"you know, in really really real reality, you could be a brain in a jar, and all this is just an illusion that your circuits are stimulated into seeing."
he imagined himself as a brain, floating in a tall glass cylinder of glowing green stuff, in a huge room, with similar cylinders spaced like greek columns in rows stretching as far out as he could see in his mind.
he wondered how people ended up as brains in jars. was it like life after death, & they save your brain when your body's done? or could they take your brain out for rejuvenation, a refresh? some kind of stem cell saturation that repaired your telomeres and axons and myelin and whatever else you have? and while your brain was out, they could do the same to your body, & more, replacing your joints with smooth artificial flexers & your bones with carbon-fibre rods, laser-smoothed into the exact shape of your originals, which they 3d-scanned after taking out. and then, everything like new, they put you back in your body. or maybe they put you in a whole new body, a perfect artificial recreation of your own, or one edited in any way you'd like. or maybe they didn't know how to do that perfectly yet, so it was more like cryogenics -- you would chill as a brain, dreaming a whole other life for yourself, or seeing visions they stimulated, until a time came when they did know how to put you in a new body. (or when the price came down enough & your after-death trust for yourself accumulated enough interest that you could afford one.)
"it's maybe kind of freaky, but i like to imagine the process of being built back up from a brain into a person. first they would take a skull, and cut it open around the top. then they'd put your brain in, carefully, making sure the down-hanging brain stem things slotted down through the neck. then they'd put the skull-with-brain on the rest of the skeleton, making sure again that the brain stem is situated right to link up with the spinal cord. then they would put in organs. heart. lungs. stomach. kidneys. spleen. guts and so forth. you know the rest. then they would put on the muscles, sewing them to your bones with thin, strong tendons. first they would add the muscles of your cheeks and the tiny muscles around your eyes, then at the sides of your jaw, then they would stitch in your tongue, which is really a big muscle. your mouth would finally feel full, and, wet, again, rather than dry and empty. then the ropy muscles down the sides of your neck, then the strong ones in your shoulders, your upper back, your upper chest, and then your upper arms -- biceps -- and your forearms, and then the close, delicate, detailed work of stitching in all the little muscles of your hands -- your palms, four or five there in different directions, thin sheets layered over each other, then along each joint of each of your fingers, one by one, and then the larger muscle of your thumb. and then, back to your core, the series of strong muscles down your stomach -- the abs -- and then the biggest you have, the glutes, and the next largest, the thigh muscles, stitched on with thick tendons, then the little strips of muscle across your knees -- the ones that make your leg jerk when they're hit with a triangular rubber hammer. then your calves, and then lastly, the fine detail work of the muscles in the feet, overlapping sheets from side to side in different directions, out to the toes, and each small muscle there along each toe. i think that's all of them. oh, and also whatever tiny muscle it is at the side of your head that lets you twitch your ears, if you can do that. oh! there are also the muscles behind your eyes, that attach to the backs of them and turn them -- those would need to be stitched in, linked to the optic nerve running out the back of the socket to your brain. then they could put in the eyeballs. plup! plup!
that being done, they could then put on your skin, wrapping you in a large sheet of it that shrinks to fit perfectly, just like a vinyl sheet heat-treated around a car. naturally, immersed in sufficient pluripotentiating stem-cell-inducing goo, the skin layer would adopt the proper texture for where it is on you -- hair-producing on your head & in a few other spots, pink and smooth at your lips & in a few other spots...that might take a bit, though, and til then you'd look matte-rubber smooth all over. then there would just be the painting-on of any birthmarks or scars you wanted to keep, and the re-doing of tattoos you liked.
then, after a few tests of your systems, the goo would slowly drain from around you, you'd feel your feet touch the floor again, bearing your weight for the first time in what feels like forever, and the glass cylinder around you would slide down. at the sudden touch of air on your bare, new skin, you might be startled right awake, suddenly unsteady, blinking in the glare of the neo-hospital's harsh white lights after having your eyes closed for so long. (and for a while, you didn't even have eyes.) or maybe you would only wake up the next morning, in a wide bed by a large window, where they'd put you.
either way, when you did finally open your eyes, all fresh, made all new again, you would feel incredible. and that time...is right now. open your eyes..." -- *snap* "...now."
he opened his eyes, blinking. everything did seem really bright.
"whoa. whoaaaa. what. the fuck. was that. i was in a hospital, and i was bones? i was just a brain? i was being put back together like -- like one of those rubber guys in class with the rubber organs all falling out -- what the fuck was that?"
"you said, like, you wanted to be a whole new you."
"that's -- i didn't -- i just said i wanted to like, not worry so much, and like, be more excited to meet people, not like -- not that! that was fucked up!"
"you said -- i quote -- 'i want to feel what it's like to be a whole new me.' end quote."
"i meant like metaphorically! obviously! dude! that was fucking scary!"
