Gemini [WIP]

Chapter VII

The impulse to leave a record of our existence, to permanently mark the face of history and announce we existed, is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Cave paintings in France, runes etched into Scandinavian boulders, the great pyramidal cenotaphs of the Egyptian pharaohs, and the enigmatic mounds of North America are all testament to this. Imprisoned criminals, perhaps the clearest examples of naked human impulse, differ little from those ancient rulers in etching messages, symbols, mementos, and their stories into the walls of their cells, the only medium available to them. The fear of being forgotten, of not leaving a trace in the annals of mankind, strikes a primal fear in all of us. So as I find myself battling this same urge, as a ghost, an intangible prisoner in an intangible prison, I have no recourse but to tell my story to you, my imagined reader, in order to scratch this primal itch.

My brother didn’t take the death of our parents well. It was a fairly standard tragedy: drunk driver, head on collision, she walked away with nary a scratch and our parents dead on impact. We held a quiet funeral for them, numbness giving way to grief in time, anger, acceptance, the whole process. Losing your parents suddenly as a young adult is never easy, and never fully heals, but life moves on and you have to move with it. At least that’s how I processed it. He buried himself in his graduate research at MIT, channeling that fury and loss into his research on the brain, the mind, and the nature of consciousness. I don’t think he would admit to it openly, but he was looking for a way to revive them.

I gave him a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for his birthday, hoping he’d read it and see something of himself in the titular doctor, but when I visited him a few months later, the book was almost lost under sheaves of notes and disassembled electronics, spine uncreased. There are always two sides to any story, and while mine seems sad and bleak, to an outsider, it’s a story of overcoming personal tragedy, spring boarding those lows into the highs of human achievement.

I am a mere footnote, a few lines on the “early life” section of my brother’s wiki page. He is the world-renowned, Nobel-winning inventor of the first non-invasive machine-mind interface. He patented the fundamentals of the Halo system that spread the world over, making him and his patron cum employer unbelievably wealthy, household names in a hundred languages, and ignited a new spark for the rapidly-cooling furnace of the Information Age. The Halo was a (relatively) cheap, portable telepresence device. Pop the circlet on, and you could enter virtual worlds, piped directly through your cranial nerves.

Initially, this was just sight and sound (the pornography industry being the first to adopt, as they are of all new visual mediums), but rapidly expanded to physical sensations, smell, and taste as well. It’s hard to understate how much this changed things globally. Staid, time-tested industries like air travel nose-dived overnight as tourists the world over no longer need to be physically present at their destinations to be there. Fine dining took a hit as well, once they figured out how to code the flavor and texture of lobster and filet mignon. Why spend hundreds on a meal when you could taste the exact same thing for a pittance and fill up on cheap carbs in the meantime? Prostitution, theme parks, cars, office buildings, national parks, live music, anything that depended on physical presence either died or became the sole provenance of the wealthy. From Brazil to Bangkok, the adoption of the Halo across the globe changed the face of humanity.

Of course, the elite still maintained that the physical world was prime, and the few planes, restaurants, escorts, and resorts that survived the industry crash became exclusive havens of the well-connected and financially endowed. This was now the crowd that my brother made his way through, hobnobbing with tycoons, magnates, and prime ministers. I watched this from a distance, via celebrity gossip and carefully picking through video of publicized events to catch a glimpse of him in the crowd.

My own path had gone somewhat differently. Despite our similarities, our identical upbringings, there was some deep-seated quirk, some twisted neuron or kinked strand of DNA that set us off at slightly different angles, the gap between widening as we walked our respective paths. We both took to computers readily, my brother looking to make new things, expand capabilities and knowledge, while I sought to find the cracks in the system, weaknesses, flaws. This presented itself in my youth as using the command line to send rude messages to all the computers on the school network, breaking into people’s social media accounts, and joining with the nascent Anonymous group online to take down perceived evildoers online.

Through Anonymous, I met others like me with the same interest in finding the ragged edges of things, lifting up the skirts of the digital world and peering underneath. I became involved in risker and more esoteric endeavors, moving away from DDOS’ing the Scientology website to hacking the poorly guarded reams of personal information companies left on their website, selling identities wholesale to nameless buyers around the world. I bought into Bitcoin and the blockchain early on, and multiplied my digital wealth in the pandemic years scamming the witless, bored masses into buying “unique” images known as NFTs. I sunk into the mire of digital crime, trying to convince myself that the balance of my crypto wallet outweighed the estrangement from my family, who didn’t understand or (rightfully) approve of what I was doing.

Meanwhile, my brother, the beloved Casimir – “Caz”, was attending MIT. Our estrangement only deepened as he went on to achieve accolades and awards for his academic prowess.

[To be continued...]