Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium

by Jeff Pollard

  Renee stands in the kitchen, hacking at her left arm with a meat cleaver in her right hand. She chops at it again, the lower limb is barely attached but clings on by a few stubborn tendons and strips of flesh. She gets the arm free, then drops it into the center of the kitchen where there is a pile of a dozen body parts resting in a pool of blood. Renee steps into the televator in the corner, and comes immediately back out with both her arms in perfect condition. Renee puts her arm back on the edge of the counter and prepares to hack off another arm, but stops as she notices Gwen standing in the doorway, horrified.

  Nellie performs a vivisection along with two aides. A nurse runs in and interrupts, “Nellie, you've got a problem.” Nellie runs to a televator and Percival emerges in the kitchen, finding Gwen and Medved in a stand-off with Renee.

  “What's going on?” Percival asks. Renee throws a stray foot from the pile at Percival's head. The cold, stiff foot skitters across the dining room table.

  “Renee, this is not healthy,” Percival says.

  “So what are you gonna do? Ground me? Oh no, I can't go outside!?”

  “Please, just put the knife down, take a deep breath, let's talk about this.” Renee doesn't drop the knife, but merely stares at Percival coldly. “Please.” Renee reluctantly drops the knife, it plants itself upright in a copy of her leg. “Thank you.” Percival takes a few steps toward Renee.

  “Don't fucking touch me,” Renee says coldly.

  “I'm sorry that you couldn't live on Earth, but this world is just as good,” Percival says, walking closer.

  “I said stop!” Renee flings a knife at Percival, hitting him in the arm. It slices him and falls to the ground. Percival flinches and backs away with blood spurting down his arm. Renee stares at Percival recoiling in pain. Feeling overcome by existential rage, she collapses to the bloody ground.

  Medved's furry paws soak up blood as he approaches timidly. Renee looks up at her teddy bear with the watery eyes of a child. Medved scoops her up in a bear hug and carries her away to her room.

  Renee stays alone in her room for weeks. She barricades the door and lives without food or water since she knows her sensations of hunger and thirst aren't based on real needs. No amount of pleading would bring her out. She would sit, legs crossed, eyes closed, meditating for days on end.

  I'm a higher being. I mean, consciousness evolved as just a means of seeking food, avoiding predators, etc. Once little creatures evolved locomotion, once they had somewhere to go, they needed a driver. All of our emotions and feelings are just data. Hunger is data that I interpret to mean that I need food. Love, loneliness, anger, they're just data. Information giving me, the pilot, a better idea of where to steer this body, how to keep it operating, fueled, to get it to procreate.

  But I don't have a body. I don't need to be afraid of anything. I don't need to eat or drink.

  So what use are these feelings anymore? It seems that the meaning of life is just to try to keep alive, procreate, and placate these needs we feel. There's not necessarily any truth to any of these concepts. Humans feel love about as strongly as evolutionarily predicted. When you have a species with a long and difficult gestation period, combined with a small litter, helpless young, etc., you expect to find love, or at least an approximation of monogamy. The creatures that have no trouble procreating at all, the ones who lay a thousand eggs and get on with it don't have any kind of love. Why would they need it? But creatures with very difficult reproduction, like penguins and whales, where having both parents around makes a huge difference, will seem to have intense love, very committed monogamy. So basically, evolution has fine-tuned their DNA to give them the best parenting strategy to fit their circumstances. So humans have an idea of love, but if some creature became super intelligent that had no difficulty reproducing at all, where the parents never had to even look at each other, then there would be no concept of love, nor of romance, companionship, anything. So we spend our lives looking for love because our DNA has constructed us in a way to make us feel a need for it. It's not that we're objectively living in the world, deciding that we should love because love is good thing.

  So if love is just as artificial, just as based on needs that my fictional body is communicating to me, as thirst, then what is the point? Perhaps I can be a higher being. What if I ignore all these needs, all these gauges, what will I feel then? Perhaps there is some higher level of consciousness where instead of feeling pain, hunger, thirst, fear, etc., instead I could physically feel a need to help others, a need to be creative, a need to learn, and feel those things just as clearly, just as strongly as a normal person feels hungry.

  If every few hours I felt a need to do something nice for someone, wouldn't that make me a better person? Couldn't we create a utopia in this way? Imagine feeling a need to create a beautiful work of art just as strongly as you feel hunger.

  Still, my stomach hurts, my mouth is dry, I want to cough, but I won't. I just won't.

  Why is the pain in my stomach so intense? I understand that it's a bad feeling to be hungry, because it motivates you to seek food, and the hungrier you are, the worse you feel, so that the motivation to seek food increases as the severity of the situation increases. That's fine, I get that, but at a certain point, the pain becomes a bigger problem than the lack of food. I understand that if we didn't experience pain as a “bad” feeling, then we wouldn't learn to avoid it. If we put our hand in a fire and it didn't bother us, it would be bad for our survival, so it's a bad feeling, we learn to avoid pain. But, what about chronic debilitating pain? If pain is just information meant to tell us, hey, that's bad, quit doing whatever that is, then why do we have to have chronic pain? I guess feeling pain is an evolutionary compromise. Feel it too little and you'll get in too much trouble, lose more limbs, die sooner, etc. Feel pain too much and you'll be too incapacitated to do anything. So there's a big middle ground and we're just the present state of that compromise. What if we bred out those who had debilitating pain? Could we evolve to a point where we only felt pain briefly, giving us information at the time, but not continuing to send the signal indefinitely? I suppose we could, only if there are people that already are that way to some extent. It might require a mutation to get into that state before we can select for it.

