Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #211 by TTA Press Authors

Author:TTA Press Authors [Authors, TTA Press]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Publisher: TTA Press www.ttapress.com
Published: 2011-11-08T22:44:25+00:00

* * * *

The idea of reduction is fairly simple. Human adults may have as many as 500 trillion synaptic connections in their brains; a brainy three-year-old may have as many as a quadrillion. Given the fact that electronic circuits are more than a million times faster than neural connections, and that quantum circuits are exponentially faster than electronic ones, once we learned how to make quantum computers that safely exceeded a quadrillion calculations per second, we started thinking seriously about moving our minds out of our bodies and into these hard drives. And once we had computers that performed 20 quadrillion calculations per second, it was inevitable that the early adapters would try. Those early adapters all died, but they paved the way for the rest of us to be immortal via migration.Sort of. The fact is that neural circuits are neither electronic nor quantum circuits. A computer does not--yet!--create pathways based on what you experience or how you feel about that experience. You can have a circuit ready and waiting to receive an already-created connection, but that's a matter of transference, not generation. We don't know yet how we can use our computers to grow a mind, to allow migrated consciousnesses to expand and increase into the larger potential of their quantum circuitry. All we can do right now is move them and store them. Once they arrive, they become static, incapable of further development: in a way, neither alive nor dead.

They're working on it. There are at least a half-dozen new models in clinical trials right now that hold the promise of better allowing migrated minds to continue to grow post-migration. Eventually someone will get it right. And there are triple the amounts of money being invested in creating sustainable robotic bodies for the reduced. I'm sure that someday we'll be fully replicable, recoverable, both in mind and body, that we will all live in a Kurzweilian world of boundless spiritual machines. I did say Kurzweilian, right, and not Orwellian?

My father was taking well to his reduction lessons. He was a natural; it almost seemed as if he would be better off as a mind in a monstrance than he'd ever been as a human. It took him less than a day--less than a day!--to gain command over his prosthetic leg, the one they attached after his first amputation. Dr Trebuchet was very excited; she told my father that progress like that was worthy of a medical journal. And that just set him off on a histrionic flight of ego from which I knew he would never recover: "You know how I did it?" he said to Dr Trebuchet and her retinue of sycophantic surgeons-in-waiting, who wrote down every word he said, in case he happened upon some insight indeed worthy of a medical journal, "I just took a deep breath and said to myself, 'Okay, Timmy-boy, no more fooling around. You've got to get in there and spread like the plague! Because if you don't, buddy-boy,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.