo once.”
“It was just kind of a motivational thing. Like, no matter how bad things get, somewhere there’s a pangolin, not giving the first fuck about my problems. Just lying on a rock, getting warm in the sun. Being a chill motherfucker. And that, somehow, was supposed to give me the strength to keep going.”
She couldn’t stop laughing. “That is the absolute gayest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Hey,” he bristled. “Remind me to interrogate you about the life choices you made when you were sixteen.
“I’m more worried about life choices I’m making now.” Ubra said. “To be honest, I’m terrified. We’re in a bubble out here. We have no idea what’s happening on Konotouri station, or the planet.”
“It might not be so bad,” she said. “A false alarm. If that’s the case, we’ll have two weeks of trying to find stuff to do.”
“Want to explore the station?” She asked. “I’ve heard there’s a bar. And a casino.”
“They hate us. We’ll get called cheats if we so much as win a ducat.”
“Well, we’ll just have to make our own fun.”
The commander turned a corner, and saw them sitting close. “Not that it’s any of my business, but fraternization between soldiers isn’t allowed.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. You gonna court martial us?”
“I can’t,” he said. “Just try to be on your best behavior. We’re going to have a lot of eyes on us when we dock at the station, and we need everything to go as smoothly as possible.”
“Not that it’s any of my business,” Zelity said, “but have you found…”
The commander sighed. “No, I haven’t. I’ve looked and looked. No headset, and no name. There’s not a single trace of information about who I am anywhere on this ship. I’ve decided just to say ‘fuck it’ and give myself a name. Aaron Wake.”
Ubra scratched her head. “Aaron Wake? Wait, I get it. ‘I AM AWAKE.’ A. Wake. Nice.”
“Not as nice as having an identity.” Wake said. “Not every day a commander gets to be jealous of his enlisted men. Do me a favour and don’t mention anything about this when we hit the station. It makes the Solar Arm look incompetent, like they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
“You’re making a pretty big assumption, commander.” Zelity said. “That this wasn’t their intention.”
“What are you saying?” Wake snapped. “Why would they place you under the command of someone with
no memory? That’s ridiculous.”
Zelity didn’t really have an answer. There was genuine anger and frustration in Wake’s voice, and he didn’t know how to handle it. “Hey, I’m just a grunt, okay? Whenever shit rains down from a high place, I’ve got two choices. Either the guys upstairs have made a mistake, or there’s something going on that I don’t understand. And considering I’ve got ‘Pangolins don’t give a shit’ tattooed on my chest in yellow, I’m automatically the dumbest guy in this or any room.”
Whispers – time and date unknown
“You’re a fool, Zandra. I’ve mistrusted you for years – you tell lies, and play games. But now I wish you were merely deceitful. How could you have done this?”
“They found The Doorway. The thing we’ve been digging for decades to find, they rammed a drill through. I had to act.”
“And since you attacked them, we lost the Doorway again. We could have waited for them to leave, laid claim to it, and then we’d have been free to study it at our leisure. Instead, you attacked. They ran away, the beacon was deactivated, and now the Doorway will be buried again under tons of rubble. We’re now in the same position they were before.”
“We’re in a better position. Now we have evidence that the Doorway exists. There was always the suspicion that it was just a rumor.”
“A very small silver lining on this particular cloud. But let’s talk about your killing of the scientists. Why? What did they do to deserve death?”
“I was hoping to tie up loose ends, father. They would have gone back up to the station, and made their report. This report would soon have fallen into the hands of the Sons of the Vanitar.”
“But as actually happened, they were able to make a report anyway, so you didn’t actually avert that outcome. All you did was add a messy body-count to the report. Now the Sons of the Vanitar will have cause to send a large force to this planet. We could be exposed. Worse, they could find the Doorway before we do.”
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