So long as I had a single stream of consciousness and wasn't a network of individuals linked together, then if one body was destroyed and replaced, it became a Ship of Theseus situation rather than a replaced by a clone situation. At least, that was my opinion, although I would definitely try to avoid dying anyway.
There was just the issue that the human brain was definitely not designed for sensory multiplexing. I had tons of ideas on how to create a brain that did support that feature, but the issue was it wouldn't be my brain . It was much harder to add these types of features to a brain that already existed compared to designing them in vitro. Consciousness was an emergent property, even for me, and without a lot of testing, it would be quite dangerous.
These neural oscillation synchronisers, however, seemed to use a cybernetic mechanical solution to this problem while I had been thinking of how to safely deploy a biological one. They claimed that they linked the large-scale brain networks together fairly seamlessly.
It was wrong to think of the brain as a monolith in the first place. It was wrong to even think of individual brain regions as a monolith. My consciousness was comprised of a series of functional connectivity networks in the first place, so it should be possible to add more without losing the spark that was me.
How interesting. I shifted back to the patient records and looked at the proposed treatment plan provided by Zetatech and sucked my teeth in disappointment, "Tsk... this is going to have to be all changed. Why are they trying to do it on the cheap?"
I shook my head and lifted my hand off the biometric scanning plate, which caused the open file to close and the room to unlock. I triggered deep dive mode on my deck but just sat in my inner bastion node and rezzed in some virtual paper to write notes. I didn't bring any physical paper into this room with me, which was an oversight, and sometimes I preferred to write things down the old-fashioned way.
The augmented reality mode of modern cyberdecks was quite slick, but it still wasn't in the realm of rendering full-sense interactive virtual objects and pasting them into your sensorium yet.
"Hoot," my ICON said, and I frowned, waving a wing and talon. I had never actually updated my ICON to something different. That was bad, but I hadn't actually had much time to dive into the net since I had been in LA.
I asked Dr Iverson to come along when I met with the Zetatech tech rep. I could immediately tell it wasn't the person who invented this technology but possibly one of their minions, or research assistants, rather.
I wanted to interrupt him, but Dr Hasumi was too polite to do so, so instead, I waited until he finished his presentation. When he asked if we had any questions or concerns, I nodded, "Yes. The two patients are monozygotic twins, clones from a genetic perspective. That's good. However, they've diverged significantly since then. Look, each twin has a different model of operating system and different optics. Then there are various other factors, like a poorly healed meniscus injury on patient A, and patient B has two missing molars. These factors need to be normalised."
He frowned and said, "What do you mean?"
"Remove and replace all of their implants with identical models. Neither of their OSes was designed for the high-speed neural architecture your widget uses, anyway. Repair and regenerate patient A's meniscus, regenerate patient B's molars, et cetera," I said simply.
The guy shook his head, "None of that is in the research budget; we can't-"
This time I did interrupt him, but as politely as I could by raising my hand until he stopped speaking himself. I leaned forward, "Please stop trying to spend an eddie to save an ennie. You're going to implicate your research results if you don't correct for every factor you can on the front end, and worse, you're going to implicate them in a false negative. And worst of all, this is all cheap!"
Also, with identical everything, it would reduce the amount of mental instability this procedure would cause them. Plus, from my perspective, it would give me more data if I could observe them when they were as close to identical as possible. I was sure that Zetatech didn't care about their research subject's stability, but in this case, they should because it would impact their data from the experiment. I continued, "Plus, you produce all of this stuff yourself, except for optics which are cheap anyway. Why would you even entertain the idea of not changing everything to your company standard? Are you going to rely on the word of their current OS manufacturers, BioDyne and Meditech, that they implemented the common high-speed data bus and followed the entire standard correctly? If you have issues in the future, how will you isolate for this and debug it? You could be chasing your tail for months before you realise some issue you notice in these subjects is not even your problem."
He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he was silent for a good minute before saying, "That is a good point. I'm going to have to call Dr Reynolds. If you'll excuse me for a moment."
