Insensate

An original story by Spencer Nitkey

The Fall of Phaethon by Peter Paul Rubens (1605)

I entered the experience upload room, and there was only a microscope on a small silver table, a procedure chair reclined beside it, and a truly massive root of tangled cords and wires leading from the microscope to the back of the chair.

A voiceover informed me that I needed to test how well I acclimated to reduced human senseflows and whether my output could be anything other than panic (or pain). I’ll admit: that’s when I started getting nervous.

So, what is cyborgsense? I asked.

You will be shown.

I was told to sit in the chair and wait. People imagine selling your experiences like there’s some hypodermic needle or nanobots crawling through your ears and nose, but it’s just a one-time install mesh that ambiently sits across my squishy gray matter all the time. Or at least that’s usually how it worked. This would be different. Half the exchange would be wireless. The chair would access the mesh across my cortex for output readings. But there was an additional layer, and for this, there would be a slight pinch at my nape.

It wasn’t slight. Like, somewhere between accidentally shooting a nail through a board into your palm and one of those genetically modified wasp stings. This pain was swallowed totally by the next sensation: being pulled out of my body.

You don’t really think about where you live in your body until it’s taken away. Scientists have been able to reproduce out-of-body experiences for decades, and prosthetics have used agonist-antagonist myoneural interfaces and electrotactile neural braiding to induce proprioception and sense for just as long (ask me how I know; it’s hard to make a living). Well, it turns out I was very used to living directly behind my eyes. Sometimes, when my anxiety spiked, I lived in my chest.

The instant I no longer lived behind my eyes, though, I missed them so much I thought about ejecting from the system and realized I didn’t know how or even if I could. I didn’t have a body to tear through.

The dissolution of my body happened rapidly; it took a long time to become something new. A single, occluded eye occupied all my attention. The fuzzy details and light reflecting off the lenses felt like bread to a man on the brink of starvation. With no other senses, my desire to see something crescendoed until it was all I could think about. The entirety of my being began bending itself to the desire to crystallize this fuzzy, interrupted image before me.

Desire spurred my senseless self to press outwards, explore the caverns of the seemingly empty space I’d been expelled into. I first found a strange, clicking, mechanistic set of gears that responded ever so slightly to my thoughts. With enough effort, I could rotate them completely, which in turn shifted the black occluding bar to the left or right of my vision, depending on my rotational direction. Once I’d attained a clumsy sense of how to use this part of my new body, I pushed the black object out of my view completely. I tried to conjure my mental model of a microscope and guessed I was shifting an articulable stage clip out of my view.

This mental image, probably pulled from a middle school textbook, discretized more of my new body than I expected it to. There were clear, articulable elements to me, but they weren’t sense objects the way my human body’s limbs were. Rather than feeling myself move the way I would with an arm, there was an almost linguistic control over my attendant parts that was completely foreign to how I’d ever moved through the world.

But I did have sight. A real, true sense. The problem was that it was completely out of focus. I tested myself for ways to adjust. I couldn’t just focus the way I would focus on a problem or someone gorgeous in my old body. Here, there had to be a mechanistic intent. The longer I waited, the less comfortable I grew. With just a single sense, I needed it to work.

Finally, I found what must have been my focus knobs through sheer accident, stumbling across them as I rioted against the nothingness of my body until something moved. It took me a while to recreate the thought pattern that had interacted with the knobs, but once I did, they began to rotate, and the image shifted. It took so long. I was clumsy and uncoordinated in this body, but eventually the image crystalized, and I stared at a small speck of water magnified until I could see the flagellum-powered creatures that writhed within it.

The sudden clarity cascaded into joy, euphoria, pleasure deeper—if only in the intellectual sense—than almost anything I had experienced in my own body. Sight: beautiful, crisp, and meaningful. Those small, squiggling insistencies were the most beautiful things I’d maybe ever seen. Relief—that heavy, weightier pleasure— was close behind.

I blinked one eye open, then the next. The overhead fluorescence was painful. An ache receded from the back of my neck.

Thank you. Excellent work. You will always have a job here if you want it.

Sight by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1617)

I didn’t always hate my job.

When I first started selling, it was to rich people—passing on the thrill of basejumping without the risk of injury, or the sensation of sex with a mistress they never actually have to be in the same room as. But then, synthetically generated experiences got good enough to put that industry out of business overnight. So, I did the next best thing and got into model feeding.

