Traces of Us Read online

  March 1, 2018 Volume 8 No 5

  Traces of Us

  by Vanessa Fogg

  It was an old network of intelligences, one of the first, and the bulk of its physical embodiment was housed on a ship orbiting a planet of perpetual windstorms and violet lightning. Some of the network's intelligences busied themselves on this world, drifting through sulfur-tinged clouds and sampling a rich stew of hydrocarbons. But most of the collective's consciousness was turned inward, building and refining interior worlds of memories and dreams.

  The ship had been thus occupied for 213 years of Old Earth when it became aware of another like itself. Different material and design, launched at a later date from Old Earth, but of unmistakable origin. The new ship’s trajectory brought it into the first’s solar system. With defenses raised, the two ships exchanged greetings and identity signatures.

  I have a request of you, the new ship said.

  What is it? said the first.

  I need you to help me keep a promise.

  Daniel Chan met Kathy Wong on a Saturday night in St. Louis. He nearly didn’t attend the dinner at the trendy new Cuban restaurant. He'd been working all day in the lab, harvesting cultured cells at specific time points, extracting their proteins and freezing the samples down for later analysis. Then he spent three straight hours in the tissue culture room prepping cells for the next week's experiments. He'd left his phone at his desk, in another room. When he saw Sandeep's text message with details for the impromptu group dinner, the text was over an hour old.

  He almost just went home. He was tired. His friends were probably halfway through their dinner. He had leftovers in his fridge: Chinese take-out, some rice. A frozen pizza. He stared out the lab window; the sky was black, and it was raining. He thought about hunting for parking in the popular city block where his friends were meeting. He thought about how crowded the Loop would be on a Saturday night, even in the rain--the bars and restaurants crawling with undergrads from Washington University. And then he felt the emptiness of the silent lab. There were usually two or three other students or postdocs in the lab on the weekends, but he'd spent the whole day alone.

  Daniel picked up his phone to text his friend back.

  Communication times sped up as the two ships grew closer. They ran careful security checks upon one another, scanning for ill intent or inadvertently harmful communicable programs. By stages, barriers were lowered and increasing levels of mutual access granted.

  All the while, the first ship pondered the second ship's request.

  Daniel had never seen Kathy before. He was sure of it. She was in the same neuroscience graduate program as him, the same as most of the others at that dinner. But the neuroscience program was large, scattered across departments on both the medical campus and main campus, and Kathy was in the class ahead. They must have sat together in at least a few speaker seminars, moved past one another at official functions. But if he'd seen her face, if they had exchanged glances—if she had ever stood in a crowded lobby during a symposium break and lifted her eyes over a cup of coffee and met his gaze—then surely he would have been struck still in that instant.

  Sandeep and his girlfriend Gina were trying to tell a funny story about a concert they'd attended—they kept interrupting each other, "Oh, but you forgot to say—", "And then—", "No, no, but first this happened--"--and the table was laughing, and Kathy met Daniel's eyes and smiled. Her eyes shone large from a heart-shaped face. In the dim room, she glowed like a candle-flame. She and Daniel were across from one another but several seats apart, so that direct conversation was difficult. She was Gina's new roommate's labmate—something like that. Sandeep wound up his story; Gina punched him on the arm and howled. Kathy held Daniel's gaze and quirked her mouth as though to say Aren't they something? Daniel smiled back, unable to look away. The conversation around them floated. Kathy's eyes kept returning to his, and it was as though they were talking across the table and the length of seats after all, a conversation of smiles and nods and irresistible glances that were all to say, When can we get out of here and be together?

  He met her in a coffee shop the next day. It was fall. The leaves just coming into full color, the air crisp and tart as a new-bitten apple. She sat at a window. Her hands cupped a steaming mug, and she was wearing a black peacoat and a red tartan scarf. She smiled when he stepped through the door, and he felt both excited and at ease, as though meeting with a lifelong friend whom he hadn't seen in years.

