Dave Wolf

I'd been reading articles and books about all the various attempts to create Artificial Intelligence, which included the concept of uploading a mind to a computer. (What you could call "copying the Connectome.") That fascinated me. I wondered: What would it feel like to be the uploaded entity? To have all the memories, knowledge, desires and other feelings of some specific human, but to be stuck inside a computer with no arms or legs or lips or any of the other fun parts of one's anatomy? I pictured a laptop with a human trapped inside, and went on from there. Among the things I had to consider: why would someone volunteer for such a process? Well, suppose the person was approaching the end of his or her natural life? Suppose the person had a fatal disease? Then I had a kind of ad-man brainstorm. Suppose there was a company dedicated to hosting memorial videos: acting as a web-host in partnership with a large and successful funeral home or chain of them. What if, instead of merely hosting a video scrapbook and a few spoken quotes of the deceased, along with tributes recorded by loved ones, what if they went a step further and offered to "record the brain waves of the loved one who was facing the great beyond?" It might not be useful now, but with all the rapid advances in computing, might it not be possible one day to turn those brain waves into an avatar? A digital representation of the deceased loved one? Someone his or her grandchildren and great grandchildren could visit with, and gain from his or her compassion and understanding? I could picture a pretty irresistible sales pitch based on that concept. It didn't take much further tinkering before I had everything I needed to launch a novel! (Other than tons of research, of course.)

My first story, written when I was a teen in high school, looked forward to the day when people would be able to experience total immersion in a story or adventure. This was back in the 1950s, before Virtual Reality was a gleam in anyone's eye! In my story, the immersion took place in a special recliner chair that shifted and moved to help simulate the action the user was experiencing. All his senses were involved. The immersion chairs were so successful that once someone started using one, he or she would have no desire whatsoever to turn it off and live in "Real Life." Again, this was way before the text acronym IRL was ever used. The kicker in the story was the salesman for this company. He had a strong resemblance to Satan. Looking back on that early effort, I have seen any number of similarly-themed stories and movies, including Matrix and Total Recall among many others. It occurs to me that if I had done a better job writing that, and had found a publisher for it, my entire future might have changed!