The Doomsday Plot (imaginary conversation)

This is the fourth and final part of a series about the deathbed regrets of a person with the dead man’s switch to a doomsday device implanted in their brain. Follow the links for part one, part two, and part three.

I must have been wrong about much of what I believed about myself. Specifically, I must have been wrong when I thought I had been conscious but immobile for a thousand years or more, while every segment of humanity joined in effort to keep me alive because I had the transmitter to a doomsday device strapped to my Cartesian gland, and had set it to initiate the destruction of everything at the cessation of mental activity.

I went over all that had happened after they poisoned me either to retaliate against my immoral act or more likely to keep me from setting off the device anyway, from spite, which obviously I wouldn’t have

— why is that so obvious —

because I gave plenty of evidence that I didn’t really want to hurt humanity, and it had only been a joke in poor taste all along. Take an example: Once I’d convinced the authorities ruling then that the threat was real, what were my demands? I demanded only petty things. That was supposed to be a hint …

— that was supposed to be a hint? —

well, I didn’t think things through, did I, that’s what I’m trying to

— you had ten years to think it through. It took you ten years to plant all the components of the doomsday device at random places underground to make sure they could not —

Ahh! You said they. So at least more than a regular lifetime must have passed.

— More than a thousand years. You were right about that. —

But I was wrong about being conscious for all that time, for which I am … appreciative, I think. Yes. About the knowledge that I didn’t actually repeat the same reasoning, over and over, unheard and without any chance to make anything right – which I agree, there’s no way they could have trusted me with that.

I went through those scrambled thoughts only once. Or a handful of times. I can’t really know, the point is I have been un-conscious, completely blank, for the time they have kept me alive – as good as suspended, but not quite.

And they have the technology to interact with my brain in a way that bypasses my center of will, so I can’t choose to activate the apparatus, or could have. If that’s what I’d been disposed to.

They can detect the brain activity that creates my train of thought, and they can affect it to interject their own thought – even put on a marker, so that I know the difference, which means – and this fascinates me – that I can communicate without being capable of action. What does that mean for the theory that communication is a form of action?

— I don’t even know what you are talking about. —

Right. A thousand years. Philosophy must have moved on in that time. Or moved along. Depends on whether science and philosophy are progressing towards a goal, or just running in circles around the real, which in itself was much discussed in my

— I didn’t mean that. I meant: I don’t know why you assume you are incapable of action. —

What? How else would it make sense? You must have

— are you basing this on that vortex of speculation you thew yourself into when we started to wake you? —

Yeees …

— And how do you manage that? How can you sound hesitant when your words only exist as thought? Hesitation is a property of speech. —

I’ve had a really long time to learn.

— No you haven’t. I just explained to you about that. —

Right.

Uhm …

(Yes, yes. I was just thinking the word “uhm”.)

But uhm … so how can you convey exasperation with only thought? Cause I’m pretty sure you were exasperated just now.

— It’s easy from my side. I just add an emotional marker. We, on this end, have actually had all those centuries to learn. —

So. Am I incapable of action?

— Your motor functions aren’t restored yet, so you can’t affect the world through movement. —

Yet?

— But as you just pointed out, you can communicate, which means you are part of, what did you call it? The chain of events that goes back to the beginning of time. —

So I do have free will.

Whatever that means.

I guess you must have found an answer to that, in all those years.

— Assuming we still think it’s a question that even makes sense. —

But I’m able to send the signal? Activated the device? Right here and now?

— If you wanted to. —

Huh. I’ve been here so long … no, stop. I know I haven’t really. But in the past hour I was so convinced that I had, it left a mark on me as if it had been true. So, what I’m trying to say is, I have gotten so used to the belief that I couldn’t want anything at all, that I lacked the capacity to even want.

— Actually, the time scale was one of things you got right. —

Yeah, but I haven’t been here. I’ve been oblivious.

— Right. —

And you will have noticed – that I have not sent the signal to destroy the world. So that’s something.

— How would we be sure that you had not? —

Because then the world would have been destroyed by now. It wouldn’t matter if you had me in some sort of underground facility, as I speculate that you may, an hypothesis you will be aware of if you have been reading my thoughts, because if you got me to location where the destruction wouldn’t reach, the regular signal from my transmitter would also be blocked, and the world would have been destroyed even sooner.

— This is why you discarded the hypothesis that we would place you somewhere undetectable. —

Exactly. So if I had destroyed the entire world, then you, being part of it

— now that’s a drastic assumption! —

What?

— That we are part of the world. How do you know, for example, that humanity, by now, has not found a way to exist without bodies? Isn’t that the exact same function your time ascribed to the Cartesian gland? To connect our material existence with some kind of non-material state – in your time not yet understood, but in a thousand more years we would surely have made progress? —

That’s not quite what

— or we could be talking to you, oh I don’t know. From orbit? So we would learn about the destruction of the world soon enough, but we wouldn’t be constantly looking out for it, because what if we wanted to stave off that knowledge for as long as we could? —

I suppose …

Well, do you?

No, wait a second …

— Or we could be computerized, not human, but an automated language production routine, designed to —

but I wouldn’t be alive.

