Mad-Sci-Soc

by Arrand Pritchard

  “The reality of this universe is based solely upon our ability to experience it,” Terri read. “A basic property of physical reality is only accessible to the quantum processes associated with brain activity. Our brains are simply receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness intrinsic to the fabric of space-time. If your heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state, you lose the conscious experience. The quantum information within the microtubules, though, is not destroyed. It cannot be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates into the universe at large.”

  The theory concludes that “something” will live on after the death of your physical body. The sake of a better word, a “Soul”. It may be possible that the original Terri's quantum information could exist outside of her body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul. Perhaps in another interconnecting universe.

  So while new Terri may be conscious, have the same body chemistry and memories, she may not have the same soul as the original. She liked this theory of quantum consciousness because of its explanation of near-death experiences (not that she had any), astral projection (nor them), out of body experiences (nor these) and reincarnation (this is the one that hit home with her!) without needing to appeal to religious ideology.  

  “Holy Monsanto hydraulic-fracturing-fluid! There is a soul!” thought Terri, in a sweat. “There is a soul, and, ipso facto, I must have a soul too. But I am unlikely to have the same soul that inhabited old Terri. Her soul was lost while I was created inside her body as a separate entity but with her memories!”

  At this epiphany, Terri stopped her studies for a few days as she raged at Max and mourned the loss of her former self, the loss of her old soul.

  She eventually returned to the question of how best to describe herself. Terri eventually settled on the term NBOMNS: New Body, Old Memories, New Soul; which she pronounced as “Bombz”.

  She pondered the number of Bombz-Terri's that Max could have created. She knew that Max had, at least, attempted to copy her more than once. Was she the first to survive? Has Max tried again? Did Jenny see another Terri Bombz? Could she track her other selves down? Should she track them down? Would other Bombz track her down? Could they all pass through the same biometrically controlled security controls? Security! That was worth considering. What was her life worth to, say, dark actors, state organised or criminally organised, if she ever made a fuss as she was already registered as being dead? She certainly could not refer to herself as a “Bombz” when going through security.

  Terri asked Karmen these questions while on the visit to her mother in Minneapolis. Once they boarded the train and the logistics of the trip had been discussed, Terri fell silent and languished in gloom. Karmen made a comment about how old Terri was always full of life and fiesty… that comment lit the blue-touch-paper for Terri to launch a diatribe over all the different aspects, legal, moral, spiritual of being a Bombz that she had been researching.

  After politely listening to Terri’s rant, Karmen started to pooh-pooh the more outlandish concerns. But then Karmen, as she attempted to model the outcomes from different scenarios on her G-phone, she admitted that Terri did need to worry since all of her probability models failed. There was no concept of a being like Terri within the algorithms. It was a totally new concept, unparameterised and uncalibrated. Without being able to identity the exact reason why, new Terri’s safety worried Karmen. She advised Terri to keep a low profile, not to interact with Max (not as though she ever wanted to again), or the other Terri Bombzees, if any existed, which Karmen doubted anyway, even after Terri recounted Jenny's story of bumping into her double.

  Terri recalled the day she arrived to confront Max and remembered Conrad's confusion on seeing her. Had he just seen another Terri Bombz? Was that why Max agreed to delete her data file because he had already replicated her? But a new Bombz created without Conrad's and Karmen's help? So that Max, alone, could indoctrinate her?

  ***

  Saturday, March 1, 2118

  Terri's tearful reunion with her mother was an emotional roller-coaster, the type of roller-coaster that sent you over a lake of crocodiles where you feared you may get stuck upon, upside down.

  It was near lunchtime when they arrived in the auto-taxi outside her home. The fear of this moment was a hundred times worse than she had imagined. This was the hardest day of her life. Terri sat frozen, like a "serac", inundated by the flood of vivid memories, overpowering memories of childhood drama, teenage angst and real grief when she heard the news about her Dad.

  Karmen entered the family home first to explaineTerri's return to the pre-assembled family: mother, siblings and aunts. Then Terri stepped out of the taxi to gasps from old friends and family as they realised she was alive. There were tears of joy and impromptu dancing. Food was delivered by swarms of drones.

  But then her mother needed to sit down with Terri. She began to weep uncontrollably. So much so, that the family dispersed, quietly leaving Terri and her mom crying together and repeating conversations of loss and grief and then disbelief, then joy, then hurt and pain. It was the pain of a twisted knife wound that would take a while to heal.

  Karmen left Minneapolis. Terri stayed with her mother for several weeks.

  She returned to New York even further behind with her studies but with a steely resolve to do well academically.

  After the long stay in Minneapolis and Terri not visiting Jenny on returning, the BFF relationship was truly severed. A few days after her return, Terri passed Jenny in the corridor and Jenny pretended to ignore her. Terri did not even notice. This provocation failure upset Jenny so much as to make it the norm. By the time Terri recognised that she was being shunned, the relationship was damaged beyond repair.

  It was a week after her return when Terri realised she had not talked to anyone. Terri was tied up in a world of Philosophy. “Cogito Ergo Sum”: Descartes’ first principle… no, it did not work for her.

