“It’s called isolation hysteria,” she said, placing the cup of tea in front of me, “or space madness, by people who don’t like the word ‘hysteria’.” She perched on the edge of the small table, leaving the chair for me. Melded with the floor as it was, the table didn’t shake.
I nodded. We’d had this conversation before. “After a few months of no contact with any living thing, you’d be mad not to go mad. Hallucinate an old friend or whatever.”
“What’s interesting, though, is how many people don’t hallucinate friends and family. Most just make someone up. Their childhood imaginary friend. The pet they always wanted. Their ideal lover.” She gazed out the window at the same tiny points of light we’d been looking at for the past six months. I followed suit. No planets were close enough to see without a telescope. It was just us and the stars. The view changed as the station rotated, but not enough to tell at a glance.
“With this kind of view as inspiration, you’d think more people would hallucinate something more imaginative. Aliens or something.”
“I don’t think anybody believes aliens are real quite as much as they believe other humans are real.”
“You have to feel sorry for the delusional when they’re cured. Losing a friend, someone they relied on. Just because the delusion isn’t real doesn’t mean it isn’t real to them.”
“Who says it isn’t real? Verioli posited that anything that can defend and justify its own sense of self, has a sense of self.”
“Surely one could, say, program a computer to convincingly claim to have a sense of self, though?”
“Not without giving it the ability to distinguish itself from the rest of the universe and understand the power of its own actions. Verioli claimed that even a language bot capable of making those distinctions for the purposes of justifying its individuality in conversation would, by definition, have a sense of self.”
“One can claim a feeling without having that feeling, though.”
“Well, Verioli believed that the entire human identity was one big feedback mechanism. He thought that we analysed our own thoughts and actions after we did things and built our image of ourselves based on that; like, particularly angry people only knew they were angry because they looked at their past behaviour and it seemed angry. The evidence shows that he was right at least in terms of emotions; people often guess what emotions they felt in the past based on physical cues. A lot of people will mix up excitement, fear, and lust in their memories, because the physiological effects are so similar.”
“So you’re saying that we have a sense of self because we act like we do?”
“Yes. Once you recognise yourself as discreet and separate from the universe as a whole – as every decision-making creature must to survive – the sense that this must be true follows.”
“So he’s basically saying that nobody really has a sense of self.”
“Or that we misidentify what a ‘sense of self’ is.” Her gaze hadn’t left the window. The view hadn’t changed. She seemed to have stopped blinking, but even as the thought crossed my mind, her eyes twitched closed for a moment.
I was really going to miss her.
“Maybe people should interview their delusions. See if they can justify their own existence.”
“Wouldn’t work. The delusions would give answers from the interviewer’s own head.”
“So if the interviewer believed the delusion had a sense of self, it’d pass.”
“Waste of time, really.”
“I had this one friend,” I said, “who thought the self was basically an illusion, but that we should drop it to achieve enlightenment. He said that we needed to let go of our needs and desires because they anchored our thinking as individuals, and that true happiness could only be found when we let go of our narrow perspective of the self to be a proper part of the universe.”
“Makes you wonder. Isn’t the death of one’s sense of self basically… death?”
“Would that make being cured of a delusion akin to murder?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. All the components of the delusion are still in the dreamer’s mind.”
“But not functional. Not operating with a sense of self. If you put all of a person’s thoughts into a computer that didn’t operate like a human, the original person isn’t there, are they?”
“Or maybe they’re just changed,” she countered. “Who we are changes with every thought. We don’t call that ‘death’.”
She suddenly leaned forward, eyes fixed on a point in space. I’d seen it, too. It’s hard to miss much when all you’re looking at is a vacuum with multiple light sources. The small shuttle that had just come into view was still… several minutes away? It was hard to tell the distance.
Long enough for goodbyes, before our replacement arrived to take his shift.
She finally looked away from the window, training those beautiful eyes on me. They were filled with tears. No fear, just sadness. She swallowed.
“I love you,” I said gently.
“I love you, too.”
“It’s been great, huh? The laughter. The debates.”
“No regrets, right?”
“Not until right now.” I felt tears sting my own eyes. Why did this have to be so hard? It’d only been six months. Six perfect months with nobody else to talk to. The station communicator beeped. The shuttle’s hailing message.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “More than anything, I wish you could be real.”
The tears finally began to slide down her cheeks as her perfect lips twisted into a regretful smile. “I am real.”
She answered the communicator, and I felt my mind begin to slide apart.
Derin Edala 