Please welcome Tony Bertauski, Author of The Discovery of Socket Greeny with today's guest post.
The sky roared. A cargo plane flew low, just having left the military base. I sat in my car, the plane’s engines drowning out the radio, watched it climb higher. It entered the whiteness of a cloud. And then it was gone. Only the roar could be heard, distantly.
Sometimes, my thoughts are like this. There one second, gone the next. Leaving behind a rumble of their existence, but no real substance. I can walk from one room to the next and forget what I was doing.
I carry a pen and paper in my pocket, now. When an idea comes to me, I jot it down immediately. It used to be I could only hope to remember it later. There was a ten percent chance of that. Now I write it down, and more then just a word to jog my memory. Once I looked at someone’s name with no idea why I wrote it, remembering days later that it was a person I needed to email.
What if I reach the age where all my thoughts are like this? I’m soaring through clouds where everything is white. Where I can’t remember the seconds that just happened. I’m just here with no anchor to the past, no concept of the future. Am I still me?
What if technology had the ability to clone us? Maybe it’s ten years from now, Steve Jobs steps on stage and announces Apple’s next great product. Not an iPad, not a holographic computer. No, it’s the ability to create an inorganic us: an exact duplicate made of circuits for a nervous system and gel for blood and an Apple logo on the small of the back. We can copy ourselves. Make a twin that eats, sleeps, and laughs, just like us.
Not only does this duplicate look like us, it has our memories, too. He remembers when he first road a bike without training wheels, when he first kissed a girl. Remembers when he married my wife. If those are my memories, is he me? If I’m not my memories, who am I?
Is he real?
One thing you can bet on. My duplicate will want to survive. He’s programmed like a human. We’re good at surviving.
Last question.
What if you find out you’re the duplicate?
About the Author
Father. Husband. Teacher. Writer. World-class slacker. I am all these things. And these are my thoughts about them
Where You can Find Tony?
Books in this series
1 comments:
Love this guest post! =)
I can actually see the ability to clone humans not being far off!
Post a Comment