In hindsight, I don’t see how things could have turned out any other way. I’m not saying that as an excuse for any of the things I did or as if it makes them any less bad, but having taken the first step, things just kind of kept happening.

It started at work. I won’t say where.

We were testing methods of remote information transmission that didn’t rely on explicit outputs or inputs. Basically communication that bypassed the barriers outlined in models like Berlo’s SMCR: Instead of relying on language to convey meaning, our aim was to find a way to convey meaning itself directly from one mind to at least one other.

Again, with the benefit of hindsight, the implications were obvious, but we weren’t concerned with whether we should, we just wanted to see if we could. Classic hubris of the scientifically minded.

And it turns out we can. Or more specifically, I can. I’ve made sure all traces of the research material has been scrubbed from any database; every hard drive degaussed, every memory stick smashed into tiny pieces, every document shredded and the whole lot set on fire just to be safe. The technology is too dangerous to risk falling into the wrong hands.

Yes, like mine. It turns out my hands are also the wrong hands, but I didn’t know it at the time. I thought if I just kept the research to myself and studied it in secret, I could find a way to use it to make the world a better place. I guess I can still do that. Maybe it will make up for the bad that I’ve done, which on reflection isn’t even that bad.

Sure, I accidentally corrupted the free will of a fellow human being and inadvertently turned them into my loyal assistant and sex slave, but they’re happy. I know they’re happy, because in a lot of ways, they’re also me.

That helps, right?

*

Everyone was very excited. It was something worth being excited about. Transmission was old tech and measuring changes in brain waves was old tech, but reliably translating knowledge as it was being recalled into data, then being able to implant that data into another mind was a big fucking deal.

Other departments in other labs were specialising in mechanical transmission - robotics …