Solipsis: Escape from the Comatorium (6 page)

“
My
whole life is fake,” Renee says, “that asshole!”

“
Don't
be so hard on him,” Patrick says.

“
But
he lied to me,” she replies.

“
He
saved both our lives,” Patrick says, “he did my
vivisection.”

“
Wait,
how did you know he saved my life?” Renee asks.

“
Because,
it was a really tense time,” Patrick says, “hard to
forget that.”

“
You
remember my birth?” Renee asks.

“
Oh
yeah, real well,” he replies excitedly, “It was like
right after I moved here.”

“
So
you've been fourteen all my life,” Renee mutters.

“
I
guess so,” Patrick says sheepishly.

Renee
looks into his eyes, “I thought we would grow old together.”

“
We
don't have to think like that.”

Renee
sneaks back into her house in the dead of night, climbing a tree to
the roof and entering through the glass dome. She gets to her room,
quietly turning on a lamp. She looks through old photos, mementos,
dream journals. Lies, all of them. Renee flips through graphic
depictions of nightmares: visions of hell, torture, death. She tears
out page after page, crumpling the papers and throwing them to the
ground. Percival watches from the doorway.

Gwen
sits comfortably on the couch, reading a book and listening to
headphones. She turns a page and is distracted by an odd sound. She
turns off the music and listens. After a long silence, there is a
sickening thump. Gwen proceeds carefully down the stairs and the
noise gets louder. She finds a trail of blood leading to the kitchen.
Gwen tentatively steps around the corner, and reluctantly allows her
eyes to follow the blood trail.

Renee
stands in the kitchen, hacking at her left arm with a meat cleaver in
her right hand. She chops at it again, the lower limb is barely
attached but clings on by a few stubborn tendons and strips of flesh.
She gets the arm free, then drops it into the center of the kitchen
where there is a pile of a dozen body parts resting in a pool of
blood. Renee steps into the televator in the corner, and comes
immediately back out with both her arms in perfect condition. Renee
puts her arm back on the edge of the counter and prepares to hack off
another arm, but stops as she notices Gwen standing in the doorway,
horrified.

Nellie
performs a vivisection along with two aides. A nurse runs in and
interrupts, “Nellie, you've got a problem.” Nellie runs
to a televator and Percival emerges in the kitchen, finding Gwen and
Medved in a stand-off with Renee.

“
What's
going on?” Percival asks. Renee throws a stray foot from the
pile at Percival's head. The cold, stiff foot skitters across the
dining room table.

“
Renee,
this is not healthy,” Percival says.

“
So
what are you gonna do? Ground me? Oh no, I can't go outside!?”

“
Please,
just put the knife down, take a deep breath, let's talk about this.”
Renee doesn't drop the knife, but merely stares at Percival coldly.
“Please.” Renee reluctantly drops the knife, it plants
itself upright in a copy of her leg. “Thank you.”
Percival takes a few steps toward Renee.

“
Don't
fucking touch me,” Renee says coldly.

“
I'm
sorry that you couldn't live on Earth, but this world is just as
good,” Percival says, walking closer.

“
I
said stop!” Renee flings a knife at Percival, hitting him in
the arm. It slices him and falls to the ground. Percival flinches and
backs away with blood spurting down his arm. Renee stares at Percival
recoiling in pain. Feeling overcome by existential rage, she
collapses to the bloody ground.

Medved's
furry paws soak up blood as he approaches timidly. Renee looks up at
her teddy bear with the watery eyes of a child. Medved scoops her up
in a bear hug and carries her away to her room.

Renee
stays alone in her room for weeks. She barricades the door and lives
without food or water since she knows her sensations of hunger and
thirst aren't based on real needs. No amount of pleading would bring
her out. She would sit, legs crossed, eyes closed, meditating for
days on end.

I'm
a higher being. I mean, consciousness evolved as just a means of
seeking food, avoiding predators, etc. Once little creatures evolved
locomotion, once they had somewhere to go, they needed a driver. All
of our emotions and feelings are just data. Hunger
is data that I interpret to mean that I need food. Love, loneliness,
anger, they're just data. Information giving me, the pilot, a better
idea of where to steer this body, how to keep it operating, fueled,
to get it to procreate.

But
I don't have a body. I don't need to be afraid of anything. I don't
need to eat or drink.

So
what use are these feelings anymore? It seems that the meaning of
life is just to try to keep alive, procreate, and placate these needs
we feel. There's not necessarily any truth to any of these concepts.
Humans feel love about as strongly as evolutionarily predicted. When
you have a species with a long and difficult gestation period,
combined with a small litter, helpless young, etc., you expect to
find love, or at least an approximation of monogamy. The creatures
that have no trouble procreating at all, the ones who lay a thousand
eggs and get on with it don't have any kind of love. Why would they
need it? But creatures with very difficult reproduction, like
penguins and whales, where having both parents around makes a huge
difference, will seem to have intense love, very committed monogamy.
So basically, evolution has fine-tuned their DNA to give them the
best parenting strategy to fit their circumstances. So humans have an
idea of love, but if some creature became super intelligent that had
no difficulty reproducing at all, where the parents never had to even
look at each other, then there would be no concept of love, nor of
romance, companionship, anything. So we spend our lives looking for
love because our DNA has constructed us in a way to make us feel a
need for it. It's not that we're objectively living in the world,
deciding that we should love because love is good thing.

