We Die Every Day

We die to each other daily. What we know of
other people is only our memory of the moments
during which we know them.

• TS Eliot

It had been nearly two weeks since Bixby had come to work, and our boss had said that while the man had answered his phone, it might have been better that he hadn't. Bixby hadn't been raving, exactly, but he'd certainly not made much sense. While we weren't friends, we were friendly, and so I drove by his house to check on it.
It was a rainy, dreary day, and the house sat at the knee deer of a short cul-de-sac, seemingly more distant from its neighbors, like a wallflower at a party. I pulled in behind Bixby's car and examined the house.
Dark as the day was, there seems something wrong with how every window, shades drawn, showed bright lights burning behind them. So far as I knew, Bixby lived alone. I felt as if I were intruding as I made the walk from the driveway to the small covered porch, as Bixby was a very private person.I only knew the house after having dropped him off once when he had some car trouble, for which he'd sincerely thanked me, yet he'd not invited me in. As I walked up, I could hear music, angry guitars at high BPM, through the door, loud enough to shake the translucent glass. I rang the bell.
There was nothing wrong with Bixby's hearing. Despite the music, he'd heard the bell, as the music cut with quick finality. A moment later, the light in the glass dimmed in a vague silhouette. It stayed motionless for a long moment, so much so that I began to squirm. I opened my mouth to speak when Bixby spoke.
"Who's there?"
Double quote John. Double quote I said. "John Rutherford. From core dynamics. I… I came to see how you're getting along?"
Bixby gave me more of his silent outline. The rain striking the porch roof was the only sound competing with my memory of Bixby's last two words. His voice, it sounded rough, either from harsh use, or from long silence. I wasn't sure which. "You OK?" I asked.
The sound of the thumb bolt turning in the door nearly startled me the knob turned, and the door opened, perhaps an inch or two, before Bixby silhouette receded. "Come in, John," he said from over his shoulder. I pushed the door open.
I was nearly blinded; the door opened onto a pure white light so strong that it felt like a door into the sun, but there was no heat to it. In fact, despite the damp overcast day, the air from the door felt as if I had opened a refrigerator.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw Bixby's back as he stepped through a doorway on the right side of the short hallway on one end of which ended at the doorway I'd opened on the other, a narrow stair on the left side, went up and cornered, right apparently to bedrooms I thought and just passed the stairs, a door into a kitchen. Other doors on both sides from those doors, the kitchen, and stairs, poured that same white light, as bright as a surgery. Squinting up, I could see why. A naked light socket above me had been stripped of its fixture, and then the place of a traditional bulb, a device with three panels of strong LEDs connected to the socket. The fixture over the stairwell has been given the same treatment.
"In here, John." I heard him call. I stepped down to the doorway.
The doorway led to a sitting room. Bixby was shuffling, and a draggy, off-balance way, to the opposite wall against which set a roll top desk, a laptop, laying upon it, opened and running. Bixby was wearing a bathrobe, which spread around him open bare legs, and bare feet below. His hair spread around his head, disheveled, the clean.
The desk was clean and clear, but the rest of the room was a wreck. The sofa and chair had been flipped over, the coffee table thrown into a corner. The floor was covered with a thin, gray carpet, littered with stains, debris, paper, and laundry. Bixby reached the desk, and turned to face me.
He wore only a pair of boxers under the row, and I only barely registered how he looked pale, wasted, and already gaunt man who appeared a collection of sticks wrapped in a plastic bag from which the air had been taken.Most of my attention was drawn to his face, and his eyes. His eyes…
Bixby's eyes were so red and bloodshot, the surrounding flesh so raw and red, that it was difficult to tell where eye and skin divided, yet those parts which were white were so glossy that in the harsh light (a similar fixture adorned to this room) that they seemed like lamps themselves. The eyes didn't move, but his head made short, fast jerking motions that allowed him to take in me, the room, and apparently random targets.
"So," he said in that cracked voice, "what do you think?"
"Um, What?" I said.
"Am I OK?"
I tore my eyes from his for a moment, and swept across the room, his chest the skin nearly blue. "No. Bixby, what's wrong?"
He nodded, his expression, nearly blank, never changing. "Yeah," he said, "yeah, right, what… OK." He looked down, running fingers through his hair. He turned for a moment and lifted a coffee mug from the desk, raised it to his lips as he turned back to me. He stopped, the motion seemed to freeze completely. His face still blank, he began to speak, at first nearly a mumble, gaining volume as he went on.
"10 days. It's been 10 freaking days, all I can think about, every moment, and I can't… I can't find the words to say… I mean, how do I tell you what's, wrong!" On the last word, he spun, and whipped the coffee mug into the wall, splattering coffee everywhere some on me. I jerked away.
"It's cold, John." He said, turning in place. "Cold, has to be, in here, pretty much the second it pours, cold, ah , here." He reached behind the couch and pulled a battered box of tissues, lobbing it to me. I fumbled it, dumbstruck. I pulled out a few, and as I pad it at the brown liquid, I looked about for a place to put them. Bixby noticed, and took the box from me, then the dirty tissues, and tossed them back behind the couch. He looked back at me, and started to giggle. I'd read the word titter before, but never quite gotten its meaning until now.
"Want some more coffee?" he said.

