2066 – Janek’s Second Conjoining

Friday 24th June

Record date 20661105

I am recording this for future conjoinees while my second conjoining is actually happening.  I have managed to attune my thoughts to a very short frequency wavelength, and am sending, in rapid bursts my impressions.  There is no real time to analyse and put them in any coherent order.  Maybe I will be permitted to return to them and correct any misapprehensions that might arise; for now this will have to do.

I have been spending my time, exploring the knowledge banks of my Hypercom twin.  What at first seemed inexhaustible and vast, daunting is the word that springs to mind, is at last beginning to be understood by my own, I must admit, still inferior brain.  However despite having a vastly improved processing function, far more than all other humans thanks to my first full-conjoining, I still retain approximately the same memory capacity.   However, what almost all other humans fail to realise is that this is more than adequate.  We, none of us, have learnt to use our memories properly.  We ‘lose’ memories, we have favourite memories, we un-remember things we would like to forget (or more tragically those we would wish to recall), we remember remembering a memory rather than the memory itself, we cannot recall the simplest of recent memories and yet remember, clear as a bell, some childhood impressions which serve no real function except to feed our sentimentality.

Since my first conjoining my brain now has the ability to sort and file, to store and to recall all of my memories.  In fact all humans actually do record every single thing going on in their lives but are remarkably useless at filing them.  All of our memories are there, none of them go away, even as individual brain cells die and are replaced by new ones the memories are all still there.  You just have to try a bit harder to find them.  How many times do you hear a song on a screen, and know it, the tune, the melody, the words even, though it may have been decades ago you last heard it.  Walking down a street you suddenly recognize someone from twenty, thirty years ago. You know them, of course you know them, you just cannot put a name to a face you once knew so well.  The memories never go, but still we cannot find them, even commonly used words escape us as we scrabble around; hands deep in the mud, grabbing at squidgy elusive clues, but still our eyes cannot see.   We are lazy animals, we do not know yet how to file and to restore our memories.  I am rapidly learning this skill, and as I probe deeper and deeper into the hypercom’s brain I am recording and storing that knowledge in my own mind.  I admit that there are times when I need to rest, to lay down and attempt to clear my mind of all these images, smells, sounds, numbers and equations.  Overload I suppose you might call it, so even I have to learn to ration myself, to take things slowly, after all I have years ahead of me to ‘read’ my Hypercom’s memories.

I have started to learn Russian too, I don’t really know why.  Almost our constant enemy for over a century now, and yet we still know so little about the Russians.   Maybe it is just the beauty of the alphabet, those reverse R’s the strange looking M, the proliferation of consonants.   I will of course learn all of earth’s languages given time, but for now I am quite enjoying Russian.  I am attempting to read Dostoevsky in the original Russian; Crime and Punishment of course, that most cerebral examination of the human ’soul’.  Though of course we long ago dispatched such sentimentality to the rubbish bin; for centuries people were obsessed by ideas such as ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, when all along it was just their own heightened self-consciousness giving them ideas above their station.  Mine is Euston by the way.  Joke – Durghhh!!!  We are still like little children, amazed that we can even think, and gazing in awe and wonder at our own understanding, the comprehension that we are actually thinking at all.  Our unreasoning brains cannot quite believe we are even capable of thinking and so we believe we are somehow special and create stupid ideas such as ‘soul’.   Ahh soul, I remember him well.  (Yeah, work it out for yourself.)

And so I am thinking, or trying to think, at the same time as transferring these thoughts, impressions, images that flicker across my seeing mind, my reactions, my emotions as I prepare for my second-stage conjoining.  One thought that has just crossed my mind is that the Hypercom I have been partially conjoined with has no sense of its own self.  It has not even given itself a name; it has a serial number – an address and identity code, but they hardly count.  It never refers to itself as an entity, it doesn’t seem to discriminate between its own intelligence and the shared knowledge of the Hypercom community.  Interesting.  This may actually have been a serious design fault; though the thought has just struck me that the fault may not have been that of the designers of Hypercom but of our own human brains.