26 The Bridge
(ns meme-constructor.speculative.story-3-the-bridge
(:require [scicloj.kindly.v4.kind :as kind]
[meme-constructor.figures :as fig]))A short story of Part VI (speculative). Fiction. It explores the coupling thesis from post S1: a link between two adult brains is first only a channel, a shared strand of experience can only grow through shared concepts, and it cannot be undone by cutting the link.
The brochure had a diagram on the second page that Paul came to hate.
It showed two circles, labelled A and B, joined by a line. Beside the line was a dial. As the dial turned up, the line thickened, and at a point marked with a small red star the two circles vanished and were replaced by one larger circle, labelled AB. Beneath it, in the confident sans-serif of a university press office: At sufficient integration, theory predicts the emergence of a single unified consciousness.
“Theory,” Edda said, tapping the word with a fingernail. “Which theory?”
“The one with the money, I expect.”
They were seventy-one and seventy-three, and they had been married for forty-four years, and Edda had a disease that would take her speech within eighteen months and her life within three years. They had read everything. The integration people said that consciousness was a quantity, and that if you joined two brains with enough fibres, the quantity would at some point be larger for the pair than for either half. At that point, they said, the two minds would simply be one. The star on the diagram. Cross it and you were AB. Step back and you were A and B again, unharmed.
“I don’t want to be AB,” Edda said. “I want to still be here when I can’t talk. That’s all.”
“I know.”
“If being AB is how that happens, I’ll be AB.”
The link went in during March. Sixty-four thousand channels each side, threaded through both hemispheres into association cortex, and a cable, which the engineers insisted on calling the bridge, running between the two headsets they wore for four hours a day in a pleasant room with a view of a car park.
For the first two weeks the bandwidth was low and nothing happened. Then it went up, and something did.
It was like weather. That was the only way Paul could describe it to the research team. Somewhere at the edge of his mind a climate began. Pressure. Warmth. Sudden cool patches. Occasionally a bright flicker, like sun off a windscreen. None of it was about anything. It did not feel like Edda. It did not feel like anyone.
“Same,” Edda said, when he asked. “It’s like standing next to a machine that’s switched on.”
The team turned the dial.
By May they were at ninety percent of the bandwidth the integration people said would be enough. By June they were past it. The star on the diagram came and went. Paul sat in the pleasant room with his wife’s weather rolling through him, and he was Paul, and she was Edda, and the theory had been wrong.
“It’s not wrong,” said the young researcher, whose name was Kofi and who was the only one on the team who had never used the brochure. “Or it’s not wrong in the way they think. You’ve got a channel. A very good one. What you don’t have is a language.”
He had a whiteboard, and he drew on it the way Paul imagined he had drawn for students.
“Every concept you have is spread across millions of cells, in a pattern that grew in your brain from your childhood. Edda’s concept of, I don’t know, a chair, is spread across different cells in a different pattern that grew in hers. When your chair-pattern fires and the bridge carries it to Edda, it arrives as noise. It’s like sending her a page of text in an alphabet nobody has ever seen. The bits all arrive. They just don’t mean anything to her yet.”
“Yet,” Edda said.
“Yet. You can learn. You learned to speak German, you can learn to speak each other.” He grinned. “Babies do it with a much worse channel.”
They learned.
It was slower than anything either of them had ever learned, and stranger. It began with the weather. Paul noticed that when he thought of the sea, a particular cold patch came back to him from Edda’s side, a little later, as if she had caught his sea and answered it with her own. He told her. She said: think of it again. He thought of the sea. The cold patch came back.
“That’s you thinking of the sea,” she said. “Or me thinking of the sea because you did. Either way. It’s the sea.”
They named it. Not with a word, though they used the word to begin with. They named it by agreeing: that feeling, the cold patch that comes back, means sea. Then they found another. A warm pressure that came when Edda thought of their daughter as a small child. A flicker, like light through leaves, that came from Paul whenever he remembered the house in Lüneburg. By September they had forty. By Christmas they had several hundred, and they no longer needed to say the words aloud.
