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“I don't want to die, Father,” I say to the priest, squirming on the plastic chair next to my bed.
Squirming.
Strange that a chaplain would be so squeamish. About heaven and hell, the baggage of his trade.
“This is the time to take stock of your life, to prepare for judgement, André... ,” the priest says.
But I’m no longer listening. I’m thirty-four, a mathematician at the École Polytechnique. Some success under my belt and so much more to give. I’m not minded to check out so easily.
“Thank you, Father,” I say, waving him away. He looks at me oddly, muttering something which sounds a lot like ‘denial’ under his breath.
So they send in the psychologist.
Dr P_ looks smart and businesslike. It’s pleasing not to be patronised for a change.
How is André feeling this morning? You are going to eat your porridge aren't you, or shall I be cross?
“Leukaemia, right? Terminal? How long do they give you?“
I decide to test him.
“It's a Poisson process. Mean survival time - as of today - is five days.”
He doesn’t blink an eye.
“Like radioactive decay, huh? We'd better get a move on, then!”
“If I were seventy,” I explain wearily, “with all my creative years behind me, well it would be different. I'd be happy to mulch back into the biosphere, my work done. But, ...”
I wave weakly and helplessly,
“... I'm just not ready to go.“
Dr P_ gives me a sympathetic look.
“Not much we can do about your personal Poisson process, I accept that. But reflect on this. Personal extinction is really something quite different. Something considerably more tractable.”
I may look confused; I certainly feel it.
The psychologist pulls up his tablet.
“I've got your details here. All those psychometric tests you did?”
He looks at me in mock admiration.
“IQ of 145, it says here. Not quite genius level but you must be one in a million.”
“1,300 in a million,” I correct him.
I'm beginning to warm to this guy.
“I'm looking at your Five-Factor and Myers-Briggs stats now,” he continues. “It says here you’re: flippant and facetious; careless about things which don’t interest you; tunnel-visioned and obsessive about the things which do.”
“That’s not so exceptional,” I say, “For a mathematician.”
He leans towards me, suddenly more serious.
“Personal identity is a strange old thing,” he says. “Every night you turn yourself off. Every morning you reboot yourself. A new you for a new day.”
He holds up his hand at my skeptical frown: where's he going with this?
“Listen. Hear me out. If you woke up tomorrow with amnesia, remembering nothing of your previous life, but still feeling some ineffable sense of your you-ness, is that still you?
I nod, humouring him. I know such things have happened. It wouldn't be ideal, but .. .
"Sure. It’s not like you’re dead."
Dr P_ stands up.
“Approximately a billion people in the world have been sequenced by now and their results put online for research purposes. In my professional capacity I have .. André, are you listening?“
I suppress a yawn. Always interesting to hear about a colleague's work.
In any case, he hadn't stopped.
“I want you to think about the test-retest box around your psychometric score. Sure, it's tight but there are a lot of people out there. We'll run the PGS algorithms but I can tell you right now with greater than 99% certainty.
"You have a doppelgänger out there somewhere."
Two days later a mathematics professor died at the tender age of thirty-four. It was remarked that his face had a peaceful expression, maybe even the hint of a smile.
It was another beautiful morning on the Ukrainian steppe as Katya left her parents’ cottage to cycle the ten kilometres to Institute 14, a school for the precociously-gifted.
On arrival, Katya logged-in and found an unexpected email. It was from Paris, France via anonymized routing. The author, a clinical psychologist, apologised for not being able to greet her properly - confidentiality required that he should know nothing of her identity or location in the world.
The message was simply for her information. A very promising mathematician, Professor André Z_ had just passed away, and the computers had identified her as being an uncanny match in personality and intellect.
There was a link to her mental twin's Wikipedia page. If she wished she could check out her doppelgänger’s life history and accomplishments. No specific action was required on her part and there would be no further communication.
Katya, mildly curious, scanned the article and then deleted the message. It was quickly forgotten as she hurried off to her first class of the day, in advanced statistics.
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