  What if there are higher order needs that we could feel. If I erased all bodily needs from my psyche, would the brain internally create new needs? Like losing a sense strengthens the remaining senses, I could start feeling deeper needs.

  Renee quietly emerges while everyone is sleeping, drinks, showers, and then goes to the kitchen to eat. She picks out several dishes on the oven. She feels conflicted, watching imaginary food materialize in the oven. She's never eaten a real thing in her life, and while she knows it is all unreal, she still wants badly to eat it, or even to just taste it. She sits down to gorge herself and Percival enters. Renee averts her eyes from her father, expecting a confrontation. Percival quietly gets a tub of ice cream from the freezer and sits down to eat straight from it. They eat in silence.

  “Sorry about, the whole kitchen thing,” Renee mutters between bites.

  “It's not your fault. You were in shock.”

  “You still should have told me,” Renee says quietly.

  “We worried about you growing up without consequences. How could you develop empathy or even care about doing anything with your life?”

  “You should have told me I'd never have kids,” Renee says coldly.

  “Well you can, I mean you can't physically carry a child,” Percival tries to explain.

  “Just shut up, I don't want to hear about simulated bullshit. You know what I mean.”

  Percival pauses, and quietly says, “I just hope we raised you right.”

  “You say that like you think I'm gonna turn into an evil bitch,” Renee replies.

  “You're not allowed to leave this house until I know that you understand that your actions have consequences,” Percival says.

  “That's fine, I'll just be
come a solipsist like Descartes.”

  “You know, we named you after him,” Percival tries to connect with her through the tension, “thought it was fitting considering your situation.”

  “As a solipsist, I believe that he was named after me,” Renee exaggeratedly smiles and flutters her eyelids.

  10

  “Surprise!”

  Renee walks out of the televator, finding the living room vividly decorated. The glowing virtual wallpaper put on a display of fireworks all around, and announces Renee's sweet sixteen party. She has no true relatives, cousins, uncles, grandparents, only her immediate family of Mom, Bear, and Dad/Mom. Patrick comes out of the televator behind her, chuckling, having been in on the ruse that led to this surprise entrance. A handful of others are also in attendance, the few people Renee knows from the sparsely populated “school” they share. She had rare opportunities to interact with anyone of her own age, though the population of Solipsis had seemed to grow significantly in just a handful of years. The main limiting factor wasn't money, resources, or even medically viable subjects. No, the vivisection procedure was not popular because it was looked down upon as barbaric, selfish, and inhumane. At least, those were the reasons offered up in talking points.

  Solipsis isn't the only place where one can get the procedure done, but it was the only fully integrated neural network built specifically to house a virtual society. In the beginning, vivisected people were called psychonauts. In Solipsis the word was rarely used, and usually only by newcomers. Here a psychonaut was a person with a name and a face. A virtual face anyway. The few psychonauts in the outside world lived vicariously through animatrons, and were mostly regarded as freaks. The average person did not want to speak to a robot, especially not one that hadn't quite crossed the uncanny valley. For many it was a disturbing experience to interact with this soulless robot that pretended to be a human being. The attitude and treatment were bound to improve, just as people resist any major change. It had only been a generation since a select few had started to cheat death, and that new fact of life was very slow to be accepted. One might have expected the population to jump at the chance at immortality, but it wasn't seen that way. The prevailing thought was that vivisection made you into less than a person. It was like being offered immortality by a zombie. What kind of immortality is that? Slowly however, the attitudes had started changing, and the population of psychonauts was starting to expand at a compounding rate. Recent improvements in animatrons was likely a key factor, as they had started to be much more life-like.

  An animatron was an expensive piece of equipment. Most were custom made to exactly mimic the original person, though some animatrons were not copies or even really human. The further you ventured from your neural layout, the harder it would be to control. An exact copy would be almost as easy to control as your real body. Slight changes would require you to get used to having longer legs for example. Switching to a drastically different animatron was like waking up in someone else's body. You could learn a new one, even a drastically different one, but you would have to stay put in that animatron for a long time, long enough to rewire your brain to the new control scheme. And once you did that, you would no longer be able to control your original body or avatar. So selecting an animatron is a big decision. Not only is it expensive, but it requires a long-term commitment to actually learning the new controls.

  “Happy Sweet Sixteen!”

  Renee is very surprised to be suddenly surrounded by most of the people she knows.

