Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Chapter 207 Human Experimentation

The data from the Alpha experiment was released internally.

At the technical review meeting, Shen Yiming showed two videos: a real mouse and a digital mouse making highly consistent behavioral choices in the same virtual space. After the videos finished, the meeting room was quiet for half a minute.

Zuo Cheng said, "The next step is people."

No one objected.

The ethical review process took nearly four months. This was the first formal review case by the Digital Life Ethics Committee, and the discussion minutes were over seventy pages long. There were dissenting voices, and some advocated waiting a few more years. The final vote was a unanimous approval.

The preconditions were very strict. Volunteers had to be terminally ill with a life expectancy of no more than six months, have full civil capacity, and fully understand and acknowledge all risks in writing. The informed consent form went through twelve revisions, each carefully weighing the balance between protecting the volunteers and respecting their wishes.

A month and a half later, they found volunteers.

Gu Feng, 63 years old, was formerly a professor of neuropathology at Huaxia Medical University. Diagnosed with ALS four years ago, he can only barely move his left thumb and index finger, except for his eyes. He signed his name on the last page of the consent form with his remaining two fingers; the handwriting was crooked but the strokes were complete.

After he finished writing, his assistant wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Shen Yiming asked, "Professor Gu, are you sure?"

Gu Feng answered using a voice-assisted device; the voice was synthesized, but his speech rate and pauses still revealed that he had spent many years lecturing. He said, "I've studied the brain for thirty years, and to finally be able to use my own brain to give this field one last lesson isn't a loss."

When Zuo Cheng heard this, he stood outside the office for a while without going in.

The trial was scheduled for a Friday.

The operating room was located on the third basement floor of Hangzhou Central Hospital and had been specially modified for this experiment. The NX-40 chip had already demonstrated bidirectional acquisition capabilities in animals, but the human trial used a customized version with 4,000 sampling channels, covering the prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, and part of the cerebellum, an order of magnitude larger than the coverage area of ​​the alpha experiment.

At nine o'clock in the morning, Gu Feng was wheeled into the operating room.

At the same time, the display screen in the 402 Technical Center lit up.

The live broadcast was at Gu Feng's own request. In his preoperative instructions, he wrote that if the experiment was successful, the footage would be useful for medical history. If it failed, it would still let future generations know where to go from there.

Zuo Cheng wasn't watching the live stream. He sat in the observation room next door, in front of a screen that displayed no images, only a real-time stream of neural signal data. The numbers scrolled across the screen like flowing water, and Shen Yiming watched them with him.

The surgery lasted nearly four hours. Professor Zheng was the lead surgeon, and the brain-computer interface was implanted with millimeter-level precision. At 11:40 AM, the last piece of skull was successfully repositioned.

At 2:30 p.m., the data link was established.

The NX-40 began transmitting its first set of neural signals to the quantum computer, sampling at a frequency of 30 kilohertz, at nearly 120 million data points per second. The quantum computer's processing core began running a neural network model trained for 100,000 hours, tasked with translating the raw signals from 4,000 channels into the complete consciousness of a digital human.

The translation speed is 1.5 times faster than real-time, and Gu Feng in the digital world lives half as fast as in reality.

At 3:07 PM, the virtual Gu Feng opened his eyes.

The virtual environment is a standard office with a desk, chair, bookshelves, and a window. Instead of a landscape view, the window shows a simplified street scene with streets, trees, and people walking around.

The virtual Gu Feng sat in the chair for a moment.

No one in the observation room uttered a sound. Shen Yiming's hand holding the mouse trembled slightly. Zuo Cheng's eyes never left the screen.

Then the virtual Gu Feng looked down at his hands.

He raised his right hand, flipped his palm over, then clenched his fist. His lips moved, and the virtual environment's voice system decoded his neural signals into text, displaying it in the screen's chat box. The first sentence was: "I can still move."

Then he stood up.

A body paralyzed for nearly four years has stood up again in the digital world. Virtual Gu Feng took a few steps in the office, his steps a little unsteady, like someone who hasn't walked in a long time relearning. He walked to the window, looked at the virtual street scene outside, and stood there for a long time.

Shen Yiming typed in the chat box: "Professor Gu, can you hear me?"

The virtual Gu Feng turned his head and said, "Yes."

Shen Yiming typed: "What are you thinking about?"

The virtual Gu Feng said, "I've been thinking about how long it's been since I stood up. Almost four years. I thought I'd never know what it felt like to stand again in my life."

Shen Yiming's fingers paused on the keyboard for a moment.

Zuo Cheng said, "Ask him what day it is today."

When asked this question, the virtual Gu Feng paused for a moment to think. He said, "If you hadn't modified my time perception parameters, today should be the trial day. I wrote the trial day in my pre-operative instructions, but I don't know how much time has passed now."

The actual time was less than six hours after the date he last confirmed, so his sense of time was accurate.

Next comes a series of standardized tests: memory, cognition, and emotional response.

The performance of the virtual Gu Feng silenced all the neuroscientists involved in the project.

His long-term memory was intact, while his short-term memory was slightly off but within the expected range. His logical reasoning ability was consistent with the pre-operative assessment. When asked about his daughter's name, he accurately stated her name and birthday. When asked about the thing he regretted most in his life, he paused for a few seconds, then said, "Not spending more time with her."

This statement silenced the observation room for almost a minute.

The test lasted four hours. The virtual Gu Feng made a request, saying he wanted to read a book. The system contained more than twenty professional books he had specified before the operation. He chose Chapter 15 of "Principles of Neuroscience," read it from beginning to end, and even made annotations next to the paragraphs. The annotations were completely consistent with his academic habits.

That evening, the experimental data was compiled.

Zuo Cheng called Shen Yiming into his office and said, "Tell me your judgment."

Shen Yiming said, "In terms of behavioral consistency, the accuracy rate of memory retrieval exceeds 97%, and his cognitive abilities have retained more than 90% of their pre-operative state. His thought patterns, language habits, and emotional responses are all consistent with the original. I believe this is transfer, not replication."

Zuo Cheng asked, "Why?"

Shen Yiming said, "Because he made annotations when he was studying. A copy doesn't make annotations; all of the copy's reactions are within the range of the training data. Annotations are new; they belong to him."

Zuo Cheng said, "So he is Gu Feng himself."

Shen Yiming did not answer immediately. He said, "From a scientific standpoint, I believe so. But from a personal perspective, I am not qualified to answer this question."

Zuo Cheng asked, "Why?"

Shen Yiming said, "Because the real Professor Gu is currently lying in the ICU, his body is still breathing, but his consciousness is reading in a quantum computer. Whether this is one person or two, I can't tell."

That evening, the official account of 402 released the entire video of the human consciousness uploading experiment, along with complete experimental data and the ethics committee's review comments.

Within three hours of its release, the video had garnered over 90 million views worldwide.

The top-ranked comment was just one sentence: "I cried the moment he stood up."