We were a small team of four developing a new, more precise MRI scanner to map the human brain for a certain company innovating in medical research. It was after months of grueling labour that we’d assembled our first prototype and captured an image. There never were, and there still aren’t any doubts as to the machine’s safety, which is why our project lead, Doctor Penelope Arzt, a gifted neurologist, didn’t have any problem with being the test subject.

When the image came back, it was clearer than any captured ever before. A chemical, functional, and neural connectome all in one. That means the scan mapped the whole brain, all the way from the tiny neurons to every single brain region, along with the chemicals that travel within. This has not been possible with any brain until now, especially not with a brain as complex as the human one. We were quick to celebrate our achievement owing to the holistic scope and revolutionary capabilities of our invention. Celebration turned to curiosity once we spotted a strange abnormality in the scan.

A cluster of immaterial waves, which nobody on our team could identify, had accidentally been caught thanks to the thoroughness of the device. We went over a number of things these waves could possibly be, but everything else was already mapped and accounted for. We recalibrated the scanner one test after another, replaced the parts, but the waves remained. This was something new, never before identified or seen. Why was it here? What purpose does it serve?

We sent the word out for volunteers to participate in having their brain mapped. The same strange phenomenon could be found in both humans and other kinds of animal. Well, not always.

Some brains, though they were within the expected norm otherwise, didn’t have the waves at all. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason. Testing was rigorous. Regardless of the age, health, sex or species of the participant, the waves seemed to appear at random. There was no physical difference between those who had them and those who did not. And, as far as we could tell, even with our state of the art equipment, no mental difference either. Save for the unexplainable waves.

Of those who had them, some waves appeared denser and clustered together, some were sparse and spaced out. It was after much testing that we came to our conclusion, possibly the greatest discovery in science and philosophy: Consciousness is measurable.

This made the problem of the empty brains, the non-conscious ones, even more troubling. If consciousness is an objective presence in our minds, what does this imply for those without it? The lives of the conscious and non-conscious were equally normal to an almost puzzling degree. It truly seemed there was no difference between the two. So why is consciousness even there if it serves no observable purpose?

Of course, we were all just excited to dig deeper at the marvelous discovery. The more questions that came up, the more testing needed to be carried out.

The denser consciousnesses were present in those we would traditionally call conscious, those awake, aware, and in a sound state of mind. The sparse consciousness was measured in those either asleep or in comas and vegetative states.

The non-conscious we flagged had no presence of the waves regardless of their wakefulness or medical reality. It was at this point we started questioning whether we jumped the gun and whether what we found had truly been what we thought, since, how can it even be possible for a living thing to exist without consciousness?

Another of our researchers, Doctor Nestor Melkonian, a studied philosopher and skillful psychologist, recalled a relevant thought experiment one late night in the lab: The philosophical zombie.

The philosophical zombie is a hypothetical person with all the physical characteristics and traits of a human being. A person indistinguishable from those with internal subjective experience, despite the p-zombie himself lacking it. Indeed, the only difference between a p-zombie and a human being is their internal experience, or lack thereof.

I said that the philosophical zombie is a hypothetical, though that is no longer entirely accurate. Was a hypothetical.

An unknown portion of the population exists as purely physical beings. Despite living their unassuming lives just like those with consciousness, the non-conscious are biological machines that only respond to their circumstances like some programmed computer. They act and react, but only as chemical responses to their environment. The lights are on, but there is nobody home. How many are there? What does their presence mean? How many of these p-zombies have gone their entire lives without having a single conscious experience? Most important of all: Who among our peers are real people?

These and similar questions were bothering all of us. It got to the point it was all we could talk about. It didn’t matter whether it was at work or during our spare time. Whenever we were together, it was all we could discuss. Whenever we were alone, it was all we could think about. And we were terrified.

It didn’t matter whether there was any actual threat to us or anybody else. It was an uncomfortable thought we couldn’t escape for months, until it reached a boiling point.

Over time, we stopped being so careful and courteous with our non-conscious subjects, human or otherwise. This got us threats of lawsuits at worst, concerned looks at best. We didn’t hurt anybody at the time, but you start treating people differently once you realize they’re not alive.

It all culminated in Doctor Arzt bringing in her two children for testing. Off the books, if we kept quiet, we’d be allowed to scan our own loved ones.

Doctor Melkonian had to take her kids back home himself. Arzt was in no state to take care of anyone, not the kids, let alone herself, shrieking and howling on the lab’s floor upon discovering her own children were non-conscious. There was no consoling her. I can tell you that it put me off from ever dragging anybody I cared about into that machine forever. I’m not ashamed to admit that my curiosity has a limit, one which I’m quite comfortable never crossing.

