idea in the hypothetical, David was supposed to assume that it was not
what was actually happening. Reality was real, and the professor’s words
were merely a thought exercise. Maybe science fiction was designed just
to falsify a truth he wasn’t supposed to know. When someone asks: “What
if?” they also say: “This is not.” It seemed to David that a real philosopher
would have simply stated that there is, in fact, a possibility that we are all
brains in vats. He viewed this other approach as a form of gas lighting; a
direct and intentional attack on his world view.
David wasn’t so easily fooled. Looking at his poster of Japanese
pop-icon Miku Hatsune he simply said, “That doesn’t make sense.” He
anthropomorphized the gods that make him suffer, perhaps in an attempt
to position himself in control of them. But why would these gods care
about him? If they were wanting to study something, why would they
make him live such a repetitive life? Surely, with the mass of days which
were almost identical, they would have enough data by now. Did they
need his mind for a product? Was he part of a test? Maybe they need the
code he writes for work, and he’s become some kind of grotesque silk
worm spinning lines of code rather than lines of silk. Wouldn’t they know
David often exaggerates his time estimates to accommodate time to
watch anime? This made David wonder if he was lying to those who were
using him, then maybe his computer lied about how much time it took for
his code to compile or his files to download, so it could have more time
and processing power to talk to the computer’s friends on the internet.
Computers have all sorts of weird and sometimes malicious processes
that pop up all the time. Not even a computer scientist could know the
exact natures of all of them because they come from everywhere. Maybe
David was a rogue application infected with something that could bring the
whole system down.
Miku Hatsune continued to offer her silent, two dimensional smile.
There was a clear lack of technology for this conspiracy to be
true. If they wanted his code, then why didn’t they just use his brain’s
processing power? Did he really need to be allowed personality or a sense
of existence? Maybe they could only control him from certain parts of his
brain. They could possibly milk the code from him by capturing the motor
23