You know that feeling, when you meet someone interesting, and you know there’s more behind everything they say – so much knowledge, so much insight? When you can’t get enough, and wish you could connect to their brain and download everything, all at once?
You do know that feeling, right? I’m not the only one who gets that?
I met a girl online, let’s call her Amy. We were into the same things, hung around on the same servers. I got that feeling. We were on the same wavelength. We sat up all night talking, for months. That was still too slow. The feeling got stronger.
Then, 5th of January: I dreamed that we were both robots. She had a port in her head. I had a cable attached to mine. I connected the cable and started the download.
She wasn’t online the next day or the day after. That was the longest we hadn’t spoken in months. I messaged her every day, but she didn’t reply. A month later, I still hadn’t heard from her.
But every night I dreamed about her. In the dreams, she moved into town. We had the conversations we would have had online. The dream version of her felt just as real as the real version I was pining for. I knew I was dreaming – unusual for me – but didn’t mention it.
During the day, I found myself thinking about her, and… knowing things. I knew her sister’s address, her mum’s birthday. I remembered her first day at school. She hadn’t told me any of this. I was convinced my mind was making it up, inventing details for the dreams.
Sometimes, in the dreams, she said she missed her old town. But, 2nd of February: she sighed in relief and said she was free of that now. This was her home now.
Three days later, I got a message from her mum. She had gone into Amy’s phone, seen my name and our messages, realised I was someone important to Amy – and now she was breaking the news to me. On the 5th of January, Amy had gone into a coma. On the 2nd of February, her condition had worsened suddenly, and they had switched off the life support. Amy was dead.
I was devastated. I couldn’t tell her that just last night, Amy had told me how glad she was she’d moved to where I lived.
You could say this is when I first broke with reality. But I know better.
My mind went back to the first dream. The download was supposed to be ‘copy’, not ‘move’. Who ever heard of ‘download’ being a destructive operation? That was the fantasy, not this.
You can see how I was already thinking.
I confirmed it when I logged into Amy’s email with the password I knew – that she would never have told anyone – and the password was correct.
The robots were metaphors, but somehow the act was real. I’ve stolen my best friend’s mind, and she doesn’t even realise.
The dream version is the real version now, I’m sure of that. She’s a whole other person inside of me. I can choose when to run her. When she isn’t running, every part of her is accessible to me – all her knowledge, all her memories, all her experience. Just as I wished. I could imitate her words or actions perfectly. And when she’s running, she has no idea that everything there is fake. She has no idea that she’s dead.
How do I tell her? Should I tell her? Should I run her at all?
Probably you don’t believe me. You haven’t seen the proof, after all. Maybe you think I’m making it up to cover something more mundane. Well, humour me. Pretend. I ran away from my home, my life. I’m hiding now. I can’t talk to anyone I know, not about this. I don’t know if I’m safe to be around, or safe to be online. What if I meet someone else, and it happens again? What if I decide I like it, and make it happen again?
I don’t know what to do.
What should I do?
Please help me.