So
if love is just as artificial, just as based on needs that my
fictional body is communicating to me, as thirst, then what is the
point? Perhaps I can be a higher being. What if I ignore all these
needs, all these gauges, what will I feel then? Perhaps there is some
higher level of consciousness where instead of feeling pain, hunger,
thirst, fear, etc., instead I could physically feel a need to help
others, a need to be creative, a need to learn, and feel those things
just as clearly, just as strongly as a normal person feels hungry.

If
every few hours I felt a need to do something nice for someone,
wouldn't that make me a better person? Couldn't we create a utopia in
this way? Imagine feeling a need to create a beautiful work of art
just as strongly as you feel hunger.

Still,
my stomach hurts, my mouth is dry, I want to cough, but I won't. I
just won't.

Why
is the pain in my stomach so intense? I understand that it's a bad
feeling to be hungry, because it motivates you to seek food, and the
hungrier you are, the worse you feel, so that the motivation to seek
food increases as the severity of the situation increases. That's
fine, I get that, but at a certain point, the pain becomes a bigger
problem than the lack of food. I understand that if we didn't
experience pain as a “bad” feeling, then we wouldn't
learn to avoid it. If we put our hand in a fire and it didn't bother
us, it would be bad for our survival, so it's a bad feeling, we learn
to avoid pain. But, what about chronic debilitating pain? If pain is
just information meant to tell us, hey, that's bad, quit doing
whatever that is, then why do we have to have chronic pain? I guess
feeling pain is an evolutionary compromise. Feel it too little and
you'll get in too much trouble, lose more limbs, die sooner, etc.
Feel pain too much and you'll be too incapacitated to do anything. So
there's a big middle ground and we're just the present state of that
compromise. What if we bred out those who had debilitating pain?
Could we evolve to a point where we only felt pain briefly, giving us
information at the time, but not continuing to send the signal
indefinitely? I suppose we could, only if there are people that
already are that way to some extent. It might require a mutation to
get into that state before we can select for it.

What
if there are higher order needs that we could feel. If I erased all
bodily needs from my psyche, would the brain internally create new
needs? Like losing a sense strengthens the remaining senses, I could
start feeling deeper needs.

Renee
quietly emerges while everyone is sleeping, drinks, showers, and then
goes to the kitchen to eat. She picks out several dishes on the oven.
She feels conflicted, watching imaginary food materialize in the
oven. She's never eaten a real thing in her life, and while she knows
it is all unreal, she still wants badly to eat it, or even to just
taste it. She sits down to gorge herself and Percival enters. Renee
averts her eyes from her father, expecting a confrontation. Percival
quietly gets a tub of ice cream from the freezer and sits down to eat
straight from it. They eat in silence.

“
Sorry
about, the whole kitchen thing,” Renee mutters between bites.

“
It's
not your fault. You were in shock.”

“
You
still should have told me,” Renee says quietly.

“
We
worried about you growing up without consequences. How could you
develop empathy or even care about doing anything with your life?”

“
You
should have told me I'd never have kids,” Renee says coldly.

“
Well
you can, I mean you can't physically carry a child,” Percival
tries to explain.

“
Just
shut up, I don't want to hear about simulated bullshit. You know what
I mean.”

Percival
pauses, and quietly says, “I just hope we raised you right.”

“
You
say that like you think I'm gonna turn into an evil bitch,”
Renee replies.

“
You're
not allowed to leave this house until I know that you understand that
your actions have consequences,” Percival says.

“
That's
fine, I'll just become a solipsist like Descartes.”

“
You
know, we named you after him,” Percival tries to connect with
her through the tension, “thought it was fitting considering
your situation.”

“
As
a solipsist, I believe that he was named after me,” Renee
exaggeratedly smiles and flutters her eyelids.

“
Surprise!”

Renee walks out of the
televator, finding the living room vividly decorated. The glowing
virtual wallpaper put on a display of fireworks all around, and
announces Renee's sweet sixteen party. She has no true relatives,
cousins, uncles, grandparents, only her immediate family of Mom,
Bear, and Dad/Mom. Patrick comes out of the televator behind her,
chuckling, having been in on the ruse that led to this surprise
entrance. A handful of others are also in attendance, the few people
Renee knows from the sparsely populated “school” they
share. She had rare opportunities to interact with anyone of her own
age, though the population of Solipsis had seemed to grow
significantly in just a handful of years. The main limiting factor
wasn't money, resources, or even medically viable subjects. No, the
vivisection procedure was not popular because it was looked down upon
as barbaric, selfish, and inhumane. At least, those were the reasons
offered up in talking points.

Solipsis isn't the only place
where one can get the procedure done, but it was the only fully
integrated neural network built specifically to house a virtual
society. In the beginning, vivisected people were called psychonauts.
In Solipsis the word was rarely used, and usually only by newcomers.
Here a psychonaut was a person with a name and a face. A virtual face
anyway. The few psychonauts in the outside world lived vicariously
through animatrons, and were mostly regarded as freaks. The average
person did not want to speak to a robot, especially not one that
hadn't quite crossed the uncanny valley. For many it was a disturbing
experience to interact with this soulless robot that pretended to be
a human being. The attitude and treatment were bound to improve, just
as people resist any major change. It had only been a generation
since a select few had started to cheat death, and that new fact of
life was very slow to be accepted. One might have expected the
population to jump at the chance at immortality, but it wasn't seen
that way. The prevailing thought was that vivisection made you into
less than a person. It was like being offered immortality by a
zombie. What kind of immortality is that? Slowly however, the
attitudes had started changing, and the population of psychonauts was
starting to expand at a compounding rate. Recent improvements in
animatrons was likely a key factor, as they had started to be much
more life-like.