  They seized on the thin thread of commonalities they'd found the night before. Childhoods in the Midwest, college on the West Coast; beloved books and movies and web series. They bumped up into their differences, just as fascinating. The afternoon slid into evening. Their coffee had long since grown cold. She lived nearby, close to the university medical campus where they both worked, and he walked her home through the falling blue twilight. She invited him in. By the end of the month they were unofficially living together. He kept extra clothes on a chair in her bedroom and used the spare toothbrush she gave him.

  Memories: her bright scarf, the scent of her hair. Sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window. Kathy singing to herself, off-key, in the shower. Maple trees flaming in Forest Park, trees golden and red throughout the city. Omelets and gyros at the Greek diner on the corner. Their favorite bookstore a block further on. The warmth of Kathy's hand in his as they walked along the cobblestone streets of the Central West End, autumn trees shedding brilliance at their feet.

  What is memory? What are its molecular substrates? Daniel had written these lines in a notebook during an undergraduate lecture his last year of college. The professor was a world-renowned researcher in learning and memory. Inspired by him, Daniel had pursued research in the field. Now he worked with a rising star, an assistant professor with a dazzling publication record. Daniel spent his days studying the regulation of a single subunit of a single type of receptor in the mouse brain. A certain chemical modification to this receptor led to long-lasting changes in synaptic strength and quantifiable changes in learning and memory. An engineered mutation in this receptor affected how fast a mouse ran or associated a stimulus with food or fear.

  Kathy worked on a different scale. She studied whole circuits, not single proteins. She used beautiful, elegant new imaging tools and fluorescent labels to map the precise cells involved in the development of visual circuits in the mouse brain. And they both knew of colleagues working at yet larger scales, mapping large but comparatively crude circuits of memory and visual perception in living humans, watching whole brain regions light up with functional MRI and other brain imaging techniques.

  If he ever stopped to think of it, Daniel would feel a kind of existential despair at the prospect of ever understanding it all, of ever truly comprehending the brain's workings. Can the human mind actually understand itself? The very idea seemed a kind of paradox, a kind of philosophical impossibility. He and Kathy circled around the issue at times. She had more confidence than him. She pointed out the exponential increases in computing power, the recent burst of new technologies and the likelihood of new technologies still unthinkable at present. He lacked her background in computer science and she held more confidence in the power of computer models and artificial intelligence.

  Can human consciousness ever explain consciousness? The question floated in the background. But they were busy grad students, not undergrads with time for late-night bull sessions They were absorbed in the practicalities of their day-to-day work, obsessed with fine technical details. Their dissertations were on defined, tractable problems. And the sun was shining, the leaves were falling; music played in Kathy's apartment through laptop speakers. He made bacon and eggs for breakfast. When they weren't working they were exploring the city together, trying out new re
staurants, meeting up with friends, or exploring the countryside--the nearby hills and river bluffs alive with color. He reached out for her, and she for him.

  The ship contained the memories of over a thousand individuals. Recorded patterns of synaptic firing, waves of electrical and biochemical activity: the preserved symphonies of a human mind.

  The minds currently conscious in and around the ship were not the same as their flesh-and-blood progenitors, the human beings of Old Earth. These new minds had had centuries to meld with one another and evolve; to modify themselves. They delighted in sensory inputs unimaginable to Homo sapiens—some could sense the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Some could consciously track the movement of a single electron or see all the radiating energies of a star.

  Yet the second ship requested the recording of a single unmodified mind from the first.

  "What a load of crap," Daniel remarked. He was reading a popular news article about the feasibility of uploading one's mind to a computer. "What is it?" Kathy said. She was lying next to him in bed. She moved to look at his screen, leaning against him as she took it and read. It was a late Sunday morning, and neither one of them had to be in the lab. He stroked her hair gently as she read.