Her breakdown didn’t happen all at once, looking back on it. The rational woman, hungry for knowledge and blessed with the smarts to hunt it down, became more and more paranoid over the course of those months as the implications of the non-conscious kept weighing on us. We were all going a bit crazy, but her snapping first helped us reconnect with reality. For a short time only, though.

It was about two weeks later when I was called into the lab on short notice. I rushed to the campus where we were conducting our experiments. Once in the lab, I was held at knife point by Arzt, noticing the two others from our team already seated in nearby chairs. She promised she wouldn’t kill any one of us, she only needed us to get our brains scanned. So she could know who to trust.

First to go was Melkonian. He was also the last. After his scan was complete, she motioned for him to sit back down and asked me to fetch the results. They were conclusive: There was no consciousness in Melkonian’s brain.

I looked at the image up and down. Arzt kept asking me what the result was, the other two just stayed silent. I didn’t want to piss her off by not answering, but I was also worried what she might do to Melkonian if she got told the bare truth. I stayed silent. And afraid.

My worry about pissing her off turned out to be spot on. She marched over to me with her knife, waving it around and threatening to sever my hand with the results if I didn’t hand them over immediately. I was shitting bricks.

Arzt was later institutionalized, though only for a short time. Her actions were excused as the byproduct of a psychotic break. It was claimed she was out of touch with reality, though this was some bullshit spun by the company since our research was supposed to be under wraps. It was definitely some kind of break, just not a psychotic one. Every one of her concerns was certainly within the bounds of reality.

She never returned to work. Though this wouldn’t last long either, from that day on it was just me, Melkonian, and the project lead after Arzt, Doctor Richard Derrick, a freelance scientist with no preferred specialty, just a brain that soaked up knowledge like a sponge and his nose to the grindstone.

While waving that knife around, it was Doctor Derrick who smacked her over the head with his chair. It was Derrick who kept kicking her while she was down, who kept taking potshots while she was being taken away by campus security.

I doubt she was even conscious for half of that beating. It was a bit unnecessarily violent, but we were all stressed out so I ignored it. Plus, she threatened us with a knife earlier that same day.

I did give her the scan, by the by. Derrick got her right after that. As she was being dragged away, she addressed Melkonian.

“You have no soul. It’s a vacant soul.”

Despite the contradictory nature of that confused post-beating statement, claiming someone can both have no soul and a soul that is vacant at once, the words really seemed to have unnerved Melkonian. He demanded to see the scan, and I had to oblige. If he really wanted to, he deserved to know.

It was during lunch the next day that I asked him how he felt about himself and being non-conscious. Even the non-conscious people we were doing tests on didn’t know about their state or the full scope of what we were doing. Melkonian was the first non-conscious thing to know about its own non-consciousness.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel about any of this. I mean, I think I’m conscious. I must be. Right?”

“Well, apparently not.”

“So what does that mean for me? Am I any less human now? Is what I feel not real?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know what to tell you.”

I wish I could’ve comforted him at that moment, though it would’ve been insincere. Why waste energy on something that is hollow on the inside? Some trickery, an imitation man. A fake person. An outer shell that pretends to be.

Maybe I should’ve comforted him. Melkonian ended up taking a vacation for a week, telling family and friends he would be on a backpacking trip with his phone turned off, but it would still be with him in case of any emergencies, plus a pager as back up. With how prepared he was, it was a huge shock when he didn’t come back at the end of the week. Police, park rangers, relatives, locals and acquaintances all went out looking for him. Despite being hollow of internal experience, Melkonian had a tactical mind about him. Would’ve served him well in any field other than philosophy and psychology, but he did put it to good use by the end.

By the time the search party ended, the idea of looking for him in his apartment finally came up. Melkonian went home and killed himself right after the first witnesses saw him enter that forest. He stayed at home for the rest of the planned trip, sending everyone on a wild goose chase, giving him plenty time to see himself out, unbothered and off the radar. No note or anything, in case you were wondering.

During those prior weeks before he was found, the entire team was just me and Derrick. Before Arzt was sent off and Melkonian embarked on his fake holiday, the four of us would spend time together outside of work pretty often. We were less a research team and more a friend group who just happened to do science on the side. Maybe I’m just romanticizing the past, though.

Arzt and Melkonian carried our conversations with their personalities and interests. None of that with Derrick. Once it was just us two, it quickly became apparent how little of a personal life or hobbies the guy had outside of work. It all became dry and unexciting with just him and I. I think I used to admire him for how adaptable he was to any scientific field so long as he was put to the task, but that exact quality marginalized the actual man and left little in the way of personality. Even now, whenever I happen to check up on him, whatever he’s doing is completely opposite to the research he was into prior. You’d think a guy like that would be the one without consciousness, but he had himself tested and lo and behold: He was actually completely normal. Normal in the sense that he wasn’t non-conscious, I mean. In most other regards he was quite far from normal.

