Although Wes is very familiar with the upload process, he cannot interfere with the final operations. The committee's vocation consists solely in judging and supervising. The upload needs to be completed by someone from the computing center.
When he backed away, the guards quickly took over. The operation is very simple. After several process improvements, you only need to press a button under the uploading station, and the machine will do the rest. It doesn't take two people to do it. Those are just ridiculous procedural requirements. Weiss then corrected herself mentally - the procedure was not ridiculous, it was done to avoid any worst-case scenarios. Therefore, even if it does not work in most cases and even causes pain and suffering, it is still sacred and important.
He saw blue light passing over the top of the upload platform. Preliminary scanning and modeling is complete. That's preliminary work. Then the flexible probe and the liquid electrical measurement robot perform real structural simulation. From a non-professional perspective, it is to completely and accurately transform the entire person's thinking system, from the main brain to the three accessory brains, into another form. The extent to which this process damages the material depends on the tool and, furthermore, on costs and laws. But now most of the obstacles have been removed. They want the best possible simulation, and it is unnecessary for mentalists to retain any degree of sanity.
That's not Wes's job either, but he thinks about it occasionally. What does "mind" really mean? That's just a structure. Bei Zeng explained to him this way. Life emerges from extremely exquisite structures, but it is not the result of careful design as religious believers say. Of course, it's not an accidental coincidence. Life is the product of probability and time. The former offers choices, while the latter makes choices. There is no foresight, assumption or reasoning in this process, and there is no absolutely correct mind involved in judgment, but in the end the remaining choice will be the best.
What if the options were endless? She was optimistic that that would select the best life. Infinite, of course, is almost the same as omnipotent. The Slicer is the door that leads to the Almighty. They approached it using stairs paved with blood and toil, trying their best to knock on it and eavesdrop on the movement from the other side of it. But they weren't sure there was anything behind the door.
What does that mean? That wasn't just their hope of escape. Bei said. Maybe that’s the only way to the next stage of life. A new evolution. The slicer may be intelligent—or rather, the slicer must be intelligent. It has to think endlessly like a dissociative patient, and put the answers into words like an ordinary person. After crossing the infinite hidden rules of the universe, no one really knows what will happen. Maybe everything was going well, Bei told him, and the Slicer would simply grant their wishes, end the Big Squeeze, return the universe to what it was before, or at least give them a place to stay. But maybe the slicer will become something with a deeper meaning, like life itself. When it comes to the sublimation of life, Bei holds a very open attitude. What is known about existing life is very limited. They are as ignorant as infants about infinity, or any concept equivalent to it. They didn't really "invent" anything, but they were trying to discover and prove something.
She also never hid that they might go extinct and become the nourishment of another new civilization. But of course, her duties required her to avoid it, and her colleagues didn't like the assumption at all. It was not easy to communicate with the elders of the computing center, even if they were nominally beneath her. Slicers force domain experts to come together and collaborate, but the way they view slicers is very different. Bei is like a mother looking at her children, while some people just make tools. He had no thoughts of condemnation. The slicer was indeed just a combination of neuron-like module boxes, circuits, sensors, probes, computing chips, energy pools, and the like. People claim that it can create infinity, which seems a bit presumptuous. The slicer plan was probably a failure from the start. It assumes that dissociated patients have infinite minds, and assumes that they can simulate this mind. No one, or any theory, can give a strong guarantee on these two points.
Weiss didn't keep this opinion and let it rot in his heart. He never concealed his thoughts from Bei, and Bei asked him as a friend: What do you think the mind is? Is there really some meaningful whole formed between these assemblages of bones, muscles, and nerves? They are not fundamentally different from slicers, except that they are made with fewer possibilities and more time. Life does not consist in the constituent materials, but only in the emergence of structures. This is certainly not in line with current medical views, but it is not surprising that experiments lag behind theory. This is the norm in cutting-edge disciplines. Now they have to race against time, not to invent the dissection device, but to discover it in the heads of dissociated patients and then prove it through the device they built. This is a great study leading to greater meaning. And if the Big Crunch was to be the end of their civilization, she hoped at least the Slicer would be operational. She doesn't really have to give an answer, she just wants to know if her perspective on life is correct.
Weiss was briefly distracted. He didn't know why he was thinking of this at this moment. Some fragmentary past events. And when he came to his senses, the upload had ended. Foao was still lying on the upload platform with a calm expression, as if he was asleep. The scene seemed to sting his nerves, causing him to subconsciously escape to the past. How he wished he could still stay in these past events, roaming in the void in the starship. The stars were like fragments floating in the abyss. He often imagined that they were all falling, rather than that the starship was moving away.
Foor is dead. he thought calmly. Then the thoughts opened again. Don’t think about the stinging reality, but fragmentary past events and memories. Life is made of memories, even unconscious body memories. The brain remembers. Nerves remember. Hands, feet and even skin have their own way of remembering. Habits and scars. The elders of the Computing Center may explain it however they want, but he believes that life is made of these.
Blue beams of light flashed across the room. That's Foo, too. But it's not a complete electronic ghost Fuo. They don't even need the original Foor alive, let alone dead. It can only be said to be some data about Foao's ideological structure, like a code converted from a picture. But even these will not be preserved intact. He knew it. These must be tried to be disassembled and used to modify a certain module of the slicer. he does not know. This is not what he has learned and done. Foor is indeed dead. The white light at the front of the upload station went out. At least it was a painless departure, as he was anesthetized long before the probe entered his brain. Yes, there is one less person who shares the same memory with him.
The guards went up to confirm the situation. This is just a program. They would take him away and send him to a recycling bin. One of them walked up to Weiss and gently reminded him of the existence of the round coin. Only then did Weiss remember its existence. It felt so thin and sharp that it was already scratching his skin in the grip.
"We'd better send that for recycling too," said the caretaker. They have inspected it and determined that it is only an artifact of commemorative value. If found elsewhere, it might be consigned to a memorial, but items entering the Computing Center do not need to comply with antiquities regulations.
Weiss agreed. That's also completely within procedure. They have been away from the original currency for a long time, but there are still many physical and data models that remain. That is not a rare object worthy of an exception. In the eyes of many people in the computing center, antiquities themselves are a false concept, and the obsession with a simple form of material combination from the past is pathological, because the "past" itself lacks value. There must be a reason for a choice to become history.
He was about to hand the coin to the caretaker, but suddenly changed his mind. He personally went to Foao and wanted to return what the latter had taken such pains to preserve. When he opened the knuckles of Foao's still soft palms, the other party opened his eyes and smiled at him. His eyes were no longer charcoal gray under the light, but dark like an icy abyss. He grabbed Wes's hand and spoke in a humming cadence.
"Deal," he said.
The whole blue house flows like water.
