Right, well, a couple of thoughts.
One, I absolutely had to do that more often. And with more toys. Or other things.
But two, that also hadn’t felt quite right. Not in the sense I hadn’t been fully aroused or somehow didn’t feel fully present for it. It was more that, of all the experiences that I’d had thus far in my Virtual reality, that was the least real feeling of all of them.
I was having trouble articulating to myself why that was precisely, but something was just off.
It wasn’t like I remembered it being.
There was just something to the almost unexplainable qualia of the sim, I was realizing. Like all the sensations were a little too clean. A little too pure. As if they were the platonic ideals of every given sensory input.
I suppose I just hadn’t really noticed it before, but it almost all felt… kinda distant?
Like how you feel and experience things when you’re mildly dissociating. Not fully separated and behind the glass, but just kinda dreamlike, if that makes sense.
Except that didn’t quite explain it either. Sights, sounds, haptics, all of it could still feel plenty intense. From pain to pleasure, it was all perfectly sharp.
It was just that, somehow, it still wasn’t quite right.
I summoned the tablet that served as my primary interface with a flick of my wrist, and then hovered a finger over the ‘clean avatar’ button.
Then I thought better of it, and spawned into existence a hot shower. It’d be nice to bathe, even if it wasn’t strictly necessary for me anymore.
Besides, it’d help me sort out my thoughts.
It was only under a deluge of high pressure, high temperature water, that I finally managed to put my finger on exactly what was bothering me.
There wasn’t enough sensory noise. Everything was too sterile.
My vision was too clear. I had no eyeball floaters, anymore, and could see farther into the distance than ever.
My hearing was unrealistically perfect. Sounds in my environment never seemed to mix or muddy themselves, every thing perfectly distinct and distinguishable at all times.
My sense of touch felt filtered. Like the only things that registered were what I needed or wanted to feel at any point, and nothing else.
My proprioception was uncannily accurate. There was no felt ambiguity regarding where any part of myself was in space, in relation to my body or otherwise.
My sense of taste… I hadn’t actually tested that one yet. I’d had a bad habit of forgetting to eat or drink water even back when I had a body, and being digitized hadn’t helped that.
Though I suppose I might need to stop thinking of that previous body as actually being mine?
I wasn’t actually sure I was that person, in any meaningful capacity.
But then again, humans replaced nearly every single one of their cells within a year, or so the saying went.
The ship of theseus wasn’t actually much of a hypothetical, when it came to being a person. It was the default. No part of the self was permanent, whether that be in bones, blood, skin, or memory.
Unless you believed in the immortal soul, I guess, but I certainly didn’t. Never had, really.
Though I supposed there was an argument to be made regarding death and identity as being tied explicitly to a single throughline of consciousness. That a person was an uninterrupted continuum through time, as opposed to being in a single moment.
I just didn’t put any stock in that interpretation of identity, myself.
How could I, knowing that surgical grade anesthesia stopped every single part of the brain from communicating with itself? That was basically complete dissolution of the ego, so far as I was concerned, nearly a form of death in and of itself.
Concussions, too, tended to put a full or partial stop to the brain’s processes. Either way, the continuum was halted, even if only temporarily.
What, then, was the actual difference between blacking out for a short while, or being put on ice for several centuries, as I had?
Was it just the time? If so, how much? Where was the line? If you put someone in a braindead coma and somehow managed to both extend their life for over a century and then subsequently perfectly restored their higher brain functions, would that be an entirely different person afterwards?
I would say that person was still the same. They’d almost certainly changed, sure, but it was still the same entity.
And lastly, even if, by this same logic, there had once been a whole other version of me running around for a while, did that change things?
Was there only one cannon version of a person?
If you cloned a person, and then the two clones had slowly drifted apart over time, when did they become fully different people?
At the moment of cloning? If so, what if they were identical in every way, and distinguishing the ‘original’ was somehow impossible? Were they different people, still?
Not at the start, I would argue. Given a year or so apart, I might agree that they were different individuals, though.
What if, then, they both constantly shared memories and experiences, such that no divide ever formed?
Wouldn’t that just be one person with two bodies?
Yes, in my opinion.
So then, what if one of these bodies lost a large portion of memory, and couldn’t recover it?
Wouldn’t that be the same as forming that initial divide? Would that single person be suddenly rendered in two because of that?
Hmm… Maybe? I legitimately wasn’t sure.
Going back a little bit, what if one of the two synchronized bodies was deleted out of existence, suddenly and without warning?
Halved, was that now a completely separate entity than before?
No, absolutely not. Losing a part does not make you an entirely different person, in my opinion.
So, what if they were out of sync,, and then one of them died?
Were they separate people, then?
Some part of my gut insisted they were.
But logically, that didn’t quite fit with my previous suppositions.
After all, I’d just made the argument that a person was still fundamentally the same person, even if unique parts were lost and never recovered.
And the example that I’d just made wasn’t that different from, say, somebody losing all ability to move and feel a limb, and then subsequently removing that limb.
A part of the self became an object that was separate, uncontrollable or unresponsive, and then was removed.
Was it the amputated arm that counted as the person, or the much larger piece that was still up and walking around?
Which was I, in that scenario?
A dead part, or the altered whole?
I didn’t fucking know.
I didn’t think I would ever know. I couldn’t just reason my way out of this, not with my mediocre knowledge of philosophy.
That, so far as I was concerned, just left me with what I wanted to be. The person who’d been running around after that scan was long dead, after all.
They had no say in who I was. Even if they were still running around, I still wouldn’t want them to be able to decide what or who I was.
That made me the only real determiner of myself, once again.
Fuck whatever the philosophers, or my captors had to say on the matter. Being trans had meant I’d already had to violently declare myself into existence once before. It wouldn’t be any harder to do it a second time.
So what did I want?
To start over, count myself a fresh slate, as something completely new, despite all the memories and pieces of identity I’d kept?
No. I did not want that.
Nor did I wish to consider myself the offspring, in some manner, of that prior entity. I was not the child of a human named Cess.
I was me.
And I was Cess.
There had just kinda sorta been two of me for a couple of years.
But now there was one.
That one simply also happened to effectively be a robot, now.
Now, where was I? Prior to resolving my existential doubts, I mean.
Right!
Gooning didn’t feel real anymore!
Shit, that was gonna be a problem, wasn’t it?
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was still going to try all the VR scenarios that I could, but in the end, I knew I was gonna start craving the real thing again.
So how to go about satisfying that craving?
Change the settings on my sim, somehow, and make things feel more realistic?
Eh. That sounded like a lot of work and like it would probably lead to me doubting what real even felt like, eventually.
Maybe the answer, then, was to figure out some way to experience meat space as something more than just what was beyond the screen.
To give myself a new body. Not just a drone, or another set of remotely controllable limbs, but a body. A physical self to fully inhabit.
Yeah, that sounded right. Even if having to feel the world through electronic sensors would always be a little different than feeling human nerves, I’d still prefer it to being stuck as a brain in a box.
It didn't matter if that box had some neat tricks. I think I still wanted a real world body.
Ideally, one that was capable of feeling sexual pleasure, too.
…
Welp, time to figure out how to make one of those, I guess.
Not like I didn’t have the time. Eight subjective years were still between me and my destination, after all.