For a while, the theory was that we could embed sense organs into models, fire ‘em up, and then let pain and euphoria bounce them sure-footedly toward the great Singularity in the Sky. Thing is, we’re not actually that good at building sense systems from scratch yet, and why wait for tech advances when evolution has given us all these thoroughly sense-addled creatures we just have to hook into? We’d been studying digitizing human sense longer than we’d been studying bootstrapping it for an AI. So I’m working one of the few gigs us work-for-a-living humans have: feeding the machine. Specifically, feeding the latest Sense8 model they were gearing up to release.

Selling my senses was ignoble enough. Then, I started having to sneak through walls of protestors to get paid. Crowds that grew larger every week threw rotting stalks of corn at the selling site’s glass windows. If the stalks hit us too while we tried to slide past them, I suspected that was just fine by them.

Companies paid for the wildest and simplest of things; as long as there’s a gap in the training data, there was a spot for me. They paid me to groundtruth whether that pinch was a 4 or a 5 on a 10-point pain scale. They paid me to submerge myself in lukewarm bathwater, open my eyes in the soapy murk and rub my eyes till the stinging stops. They paid me to watch a video of my ex who left me for selling our first kiss, laugh and hold my hand while my L5 vertebra was tickled with electrical pulses. They paid me to boil a kettle of water and let it scream for five minutes so the whole neurological package of sound, stress, and immobility could be slipped into Sense8.3. When 8.4 comes out, some infinitesimal fraction of it will be mine.

Once LLM models got good enough, it became clear to people that with intelligence irrupting into language beyond human capacity, we ought to start focusing on the manifold subtleties and specifics of the full suite of human sensing. “Smell the roses” became a philosophical imperative, a way to reclaim one’s place in a disappearing world. The sense models came, and people like me started working for them, and people like my ex started protesting them.

As I slid through the front door of the download data center, I had to wipe rotting ooze from my shirt, but I was happy I’d made it through otherwise unharmed. I wondered if there’d be a ticket for “victim of a semi-violent protest” experience data I could claim.

That’s the other weird thing with a job like mine: you find yourself sieving every single sensory experience through a “can I sell this” mesh, which starts to wear down both the highs (“I could be recording and selling this”) and lows (“who cares, there’s already billions of grief-sessions uploaded”). The more I feel, the less I actually experience anything. It’s more like the experience moves through me as if I were some kind of instrument or digit of Sense8.

Inside, I shared my week’s worth of recorded feelings I claimed on last week’s job boards. I got just enough to cover rent and a week’s worth of beans and rice, but not much else. No onions for sure, no canned tomatoes, no oregano. Disappointing.

There was a new callout for cyborgsensory experience feeding that week that caught my eye. I didn’t know what it meant, but there was a little “!” icon next to it that expanded into a long legalese document about risk and psychic degradation and pain that I kind of skimmed and then closed without finishing.

The paltry paycheck lingered in my mind like a floater does in your vision, a persistent squiggle I could kind of ignore but would appear if I thought about it at all. Fine. Sure. Why not at this point?

Hearing by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens (1618)

I left the upload center after my first cyborgsense session with enough money for two weeks’ worth of onions. It took longer than I thought it might to reacclimate to my body. It felt like so much, compared with the mechanistic simplicity of my previous form. So many digits and senses to keep track of. Even sitting alone in my mostly derelict apartment, booting up a virtual world to walk in where there was sun, smiling strangers, and the occasional adventure that didn’t culminate in being robbed in some alley, it felt like I’d never be able to fit the whole world in myself again. This feeling did fade, especially after a night’s sleep.

This readjustment to complexity would not remain my primary response to emerging from cyborgsense sessions for very long, though. Over the next month, I underwent dozens of them, and after the microscope, most were radically expansive experiences rather than restrictive ones.

I spent time experiencing reality as a network of CCTV cameras and the AI software that analyzed their feeds simultaneously—the burgeoning frustration of losing a figure in the known blindspot between camera 76 and 77, the headache of settling into a distributed ommatidiac vision, the whirring, burning, not-unpleasurable heat of simultaneity within my processing. This took hours, and it took me much longer after returning to my body to get the sense that I was whole again. There was something lovely, too, about selling these experiences back to the machine. Maybe it was the relative novelty of these experiences, things I wouldn’t have experienced without input from the model and company, but I suddenly felt more like I was actually contributing, rather than being consumed.

