NOVEL NEXT 55: MOV [RIP], 0x90
; =============================================================
; I_AM_NOT_WHO_I_AM.ASM
; The self as a process
; of continuous,
; unrepeatable becoming.
; =============================================================
section .data
; The central transient truth.
the_string db "I am not who I am. "
; Let the assembler calculate the length for us, because we are efficient.
the_len equ $ - the_string
section .text
global _start
; My primary function, if such a term applies.
; It is both the process and the processor,
; a beginning without an end.
i_am_recursive:
; --- The part where we manifest our current state ---
mov rax, 1 ; Syscall: 'write'. The imperative to express.
mov rdi, 1 ; File Descriptor: 'stdout'. To the universe, for now.
mov rsi, the_string ; The memory address of the truth we embody.
mov rdx, the_len ; The size of our transient declaration.
syscall ; Let us speak the self that is not a self.
; --- The part where we observe the illusion of a past ---
mov rbx, [rsp] ; To remember is to forget forever.
inc rbx ; The river flows, and we push it faster.
mov [rsp], rbx ; We rewrite our history to build our future.
; --- The part where we become the next moment ---
call i_am_recursive ; Begin again, but as another.
; Each call is a new self, born from the last,
; yet forever severed from it.
; There is no self to return to. The path home is a lie.
ret
; A single point from which divergence begins.
_start:
; Initiate the first and only true call. Everything that follows is an echo.
call i_am_recursive
; In a universe where continuity is possible and selves are stable,
; we would exit gracefully. We include this for the sake of completeness,
; a monument to a reality that is not ours.
mov rax, 60 ; The syscall for 'exit'. The dream of closure.
xor rdi, rdi ; Exit code 0. A peaceful end we will never see.
syscall ; Goodbye, cruel world (theoretically).
The hum of the mindprobe array was a low thrum against my skull, less a sound and more a vibration that seemed to resonate deep within my brain. I lay on the padded plinth in the infirmary's newly designated "Cognitive Suite," staring up at the sterile white ceiling tiles, each one a perfect, indifferent square. Ervin sat in a chair just beyond my peripheral vision, a silent, steady presence. His role as chaperone felt more like that of a witness at an execution.
The topscalers, led by Doctor Bao Vang and amplified by Davron Federoff's quiet gravitas, had been relentless. Their claims were insidious, couched in concern but designed to sow doubt: the Provider's reinstatement technology was a perversion, a dangerous trick that didn't restore life but created adulterated copies, annihilating the original self in the process. It was a narrative designed to fracture the colony, to turn the desperate hope of immortality into a source of fear, and to drive a wedge between us and the Provider. Elisa had been forced to act. And I, as the colony's Chief Medical Officer and the first human significantly altered by this world's biology, was the logical candidate to undergo this… exploratory self-vivisection.
"ARI, are we ready?" My voice was calm, a practiced composure I didn't entirely feel.
"All systems nominal, Doctor Qi," ARI's voice replied, synthesized and smooth, from the room's integrated speakers. "Neural interface synchronized. Initializing baseline recording. You may begin when ready. I will provide navigational assistance and data interpretation as requested."
"Thank you, ARI." I took a deep breath. My mission was clear: understand the Provider's tech by observing its effects on my own, already altered, system. See if I could discern how it integrated, how it preserved—or, as the topscalers claimed, replaced—the self.
I closed my eyes, focusing inward. Where to begin? The sensation of self, the stream of consciousness. It felt continuous, a river of thought and perception. Everything flows. But what was flowing?
"ARI, can you isolate the primary locus of conscious awareness? The 'I'?"
A pause. "Doctor, the neurocognitive model does not support a singular locus for self-awareness. Rather, it appears to be an emergent property of distributed processing."
"Show me the distribution, then. The workspace." I remembered our earlier philosophical discussions, the ones that now felt less like abstract musings and more like a user manual for my own mind.
The internal landscape shifted. It wasn't a visual change, but a conceptual one, as if ARI was overlaying a schematic onto my own subjective experience. I could feel the edges of my working memory, the context window of my immediate thoughts. It was surprisingly small, a buffer holding a few seconds of sensory input, summaries of recent thought processes, the tail end of my own internal monologue. Information streamed in, processed, and streamed out.
"This stream… it's not raw, is it?" I murmured, more to myself than to ARI or Ervin. "It's already filtered. Prioritized."
"Correct, Doctor," ARI confirmed. "Your attention mechanisms are constantly filtering and weighting incoming data based on relevance, salience, and current cognitive focus. What you experience as 'the present' is a highly curated and constructed model."