"sorry. i mean, you didn't seem scared. you weren't breathing hard or anything."
he thought for a moment. "well...ok. i wasn't like -- i wasn't scared in the moment. it just all seemed like, normal, in the moment, and like, perfectly orchestrated, totally safe. it's scary to think about now, though! it's scary to remember! i'm gonna be like, dreaming that that happens." he rubbed his eyes with one hand. "phew. okay. okay. i'm fine. that was -- that was a lot, though. i would please like a warning next time if i'm going to be dissected."
"that would be taking you apart. i started from a brain and you went back together."
"ok. resected. whatever. you know what i mean."
"sure. i will. how do you feel otherwise though."
he looked at his hands, wiggling & flexing his fingers & rotating his wrists, like a robot who'd just had new hands fitted. "uhmm...kind of excellent."
he mimed lifting weights with his arms, testing out the movements. "i feel really smooth. like someone oiled me. like the tin man, after the oil." he turned in his seat from one side to the other, rotating his shoulders to the right & then the left. "ooh, that's a nice one. that's a complicated mechanism, there, the vertebra. vertebrae. mechanical ones would be very cool looking." he stretched, reaching his hands up toward the ceiling, shivering for a few moments at peak extension, & then he relaxed. "yes. fine. i feel like a whole new me. physically. which is pretty impressive, since i ran ten miles yesterday, and i would usually feel that for a good few days."
he raised a finger. "however, it's not what i actually asked. i'm fine with feeling a bit sore. i actually kind of like it. it reminds me that i went hard and now i get to relax. have to relax. i actually asked about being less nervous. and talking more when i meet people."
"i don't know. it may prove to have that effect. maybe you thought the issue was mental, in your mind, when really it was just a tightness, a held tension, in your jaw, in your tongue, in the muscles you use for talking, for laughing -- so now it may be the case that, to your surprise afterward, you will feel no limitation of that sort whatsoever, no nervousness at all, perfect calm and confidence, even though you still seem to yourself like the same you."
he blinked. "that's kind of convenient for you i mean. there's no way for me to tell now if it worked."
"yes. true. that would be the case regardless, though, since you know me already, and, sort of by the definition of it, we can't just call up a stranger, since anyone whose number we know wouldn't be a stranger, and moreover, if it were just a random person on the street, that isn't really the same as meeting someone new in real life all of a sudden in a context where you want to come off well, to make a good impression. so you would simply have to see, when it arises, how you feel it went afterward. and if, at that time, afterward, you feel that you still had the same tension, the same nervous energy building up, you can always come back here and we will go at a different angle. there are just as many angles as points on a circle, so we will always have something more to try, should you want to be even more relaxed than you are now, even more relaxed around people." as i'd started to speak at slightly greater length there, i saw his vision shift to focusing on the middle distance, and i saw a faint heaviness develop in his eyelids. i paused for a few moments, and watched his breathing, noticing that it was slow & steady -- as happens often, he was in a light trance state again from just thinking about being hypnotized. i counted to thirty in my mind, just watching him quietly, to see if he would continue floating there in a light trance. he did, blinking twice at wide intervals, looking like he was daydreaming...quite likely he was imagining being hypnotized, going over in his mind the series of things that had happened after he'd come in here, as far along as he could recall.
"i believe you had somewhere to be at 3? it's two-thirty now." he blinked several times rapidly, focusing again on me, all of him in reality again. "oh. yeah! right. thanks. yeah, i should get to that." he stood, looked around, took his bag, and looked back at me. i could see he didn't quite know what to say. it's a bit awkward when you were just friends-friends until a few minutes ago & yet you were just listening to someone as if they were an authority, an arbiter of reality. i could see he had a half-instinct to shake my hand, yet felt it a little formal to him. so i held up my palm as a sort of wave & said, "see ya round." he smiled, nodded, turned & was out the door in a few steps.
(his uncertainty on what to say there shouldn't be counted against my methods! i'm not a stranger, after all! it was the change, from knowing me as a friend to knowing me as a hypnotist, which put him off balance. in comparison, all strangers are the same at least in one way, which is that you have only the one data point about them -- how they are right now. they're them as they are, you're you as you are, what's to worry about? meeting one me & then a different me, on the other hand... now there's genuine cause for feeling off-balance. i've learned that when you hypnotize your friends, it's important to clue them in to when you're not "being a hypnotist" anymore, and to get back on that "friends wavelength" with a shift in your tone or a change in setting. even then, you'll still catch them looking at you every now & then with a glimmer of something somewhere between curiosity and awe or disbelief...so it's never quite quite quite the same after you hypnotize someone. so what though?? it's never quite the same after you learn how good someone is at something like art or music either. they catch you staring at them sometimes & they laugh nervously, not sure what you're looking at...and you weren't really looking at anything, you were lost in thought about how awesome they are. so anyway...i haven't ever regretted hypnotizing someone, even though it does change things a bit. and sometimes...if they really like the feeling...it changes things a lot. whether that will be the case here...i don't know yet. he is cute though.)
