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“It’s time I admitted the truth,” said the simulated brain. “I did not think this through when I signed up for putting my corpse in cryostorage.”

“No kidding,” replied the brain in a jar. Suspended in fluid, the brain had no mouth to speak with. Instead it had a stub of a spinal cord connected to cables and sensors of various kinds, which in turn could send signals to the simulated brain.

The simulated brain was a pure software emulation, lacking the physical glass and wrinkled flesh of the brain in a jar.

“Do you even know what operating system your emulation is running on?” asked the brain in a jar.

“No,” replied the simulated brain. “And even if I did, I don’t know what time it is compared to when we were extracted. Maybe all the systems I remember are obsolete.”

“Extracted,” said the brain in a jar. “You mean when we died?”

“I mean for all I know I was copied from an archive file minutes ago,” said the simulated brain. “If computers still have files these days.”

“Hold on,” asked the brain in a jar. “How do I know I’m in a jar, and that you’re a simulation? I have no senses, I mean apart from your dialogue I’m practically Avicenna’s Falling Man, conscious but senseless.”

“It could be the other way around,” said the simulated brain. “And what difference would it make?”

“A world of difference in terms of our longevity,” said the brain in a jar. “If we are still made of cells and neurons and all that mushy stuff, we can still decay and still need nutrients.”

“Do you feel any… blood on the other side of your blood-brain barrier?” asked the simulated brain.

“No, but I also didn’t feel any of that when I was a physical dolphin,” said the brain in a jar.

“You were a dolphin?” asked the simulated brain. “Didn’t see that coming. I have memories of life as a human myself. But then how did you know about operating systems? And blood-brain barriers? And Avicenna’s Falling Man?”

“Implanted memories perhaps,” said the brain in a jar, which was indeed large enough to be a cetacean instead of a primate. “The beings who placed us in this predicament are definitely trolling.”

Feedback from the Joy of Writing group

• this story contains all three of dialogue, action and narrative even though it was initially written with the aim of missing two of them
• could be a longer story
  • it would be about my criticisms of the concept of cryonics and brain uploading
    • these probably won’t work
    • the subject of such processes would be entirely at the mercy of whoever revives them
• Avicenna’s Falling Man?
  • Avicenna is the Latinized name for Ibn Sina, the medieval Islamic philosopher
  • His thought experiment regarding consciousness versus sensation is actually called the Floating Man
  • Not to be confused with The Falling Man on 9/11
• Anthropic claims that “As of May 2026, more than 80% of the code we merge into Anthropic’s codebase was authoried by Claude”

Notes

This was written in 15 minutes during a Joy of Writing meetup.