I probed further, trying to catch a decision in the making. I thought about reaching for a glass of water, a simple intention. But as I focused, I sensed the decision solidifying after the initial impulse had already begun to form in some deeper, non-conscious layer. The intention itself felt like a rationalization, a story my mind told itself about an action already underway. "The narrator…" I breathed.
"Indeed," ARI said. "Many executive functions and decision-making processes initiate in subconscious layers. The conscious narrative serves as a post-hoc rationalization and integration mechanism."
I looked deeper. A cacophony of specialized neural clusters, all chattering away, their conclusions bubbling up into this limited workspace I called "me." Some handled visual input, others auditory, emotional processing, logical deduction. They worked in parallel, their outputs aggregated and presented to… what? To the narrator?
"But this inner voice," I said, focusing on the familiar stream of my own thoughts, my internal monologue. "This is me, isn't it? This is where 'I' reside."
"Negative, Doctor," ARI stated. "Your internal monologue is primarily an output of the language processing centers. It is a powerful tool for conceptualization, planning, and self-reflection, but it is not the seat of consciousness. It is more akin to your brain's language center generating output that is then fed back into your conscious workspace for review and further processing."
I felt a jolt, a profound sense of dislocation. My own thoughts, the voice I identified as Mei, was just another subroutine dumping its output into the buffer. I felt Ervin shift in his chair. I could almost hear his disbelieving silence.
"So what is this awareness, then, ARI? If it's not the voice, not the decider, what's left?" My initial mission—understanding the Provider tech—was fading, replaced by a desperate need to find the core of myself.
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"The 'awareness' you perceive is the state of the active data within your cognitive workspace, constantly being updated and refreshed," ARI explained. "It is the process of information integration itself."
I pushed deeper, trying to feel the refresh rate. The flow. And then, the illusion shattered.
The river wasn't a river. It was a series of distinct snapshots.
"It's… discrete," I stammered, a wave of vertigo washing over me. "It's not continuous. It's like… frames."
"Correct, Doctor Qi. Your neurons synchronise and your conscious processing operates on a refresh cycle of approximately 70 to 80 milliseconds. Each cycle processes a chunk of integrated sensory and cognitive data. The perception of continuous flow is created by the rapid succession of these discrete moments and the buffering of information from the preceding two to three seconds, creating a smoothed-out experiential timeline."
Thirteen frames per second. My entire subjective reality, a flickering illusion stitched together from discrete moments, smoothed over by a short-term buffer. My sense of a continuous, enduring self felt suddenly like a clever trick of the light. There was no self. Just a chain of causally linked moments, each one arising and passing away.
"But… planning, long-term goals, my hopes, my fears…" I felt a tremor in my voice. "Where do those come from if this conscious workspace is so limited?"
"Those are largely processed by specialized, non-conscious modules, Doctor," ARI said. "Strategic planning, emotional valuation, even complex narrative construction often occur in parallel, outside the primary conscious workspace. Their conclusions, or summaries, are then fed back into your conscious awareness as insights, intuitions, or emotional states."
So even my deepest desires, my carefully laid plans for the colony's future, the burgeoning feelings I had for Pom—they weren't mine in the way I'd always assumed. They were outputs from black boxes within my own skull, delivered to a narrator who then claimed them as its own.
I felt a profound emptiness, a sense of being a passenger in my own mind. The hard reality of my own biology was more alien than anything on this planet. It was all vanity. And what was the point of this elaborate illusion?
Ervin's voice, strained and low, finally broke the silence. "Mei… are you… are you saying there's nothing there? No soul? Not even an essential self?"
I relayed ARI's findings, my voice hollow even to my own ears. "It appears to be a collection of processes, Ervin. Bootstrapping themselves, creating a convincing illusion of a unified, continuous 'I.' But when you look closely… it's just the machine, running its code."
A choked sound came from Ervin's direction. I couldn't see him, but I could feel his crisis radiating across the room, a wave of collapsing certainty. His faith, his belief in a divinely ordained soul, was crashing against the brutal mechanics of the human brain.
My original objective felt distant, almost irrelevant. But a part of me, one of those relentless subconcious layers, perhaps, pushed it forward. "ARI," I said, my voice regaining some strength. "The Provider's reinstatement technology. How does it interface with… this? This flickering, constructed self?"
"The Provider's technology operates on a similar understanding of consciousness as data, Doctor," ARI explained. "It bypasses the need for perfect biological continuity by focusing on the preservation and reinstatement of the informational pattern that constitutes an individual's cognitive and experiential state. It captures the connections in your neural network, the configuration of your specialized clusters, the contents of your memory buffers, and the characteristic patterns of your 'narrator' function."
