Who Am I? | Johnhain | Pixabay

Who Am I ?

Who Am I ?

Utkarsh Singh
A Philosopher’s Stone
9 min readAug 13, 2020

--

The great warrior Theseus set out on a voyage at the high seas to reach the land of evil Minotaur and slay him.

Theseus on his ship on his journey to the land of Minotaur/Representative image. | Comfreak | Pixabay

As he returned from his voyage — standing tall and victorious the Athenians rejoiced over his victory and honoured him.

As a mark of respect, the Athenians painstakingly maintained Theseus’s ship at the dock and took it out once every year — reenacting his voyage to the land of evil Minotaur and slaying him.

Theseus vs Minotaur. Greek Mythology. | Akamaihd

14th March, 2092

A Biomechanic giant conglomerate BioMech that initially started as a prosthesis manufacturer has just launched its series of smart mechanical human limbs to replace the natural existing ones.

Bio Augmentation, Upper Limb replacement, Bionic arms. | wegotthiscovered

You don’t need to be a disabled person missing a limb to get one of these.

You can walk into one of the company clinics — fill out the paperworks, make the deposit and get prepped for the operation immediately and leave the clinic with a new set of mechanical limbs.

These limbs are far superior than the pre-existing human limbs with sophisticated designs and AI assisted engineering on both hardware and software fronts.

Individuals with these artificially designed limbs outperform regular humans greatly. They can run faster, lift up heavy weights and do not get tired easily.

Soon a revolution began, companies involved in manual labour started partnering up with BioMech and other such new startups.

They would finance the limb replacement of their workers involved in manual labour and pay the company in installments from the workers salary.

BioMech benefited from its sales, the companies benefited from increased efficiency of the workers who would now work longer and get more job done than ever before.

Companies wanted everyone to take up on the offer or leave the job. The government would eventually interfere and the companies could no longer force it’s employees to take up these limb replacements.

Companies however made sure that there were enough incentives around for its employees to take up on these replacements so they started paying their workers by the amount of work done rather than the number of hours spent working.

James Mello was a worker at a shipyard company. When his company started offering limb replacements he was furious. The idea of having your natural limbs replaced for a mechanical set manufactured in a lab was outrageous for him.

As the time went by the companies started squeezing harder. The pay was deteriorating by the month as more and more co-employees started signing up for the replacements and got more work done than James could ever possibly imagine.

His natural hands and legs could compete only so much.

Realising that this can only be delayed and not avoided altogether, James eventually signed up for the limb replacement at the company office.

The officer told him he was doing the right thing and that he should’ve joined like the rest earlier.

The operation was to take place the following day. James reached the clinic and met the surgeon who was to operate on him. The surgeon asked him to confirm his identity and he said — James Mello.

The operation was finished in a few hours and James woke up with a new set of upper and lower limbs.

In the beginning it felt weird.

To look at ones own hands and to see a set of metal ones and not flesh and bone.

However, just like everyone else James too eventually got used to them. Since he never actually considered his arms and legs as his locus of identity he wasn’t too bugged with them. Moreover, now he could earn more than he previously did and his improved performance gave him a sense of satisfaction and acceptance in the new and now mostly hybrid society.

With exponential advancements in every front of technology BioMech eventually came up with newer part replacements.

Now you could get your pelvis, vertebrae and ribs replaced too. This allowed the limbs to better perform as the core was much stronger, had more functionality and integrated better with the augmented limbs than before.

James tried to resist the change as he thought it would be a little too much to replace almost every major part of your body but just like before he eventually gave in again.

As he reached the clinic once again after getting the paperwork done by his company, the surgeon who was to operate on him asked him to identify himself and he said — James Mello.

As the years went by the Athenians kept the tradition alive.

Reenacting Theseus's voyage to the land of Minotaur and the High seas. | Martin Penot | Unsplash

As the ship aged, every now and then a part or two of the ship would get worn out. Sometimes it was the fore mast sometimes the bowspirit and so on.

To keep the ship alive the carpenters would take out the rotting wood out and replace it with a newer one of the exact same size and the exact same material.

Years went by and the tech kept on advancing. The augmented limbs and other body parts not only helped in terms of physical performance but also claimed to have increased longevity of the owner.

The average man now lived for over 150years.

A new company enters the bio augmentation bussiness with its revolutionary new product NeuralThread.

NeuralThread was the brain child of a tech revolutionary Alon Hexx, founder of the Hexx industries.