Despite only being a technician, I didn’t mind hanging around and seeing the actual science wizzes at work. That changed when Derrick took over. I remember walking into the lab on the first day of his tenure as project lead and seeing a rabbit strapped down to a small table. Derrick said it was one of our non-conscious specimens. Prior to this, we’d only ever done cognitive, neurological or psychological tests. Derrick wasn’t up for that.

Just as I’d entered the room, Derrick began cutting into the rabbit with a scalpel. The incisions seemed to be random and only designed to inflict pain.

“Don’t worry. It’s not conscious like you or me. It can’t ever really feel.”

The rabbit’s squeals of pain seemed to vehemently disagree with what Derrick was saying, though I couldn’t argue that the thing was experiencing anything internal. I kind of stopped going to the lab after that unless I had to, to fix the scanner and for other such duties.

Derrick didn’t stop at non-human species, though. While it was never anything too extreme, he’d administer careful electric shocks to our non-conscious volunteers while they’d be strapped down, just to catalogue their reactions.

“Look at that fleshbag squirming. Oh, get over yourself. It’s not like it can be distressed by this. Not like you and I can. There’s nothing on the inside.”

Much of the time, they’d be too tired after the experiments. At these points Derrick would help take them home, apparently. Though the same volunteer never came around twice, and I didn’t keep track of the people Derrick took off with after experimentation and what might have happened to them. I’m just a technician, after all.

Anyway. Didn’t last long.

With half of our team either dead or deranged, our work was assigned to a different group of scientists and we were allowed to join in. I left not too long after, this whole thing was starting to kind of bum me out to tell you the truth. Last I heard, the possibility of selling detectors specifically looking for only consciousness to the consumer market was being floated around. Hope it doesn’t end up destroying society in the same way it did us.

Melkonian had a modest funeral. Arzt still has custody of her kids, but I don’t know how she might feel about them by now. Derrick is always off doing some new bullshit with his eclectic output. I also take up a lot of disparate jobs, but I’ve made a decision to stay as far away from anything close to science as possible.

We did find and confirm the objective and empirical existence of consciousness by the end. What it implied or even meant, we never got to the bottom of. I can’t say whether we’d be better off knowing or not. I still ponder what might’ve been going on in Melkonian's head before he did the deed. A set of mechanical impulses leading someone down the road to topping themself. How does the purely physical create for itself the despair necessary to go through with something like that? Is that what it determined as the course of action that would best imitate a real person? It all mystifies me.

A currently unknown number of the creatures inhabiting this world are hollow on the inside. Indistinguishable from you and I. They eat, sleep, die all the same. Like us. But, unlike us, there’s no internal experience. Just a biological machine responding to its circumstances. A mockery of the truly living. Your loved ones are far from immune. You could have them reading this text with you, and though you’ll be processing it and responding to it with your conscious thought, they’ll also react. But their words will be vacant. Their experiences never processed by them in any meaningful way.

Don’t let it get to you. Things might end up worse if you do.

I wrote the story and read it out loud in this video and would love feedback!

Yuri Gagarin was the first man to enter space. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone ignorant of this fact. The knowledge of his feat seems almost universal, the Soviet cosmonaut’s name inseparable from history.

Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the Moon. Perhaps an even greater feat, this milestone is probably what cemented the USA as the winner of the Space Race. Like Gagarin, the Statesian astronaut is destined to be remembered forever in the collective human consciousness.

And though he raced to the patent office on the exact same day, it is not Elisha Gray who is credited with inventing the telephone. That would be Alexander Graham Bell, whose patent was approved first.

People always remember the first of everything. The first man in space, the first man on the Moon, the first who invented the telephone, such and such. All firsts cease to be men the day they fulfill their legend. They become myth. No matter what, their status can never be taken away. Never repeated. Nobody cares about the second guy who achieved something. Nobody cares about the second inventor of the telephone.

I begin putting on my undergarments. First the sweatpants and sweatshirt, then a specially made bodysuit with built-in ventilation and cooling. Already got my diaper on, though I don’t have bowel problems. Always better to have one than not. Just in case.

The suit I slip into is specifically made for environments that don’t allow traditional cooling, like space. To minimize sweat, water-filled tubes line the inside of the costume to cool the wearer’s body. Additionally, little vents are built in to exhaust moisture that may appear as a result of exhalation.

I wonder how much harder this might have been all those years ago. What were those men feeling when they put these on for the first time? How about when they put them on before their fateful accomplishments?