  “You're sixteen,” Percival says, “you know what that means.” He motions for Renee to follow. They head up the stairs and Renee enters her room, finding a copy of her standing idly in the center. “Your very own animatron!” This was just a digital representation of what the animatron would look like on Earth, like a receipt. The animatron looked almost exactly like Renee's avatar. Renee walks around the virtual representation, looking it over. She runs her hand across it and feels the rubbery latex skin covering the metallic skeleton hidden underneath. “It's not quite an exact copy, but you'll grow into it.”

  Renee looks it over, nodding, a small smile on her face. The crowd followed up the stairs and fills the entrance to her room. “Pretty cool,” she says simply. She had attempted to be somewhat polite, but her voice wouldn't act the part, coming off more sarcastic than grateful.

  “Do you not like it?” Gwen asks.

  “It's fine,” Renee says, “I mean, I maybe would have liked to be involved in picking it out, since it, you know, defines me as a person, but you made that decision without me. Probably for the best, I'm so indecisive, so thanks for just going ahead and picking it out for me.”

  “It's a nearly exact copy of your avatar,” Percival says seriously, offended by Renee's ingratitude.

  “Yeah but you won't let me customize my avatar,” Renee replies. The crowd begins to back out of the room awkwardly.

  “I do let you customize it!”

  “No, you let me change my eye make-up or get ear piercings, you don't let me really change it.”

  “We've gone over this, we wanted you to develop normally.”

  “Well I'm not normal, what the hell is normal? Not me, not this virtual body, not getting a robot for your sixteenth birthday. I'm not normal, so let me decide how I want to look.”

  “You're being a brat right now,” Percival says.

  “I'm out of here,” Renee replies. She takes off through the crowd, heading to the televator with Patrick in tow.

  “Maybe we should have let her pick it,” Gwen says.

  “I can't believe what a brat she is,” Percival says.

  “You know teenage brains are essentially wired up to be assholes,” Medved says, “It's not her fault.”

  11

  “I thought you weren't allowed to change your avatar?” Patrick asks rhetorically.

  “It's my body, not his,” Renee replies, opening a menu in this avatar shop in downtown Solipsis. It was the Earth equivalent of a tattoo parlor in the red-light district. There were countless merchants offering everything from new avatars, body mods, explicit “games,” to virtual drugs, they had it all.

  This avatar shop had several booths in which you could explore an infinite combination of avatar ingredients.

  “What do you think of this?” Renee asked as she finished modifying the displayed avatar's hair. It was red like hers, only more metallic, more wavy, and with streaks of silver.

  “Silver streaks?” Patrick asks, “You don't want to look old do you?”

  “They're not silver, they're platinum. Literally, a platinum alloy.”

  “Won't that hurt?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Why don't you ever kiss me?” Renee asks Patrick over a hefty glass of absinthe.

  “What are you talking about, I kiss you all the time.”

  “No, I kiss you, then you kiss back.”

  “Is that different?” Patrick asks.

  Renee glares her answer back at him.

  “So is this kicking in or what?” Renee asks.

  “I can't feel it,” Patrick replied.

  “The sign says that it stimulates our brains to mimic the absinthe.”

  “Mimics how?” Patrick asks.

  “I don't know, I sure don't feel anything.”

  Renee awakes to sunlight that seems unusually bright. She rolls over, finding Percival glaring at her from the door.

  “Can you explain why I got a reciept for a new animatron this morning?” Her father asks.

  “Umm.”

  “It looks like you just went ahead and bought a brand new one, with a stupid design, with my credits.”

  “I guess.”

  “What's wrong with your hair?” Percival asks, approaching the bed. Renee pulls the covers up to cover herself.

  “Nothing.”

  “You changed your avatar,” Percival accuses.

  “Just the hair,” Renee insists. A barbed devilish tail slithers to the safety of the covers.
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  “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “You are grounded, you got that!? Grounded. No seeing Patrick, no going out, not until you pay for this animatron.”

  “But I don't make any money.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Time for dinner!” Gwen calls from the kitchen. Medved and Percival are already sitting, awaiting their digital food. “I bought this recipe at the market today, it sounded really good. It's Mako shark curry with coconut and a mango chili sauce.”

  “I still haven't found a curry that really got the taste right,” Medved says.

  “I think Rockford's the best food programmer,” Gwen says. “So maybe he's got it figured out.”

  “Renee! Dinner!” Percival shouts.

  “Don't shout,” Gwen says.

  Renee comes hopping down the stairs.

  Percival looks up, getting a clear look at Renee's new avatar. “Go put your normal boobs back on!” Percival demands.

  “Don't tell me what to do with my body,” Renee says, and she walks right past the kitchen, heading for the televator. A barbed demon's tail trails behind her, flicking against the wooden railing lining the stairs that lead to the televator.

  12

  “How long do I have to stay here?” Renee asks.

  “As long as I do,” Nellie responds. They are on Earth, sitting in Nellie's office. “You're going to watch me work until I've made the amount of money it cost to buy this animatron. Maybe then you'll learn the value of money.”

  “What value does money have to me?”

  “Well those games you play aren't free, game designers spend months making those things.”

  “Yeah but we have no scarcity, why do we need money at all?”