In none of those cases would I be alive. I would have been destroyed with all other multicellular life on Earth and probably much of the monocellular life as well, and then you couldn’t have been talking to me, which you obviously do.

— Ok. —

What?

— Ok. You can stop. You have convinced us. —

That I’ve not yet destroyed the world. Didn’t you know that already?

— We probably did. —

So why have we been arguing about it?

If you could even call it an argument! I mean, we’re just strains of thought …

My own thoughts, including the ones you project onto my brain, as long as the activity that makes them words I can understand takes place in my brain, so as long as I identify my brain as the locus of my self …

Wait. I don’t.

I don’t. The Cartesian gland. That’s the point. It’s been the entire point, all along.

Unless you know better in your time. Wait, what did you say before? You said as much!

You said it was in my time we ascribed that function to the gland.

You mean we were wrong? It’s not a conduit to the immaterial aspect of our minds?

— Wouldn’t you like to know! —

What is this? What’s happening here?

at this, the external voice does not answer in words, but floods the mind of our narrator with markers of laughter. Set to a flavor of mockery.

You don’t … care if I try to activate the device, do you!

You can’t. You wouldn’t have brought me to consciousness if there was a risk I would set off disaster. I mean, why keep me in a coma for a thousand years, spending who knows what resources and life extension research …

So either, you feel confident that you’ve deactivated the doomsday apparatus, or … you know, one of the scenarios I imagined as you woke me was that you could evacuate the Earth. Bring everyone else out of range of the apparatus, and me.

— Or we could have given up. Maybe we have found peace as a species, and are now ready to face our end? —

Together with every other thing alive on the planet? I can’t believe you’d have become that callous, not in just a thousand years …

— WHY NOT! —

as typography would indicate, this was inserted with a shouting marker into the narrator’s mind

— I mean. You were! —

I was not! I never wanted to destroy the world! I just wanted to … I don’t know! Make it into a conscious decision not to destroy. Make humanity prove to itself that I cared. I hoped …

— You did it as a joke! —

A joke with a point to it.

— You did it to make a point! —

a long silence followed after this

this was something of a feat, when you consider: The medium of conversation was the narrator’s continuous train of thought

some of the first words coming back to that mind was:

(If only I’d learned how to think non-verbally sooner.)

— Okay. I’ll answer your question. It’s the evacuation thing. It was completed sometime last week. We are all living on space stations and other planets, now. —

— Or to be precise, all the other humans are. I wanted to stay behind and inform you of all this. —

A ceiling.

— What was that? —

I just opened my eyes. Motor function is returning. I could wiggle my toes a few minutes ago. And now I am looking up into

a ceiling. Hospital like. With movable plates on a rectangular grid. Long glowing tubes for lightning.

Have you preserved this architecture for a thousand years, or reconstructed it for my benefit?

— What makes you think we’d do anything for your benefit? —

Deactivate.

— What was that? —

again, with a flavor of mockery

Deactivate. Deactivate!

— Do you think you can just … turn me off? —

No! I’m talking to the device! The doomsday apparatus.

It’s not responding!

— Hmm. Why could that be. Do you think maybe our surgeons … have shut down the access points after all? The ones that were supposed to give you control? —

What? No, why would that be my first thought? If you could do that, why couldn’t you just shut all of it down.

— Who says we cannot? —

Because why then go on with the evacuation?

— Maybe we just don’t care anymore. About the Earth, at least. —

You would … leave me down here? Wake me up? With the apparatus intact and no way to shut it down?

For what! Revenge?

— You have no idea, do you, about the past thousand years! The economic consequences of your so-called joke. The philosophic ones. The cultural ones. That’s one vindictive species you’ve made them into. —

What are you building up to now?

communicative markers of innocence

You said them. As if you don’t count yourself as one of them. You even emphasized the word. Why?

— Easy. Because I’m not. They caught up with me after I delivered you that poison (hah! who would have thought) and have kept my on life extension for as long as they kept you, and when their descendants woke me up just recently, they asked (because in their culture, one must consent to something like that) if I wouldn’t mind to stay behind and deliver-slash-inform you of your punishment. —

— Which they knew in advance, having access to my personality, I would be more than happy to. —

— You see, some of us were that vindictive even in our own time. —

Well. Good work, I suppose.

And I mean, I can understand wanting to hit back, I suppose. I’m not exactly the prototype of proportionate response.

— You can say that again. —

pause

I can move my fingers now.

I can hear. A window must be open.

Ouch! Oh no!

I can hear birdsong.

— They will be around for a little bit longer, yes. The birds. —

I feel … some sort of mesh, stuck to my head?

— Our means of communication. You will be rid of me once you take it off. And also, let me emphasize: The other way around. Then we’ll have entire continents to ourselves. For what time is left. —

I raise one arm …

I sit up in a hospital bed, so similar to a hospital bed from my own time, I almost wonder if it’s been all a bluff … except we didn’t have thought-projecting technology in my own time … I remove the mesh.

Though still laying down, I already imagine going outside … the empty world, though not empty at all, and the cruelty of my punishment.

While I disliked humanity before, I think I despise what they are right now. Destroy all that, for a lesson I won’t even be around to learn …

I can hear imagine what my interlocutor from before would say:

— Well, good work I suppose. —

The birdsong grows unbearable already.