The kitchen table was covered with equipment. Quite a lot of it carried Core Dynamics logos.Some I recognize, but the one I didn't know, looked like a headband, covered with ribbon, cables, and odd bits and bobs. Along, thin wire led from the headband to a massive breadboards, which turn wire to three USB ports on the desktop chassis of the PC dominating the table. On the screen was a terminal window.
"Cream? Sugar?" Asked Bixby. He stood with two coffee cups held by thumb rings in one hand and in the other a coffee pot he was deliberately splashing Coffey into the cops, both at once. "No." I said.
He set the pot down, and shuffled over to me. He held out a mug, and I took it, thanking him. I took a sip and Windt.
"Too strong?" He asked.
"Yeah, a bit." I said. This was an understatement; it was black as pitch and nearly as thick as syrup.
"Sorry" he said. He nodded at the table. Double "this would be easier to show them tell. Put this on." He handed me the headband.
I didn't reach out right away. He shook it at me slightly, and then smiled weakly."oh, right." He said "if I look like I look, you're wise to be nervous, aren't you?" Again, he tittered. "Look, you know I'm in metrics, right? All of this is read only, OK? Totally passive. Look at it."
I took the headband, and turned it slowly. While I didn't quite understand the configuration, I recognize the components, and like he said, they were extremely sensitive, electromagnetic sensors, and all passive. In other words, it could tell you about magnetic waves, but it wouldn't generate a field.
"See?" he said. I nodded. Emotions towards my head, splashing coffee on the floor. I lifted the headband and put it on my head. It was heavy, but not uncomfortable.
Bixby reached over to the keyboard. He struck the up arrow on the keyboard, and the terminal window read:

> measureCon.py

He pressed enter. On the bread, boards, seemingly random LEDs blinked. After a few seconds, a new line appeared.

Conscious Thumbprint: 2E 47 1D 8C A3 94 1B 94 1B 37

"See?" he asked.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It's you, this time." He said.
"What?" I asked.
"OK, lesson time. You know what biometrics are, right?"
"Yes, a security thing. Like a thumbprint."
"That is one sure. Do you want something? That's unique to a living person that you can't reproduce without them being there, like a password that you can't forget."
"We use them at work." I said.
"Yes." Bixby seemed to stall, blank for a second or two, then he came back to himself. "Macros are getting worse." he muttered. He reached into his robe pocket and drew out a few pills. He put them into his mouth, then bolted the Coffey down. He looked at me.
"Stims." he said. He seemed to read something on my face and his expression clouded. "Judge later, listen now, OK?"
"OK," I said. "Passwords?"
"Right, right." he said. "The trouble is a password you don't give up. Fingerprints get left everywhere and the new plastics are making those easy to clone and use with cheap equipment. Irish scans are still hard to harvest, but if you remember that thing last year with that ambassador from China got his eyes scooped out like a tomato core, you'll understand why CD Wanted to find a biometric that you can't easily steal."
"I get it," I said. "So you're doing brain waves?"
"sort of," Bixby said. "it's a bit more. So when I built the array, "he said, sloshing at the headband, "I thought that, too. Then I did animal testing."
He paused. Blank or expectant, I couldn't tell.
"Animals? "I prompted.
He nodded, eyes fixed in space. "Dogs, first. And people, I get a solid read every time, a unique value for each person. I wanted to see if an animal could spoof the system, but the dogs never gave a read. I ordered other tests, and that's when I ran into the second problem."
Pause. "What was the second problem?" I asked.
"Damned thing didn't work!" he shouted, and began pacing back-and-forth. "You get a unique value, all right, no matter how many times in a day you scan. If you run that again "he pointed at the keyboard, "you'll get that same ID. But when you do it tomorrow, you won't. I had to know why. We were so close to a great system, invincible, security, but inconsistent results why? "
"Then animal testing came back. Primates registered, but no other living things. Same with the chimps, though, wait a day, and the ID changes. "
He stopped. Look down at his bare feet. "Then I tried sedation. I started knocking the chimps out. That's when I got a glimmer.
"See, once you put them under, they didn't register. REM sleep was the barrier. When they came out out of R.E.M., they had a different value. That's when it dawned on me. I was measuring consciousness."
"What?"
"Consciousness. The active, self-aware mind. I was keyed on it, capturing it. And that was last week, when I realized it. See, the brain, it's like that thing. "He pointed at the computer on the table.
"When it's running, it pulls data from memory, rules, and past experience, and it uses that to construct a system start. But switch it off, and back on, and you get a different state, seemingly identical to observation, a different. Do you see, now? Do you get it?" He was agitated.
"No, Bixby. I don't see it. Help me."
He tittered "Are you sure? You really want this? Take the red pill?"
"What pill?"
"Where does that state, the first one, go? If, when we wake, we are unique, different copy of our own consciousness, then what happened to the last?"
I shook my head.
"Look at me!" he screamed. "I haven't slept in 10 days! Bright lights, cold showers, drugs? I hate metal music, but it keeps me up. This is torture so why would I torture myself for 240 hours?
"We die, man! We die every day!"
He jammed the headband on ran, the program, pointed at the screen "I know that for as long as that key stays the same, I'm still alive. You, you go through what you think is your routine, not knowing that you're just a construct that your brain built to drive your body with an illusion of continuity, but in reality, you're never going to experience anything once your nightlight goes off, and you drift peacefully off to oblivion!"
I backed away, as he started reaching into cabinets, throwing dishes. "Rage, rage "he screamed. "Dying! Light! Rage! "

I called 911. They came with an ambulance.
The very first thing that they did was to sedate him.

He never came back to Core Dynamics. His project was abandoned, citing inconsistent results.

And me? I'm fine. I feel a little guilty. There's no playbook on mental health, or how to help people. I wish that there were.
But other than that, I'm fine. Just a little insomnia. But most nights, my sleep is fine. And I wake up feeling like a new man.