When he left, Dr Iverson nodded at me appreciatively and said, "You vaporised him, Dr Hasumi. Preem. I hadn't even looked at the specifics of each patient yet; I was focusing on how we will connect the device so thoroughly." He held his hand out for a fist bump, which I obliged.
"So, today we'll R&R everything on A and B, give them the rest of the day to acclimate to the new Zetatech systems, then tomorrow do the procedure?" he asked, testing the idea.
"Yup," I said in a somewhat un-Hasumi way, emphasising the "p" sound of the word excessively, "Draw up orders now to admit them both, too. They can spend the night in medsurge; otherwise, one of them will get hit by a bus on the way home or some other complication, and then we'll be back at square one tomorrow."
I did see the patients, a set of brothers by the name of Paul and Will Ochoki. Personally, I did think they were on the borderline of being crazy. They clearly had some attachment and abandonment issues, having survived both their parents dying when they were five years old. They only had each other to rely upon since then.
That said, they were definitely willing participants, and even more, they thought it was great, amazing even. I couldn't deny them medical agency simply because they were a few french fries short of a little clown meal. Otherwise, hardly anyone in Los Angeles or the world would qualify to make their own decisions.
They knew the risks, and they were willing... no, eager participants. That was good enough for my morals.
The surgeries over the next two days went off without a hitch, and the delay of twenty-four hours not only gave the twins a chance to acclimate to their replaced cybersystems but it also gave me a chance to, in the middle of the night, very carefully examine and partially disassemble one of the neural synchroniser systems.
"Okay, I'm going to activate the system," I told the twins, with the Zetatech rep sitting in a corner, trying to avoid looking excited. I mentally flipped a switch, and both brothers froze for a moment before glancing around and then at me.
"This is..." body A said, "... quite unusual," finished body B.
Dr Iverson, next to me, was reading scrolling text from his optics and said, "Intra and interneural transmissions are in the green; data link at sixty-one per cent of max throughput, SNR nominal, high-speed data bus nominal, everything is to spec."
The Zetatech rep had us run battery after battery of tests, but I cut Dr Iverson loose before lunch, which he seemed very thankful for. I stuck around mainly because it was expected I help the suit with reasonable requests, but more importantly, I was quite invested in how this was working.
It certainly appeared to create a new personality that was different from both patient A and B, and I was privately calling him Ab as a combination of the two. But at the same time, they scored somewhat similar on some personality matrices, too.
The Zetatech guy seemed excited, though just from the fact that they seemed mentally stable, which left me wondering just how terribly their initial tests of this system had gone.
At the end of the day, I gave Ab one of my business cards for my clinic. I'd be interested in following up with him. The deal with Zetatech meant that he was keeping the implants after they were done with repeated tests over a period of months, and I'd like to examine them at that time.
These neural synchronisers were completely and utterly useless to me, and in fact, the exact opposite of what I wanted, but they went about it in an interesting way that I could and already had learned something from.
Everyone had certain things that they were sensitive to, and I heard one of my personal peccadillos later that evening when I overheard David talking to Gloria about bullies. I perked up, setting aside the chopsticks. Gloria seemed to be trying to suggest that he should be trying to get along with them and makeup with the boy that was bullying him, which caused my blood pressure to rise twenty millimetres instantly.
"No, no. That won't work," I said to both of them intensely, "You can't let assholes get away with being assholes."
She looked at me and sighed, saying, "Tay, the world is full of assholes; you do realise that?"
I nodded and said, "Yes, and do you know why?"
She went along with my obvious question and asked, "Why?"
" Because people let them get away with it," I said with intense emotion and meaning. I sighed and said, "Besides, he's in a Corpo school now. Corpo children are designed to detect and seek out weakness almost from when they can walk. You didn't grow up like this, but I did. If you want David to succeed on this path, then he needs to listen to my advice right now. He's already on the back foot from being an independent enrollee. The most anti-social of the little shi-" I stopped myself in mid-swear, "little brats probably smell blood in the water, just from that alone. If he were a real Corporate enrollee, he would have the built-in support network of the other kids from his same Corp to assist and shield him."
