Are/Was (Short Story)

We are our bodies.

The science is increasingly clear on this. I can try to dispute it rationally. I could even rail against it, confirm to the world that I'm the madman some folks already think I am. I don't, because I don't see the point of it. New studies on the matter seem to outnumber new days anymore, and each one is stronger proof against me than the last.

Nevertheless, my experience is somewhat different. I'm not alone in this, either. In the bigger cities, there are support groups for folks like me. Apocryphally, we make up our own demographic, complete with stereotypes. I first learned of this as an undergraduate, when a classmate told a joke about professors who feel their bodies are just transportation for their brains. Up until I heard that, the idea that that was a feeling at all, let alone the kind of thing that might be discussed and even disagreed with, was completely foreign to me. I guess I had just assumed that the stark separation of body and brain was the human experience, like free will, and science be damned if it proved something different.

Of course, free will has been conclusively disproved, and that hasn't stopped people from experiencing it. I suspect even as science continues to cement the importance of everything that connects the body to the mind, and even as discoveries minimize the importance of things like the blood-brain barrier separating them, that I will continue to experience what I do. It's an experience that others continue to be confused by and I continue to have difficulties describing. I guess the best way to explain my relationship with my body is to cite an avid motorcyclist's relationship with cars: at best, they're mildly unpleasant but potentially useful vehicles, and at their worst, they are like prisons.

Getting out of this particular prison isn't as easy as pulling onto the shoulder and opening the door, of course, though luckily I've always lived in a world where the prospect of doing so is promising. When I was young, they only had the cybernetic enhancements, which were interesting and occasionally fun, aftermarket accessories for my cage, but not a solution. Plus, I had to wait about twenty years just to start getting them–my parents wouldn't sign the bodymod form, and they certainly weren't going to pay for anything of that nature. Thanks to a promotion in my career, I was able to get in on the second generation of the android blanks, and when they came out with the server conversion, I was one of the first to try it.

It's better. It really is. The interface they set up is too robust and too graphical for my tastes. I guess it's to avoid shocking people who are used to living in a physical world. So I'm still moving through spaces, but now they're fundamentally intellectual spaces, with no precise physical corollary.

Unofficially, I guess, I'm still moving through spaces. Officially, I don't exist anymore. Officially, I'm dead, and there is no “me.”

I was my body.