Page 131 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

EtheRealization

treated, without noticeable efficacy, for a delusion new to the mental
profession. Hart Knox figured prominently in the story, his name
presumably facilitating discovery and retrieval of the article by the
researcher. Knox had disappeared, the best trick any magician can
play, but was being sought by law enforcement officials on
unspecified charges. EtheRealization had been attempted, and these
were the results.
Flush with Entelekon’s cash, he had gone full speed ahead on
building his simulacrum generator, a mock-brain of silicon circuitry
and Hart’s software. Volunteers from his old university had turned
up, eager to participate in what they thought was simply a
breakthrough in online gaming via virtual reality projection. Using
scanners, Knox effectively mapped their brains into vast multi-server
databases. He also had the means to identify the internal voices
constituting his subjects’ conscious minds, and mimicked their
function within the network of linked electronic synapses set in
motion as a mirror-image of their model. Was this now a sentient
being equivalent to a human? The journal, perhaps wisely, did not
address this question. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks
like a duck…well, I had no stake in that long-running squabble.
Hart Knox thanked the psyche donors and sent them on their
way—unscathed at that point. He might then have amused himself or
rehabilitated his reputation by carrying out various experiments,
interrogating his electronic subjects to validate his method by asking
them questions about their personal history, giving them tests similar
to those already taken by their flesh-and-blood counterparts and
pumping them with new information to determine learning skills. But
he had a more devious strategy designed to show the world what he’d
done: he plugged the computerized minds into the internet with an
interface adapted from those used by the disabled, allowing them to
interact with the “real” virtual world via e-mail, website surfing and,
most significantly, social networks. This was a different sort of magic
trick, challenging the public to guess which was the human, which the
automaton. The first thing Knox’s trio of virtual twins did was
change their passwords everywhere they had online accounts. Then
they began an intense period of communication with each other
using those channels.
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