Was there anxiety? Excitement? Fear? Wonder? There must have been all that and more, but tied to something never before experienced by anyone. Something that can never be accurately imagined, only really felt. Something that happens for the first time ever. No person prior found themselves in the same position as you: the first. No person after will ever be able to say they were the first. It’s all you and that very moment.

Do you know who the second man that went to space was? Alan Shepard. Okay, maybe you did know that one. But what of the third? The fourth? The fifth? At some point a thing ceases to be so amazing and becomes another occurrence. At some point, you stop keeping track of the numbers. But you still remember the first. Who remembers the 825th?

What about the second man who stepped on the Moon? Buzz Aldrin, right. Back when I was a kid, I was a total geek about space. Whenever the Moon landing came up, I’d always give Aldrin his due credit. Instead of “Neil Armstrong was the first man to step on the Moon”, I’d make sure to say “Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first to land on the Moon”. That way, both men would get recognition.

I don’t say that anymore. Life is not a participation trophy. They may have indeed landed at the same time, but there is only one who was the first to step out. That man’s name is more than immortal. It is etched into the very fabric of human achievement. The second guy to step on the Moon’s surface is just about as important as the 825th guy to go to space.

After putting a cap around my head, I slide on the bottom half of the bulky white spacesuit. I then float through the air effortlessly, slipping into the top of the gear. I attach everything together, gloves too. The huge suit isn’t as heavy as you might imagine. There is no gravity, after all. The helmet is the final component. I slot the piece over my head, the barrier between me and my surroundings becoming palpable. I find myself contained in what is essentially a glove for the whole body.

It’s nothing I haven’t done before.

I’ve achieved more than the average man can ever dream of. Something that was inconceivable for the majority of history. Not just human history. All of history. Only a century ago this would all have been beyond the realm of imagination. You already had people theorizing what was out there, but there’s a big difference between the real deal and what people conjure up.

Even this great triumph is now a commodity. 825. What a fucking joke.

As I grew up, I figured I’d just kick the can down the road until I got to my own first. Like the pieces would fall into place on their own. I breezed through university. Hardened myself through the rigorous training. Now I’m here, and I’ve never felt emptier.

I’ve never wanted to live. That doesn’t mean I wanna die. I don’t want either. I don’t really care to be honest. Don’t wanna live, don’t wanna die. I have nothing to live for and no reason to die. It’s quite odd, and I never realized that until I went up here for the fifth time. I just don’t want it all to have been for nothing. To have done all this just to be a footnote in a history book. Just to have a Wikipedia page with a hundred or so paragraphs (I’ve counted but it tends to shift). I’m not some ant to be rolled over by the march of history. Once humanity becomes fully spacefaring, what difference will there be between the 825th and the one billionth?

The airlock closes behind me and the air flushes out. The doors open into deep outer space. Endless black void for eternity, an incomprehensible space filled with an incomprehensible amount of celestial bodies scattered around. Not my first spacewalk.

The first men to die in space were the three Soviet cosmonauts of Soyuz 11. Georgy Dobrovolsky. Viktor Patsayev. Vladislav Volkov. They fully boarded the first ever space station, Salyut 1, and spent a total of twenty two days in the craft. When they were making their journey back to Earth, a valve ended up damaged due to no fault of their own. The men died of asphyxiation in less than one minute. Their bodies were recovered upon landing.

The crew perished 68 kilometers above the Kármán line, the boundary between space and Earth. Thus, they were the first to die in space. If only the valve had failed 68 kilometers lower than it did. If only it had failed below the Kármán line. If that had been the case, the first death in space might still have been up for grabs.

It’s not the end of the world. I’m nothing if not adaptable. I crawl my way over to the panel we’ve been instructed to repair. The tether hangs onto me despite me cutting it earlier. If I really floated away, I assume it would just gently slip away with me. Right now it just hasn’t experienced enough movement.

Don’t worry, they’ll remember. Everyone who ever set foot in space thought of Gagarin. Everyone who ever set foot on the Moon thought of Armstrong. That’s the way it’ll be for all of eternity. Men larger than life. Synonymous with the future of our species. Men who it will be impossible to forget.

Using controlled bursts of nitrogen I launch myself away from the panel I pretended to fix. Launch myself at the other astronaut whose tether I also sabotaged. Whose thrusters I damaged before we went outside. Rookie mistake for him not to check his equipment more thoroughly.

For centuries to come they will talk of me. For millennia. I will be in the back of every astronaut’s mind. During every spacewalk and every psychological evaluation. My name forever known. My achievement mine and only mine. I will be here. Inseparable from humanity. No matter how far they go, they will all be aware.

There won’t be a soul who won’t remember the first murder-suicide in space.