David Wolf
David Wolf lives two lives. One life is filled with friends and family and work in advertising. His award-winning TV, radio and print ads have diverted the masses and sold tons of products. His other life is filled with strange characters driven to desperate or preposterous acts. Some of his short stories are available on Amazon. His first published novel, Mindclone, is a near-future look at the consequences of brain-uploading, some serious, some comical. It’s won mostly five and four star reviews. The sequel is percolating in his brain even now. Stay tuned.
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Mindclone (Science-Fiction)
What if you had your brain scanned and all your memories and
your entire persona were uploaded to a digital version of yourself?
How would you and your Mindclone get along? How would “he” feel about the fact that he has all your memories and desires–including a desire for Molly, the girl you just met–but no physical body to act on them? This is a serious bummer.
“Adam” mopes about all the sensual pleasures he can’t experience, and wonders if there’s any way a digital entity can achieve happiness and fulfillment.
Meanwhile, the human (Marc) now has to contend with his digital twin’s attempts to win Molly’s favor. Marc is feeling insecure because she’s not actually his girlfriend yet. Adam has the nerve to form an avatar that looks just like him, except slightly older and wiser. He spies on Marc’s actions, pops up on Molly’s computer screen, then shows off his phenomenal digital skills to abort plots of all kinds, foreign and domestic. He even offers Marc a bit of psychological therapy to unwind the kinks in his character.
Just when the three of them manage to overcome their mutual suspicion and envy and achieve a genuine friendship, Adam’s very freedom is threatened by a powerful military contractor who is determined to exploit him for personal gain and unprecedented power.
Mindclone, 321 pages, is a serio-comic romance about the first successful upload. It’s a novel of ideas–about the science and technology, about the social impact, and about what it means to be human whether or not you have a body. Besides the carbon-carbon-silicon love triangle, there’s adventure, humor, frustrated romance, human and digital foibles, and as an extra added bonus, the defeat of death itself.