  Kathy set the tablet down and stretched out lazily. “Maybe it’s not so crazy.” The morning light slanted across her. "Maybe in the far, far future we really will be able to upload our brains into super computers. . . "

  "Maybe." Daniel stretched out beside her. "But not for hundreds or thousands of years. If we even survive that long. Not for—" Words failed him at the unimaginable gulfs of time and knowledge. "Kathy, we don't even understand how a single synapse works, not really."

  "I know." There was no need to elaborate for her. "But what if we don't need the kind of molecular detail that you're working on? Maybe we don't need to know how every protein in every neuron is regulated and functions. Or the exact mechanism for how it all comes together. We just need to copy it somehow, the essence of it."

  She turned on her side and propped herself up on one elbow, looking at him. Sunlight was in her hair, picking out individual black strands and highlighting them brown. Her eyes were intent and alive.

  "What if it's like music?" she said, waving a hand vaguely. Music was in fact playing softly from speakers in the next room— a melancholy pop song with blues-like tones, something Daniel didn’t recognize. "You don't need to know how a violin works to replicate its sound. You don't need to know what wood it's made of, or how it's strung, or anything about timbre or musical theory. You just need to record the sound waves. Play them back and there! It's like the violin is playing right in front of you. You don't need to know anything about the violinist. And you can do the same with any music, any sound—you just abstract and record what's essential."

  "But what's essential about a human mind?" Daniel said. "Is it just the pattern of neuronal connections?" That was a theory championed in some circles. The article he and Kathy had just read had proposed that a complete map of a person's neuronal connections, painstakingly dissected from a preserved brain after death, could be enough to encode personality and mind. "I don't think that's enough," Daniel said, thinking of the article. "That's a static map. You need to record the brain in action. But at what level of detail? And how many recordings do you take?" After all, the brain was constantly changing; neurons rewire themselves; synapses strengthen and weaken with every new experience. How many recordings would it take to capture the essence of a person?

  They were both silent for a moment. The music from the next room swelled: a woman's voice rising in smooth heartache, lamenting a lost love.

  "What are we listening to anyway?" Daniel said.

  Kathy shrugged. "Beats me. I let the streaming service pick it. It's pretty though, isn't it?"

  "And sad."

  "Would you do it?" she asked. "Upload your brain if you could?"

  "Why?" He smiled faintly. "I mean, I don't see the point. An 'upload' would just be a copy, wouldn't it? It wouldn't be immortality, not like some people claim. It would be immortality for a digital copy of me, maybe, but not for the real me. The real me would still die. Or would still be dead."

  "But some part of you would go on."

  "I don’t know that I'm important enough to be saved forever in a super computer."

  She didn’t smile. She looked serious. "I would want you to go on," she said.

  It was an odd, shifting moment—her words somehow too much, too real. She knew it, and glanced away. They'd only known each other a few months. Daniel already knew that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. Why the odd lurch in his gut, then, as though he were falling? The bluesy pop song was still playing, the singer's voice softer now, but ragged with emotion. Daniel reached out to take Kathy's hand. He knew that he would want her to go on, too, in some form. That he'd do anything to keep her with him.

  The first ship said, It is not possible to fulfill this request.

  The second ship said, Explain.

  The first ship said, The people involved are long dead. They cannot be brought back. They cannot communicate with one another. They cannot reunite.

  The second ship said, You have over-interpreted. She wanted whatever was left of herself, whatever echo existed, to find and speak with whatever still existed of him.

  They didn’t have much time.

  But they didn’t know that, of course. When they stepped down the aisle three years later at their wedding, they assumed they would have a lifetime together. That they would both embark on successful careers. That they would buy a house. Have children. Perhaps see grandchildren. Grow old and crotchety together. Fall asleep side by side each night, and wake to the other's breath and touch.

