K-Rox lost himself in contemplation, he found himself drifting back to another happier time, he remembered the smell of brine as he and Amorphia stood on a beach of pure white sands stretching out to meet an incoming tide.
“How do you tell which memories are truly yours K-bot?”
“Huh? They’re all mine, I made them in the first place!”
He smiled, she did not return it, for once their moods did not match, K-Rox felt in a stupidly happy mood. Amorphia had spoken about getting a body and wanting to see Mars, he couldn’t stop thinking about having her in the real.
He knew it would be complicated, she was FMS human, however wanted an organic human clone, there would be problems as to how her brain would be housed, but K-Rox was confident that they were close to being together in the real.
“Point taken K-bot, I suppose what I was getting at is; what portion of your memory is stored in your brain and what percentage on your Nplants?”
“Um, I’ve never thought of it like that before, I don’t know, I could check if you’d let me use my Nplants.”
He flashed her grin, returned with a weary, yet fond smile.
“The whole point of us having these talks Kay is for me to gauge what human experience is, how can I do that if you keep filtering your experiences through machines?”
Amorphia’s sombre mood started to affect K-Rox; he dwelt for a while on what she had just said before he answered her.
“I suppose I don’t see any difference between my machine brain and my organic one. They are one of the same thing, they both play a role in my wellbeing and so are both equally as important.”
“But they aren’t the same thing K-bot, your consolidated long-term memories are stored throughout your organic brain as groups of neurons that are primed to fire together in the same pattern that created the original experience. With each component of a memory being stored in the brain area that initiated it.
That is particularly true of us K-Rox, when we’re together and you’ve turned your Nplants off, the memories we form together are stored in your organic brain. Remember standing naked on the frozen tundra?”
He nodded, he remembered her persuading him to turn off all non-critical emergency procedures in his nanoswarm, it wasn’t a pleasant sensation.
“Well the memory of that is stored in the parts of your motor cortex that reacted to the harsh winds that day. In your primary auditory cortex you remember the words we shouted to each other above the howling winds. Your visual cortex remembers how the rain pooled in between my collarbones before running down my breast . .
Those are real memories Kay, they can’t be edited, or deleted, they are stored using basic binary algorithms that were laid down hundreds of millions to billions of years ago. The memories may fade, but they’ll always be the same; those are the memories I want K-bot, I want real honest-to-goodness organic memories."
He had never seen such pleading in her eyes, he had become so used to her unflappable demeanour, and pragmatic analysis of human life, that he was thrown by this new vulnerable Amorphia.
"This is the person I want to be Kay.”
She stepped closer to him so that their lips were only centimetres apart, small grains of sand pooled between his toes, slipping over each other finding the path of least resistance across his feet. The sound of the incoming waves crashing in the distance provided a dramatic auditory accompaniment to their conversation.
He felt her breath tickle his upper lip and nostrils as she spoke barely above a whisper
“If I manage to upload into a blank Kay, I don’t want Nplants, I don’t want an empLink, I want to be with you on Mars and forget everything . . every . . . everyone, but I’d need you to do it with me; and I’m not sure you could.”
It was clearly a question even though she hadn’t phrased it so, K-Rox was afraid to answer, and he knew why; he knew that she was right.
K-Rox snapped out of his reverie, Jemima-479 was still looking at him intently, her thin spike of a tail hovered two feet above her head, ready to strike him down. K-Rox simply stated:
“I’m in, I’ll do it, let's go.”
Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 51 - A Time For Death
Asimov's Ghost Summary and Chapter Links 41-50
Asimov's Ghost Summary and Chapter Links 31-40
Asimov's Ghost Summary And Chapter links 21-30
Original artwork by @fr3eze
Original words by Cryptogee