David just nodded rapidly, twice. Gloria thought about it for a moment before nodding. I waved David over to me and said, "Okay, first steps. Repeat after me: Identify the enemy and establish numbers."
He repeated that but looked a little confused. "I already know who he is, though."
"You know his name, sure. But do you know him? What Corp does his parents work at, what jobs do they do at that Corp, what are his weaknesses, and what are his strengths? Does he have other enemies? What are the consequences and costs if you were to just walk up and punch him in the nose? If his parents are janitors, probably nothing, but if his parents are Senior Vice Presidents, you'd be expelled for sure. As for numbers, you need to understand his resources. In grade school, this mainly means his friends. Does he have any? If so, are they just the same kids at the same Corp, or does he have a clique of eclectic cross-Corp friends? What is their status? Now repeat what I said before," I said.
His eyes got wide, and he nodded, "Identify the enemy and establish numbers."
"Correct. Tomorrow at school, you will work on gathering this information. Remember, most bullies are weaklings. Someone who is truly confident in their own self, body, and capabilities would generally not need to put someone else down. The truly exceptional don't even think about people beneath them, much less seek to torment them," I told him before rubbing my chin in thought, "Another possibility is that he is using you as a sacrifice to create an esprit de corps of his friend group. By othering you into the out-group, he is trying to collectively bond his friend-group tighter through your suffering," I said, but instantly realised that I would have to break what I was saying and dumb it down to a first-grade level as he was not quite understanding.
Looking back on my own experiences with the Trio, I felt that they each had some combination of both of those possibilities, with the exception of Sophia Hess, who I thought was just a psychopath, but I hardly knew anything about the now-dead girl. I had practised the strategy that Gloria had been advocating, one of avoidance, and it just didn't work.
I spent the next fifteen minutes repeating what I had said in various ways before he eventually widened his eyes in comprehension and nodded rapidly. I was about to discuss with him ways he could gather the information he needed to make plans next, but I got interrupted by a call. In order to actually disturb me at dinner, this call had to be either from someone in a priority group or the person had to have said a number of keywords to my simple AI-based call screening service.
I twitched when I saw the caller ID, " Moshi-moshi, Hasumi-desu," I said after answering the vidcall. I double-checked that the encryption was active.
" Hasumi-sensei, how ya doin '?" he asked in an affable Kansai dialect, which made my eyebrows twitch. I had never actually heard him speak Japanese very much before I got the language chips I was using now. There was no one-to-one comparison between accents, of course, but it was close enough to the Japanese equivalent of the "Aw, shucks" Southern American accent that I had to try to avoid snickering at his face. It suited him.
I wasn't going to talk with him over the phone, though, even encrypted, " Are you in town?"
"Ayup," he said with a grin.
I nodded, " Come to my clinic. I'll let you in. If you hurry, you can still have some stir fry." Then I hung up.
When I let him into the living room, David's eyes lit up. "Johnny!" he yelled and ran over to say hello.
"'Ello, little pardner. You been keepin' out of trouble?" Johnny asked, after lifting and tossing the kid into the air, which David still obviously enjoyed despite protesting to me that "it was for babies" when I did it to him.
"Go ahead and make yourself a plate, then you can tell me what the f... what you are doing here," I told Johnny, who nodded, removed his ridiculous white cowboy hat and sat it on a table before serving himself some of the stir-fry and rice.
As he ate, I asked him conversationally, "So, how's things in Night City?"
He winced, "Ahh... not too good. There's been some bloodshed." Then he told me about how a couple of the Tyger Claws' stupider members had murdered a prostitute. In response, the owner of the club this prostitute worked at had killed both of them with an axe in front of God and everyone.
I winced. Personally, I agreed with her decision, however, it was a bit of a short-sighted one from what I had learned about the psychology of street gangs. If she had just made the offending Tyger Claws disappear, never to be seen again, she might have even gotten a private thank you from some inside the gang. But killing them openly? It rubbed the gang's nose in it and impacted their face.