  This mental effort was tiring her out. She was fed up with research in virtual worlds, fed up with reading, watching, listening and most of all, thinking.

  Of course, the alternative theory was that there was no soul. And someday robots could achieve consciousness themselves, the so-called “singularity”. Perhaps the whole universe did not centre around her after all.

  Terri finally knocked on Jenny’s room door, holding tea bags and biscuits. But Jenny was not alone, she had a new group of friends in her room. She rebuked the friendship offering with a catty remark which was then captured, replayed and amplified on social media. Terri was too proud to try to mend the relationship again.

  After a long walk in the park, she returned to her empty room feeling desolate. Well, the room was not quite empty…

  She opened a cupboard.

  The eyes of a dusty android lit up and dilated, “Well, hello, Terri. What would you like to do today?” said Brad.

  ***

  Chapter Eleven Argument

  Tuesday, January 29, 2123.

  Five years later, Terri met Karmen for the first time since the trip to Minneapolis. They hugged. Karmen said how bobulous it was to see her. Conrad and Terri hugged too but less enthusiastically. I wondered why there was not the same delight between them.

  But I did not wonder desperately hard. While they chit-chatted, I made a beeline for the kitchen and selected a cheese and salad sandwich from the sandwich maker. Mad-Sci-Soc had a top of the range machine and it was a joy to watch the salad, bread and cheese being freshly sliced, assembled and served efficiently and hygienically.

  Sandwich in hand, I joined Conrad, Karmen and Terri for the brain storm in the Imaginarium.

  They were just finishing the it-is-so-nice-to-see-you-again stage and soon settled down to business.

  Karmen described her plan, “I have come up with five devastating questions to ask Max allowing us to determine the accuracy of the Improbability Model and make him confess his crimes. So this is them: One, when was the last time you spok
e with a Ms Bell representative? Two, what was you doing on the night of January 23 when Conrad's car went missing? Three...”

  “No, no, no,” interrupted Terri. “The only reason I came down here is to stop you talking to Max.”

  “Okay, the other option is to break into Ms Bell and steal the car back,” I suggested. “Or at least determine if it is there. That would prove Karmen's model was right.”

  “There are numerous obstacles to breaking into Ms Bell...” said Conrad paternally.

  “The plan would use invisibility cloaks at night and, with the aid of the supercomputer, we would hack the locks, sensors and drones...” I said.

  “That would take longer to arrange than a politician’s paycut,” said Karmen.

  “Well, we do have ready-made plans for just this contingency...” mused Conrad.

  “I'm sorry. I'm going to have to stop you again,” said Terri decisively. “Even if you did find or recover the car. What next? You have proved the Improbability Model but you still haven't figured out how Max was involved in a legal sense. If you confront him, he would just deny any wrong-doing. In the meantime you would also have the authorities chasing you.”

  “Would they ever find out? We all know they are as effective as a blind man playing charades,” I said.

  “It would be very hard to stop them finding out eventually...” said Conrad.

  “Which is why I would use improbability theory to force Max to confess,” added Karmen.

  “Ok,” said Terri standing. “I've come here for one reason and one reason only. All this discussion is just a distraction. After I've said my piece, you can go your merry way and get into any-sort-of-trouble-you-want by yourselves.”

  “Ok, Terri, what have you got to say?” said Conrad.

  “This is going to seem pretty unbelievable, so I'll try to talk you through it in small stages.”

  ***

  A re-imagining of Tuesday, January 29, 2123.

  Terri was right. No-one believed her. Not at first. It was just too incredible. There was shouting, crying and arguing for many hours going over the same old ground in a cyclic fashion. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, so let's just say this is what transpired. Imagine we were in an English country garden in the spring, with cherry blossomed trees and birds chirping and butterflies floating passed. We were all sipping tea and had scones, jam and clotted cream. (Remember this discussion didn’t really happen this way).

  Terri sitting rigidly in her seat due to her tight Victorian corset made a comical remark that she had heard that “physicists” considered the past and future all as one, that time was just a dimension to space time. The “present” an illusion created by consciousness and that was not associated to the physical nature of space-time. Conrad, Karmen and I, all also wearing appropriate English Victorian attire for this fantasy reenactment, made appreciative comments about this clever woman’s humour.

  But then Terri made a comment that went beyond the gentle confines of polite conversation, to-wit, an announcement, “I have to say that, by the levels of coincidences, the fact that everything ties back to Max and my own experience in losing three months of my life, and much cogitation since the events of 2117 and 2118, I am led to believe that Max has achieved the seemingly impossible...”

  We stopped our tea supping for a moment, to obtain an advancement of further information.

  “And what, by perchance, would that be?” said Karmen haughtily.

  Terri said, “I believe that Max has successfully invented time travel.”

  The three of us voiced our disbelief, in suitable terms, to a woman stepping beyond the bounds of reason, “Tsk, tsk, no, no. Terri, this is a most distressing misdirection of our lovely tea party. Max is a fine gentleman and has been very kind and benevolent to us, even if slightly overly amorous in his inclination towards you, I am sure that he would not hide such secrets from us. And such technology is way beyond current technology and capacity.”

