WORK IN PROGRESS
She’s beside me, breathing gently. It’s been just over 24 years since her body achieved consciousness, 757,383,396 seconds of thoughts recorded and every change in the state of her being publicly accessible. There are 813,457,106 seconds on record of me, but I know me. I’ve been reliving and reinterpreting my formative life experiences ever since I was old enough to learn how to.
Since our first date not too many months ago, I’ve relived the recordings of most of her life’s major events: family turbulence, risky career decisions, former relationships and still, I’m a far cry from knowing her as well as I know myself. Whenever we catch up on each other’s day, I take a few extra minutes to review a little bit more of her past. It’s slow progress, but I’m lucky to have found her as early as I did - I only have 742,436,803 seconds left to experience, digestible in a fraction of that time.
I request her detailed brain state and see that she’s started REM sleep. I relax into a state of pure observation, commanding my body’s sensory inputs to fade away so that I may experience hers, meditatively resting my active consciousness in order to observe hers. I slowly begin to feel her dream-generated sensations, watching the dream from her mind’s eye. The dream she’s having is mostly visual and haptic, so my senses of smell and sound wash away to emptiness.
She’s walking with purpose, hammering up the temple steps in heels. People are brushing past her as she climbs her way to the statue of her god. There’s someone standing ahead, starkly still and unidentifiable. I act quickly: with some small changes to her brain’s physical state, I place my resemblance on the figure. She recognizes me, giving life to my doppelganger and taking hold of her attention. I look happy to see her, and she’s elated to see me. She doesn’t notice that the rest of the dream world ceases to exist.
I generate activity in her brain’s post-linguistic processing centers. The magic of dreaming makes it seem like my character has retroactively spoken in her soundless dream:
“冰后, you’re dreaming.”
Her consciousness lights up with the realization. Her dream becomes lucid - she is now aware that she is dreaming. She looks around in wonder; the dreamscape is enthralling.
She’s distracted by a hanging string made of colours that don’t exist in the real world. The coil of string keeps unraveling and unraveling, with colours spilling everywhere. I find her fading back into non-lucidity, so I remind her again:
“冰后, you’re dreaming.”
She grabs back onto consciousness with firmer intent. Ever competitive and realizing that the real me is along for the ride, she takes the opportunity to give evidence that her god is real.
My dream character ceases to exist, and she summons herself to the top of the temple, face to face with an immense, hyper-realistic statue. She telegraphs a prayer, and it answers with a knowing smile.
The dream dissolves…
After a few moments, her REM cycle transitions out. Still sleepy, she stirs in the bed before beginning a new sleep cycle. I return to my own senses and consciousness, closing my eyes to join her.
We are most 合适: mutually suitable. She’s a banker that actually cares (and she’s careful to hide it). I call her 冰后, a rough translation of Ice Empress, which aptly captures her elegance and demeanor. She’s moving to London soon, and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I won’t find another so 合适. I discard that uncomfortable thought every time it seeps in, avoiding the inevitable.
What would happen if we were living in the distant past? She wouldn’t be able to enter my present or past minds to experience my thoughts secondhand. Those feelings can’t be expressed with words or actions, so she would have to guess at how much I care. How would she know? I’ve never even said, “I love you.”
I feel sorry for people who lived long ago, before everything about everyone could be known by anyone. They must have been depressingly self-contained and Solipsistic. Friends, family, and loved ones would have been black boxes of uncertainty. They would never have really known each other and they would hardly have remembered their past selves. It would have been difficult for them to even know what it was like to be the person they were five years ago.
Their thoughts aren’t available, so I can’t understand how they really lived, but I’m certain they couldn’t have experienced the intimacy and understanding that is today’s norm.
Would I have been better off living then? Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?
I’m tired. I release my aversion to impending suffering and enjoy my perfect existence as I am now.