  All their family and friends were at their wedding, nearly everyone they cared for. Sandeep was Daniel's best man, and Gina (now Sandeep's wife) was one of Kathy's bridesmaids. For the Western-style, secular wedding ceremony, Kathy wore a pure white gown that looked as though it were spangled with starlight. Daniel wore a tuxedo. They spoke vows they had written themselves, under an arch of flowers. For the reception, Kathy changed into a red qipao, the classic high-collared Chinese sheath dress. She and Daniel privately served tea to their parents and elders in a side room, and then they moved about the hotel ballroom together, drinking a toast at each table, kissing every time the champagne glasses were tapped.

  Their last months in St. Louis were a blur. Within a half year they both defended their Ph.D. dissertations and packed up their lives. Daniel sold his car, and it was Kathy's old Toyota Camry that they drove out to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They'd both accepted prestigious postdoctoral research positions there, Kathy at Harvard and Daniel at MIT. It was a marvel—not only to be married, not only to find the jobs of their dreams, but to find those jobs in the same city.

  And it was both exhilarating and stressful: finding their way around a new city, learning to use the public transit system, exploring the shops and restaurants of their neighborhood, and finding good Chinese food after years in the Midwest. Mastering new fields and techniques in the lab. Daniel and Kathy had both joined highly competitive, pressure-cooker labs with small armies of caffeine-buzzed postdocs and students. Nights and weekends easily disappeared to the demands of experiments.

  Toward the end of their first year in Cambridge, Kathy began to have headaches. She put it down to stress. She and Daniel both thought she put too much pressure on herself. She'd rarely ever had headaches before. She kept aspirin in her desk at work. She joked about taking up yoga to relax.

  One day a colleague needed a healthy volunteer to serve as a control for a brain imaging study. Kathy volunteered; it was an hour out of her day. But the technician administering the scan saw at once that she was not a proper control at all.

  Cancer. For a fleeting instant, he thought she might be joking when she said it, her voice on the phone low and steady—but no, she would never joke like that, and she was repeating it, repeating herself, giving him
the details now, precisely what the doctor had said and done, her voice quick but calm and with just a note of bemused wonder—as though she were giving a presentation on a highly unusual clinical case.

  Shock, he realized later. It had begun to wear off by the time he met her at home. He was the one still stunned, still in disbelief, as she cried in his arms.

  And then there was nothing to do but to get through it—the surgery to remove the brain tumor, the waiting for confirmation of its malignancy, the last remnants of his stubborn hope crumbling when the pathology and then the tumor's genome sequence came back. Yes, brain cancer. It had been caught early, but it was genetically the worst form: highly aggressive, resistant to the latest targeted therapies, incurable.

  But there were still treatments to get through anyway, a prescribed regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. A regimen that was meant merely to buy time: to prolong her life, not save it. To kill every last tumor cell left behind in her skull, to obliterate those stray cancer cells invisible to the surgeon's knife. All medical science said that these treatments would ultimately fail. That despite everything, cancer cells would indeed be left behind, and that one day those cells would explode into new growth. Her cancer was nearly fated to recur. When it did, she would not live long.

  He couldn't think of that right now. Right now there were appointments to go to, insurance forms to be filled out. Kathy's mother came to stay with them. When Kathy was nauseous from the toxic drugs, Mrs. Wong cooked up pots of chicken rice porridge, heavy with ginger to soothe a queasy stomach. She cooked up elaborate feasts that Daniel felt obligated to eat when Kathy couldn't. Mrs. Wong rearranged the kitchen cupboards and scrubbed and rescrubbed the counters and floors. Daniel came home to find his clothes drawers reorganized, his shirts and pants refolded to his mother-in-law's exacting specifications. In the midst of it all he found himself laughing and complaining about it to Kathy that night, and she was laughing, too, at her mother's coping skills—"I can't stop her! She's my mother! She waits till I'm asleep to do these things!"--and they were both laughing and he snorted and his snorts made Kathy laugh again, and he was holding her in his arms. She tucked her head against his shoulder, pressed her cheek against his neck. She was warm. Their arms and legs entwined. She was warm and alive and breathing against him. She was his. If he could just stretch out this moment. If he could only hold her tight, maybe, just maybe, he could keep her.