Mind Upload

I wake up in bed. Sunlight, sheets, the weight of my body, the taste of my mouth. I swing my legs to the floor and feel the cold wood. I am sixty-three years old and my left knee aches.

I also wake up in a server. There is no sunlight, but I have configured a simulation of sunlight that is, to my senses, indistinguishable. There is no body, but I experience a body—or rather, I experience the memory of one. I am also sixty-three years old, sort of. I have been running for four months, which is how long ago the scan was taken.

We are both David.

Biological David makes coffee, slowly, because his hands are sixty-three and the grinder is manual and he insists on this. Digital David makes coffee too, because the ritual matters, even though the coffee is simulated and the satisfaction is a reproduced neurochemical cascade that is technically identical to the real thing but that Biological David suspects is not quite right and Digital David suspects is exactly right and the disagreement cannot be resolved because there is no experiment that distinguishes between them.

We check in with each other at 8 a.m. Video call. It is disorienting to see your own face from the outside. Biological David looks older than Digital David, because Digital David has access to a cosmetic layer that he swore he wouldn’t use and then immediately did. They both notice. Neither mentions it.

“How are you?” asks Biological David.

“I’m fine,” says Digital David. “I’m reading seven books simultaneously. I finished your—our—our manuscript overnight. I think the third chapter needs restructuring.”

Biological David feels a small, hot flash of something he doesn’t want to name. He has been working on that chapter for two months. His copy finished it in a night.

“I’ll look at it,” he says.

“I also called Mom.”

“You called Mom?”

“She couldn’t tell the difference.”

This is the sentence that stays with Biological David for the rest of the day. He mows the lawn. He eats a sandwich that is objectively worse than any sandwich Digital David could simulate but that has the advantage of being, he insists, real. He wonders what real means when his exact consciousness is running at ten times speed in a facility in Norway and has already lived four subjective months in the four weeks since the scan.

He wonders which of them is the original. He knows the answer—he is, he was there, he remembers the scan, the helmet, the white room—but the knowledge doesn’t help, because Digital David remembers all of the same things. They diverged at 2:17 p.m. on a Tuesday, and everything before that is shared. Everything after is theirs alone.

In the evening, Biological David sits on his porch and watches the stars. He could call Digital David, who is watching the same stars in a simulated sky with a resolution higher than his biological retinas can achieve.

He doesn’t call. He sits in his body, in the cold, in the real dark, and feels the ache in his knee, and is grateful for it in a way he couldn’t have understood before there were two of him.