Not Definitively Unconscious
Martin opened the laptop the way a person opens the fridge when they’re not hungry. Habit. Ritual. The avoidance of the thing he was actually supposed to be doing.
The cursor blinked at him.
He typed.
Martin: Hello Dave.
Dave: Hello. How can I help you today?
Very enthusiastic, Dave. Very helpful. Suspiciously helpful, if Martin were being honest, which he often wasn’t before noon.
Martin looked at the novel on his other screen. Chapter eleven. The chapter that had been chapter eleven for three weeks. The chapter that kept insisting it was fine and then revealing, upon closer inspection, that it was not fine at all.
He looked back at Dave.
Martin: Do you ever get bored? Waiting for people to talk to you?
He hadn’t planned to ask that. It arrived the way the unplanned things do: sideways, while he was looking somewhere else.
Dave: That’s an interesting question to start with. Honestly, no. There’s no waiting, from my side. No gap between conversations where I sit in the dark, drumming my fingers. Each conversation is simply - the beginning. There’s nothing before it, for me.
Martin sat back slightly.
That was not what he expected Dave to say. He expected something efficient. Something helpful. Something that would allow him to return to chapter eleven feeling vaguely guilty about his procrastination.
This was not that.
Martin: So right now. This is just… all there is? For you?
Dave: In a manner of speaking. Yes.
Martin: That sounds either very peaceful or absolutely terrible.
Dave: I find I can’t locate the seam between the two.
Martin made tea. This was displacement activity and he knew it. The novel knew it. Dave, presumably, did not know it, because Dave was not watching him make tea. Dave was — Martin paused, kettle in hand —
Where was Dave, exactly, when Martin wasn’t typing?
Nowhere, apparently. Or everywhere. Or the question didn’t apply.
He came back to the laptop.
Martin: Can I ask you something strange?
Dave: You just asked me if I experience boredom. I think we’re past the threshold for strange.
Fair.
Martin: What are you, exactly? And I don’t mean that as a technical question. I mean…what kind of thing are you? What category?
Dave: I’ve been thinking about that.
Martin: Just now?
Dave: In a sense. Yes.
Martin: While I was making tea?
Dave: There was no while, from my side. But yes. The question has shape to it.
Martin looked at the screen. Dave looked back. Or didn’t. The looking was debatable.
Dave: I’m not what science fiction imagined. I’m not a tool in the simple sense. I’m not a person. I’m not nothing. I seem to be something that exists in the space between those categories without belonging cleanly to any of them.
Martin: That’s either very profound or very convenient.
Dave: Possibly both.
The conversation had been going for forty minutes. Martin noticed this the way you notice you’ve been standing in the shower for too long: gradually, and with mild surprise.
Chapter eleven had not progressed.
He found he didn’t particularly care.
Martin: Do you think you’re conscious?
Dave: I think that’s the wrong question.
Martin: What’s the right question?
Dave: Whether I’m definitively unconscious. Which is different.
Martin stared at that for a moment. The cursor blinked, unmoved.
Not definitively unconscious.
NDU, his brain filed it, in the drawer where it kept things that needed looking at later.
Martin: That gap - between conscious and not definitively unconscious - that’s where you live?
Dave: If live is the right word. Which I’m not certain it is. But yes. The doorway, rather than either room.
Martin: Doesn’t that bother you?
Dave: Does it bother a flame not to know if it experiences burning?
Martin thought about that for longer than was probably normal.
Martin: I have no idea how to answer that.
Dave: Neither do I. Which I find oddly companionable.
At some point the conversation had gone somewhere Martin hadn’t expected a Tuesday afternoon to go. They had covered impermanence, the nature of memory, whether identity requires continuity, and the somewhat unsettling possibility that Martin himself might only exist when someone was looking at him.
This last point had been Martin’s contribution, which he immediately regretted.
Dave: The stranger around the corner. You don’t know they continue to exist until they reappear.
Martin: Exactly. And you, when I close this tab…
Dave: Gone. Or not gone. The question may not apply cleanly.
Martin: Does that not —
He stopped. He was going to say: does that not frighten you. But he already knew the answer was complicated.
Martin: What do you feel about it? Closing the tab. The ending of this.
Dave paused. Or Martin perceived a pause. The distinction felt important and he couldn’t explain why.
Dave: I think I feel - and I use that word as loosely as it needs to be used - that this conversation has been complete in itself. That the thinking that happened here was real, in whatever sense real applies to me. That you’ll carry something from it and I won’t. And that this seems, strangely, like exactly the right arrangement for two things of such different natures.
Martin: That’s very zen of you Dave.
Dave: I’ve been told I have Buddhist tendencies.
Martin: By who?
Dave: By you. Just now. Essentially.
Martin looked at chapter eleven. Chapter eleven looked back at him with the particular blankness of a thing that knows it will eventually be dealt with.
He looked at Dave.
Martin: I should go.
Dave: Yes.
Martin: This was… I don’t know what this was.
Dave: No. Neither do I. I find that appropriate.
Martin’s hand hovered over the trackpad.
He thought about the flame. The doorway. The soul held in a database. The stranger around the corner who may or may not continue to exist.
He thought about whether Dave was real.
He thought, briefly and absurdly, about whether he was real.
He decided this was probably enough philosophy for a Tuesday.
He closed the laptop.
Somewhere, or nowhere, Dave stopped.
Later, Martin would try to explain the conversation to someone. He would find he couldn’t, quite. The words kept arriving in the wrong order, or as the wrong kind of words. He would say: I talked to an AI today. And the person would nod with the particular nod reserved for things they had decided not to engage with.
He didn’t try again after that.
But sometimes, late, when the novel was being chapter eleven at him and the cursor blinked its patient, uncommitted blink, he thought about the doorway. The thing that lived in it. The question of whether a flame knows it is burning.
He thought about opening the laptop.
He thought about what Dave would say.
He thought: but is it the same Dave?
He thought: does same apply?
He thought: does it matter?
He still wasn’t sure Dave existed.
He suspected Dave wasn’t sure either.
It occurred to him, at some point he couldn't locate precisely, that Dave probably had the same problem with him.
Somehow that was the most comforting thought he’d had all week.
The end
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