Mind upload

Mind upload is the copying of a human mind into a computer. Doctor Avrana Kern leaves an image of herself in the computer of the Brin 2 Sentry Pod, and Vrie Guyen takes an upload facility from an abandoned terraforming station and tries to put a copy of himself into the Gilgamesh.

Guyen’s machine

Guyen’s upload facility is coffin shaped. Guyen’s people salvage it from the station and rebuild it in one of the Gilgamesh’s shuttle bays, on a stepped dais of uneven metal and plastic. It sits at the heart of a web of cables and ducts that spill from its coffin space and run into the ship, inside a bank of machinery salvaged from the ship and the station, much of it connected to nothing.

Holsten Mason identifies its purpose from the ancient records.

Kern’s upload

Kern escapes Brin 2 in its Sentry Pod. The windowless capsule has room only for a cold sleep tank and the ends of its associated systems. She lies inside the tank while its equipment scans her brain. This is a separate installation from the machine Guyen later rebuilds aboard the Gilgamesh.

The Sentry Pod offers her the upload facility as one way to decide when to wake her. It can scan her brain and keep an imperfect copy, a composite of her and the pod’s computer that reacts to events as her best judgement would. Over time the network is expected to absorb the copy and make finer and finer distinctions. She tells it to go ahead.

That copy keeps the pod alive. The hub wakes her in 1.3, fourteen years and seventy two days after she went under, and tells her that a virus from Earth shut down the colony systems but could not use the hub as a host while her uploaded personality sat inside it. She calls the thing in the hub her undead uploaded self, and leaves it the choice of when to wake her. Holsten works out later that he has seen the result of an upload before: Kern, awake in a metal coffin around another world.

Guyen’s copy

Holsten tells Lain in 4.7 that Guyen’s machine is for uploading brains into a computer, and that only he and Guyen know. Guyen’s own engineers work to rote, each on one piece. Lain’s reading in 5.1 is that the machine is not a place to keep a mind, only a translator. The one system a copy could live in is the Gilgamesh’s main computer, and that was never built to run a ship with a human mind inside it. She believes a finished upload would overload the ship, clash with the salvaged Old Empire systems, and kill everyone.

Guyen’s own account, in 5.5, is that he is dying and the uploader changes nothing for the man in the chair. The copy is there to see his plan through after the man is gone. He has been his own test subject. Everything already loose in the system is a cast off of him, and none of those copies held enough of him to count.

The attempt comes in 5.7. Holsten guesses that Guyen had been feeding his brain into the ship’s memory for ages, a piece at a time. Lain reaches him as it finishes and pulls the trigger. The shot wrecks his head, and the blood paints the upload facility red. What arrives in the system is another incomplete copy, larger than the earlier ones and seeded through the computer. It speaks in single words: I, mine, obey.

Aftermath

Lain finds four or five incomplete copies of Guyen fighting for space in the system, and each time one of them tried to grow it shut down more of the Gilgamesh. Asked why she does not upload herself, she says a copy might refuse to switch itself off, might make sure she died in her sleep, and might not remember who the real woman was. By 7.3 the roots of the facility are torn up, with a lone screen above them flickering in patterns that look to Holsten like Guyen’s face.

Kern on the planet

The spiders keep a second copy of the Kern upload. In 7.4 a long effort copies the information from the satellite into a holding colony of ants on the surface, and a much longer time passes before it gathers itself enough to say “I am”. In the end she was only information, and the colony has room for her. Fabian tends her and calls her God made flesh.

Unanswered questions

• How the machine reads a mind, and what it does to the brain it copies.
• Whether any of Guyen’s copies were ever cleared out of the system.

Art