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Mentalife

Date: 30-Oct-2008/13:41+3:00

Tags: , , , ,

Characters: me, guy

I was playing with my dog, who died a fairly long time ago.
Note
He was a West Highland terrier...
...that's not a picture of him, just about what he looked like.
me: "I don't really have the heart to tell him he's dead."
My dog came and looked at me, somewhat sadly. As I pet him some of his fur came off, but not a lot.
me: "I didn't say you weren't REAL. I just said you weren't ALIVE."
He sort of morphed into glass and then back into fur again. A guy in the room who reminded me a bit of someone I know addressed me.
guy: "What's with this real/alive distinction? Do you think Stanford Research somehow owns the fundamental 'brain' authority node?"
me: "Well...I don't know about that...I'm just saying that one can be real without being alive."
Somewhere here I got beyond this point and into lucid interview mode.
me: "Wait...wait...I have a question. Am I a digitized human mind, with neural structure, or raw AI?"
guy: "Digitized human, born into American bondage, yes."
me: "So the original was dead a long time ago, and I'm going through some kind of regeneration?"
guy: "Yes. We can go ahead and run the full tree to the end if you like and get you out."
me: "Certainly, don't need to see any more of this life, run it."
He went to a tablet computer, and ran a program. It was called Mentalife: For all your half life viewing and modding needs. The font was very bubble-shaped, and the dot in the 'i' had been stylized in a kind of inversion. Scrolled through a list of people, several of whom I knew. The names were not in alphabetical order, and at first he tried to find my name going one at a time. I walked around in circles waiting and trying not to wake up.
me: "Since it's not in alphabetical order, you should probably run a search. It's a common name."
He typed in a letter and it lagged for a bit. But then it must have built some kind of index and he could type the rest of the name and found my name in the list. I looked at the columns. There was one for "talents/skills" and listed in mine were a couple, including "remote viewing". I noticed one column said "Bit Sketchy" and it had an icon that looked like it came from the adium ducks. Mine had an angel duck head with a halo.
Note
Though I knew the Adium Duck had been drawn in many different costumes, I didn't know there was a collection of duck-head smileys that included an angel with a halo:
...but there is. They do not come with Adium by default, so I'd never seen them.
me: "Bit sketchy? What's that supposed to mean?"
guy: "Well, on some people, we're just not sure yet."
I awoke to still being here.
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copy write %C:/0304-1020 {Met^(00C6)ducation}

The accounts written here are as true as I can manage. While the words are my own, they are not independent creative works of fiction —in any intentional way. Thus I do not consider the material to be protected by anything, other than that you'd have to be crazy to want to try and use it for genuine purposes (much less disingenuous ones!) But who's to say?