NeuralThread was at the cutting edge of science and consisted of implants that would fit right into your brain. They were claimed to have the capacity to directly connect your brain to the IOT (Internet Of Things) thereby putting you in control of everything that had some sort of Internet connectivity right from your fridge to your television to your house and your car and everything in between— all controlled just by you thinking about it. It connected the user’s brain to the global world wide web.

It did so by using a BMI (Brain Machine Interface) which was like an operating system but for your brain.

The only catch was that it could work only with an artificial skull, a metal alloy skull.

A skull implant. | Luke Southern | Unsplash

Hexx industries partnered with BioMech to come up with a lucrative price and an efficient procedure to get the implant to the public.

Soon the world wide web was swarmed with influencers and celebrities showing off what they could do with their brand new NeuralThread implants.

NeuralThread allowed for an array of abilities that the normal person could only dream of — from augmented visual audio capabilities, shopping online directly through your brain to playing video games and watching movies right into your brain.

This tech changed the world of humans forever.

James was again at a point where he had to make a decision.

To have your peripherals and trunk replaced was one thing but to have your brain implanted and skull replaced was a whole another level of interference that James wasn’t okay with.

Time went by and the NeuralThread made its way into the society — being a part of every household, office and human being, if you could still call them that.

The society now stood divided — the acceptors and the primitives.

James resisted the urge to get himself an implant for as long as he could but eventually gave in to the growing seclusion and his instincts for societal acceptance.

After filling up the paperwork with the company, James reached the clinic where he met the surgeon who was to operate on him. Before the operation the surgeon asked him to confirm his identity to which he said — James Mello.

Everytime the Athenians replaced a part of the old ship they added a new one of the exact same material and the exact same dimensions.

The Athenians however decided not to throw away the old wood as it was once a part of Theseus’s ship. So they kept all the removed wood and parts at a storage room in the dockyard.

As the years went by, more and more of the parts kept on being exchanged and the pile of replaced original wood in the dockyard storage room kept growing larger and larger.

Ever since the Bio Augmentation revolution began, the competition in the industry kept soaring high.

To keep up with the pace and be at the top of the competition, the companies started pushing in software updates on a regular basis to their customers which the users could install just like you installed latest software updates onto your smartphone.

In the beginning most of these updates were minor bug fixes and optimization tools that allowed better use of resources but as the competition kept getting higher the updates started getting more intrusive.

Some of these updates allowed users to download skill sets and some of them allowed for making fundamental changes to the brain by interfering with the satiety centres and modifying aspects of the brain centres that contributed to one’s personality.

James initially resisted installing updates that contained anything more than bug fixes and optimization tools but eventually he gave in to the curiosity and decided to install an update called NeoMatrix 3.14.

Before beginning the installation, the update required users to go through the terms of installation and read what the update contained.

NeoMatrix 3.14 allowed users to tweak urge centres of the brain and delete old memories and implant new synthetic ones in the brain as per their wish. The new memories were installed into the brain’s memory vault in such a way that it was practically impossible to differentiate them from the old ones.

After reading the guide the software asked the user to identify themselves before proceeding to the installation to which he answered — James Mello.

On a seemingly regular day like any other, an old man in Athens having observed the carpenters involved in maintenance of the ship for quite some time asked the keeper of the shipyard a question —

how many parts of the ship have you people replaced by now ?”

The yard keeper replied,

Well, almost all of them now. Atleast once anyways, some of them even twice. It’s a pretty old ship afterall.”

Hearing the two people discuss something a small crowd soon gathered.

Seeing the old man and the keeper argue the Athenians gathered around. | varldenshistoria

In response to the keeper’s answer the old man asked,

“..and you have kept all the original wood still in the storage somewhere in the dockyard I think ?”

The yard keeper said,

“well yes, we have.”

The old man then speaks as the small crowd observes keenly,

What if I were to take that old wood from the dockyard and put it all back one by one and remake the Ship of Theseus. Which one would be the original one ? The one that I have made or the one your men are working on right now?

His statement followed a silence as people stood perplexed at his question.

Time went by and James continued to use NeoMatrix updates to remove traumatic experiences and bad memories throughout his life and kept on implanting new pleasant ones into his adolescent and teenage years — principally changing his life tracks.

By now, James had none of the body parts he began with nor the memories he had lived through in real. His parts were synthetic and so were some of his memories.

Every month or so, a new update would be pushed by the companies.

Before installing the update, the system asked users to confirm their identity, to which after a pause he said — James Mello.

Note by Author:

Thank you for giving your time to this article that was written with much hard work, dedication and time.

You can now listen to the entire story:

--

--