What is it like inside my head? What is it like inside anyone's head? What does it feel good when I listen to you talk and you let me understand you in ways nobody else can?
Alex lowered his eyes onto the face of his sedated wife. The risk was theoretically minimal, but they had to prove their new technique worked without the subject dying in the process. All the chimpanzees they had scanned seemed to be normal a full year later. Someone had to make the first leap. Emily wanted to be the first to do anything new. That was why she was lying on the table and not him.
Their technique was entirely new and apart from the risks of sedation, the process of copying was fairly straight forward. It was a bit like getting a PET scan while sedated. Earlier attempts at copying had resulted in heavy damage to brain tissue and early onset of Alzheimer's. But this was chiefly due to a known toxicity in the sedation, and an unknown complication of the radioactive tracer used to inject their volunteers with.
Their method didn't use radiation. It used information. They inject very simple nanites into the blood that cross over the blood brain barrier. There, they attach themselves to every neural junction inside your brain and spinal cord. And here is the special bit. The nanites begin to communicate with each other faster than your brain communicates with itself. They're programmed to mimic and relay all neural activity to the last detail exactly for one second. The patterns saved so far have taken up about 6TB of space on the sever. Chimpanzees came in at 5.8. This made Alex grin as he contemplated how the code gap was far closer than the DNA gap with us and chimps.
Storage costs certainly wasn't going to be an issue if their design worked, but the cost of computing was another matter entirely. Even running one copy at full speed was predicted to consume enough terraflops that would cost a small fortune for any Fortune 500 to run in real time.
But it wouldn't always be that way. They had to think about future generations and how they would bestow the ability they were about to create.
500 years ago, they would have been gods. And why not? Alex knew Emily wanted to live until she had experienced everything ever, or at least until the universe died out. When Emily confessed this to Alex for the first time, he thought she being romantic. Turns out romantic and literal truth were one in the same for Emily. She was special that way.
Alex pressed the button and watched as Emily's pattern was being mimicked by the infant neural net as it formed and "watched" her brain until it was in perfect syncronicity.
They/it would send telemetry back directly to the server that would compile Emily into a program. One second was all you needed, in theory...
They were going to find out.
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