"We can't tell you what your own transition dreams will be. The only thing that's certain is that you won't remember them."
Caroline Bausch smiles, reassuringly. Her office, on the sixty-fourth floor of the Gleisner Tower, is so stylish it hurts--her desk is an obsidian ellipse supported by three perspex circles, and the walls are decorated with the latest in Euclidean Monochrome--but she's not at all the kind of robot the cool, geometric decor seems to demand. I have no doubt that the contrast is intentional, and that her face has been carefully designed to appear more disarmingly natural than even the most cynical person could believe was due to pure guile on the part of her employers.
A few forgettable dreams? That sounds innocuous enough. I very nearly let the matter rest--but I'm puzzled.
"I'll be close to zero degrees when I'm scanned, won't I?"
"Yes. A little below, in fact. Pumped full of anti-freeze disaccharides, all your fluids cooled down into a sugary glass." There's a prickling sensation on my scalp at these words--but the rush I feel is anticipation, not fear; the thought of my body as a kind of ice-confectionary sculpture doesn't seem threatening at all. Several elegant blown-glass figurines decorate the bookshelf behind Bausch's desk. "Not only does that halt all metabolic processes, it sharpens the NMR spectra. To measure the strength of each synapse accurately, we have to be able to distinguish between subtle variations in neurotransmitter receptor types, among other things. The less thermal noise, the better."
"I understand. But if my brain has been shut down by hypothermia ... why will I dream?"
"Your brain won't do the dreaming. The software model we're creating will. But as I said, you won't remember any of it. In the end, the software will be a perfect Copy of your--deeply comatose--organic brain, and it will wake from that coma remembering exactly what the organic brain experienced before the scan. No more, no less. And since the organic brain certainly won't have experienced the transition dreams, the software will have no memory of them."
The software? I'd expected a simple, biological explanation: a side-effect of the anesthetic or the anti-freeze; neurons firing off a few faint, random signals as they surrendered to the cold.
"Why program the robot's brain to have dreams it won't remember?"
"We don't. Or at least, not explicitly." Bausch smiles her too-human smile again, not quite masking an appraising glance, a moment spent deciding, perhaps, how much I really need to be told. Or perhaps the whole routine is more calculated reassurance. Look, even though I'm a robot, you can read me like a book.
)
A 107-year-old man arranges for his brainscan to be implanted in an artificial body, and is told there may be dreams during the transition. He will not remember his transition dreams when he awakes, but there is something subtly disturbing about being unable to identify true reality ... even if it's just for a short time.
