Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3)

by Venkatesh G. Rao

and present in YouTwo’s mind. If he/she sees the friend later, he/she would begin to have doubts: “Is this somebody I’ve seen before, or is this a YouOne memory?” That blurring would be a feature rather than a bug. Version 5 and beyond would use neurosurgical implants to create ongoing subconscious temporal integration, and might even try to piggyback on dreaming past lives into current living memory. The grafting code would also attempt to integrate narratives rather than just sensory memories. I won’t go into this, but there are some obvious and non-mysterious ways to blur present and past stories, so you start dissolving the distinction between stories that happened to YouTwo and stories that happened to YouOne. You would also eventually have actuation of things like “gut feelings” (perhaps machine recognition of a face from YouOne’s life would trigger a little squirt of stomach acid or a mild electric shock to YouTwo, creating a new class of sensations correlated with past lives). The ultimate form would of course be a realization of the sort of memory integration envisioned in Philip K. Dick’s Total Recall.