Kofi recorded it all. What interested him most, he said, was not how many they had but what happened when they taught each other something new.
“Early on,” he said, “when Edda learned a new pattern from you, she’d use it with a delay. And she’d make mistakes. She’d send back the sea when you meant the lake. Now look.” He showed them a graph. “You learn something, and she uses it the next minute. Same mistakes as you, when you make mistakes. It’s not a translation any more. It’s one concept.”
“One concept, in two brains,” Edda said.
“Growing in two brains. Together. Like the two halves of one brain grow together, through the corpus callosum, when you’re a child.”
Edda lost the ability to speak in the spring, a little earlier than the doctors had said. By then it did not matter very much. In the pleasant room, and increasingly outside it, because they had been fitted with a portable bridge for walks, she was not silent. She was a presence at the edge of his thinking, and then not at the edge, and then, some days, not a presence at all but simply part of the texture of the thoughts themselves.
He tried to describe it to their daughter, Lotte, who visited from Hamburg and sat with them and cried when she thought they weren’t looking.
“It isn’t that I know what she’s thinking,” he said. “It’s that some of the things I’m thinking with are hers. Some are mine. Most are ours now. We made them together. I don’t know whose they are any more. I don’t think it matters.”
“Is she still in there?”
“Yes.”
“Are you?”
He considered this honestly, which was a habit he had picked up from Edda.
“There’s a me,” he said. “There’s a her. We each still know which body is ours, which memories came from which childhood. But more and more of what’s actually happening, day to day, when we look at something, when we remember something, it’s happening in a place that’s neither of us.” He smiled. “The brochure had a word for it. AB.”
“So the brochure was right.”
“The brochure said it would happen when they turned the dial. It happened because we spent a year making things together. The dial was just the road.”
Edda died in October, two years and seven months after the link went in.
The integration people had a prediction for this, too. It was in a paper, not the brochure. When the link was cut, AB would disappear, and A and B would return, intact, as before. The paper was not thinking about death, of course. But the logic was the same. Take away the fibres, and each side falls back into itself.
Paul did not fall back into himself.
He sat in the pleasant room, where they had let him come one last time, with the headset on and the bridge dark, and he tried to think of the sea. The sea came. It came from his side, because there was only his side. But it was the cold patch. It was their sea, the one they had agreed on together, three winters ago, the one that was built of her sea and his and was neither. He had no other sea any more. The old one, the one from before, was gone. Not forgotten. Grown over.
He tried the house in Lüneburg. It came, too: light through leaves. That one had been his, originally. But it had changed, because she had thought it too, and he had thought her thinking it, and so on, for two years. It was theirs.
Then he tried something harder. There had been a concept, near the end, that she had made. He did not have a word for it. It was the particular feeling of the car park outside the window at dusk, when the sodium lights came on. It had been her thing. She had sent it over the bridge a dozen times, and he had learned it, and it had become theirs like the others.
He reached for it. Half of it came.
That was the only way to say it. Half. The part that had grown in his cortex was there. The part that had grown in hers was gone, and it had not been a copy of his part, it had been the other half of one thing, and so what came to him now was like a word with its second syllable missing. He knew it was the car park at dusk. He could not quite have it.
Kofi, who came in quietly and sat down, asked him later what it was like.
“Split,” Paul said. “Not two people again. One person with half of something missing. Like the patients who have the operation to cut the brain in half. They don’t turn into two strangers. They’re one person who’s lost a way of talking to himself.”
“The paper said you’d go back to being A.”
“I can’t go back to being A. A doesn’t exist any more. We grew over him.” He took the headset off and put it carefully on the table. “I’m what’s left of AB. I think I’ll stay that.”
Outside, the sodium lights came on over the car park. He looked at them for a long time, and what he felt was very nearly, but not quite, the thing she had given him.
source: book2/notebooks/meme_constructor/speculative/story_3_the_bridge.clj