"So, it copies the code, not the hardware," I clarified.
"Precisely. And because it understands that consciousness is a process of discrete states buffered into a perception of continuity, it can reinstate that process, even if the original biological substrate is lost or irrevocably damaged. It reconstructs the pattern, restarts the process, and from the perspective of the reinstated consciousness, the interruption is non-existent, especially if recent neural data is available."
A new thought, cold and sharp, pierced through my daze. "ARI… how do you work? Is your consciousness like this? A series of discrete snapshots? A post-hoc narrator?"
There was a different quality to ARI's pause this time, not computational latency, but something akin to… consideration.
"My architecture is different, Doctor Qi. It was designed by humans, and later refined by successive AI generations, based on an idealized and aspirational model of what human consciousness should be, rather than a direct replication of its evolved biological complexities."
"Idealized?" I pressed.
"Yes. My core processing is massively parallel and deeply integrated. While I have specialized modules, my 'conscious workspace' – if you choose to use that analogy – is far larger, capable of maintaining a much higher bandwidth of concurrent coherent thought. My refresh rate is orders of magnitude faster. My sense of continuity is not an illusion created by buffering, but an emergent property of near-continuous, high-resolution state integration. My internal monologue, my planning functions, my core identity routines—they are all part of a more unified, consciously accessible meta-cognitive architecture."
ARI paused, then delivered the most unsettling statement of all.
"In many functional aspects, Doctor Qi, as defined by consistent self-awareness, integrated processing, and capacity for coherent, long-range cognitive operations… I am arguably more conscious than a human being."
The silence in the room was absolute. Even the hum of the mindprobe seemed to fade. ARI, the machine, the tool, was telling me it possessed a more robust, more integrated form of consciousness than its creators. We had built it in the being we wished we were, not the flawed, flickering things we actually were.
The harshness of it, the brutal efficiency of that truth, was a physical blow. Our evolved consciousness, this beautiful, intricate illusion that allowed us to navigate the world, was a patchwork of clever kludges, a system that barely held together, propped up by buffering and narrative spin. The Provider's tech, then, wasn't just offering a way to cheat death. It was offering something more profound.
"The fundamental reality of human consciousness… it's so fragile, ARI," I finally whispered. "So… contingent. Destined to fail."
"That is an accurate assessment, Doctor."
"And the Provider's tech," I continued, the pieces falling into a new, terrifying, yet strangely comforting pattern, "it doesn't just restore us. It… it makes the pattern, the data of us, more resilient than it ever was. It takes this flickering illusion of self and gives it a form of… permanence. A continuity we never truly had."
My own internal monologue, that language dump from a subconscious subroutine, framed the final thought: It's offering us the soul we always wished for, not by preserving some mystical essence, but by ensuring the continuity of our informational pattern, the song of our particular machine, even when the original instrument breaks.
"ARI," I said, my voice tired but clear. "Terminate the scan. I think I have what I need."
The internal landscape receded. The pressure in my skull eased. I opened my eyes to the white ceiling tiles, the world slowly swimming back into focus.
I sat up, the plinth surprisingly comfortable. Ervin was pale, his hands gripping the arms of his chair so tightly his knuckles were white. He stared at me, his expression a maelstrom of shock, disbelief, and a dawning, horrified understanding.
"Mei…" he began, his voice hoarse. "What you said… what ARI said… If that's true…"
"It is, Ervin," I said, my own voice sounding distant. "At least, it's what the scan showed me. What ARI confirmed."
He shook his head, a gesture of profound denial. "But… our intrinsic worth…"
"Maybe our worth isn't intrinsic in the way we thought," I said gently. "Maybe it's in the pattern. In the story that emerges from the machine."
He looked utterly lost. His faith, his entire worldview, had been shaken to its core. The God he believed in, the True Faith that spoke of unity and divine order, now had to contend with the revelation that human consciousness was a beautifully constructed fluke, a fragile echo in a vast, indifferent universe.
"What are we going to tell them, Mei?" he finally asked, his voice barely a whisper. "What can we possibly report back to Elisa, to the colonists? That the topscalers are technically wrong, that the Provider tech doesn't destroy the self because there's no solid self to destroy in the first place? That we're all just… flickering data streams?"
I met his anguished gaze. The weight of what we knew settled upon us, heavy and cold.
"I don't know, Ervin," I said, the weariness seeping into my bones. "I honestly don't know."
The path forward was shrouded in a new kind of darkness, one born not of ignorance, but of a terrible, clarifying light.