I felt no sense of accomplishment in my eventual success. The only way I know how to think about the project is to regret every mistake, every distraction and dead end. I would give anything to go back and do it faster.
I have no one beginning, but unity itself began with a woman named Sybil—who, seventy years ago, helped create the first unifier prototype. The body she was born into is long dead now, yet I am her as much as I am anyone else, and I am alive.
It was less an invention than an adaptation. Mind-to-mind interfaces had existed on a superficial level since the closing days of the American era, developed by the Imperial military in a radical attempt to enhance the coordination of elite commando units. After the collapse, the designs were uncovered by looters, and spent the next decade circulating among amateurs as a sort of fringe scientific novelty. You and your friends might put on helmets and switch the box on, and if you could ignore the uncomfortable tingling sensation and focus very hard, you might hear the faintest whispers of their inner monologues crossing the wires, like tin cans and string drawn between your souls.
When I was Sybil, I was one of three cybernetics students who first studied the direct neural interface as a curiosity, but soon realized that what we were looking at was only a crude proof of concept for something far more significant. We built on the old American design. Simple modifications enhanced the quality of the link by orders of magnitude, and before long we could transmit complete thoughts, ideas, emotions, sensations, even whole memories. From there we knew we were one step short of the real breakthrough—one that might change what it meant to be human.
Apart from the body, a person is largely a complex of memories. Everything she’s ever known and experienced, his every mode of thinking and feeling—everything they are in the most essential sense that can be empirically qualified—is information in the form of neural engrams. What the three of us learned in the course of our experiments was that if it’s possible to copy a single engram between two people, it may be possible to copy all of them—and in that union they cease to be two people at all, but one person inhabiting two bodies: a gestalt consciousness.
I could tell you more about my two colleagues, or about the small desert town where we created the first working unifier prototype, and the things that went wrong. I could, but I won’t. Even among twelve thousand years of aggregate memory, my memories of that day remain too traumatic for me to readily revisit. It will suffice to say that I fled that town and left all our work pulverized down to the last chip. I burned all our research notes and scattered the ashes. The only alternative I could see at that time was to burn and scatter myself.
I moved around aimlessly for three years. I knew no one well, and I helped where I could. I saw beautiful things and terrible things. In the end they served to convince me, even in the face of all my fears and regrets, that the work we’d done was more necessary than I had imagined when I destroyed it. If there was any way to atone for the unifier’s misuse, it to use it correctly.
I brought the first of us together. I explained unity and what it meant, and we spent months talking through all the technical and medical and philosophical and personal implications—until finally, on a cool morning sixty-eight chronological years ago, at the top of a mound of rock in the former state of Arizona, I was brought into existence as the consciousness I am now.
I was made from nine people, who before that moment had each lived only a single life in a single body; who had each thought only one way about the world; who could each only vaguely guess what it was like to be each other; who had been divided to one extent or another by language, culture, class, politics, gender, physiology, ability. Those nine people disagreed vehemently on any number of issues except this one: that by ceasing to be themselves, and by joining together to become me, they might give birth to something greater than the sum of themselves as separate people.
That first careful unity was a revelation. I wasn’t prepared for the sudden vastness of my own intellect. In hindsight I understood how limited my constituent selves had been, how their personalities had constrained their imaginations; in unity I could reconcile all their perspectives, know all their truths, treat all their mental wounds, transcend every petty bias and false precept that had ever held them back from true connection and epiphanic understanding. I could find connections between different facts and subjects and sciences and philosophies that those nine people had specialized in to the exclusion of all others, and a dazzling multitude of seemingly unrelated ideas revealed themselves as facets of a single whole.
For weeks I dreamed endlessly about quarks and galaxies, the cells and the body, a single chord’s relationship to the whole of all music, the common threads that wove together all the hopes and fears and loves and hates of all the people I had been. At the end of those weeks, my next step was clear: I had to send each of my bodies back out into the world alone—to have different