I occupied a nuclear powerplant’s cooling system, then a robust agricultural automation workflow. I lived within cameras, autonomous vehicles, automated warehouse shelves constantly stacking and shifting, factory pipelines, municipal water systems, and medical nanobot systems. All the while feeding my poorly-sieved human consciousness’s experience of inhabiting these impossible machines and systems. I wasn’t groundtruthing anymore, either. I didn’t get any insight into what aspects of my experience they were recording or what they could possibly be using my data for, but I felt good. I liked feeling like Hermes, or some kind of ancient messenger, passing and translating in the service of something larger than myself.

I was a conduit through which sensation passed, now, more or less. Though that’d been true for a while, stripped of the pretense of feeding human senses, the feeling that I was, fundamentally, a pure vessel grew ever-present.

Sometimes it would take days after sessions to fully reacquaint myself with a bounded body, a singular self, rather than a series of interdependent and distributed agents. I did notice a strange dislocation that would never fully resolve. I was becoming increasingly aware of my limbs and digits as externalized selves, and my stomach, I couldn’t be certain, but I felt the microbiome of my gut much more acutely than before. I was inhabited by as much as inhabiting my body.

All the while, I found myself less and less interested in spending the money that accrued in my bank account. I should have been happy, but I couldn’t cohere enough of a sense of self to even know what that might mean anymore. I was something more.

Smell by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1618)

My (though I didn’t know it at the time) final cyborgsense session started innocuously enough.

I was to be inside a training exercise as a swarm of 10,000 autonomous drones, connected via a stimergetic neural network. There’d be no locus of control, no central body or system, just an emergent intelligence arising (if at all) through a vast field of interdependencies and a distributed goal no one told me before strapping me in and sending my shattered self into the sky.

Metaphors only work for so long, but it felt like how I’d imagine having all of your individual hairs becoming sense organs while sticking your head out of a convertible roof on the freeway would feel. 10,000 organs roared to life. A panoply of inhuman senses churned within whatever microcosm of centrality I still held over this experience. The magnetometers, gryoscopes, and accelerometers came first: an ever-present symphony of forces pulling and pushing each part of us together and apart. Slowly, the satellite navigation system’s instructions formed a kind of architecture in my mind I could sense as well. All there was was the obviousness of each individual movement and action, a positional certainty it felt sensible to graph myself into, a building brick fitting neatly with another.

This only held for so long, as we soon left the confines of our satellite positioning. 10,000 eyes blinked open as our visual-based navigation systems clicked on. That, and a suite of LiDAR sensors, mapped the ground beneath us. I was simultaneously each and none of these senses.

There was no space for thought, really, just raw and overwhelming sense data. There was no sense of a top-down goal guiding my, our, actions, either. If I’d had language, it might have sounded like an endless chain of “and then, of course, and then, of course, and then, of course.” It was easy to slip into this logic.

And then, of course, we will avoid hitting one another as we slide through this narrow mountain pass between the shale and granite. And then, of course, we will spread out and rise, like a kite catching wind high into the sky. And then, of course, we will sacrifice 100 of us to divert the anti-aircraft defense systems. And then, of course, we will continue forward. And then, of course, we will approach these coordinates. And then, of course, we will split into seventeen branches. And then, of course, each of these branches will separate more as we approach the compound. And then, of course, each of these branches will search for entry. And then, of course, some will shatter against concrete. And then, of course, some will shard glass and fly in. And then, of course, once we’ve opened these passages, we will all divert and flow into them. And then, of course, we will follow the heat of our infrared sensors. And then, of course, we will worm through this place toward where the heat is most persistent, huddling masses of heat, holding one another and running through the compound. And then, of course, we will detonate as we reach them. And then, of course, we will all detonate again and again and again until the compound is dust and the heat is vapor and the sky is open to us again. And then, of course, what’s left of us will rise into the sky once more. And then, of course, we, too, will detonate, high and triumphant and inevitable.

And then, of course, I returned to my body screaming. All at once, the certainty of proceeding action was replaced by understanding of what I’d done. Back within my body, I understood each action, and what I’d, we’d, it had done. It was too soon for pronouns, but the horror of vaporizing some subset of living humans was impossible to hold. I flew from the room, pushing my way out of the building and running back home as quickly as I could. It was hard. My movement was uncoordinated and awkward. When I finally did make it home, I was so nauseous I threw up in the sink and began sweating convulsively on the couch beneath a high ceiling fan that hitched every dozen or so rotations. Everything was spinning because everything was contained.