  But Terri insisted. She described her journey in Max's matter transfer machine and losing three months of her life. She proposed that Max could use the same technology to travel to the future and perhaps find technology to send himself back to present day or earlier times. After finishing our scones and after much discussion, we eventually conceded that Max could indeed have created an image of himself and propagated copies of himself into future times. Conrad tried to pooh-pooh the suggestion of time travel backwards in time due to fundamental laws of physics, time anomalies, and the creation of parallel time lines. He said, “And in any case, I would have noticed more than one Max wandering around.”

  Terri delicately described the properties of faster than light communication using quantum entanglement and its use in the matter transporter. “It could, therefore, be used in faster than light transportation of matter including the reproduction of people,” she said.

  Conrad, red-faced, conceded this theoretical point.

  Then Terri returned to the point of whether Conrad would notice multiple Maxes.

  “But would you, Sir? Where does Max spend his time?”

  “At his laboratory.”

  “Alone?”

  “Indeed.”

  “And not at Mad-Sci-Soc?”

  “No, he moved his equipment to his personal laboratory at Quantact.”

  “So the opportunities of multiple Maxes in a single time zone is at least a possibility.”

  “He would not go about his business unchallenged. If there were multiple Maxes, one would be picked up by the Bobbies (Police). He would not have the right documentation. (Certification).”

  “But,” I offered to Conrad. “You, yourself, do not have the right documentation.”

  Conrad conceded my point, he was invisible to the authorities, and therefore, technically, yes, multiple Maxes could exist in any time zone. There were ways of avoiding the attention of the authorities with the aid of Mad-Sci-Soc's administrative Get-Out-Jail-Free cards. “But,” Conrad insisted, “there would be multiple other strange things occurring that we would notice.”

  Karmen suggested that the trauma that would be caused by meeting one's future self would be impossible to conceal.

  “While I'm sure this would be real for most people,” said Terri. “I do not think this would be a problem for a person with the particular neurotical characteristics that Max exhibits.”

  Karmen admired Terri's little joke and agreed that his analytical demeanour would allow him to withstand such shock, especially if he was aspiring to that eventuality.

  So, we agreed on the theoretical possibility of at least one, or indeed, more than one Maxes moving forward in time and the possibly, at least in theory, for his return back to this time. But what was the actual evidence that Max was indeed a time traveller, what strange anomalies has she noticed?

  Terri laid out the evidence with all the skill of an Agatha Christie detective. “To everyone here we would not notice anything. The only way to understand time travel would be to experience it in the first person. To anyone else, there may be nothing to notice at all, just the merest hints that something was amiss. I can point out such an anomaly, the earliest and only obvious example. I believe it was when Max first returned to this time zone due to his clumsiness and lack of imagination.”

  “Oh,” said the assembled tea drinkers.

  “He won the state lottery in 2116.”

  “Shared second prize,” remarked Conrad.

  “Second prize in order to avoid the publicity of winning first prize.”

  Conrad rubbed his chin.

  “And then what did he do with that money?” asked Terri, knowing the answer.

  “Invested in Quantact,” intoned Conrad and Karmen.

  “At that time, a very small company, which then?” conducted Terri.

  “Was bought up by Ms Bell,” the three of us said.

  “And so...”

  “He was really, really rich,” I suggested.

  “Rich and powerful. However he still hun
g around at our club despite the obvious conflict of interest between developing Intellectual Property and re-using open source technology. Rather than concentrating on that, he was busy with research... on what? Sentience and Consciousness. Why these topics?”

  We looked at each other and then back to Terri.

  “Because,” said Terri. “He is interested in another thing... not only in matters of the flesh and his apparent infatuation with me, but there is one other reason.”

  “And that is?” I asked.

  “Immortality!”

  Saucers hit the floor.

  “A thoroughly monumental and startling deduction, Terri. Pray tell how did you come to this conclusion?” asked Conrad, stretching this tea party metaphor to the diametric opposite of reality.

  “I will gladly share such information, my dear Conrad,” replied Terri. “Firstly he has expressed to me an opinion that I, too, should desire such. Secondly, Max is the University's most avid researcher in the science of consciousness and its maintenance between human and man-made environments, and thirdly, he has demonstrated the use of sophisticated and devious stratagems that have made me wary of all aspects of his behaviour.”

  “The use of devious stratagems does not imply a thirst for immortality,” riposted Conrad delicately.

  “True. But once coupled with his defensive tactics, his deep knowledge of psychology and the preservation of the mind beyond the limits of corpuscular endurance, then it is a logical conclusion.”

  “This is just too much for me to process. First you say my good friend and partner is a time traveller. Second that he has used a time traveling ability to attempt to seduce you, and thirdly, his overall and yet secret motive for this, other than carnal lust, is to live forever? Your premise is based upon assigning to him a belief in a trans-humanist agenda and yet, contrary to your supposition, he shuns upgrades himself. I find this irrational in the extreme.”