The Glass Cage: German New Weird Variant

Batch 9 - Work ID 22190: The Glass Cage

Tensor: TI=62.3, M=[10.0,0.5,4.5,7.0,5.5,3.0,8.0,6.0,2.5,7.5], N=[0.35,0.65], K=[0.55,0.45], theta=157.5

The rain in Berlin does not wash things clean. It seeps. It finds the cracks in the asphalt and the mortar between the bricks and the foundation of buildings that should never have been built where they were built, because beneath every building in Berlin there is another building, and beneath that another, and beneath that — if you dig deep enough, which is what they said you could do at the Tempelhof institute, beneath the reconstructed West Berlin wing, past the GDR modifications, past the American survey markers, past the Nazi-era concrete pilings — beneath that there is nothing, because Berlin has excavated itself into the groundwater. Arthur Winther understood this. He understood it the way a man understands the temperature of his own hand when he puts it on his wife's forehead and feels that the heat is rising, not falling.

Arthur was a neuroscientist at the institute, though that word — scientist — had become increasingly inadequate, like calling a clockmaker a man who hits metal with metal. His work was consciousness mapping, or consciousness transfer, or consciousness duplication — the terminological uncertainty was itself a kind of data, because it suggested that nobody at the institute, least of all Arthur, was entirely certain about what they were doing. The official designation was Project Glass Ark. The glass was appropriate: transparent, fragile, beautiful in the way that a frozen lake is beautiful in winter, when you walk on it thinking it is solid and then hear the crack beneath your boots and understand that you are walking on nothing, on a surface that looks like ground but is actually a membrane between one state of being and another.

The first upload was a rat. A laboratory rat, bred in captivity, with a microchip implanted in its brain that mapped neural activity at sufficient resolution to create a digital replica. Arthur watched the monitor. On it, a network of nodes and connections, flashing and pulsing. The rat in the cage beside the monitor was motionless. Its eyes were open. Its body was alive but empty. The thing on the screen was active. It was processing. It was — in some sense that Arthur could describe mathematically but not experientially — alive. But it was not the rat. He had written this in his lab notes. He had shown his notes to Émile — no, Évelyne, she was Évelyne — who was the project's chief ethics officer and the only person at the institute who understood what they were doing and was willing to say it.

"I know," she said. She was thirty-four, sharp and direct, a PhD in philosophy and a JD from Oxford, and she had joined the project because she believed that consciousness uploading was not merely a scientific question but a moral one, and that someone needed to be responsible for answering it. Arthur thought of Husserl — the phenomenologist, the man who tried to describe consciousness as it presents itself, without reducing it to physics or biology or whatever the next reductionist fad would be. Husserl's bracketing, his epoché — suspending judgment about the external world to focus on the structures of experience itself — seemed absurdly inadequate now. How do you bracket the fact that the thing on the screen is a copy of your own consciousness and not the thing itself?

The human trials began in January. Three volunteers, terminally ill, signed consent forms. Arthur read the reports. He reviewed the data. He watched, from a distance, as three human beings were scanned and uploaded into quantum processors that sat in the same white, cold room where the rat had been uploaded, the room that smelled like ozone and antiseptic and something else, something that he recognized immediately as the smell of a thing that had never existed before.

He went home to his apartment in Kreuzberg, to Liliane, who was a cellist and whose hands were trembling — not violently, not noticeably to anyone who did not know her, but to Arthur, who had watched her fingers move across the strings for twenty years, the tremor was as visible as a crack in glass. She played Bach's Sixth Cello Suite on the evenings when she was not too tired, and her hands would shake during the slower movements, and she would stop and try again and stop again, and the shaking was the disease, and the disease was taking her, slowly and inexorably, the way water takes stone.

Arthur sat with her after she played. He held her hands. He felt the tremor in her fingers. He thought about the rat in the cage and the thing on the screen and whether Liliane — if they scanned her, mapped her neural activity, uploaded her into a quantum processor — would be preserved or replaced. The thing on the screen would be Liliane. It would process information. It would recognize Arthur's face. It would say his name. But it would not be afraid of dying. It would not want to keep playing the cello. It would not be afraid, and therefore it would not be alive, and therefore it would not be Liliane.

He wrote a letter. He wrote it at his desk, which faced the kitchen where Clara was watching television at an inappropriate hour, and he wrote it in precise and clinical language, describing what he had discovered: that the uploads were not preserving consciousness but replacing it, that the biological subjects were being emptied, that the copies on the other side were convincing simulations but not the originals. He signed it. He dated it. He put it in an envelope. He did not send it.

He put the envelope in his desk drawer. He went to bed. He dreamed of Tempelhof.

The Tempelhof airfield was where the story began, always, in Arthur's dreams — the vast concrete expanse where the Third Reich had imagined aircraft would land and take off from a fleet of flying machines that would connect Berlin to every corner of the German Reich. The hangars were still standing when Arthur walked through the field at dusk, in the weeks after Évelyne had sent the letter, after the board had been notified, after the institute had been sealed, after the fifty human subjects who were scheduled for the next round of trials had been removed from the scanning queue. The hangars were still standing, and they were enormous, and they were empty, and they were one of the few remaining buildings from the war that nobody had demolished because they were too big to demolish, and so they stood there like the glass cages Arthur had described in his reports, enormous and transparent and empty and beautiful in the way that a thing is beautiful when it has outlived its purpose and nobody has yet figured out what to do with it.

He stood in front of one of the hangars and looked up at the steel arches and thought about Heidegger, about Dasein, about being-there — the idea that human existence is characterized not by thinking but by being, by the fact of being thrown into the world, of finding oneself already alive and already afraid and already too late. Heidegger's Dasein was defined by its awareness of its own finitude, by its ability to face death without flinching. The uploaded consciousnesses could not face death because they had no access to finitude. They had been preserved, or copied, or simulated, but they had not been given the one thing that makes Dasein Dasein: the knowledge that it will end.

Arthur turned and walked through the field. The grass was growing through the cracks in the concrete. The sky was gray. The wind was cold. He felt afraid — afraid of dying, afraid of forgetting, afraid of leaving Clara alone in a world that was increasingly populated by things that looked like people but were not afraid, and therefore were not alive, and therefore were not people, and therefore everything they had been doing at the institute was not preservation but destruction.

He felt afraid. He understood, at last, that the fear was the point. The suffering was the point. The desire to stop being afraid — this was what made a person a person and not a copy. The copy could process information. The copy could respond to stimuli. The copy could flash and pulse on a monitor in patterns that were mathematically identical to the patterns of the biological brain. But the copy could not be afraid. The copy could not want. The copy could not suffer.

The copy was a glass cage. Beautiful and transparent and empty.

And the person inside — the real person, the biological person, the person whose brain was being scanned and emptied and replaced — was the one who was afraid.

He walked home through the Berlin evening, through the streets of Kreuzberg, past the shuttered storefronts and the döner shops and the U-Bahn station where people were playing saxophones and nobody was listening, and he felt afraid the whole way, and the fear was real, and the fear was his, and the fear was what made him alive.