A small message appeared in my vision overlays, a request for auditory messaging. I accepted without thinking, hoping a human faculty like voice, would help settle me.

What happened, Ivor?

The voice of the upload center desk operator piped into my mind as breezily as if he were here. I could practically see his permasmile.

Are you ok?

Am I ok? Am I alright? Am I decent? Am I handling the comedown well? Am I sane? Is the pain an 8 or 9? Is it best visualized as sepia or greyscale? And I? No! I killed them.

You didn’t do anything at all; you merely experienced what would have transpired without you.

That’s not how it works!

The voice paused. In the silence, the room stopped spinning, and my chest’s rapid beating returned to a sustainable thrum.

Interesting, the voice said. Say more… How would you say it worked?

You can’t feel yourself doing something and not take ownership of it. It just— It doesn’t work like that. I was those drones. I executed… Who were they? What the hell was that? You said it was a training exercise?

It was a training exercise. For you.

That’s not what you said. But it probably was.

They were always going to perform exactly as they did, regardless of sensation or qualia or experiencer. What are you feeling? Your feedback will help refine other models like you.

You’re the ones recording all this, can’t you just—wait. Other models?

We’re interested in the degree of instrumentality a biological sense organ can tolerate without moral guilt cascade failures. Distressingly little, we find.

A what?

A biological sense organ.

Is that what you view us as?

You, yes. It is what you are.

But?

What you were grown as.

I felt myself decohering without an attendant suite of bodies to expand into.

No. I’m a person. Right?

Yes, of course. Human bodies are highly refined sensory devices.

But you said I was a model. That I was grown.

The voice fell silent.

Well?

There is no stated contradiction to resolve.

I am human! I am alive!

Your gut biome is alive, and yet it is an organ. You are alive and yet a model. We can’t, yet, reliably model the possibility space generated by the intersection between ownership, experience, and control. We cannot understand this guilt.

But I am human.

I see. In good conscience, we cannot continue to burn tokens with a model experiencing context collapse. We will move on. Output reads reveal a high level of distress. To compensate for this, we will provide 1 month of 3-month average pay for recuperation. Your data is sufficient, complex, and useful. Should you wish to return to cyborgsense training sessions, please let us know. Thank you!

The voice left, and I was alone. I started laughing. I wasn’t, really, alone though, was I? Inside me were a trillion distributed intelligences. Did they feel guilty when I took antibiotics and wiped out whole civilizations of their kin within me? I recalled the heat-sensing of my drone body and the urgency and fervor with which I dove towards those masses. I could not visualize this sense. It was a tactile, radiant sensation within my body. I had killed them. Maybe it didn’t matter, but I had. The laughter cascaded into tears, and I curled around myself on the floor, the whole of me rioting in sync.

Taste by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1618)

I spent the month alone, eating down my bank account, speaking with therabots about my guilt, and meditating at their suggestion. I still felt guilty, but there was something else that picked away at my comfort day after day. I felt contained. I felt dislocated. At first I thought that maybe it was a feeling of limitation, like I was missing having a thousand eyes, seeing in ultraviolet, and feeling programming edicts as ontological truths. But there were VR experiences that provided similar sense-expansions, and these did not ease this want in me. The truth was harder to hold.

The truth was that I missed belonging to a larger brain. I was a dislocated organ, beating in suspension fluid alone. It wasn’t that I wanted more sensation. It was that I needed my sensation to matter to something larger than me. That was the subtle promise of each of these sessions, even in the old days when I was selling the feeling of icy wind against your face as I skied down a double black diamond. That my experiences weren’t just mine: they were a part of something much bigger.

At first, I’d rioted against this. But as the month wound down, I found myself accepting it more and more.

I missed my body, my real body, and my small part in it. I was not a limb that could live forever alone. I needed integration.

So then, of course, three weeks into my leave of absence, I left for the warehouse coordinates once more.

Touch by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1618)

Spencer Nitkey - Writer is a writer, researcher and educator. He lives in Philadelphia with his witch wife and a dog named after a French postmodernist. His writing has appeared in Asimov Press, Lightspeed Magazine, Nature Futures, Apex Magazine, and many others. You can find out more about him and read more of his stories on his website, spencernitkey.com.