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inmyheaddd · 9 months ago

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but i love that man, like nobody can - rafe cameron x reader

summary: rafe has been distant with you and then acts like nothing has happened. you feel so insane because he acts like everything is fine, to the point where you snap. warnings: resolved angst, mild language, maybee slight kind of gaslighting if you look closely… nothing really tbh! a/n: i needed obx 4 by yesterday wc: 1k

“fucking, let go of me, i don’t need your help.” you said as you aggressively wiped angry tears off your face, the action quickly rendered useless because they were only replaced by new ones within the second.

rafe took another step closer to you, “it doesn’t look like it.” he said as he put one hand on your waist, the other moving your your chin so he could get a better look at your face.

“you’re such a dick, just stop it.” you whined in frustration, sounding more sad than angry now as shrugged his hands off of you, turning on your heels and only getting one step in before he grabbed your arm, making you involuntarily turn around.

your breath hitched in your throat, you were getting ready to say something back, before rafe put both his hands on your shoulders, catching you off guard.

he crouched down slightly to be eye level with you, and the act alone somehow made you want to stop shouting back.

“listen, baby, you’re acting crazy right now.” he pointed out, eyes flicking between your tear filled ones. “i don’t know what the fuck is happening with you, but you gotta stop takin’ it out on me, alright?”

his voice was surprisingly level, not angry like how anyone else would’ve assumed he would be.

you shook your head, tears threatening to spill again before you forced them back. “i’m not acting crazy. you’re being mean to me, how am i supposed to act?”

he had been ignoring you and your texts all day today, then when he got home he sat next to you on the couch and lazily slung an arm around your shoulder. then, he casually pressed a kiss to the top of your head like nothing happened.

the action ticked you off way more than it should’ve, and now you were here.

“mean?” rafe chuckled like your words were some kind of joke, as he put his hands back to his sides and stood up fully. “what are you talkin’ about, baby?” he furrowed his brows at you, looking at you like you were speaking another language, but somehow being amused.

“that is what i’m talking about!” you exclaim, sounding far too affected than you wanted to come off as.

“you say all these nice things, call me all these pet names, and act like you really care,” you sniffle, wiping the tried tears off of your face, “but then the next day you act like i don’t exist or something, and it’s so confusing, rafe.”

“you think i’m ignoring you?” he laughed bitterly. “you seriously think i don’t have better things to deal with than whatever the fuck is in your head right now?”

that switch in his tone dismissive tone hit you like a slap, and you flinched. “you don’t get it,” you muttered, voice trembling.

“you just— you always—“ you cut yourself off with a sigh, so overwhelmed you couldn’t even formulate a proper sentence.

“you know what, fine, forget i said anything.” you stated, unable to do this any longer.

“it doesn’t even matter.” you mumbled under your breath as you turned and walked away.

“baby,” he called out defeatedly as he sighed. “wait,” he called out again, but you didnt turn around.

he ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head as let out a long breath before he quickly caught up to you in 2 large strides.

he stepped infront of you and put his hands on your arms, gentle but firm. you froze in his grip, the sudden change in him throwing you off.

everything inside you screamed to push him away and scream into a pillow, but instead, you found yourself sinking into the comfort of his touch, even though you knew better.

“listen, you’re not crazy, alright?” his gaze flickered between your eyes. “i don’t…” he trailed off, his voice going lower. “i didn’t mean to make you feel like that.” he murmured. “i’m not trying to mess with you.”

you didn’t say anything for a moment, pouting. “then why do you keep acting like that? you only show up when it benefits you. you don’t even care.”

“what? no,” he spat out, before seeing the look on your face and speaking again. “no, baby, god no.” he said, gentler this time.

“then what?” you pressed as you only got more confused with his answer. you were getting tired of this back and forth with him.

“i’m a busy guy, alright? i don’t always have the time for shit, you know that.” he stated, raising his eyebrows expressively. he looked like he was thinking for a moment as he looked into your eyes, before he spoke again. “that doesn’t mean i don’t care.”

when you kept silent and the pout you were carrying only got deeper, he continued. frustration bubbling beneath the surface. “you think i want to hurt you? because i dont.” his voice dropped quieter. “i just... i just have a lot going on.”

now your pout disappeared, “rafe,” your voice was barely a whisper, “i’m sorry. i know you didn’t want to hurt me.” you took a step closer to him, and his hands fell from your arms to your waist.

“nah, don’t apologize. it’s all good baby.” his hands moved to cradle your face, and you let yourself lean into his touch; rough but always gentle with you. “you know i care about you, right?”

his eyes darkened with something unreadable. you knew he wasn’t the best at talking about feelings, but you could see him trying. for you.

you nodded with your face still in his hands, “yeah,” you whispered.

“and you know that just because i might go away for a while, doesn’t mean i stopped caring about you, right?”

you swallowed hard, your brain torn between wanting to believe him and the lingering doubt that kept nagging at you. "yeah, i know, but... sometimes it feels like i'm not even on your mind."

his eyebrows furrowed in slight confusion. “you’re always on my mind, baby.” he muttered lowly, blue eyes boring into yours as he tilted your chin up to meet his eyes.

you couldn’t help the tiny smile that crept onto your face, feeling the dried tears long gone on your cheeks.

“always?” you asked somewhat teasingly, as rafe’s eyes lit with amusement upon seeing you smile.

“all the fuckin’ time.”

#rafe cameron #rafe cameron fluff #rafe cameron x reader #rafe cameron imagine #rafe cameron prompt #rafe cameron fanfiction #outer banks #obx #obx fic #drew starkey #drew starkey x reader #❦ jude writes

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golden-van-fleet · 6 years ago

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Your Song

Summary: Gwilym has loved you for a long time and will continue to.

Word Count: ~2.2k

A/N: Hi! I needed to write about Gwilym. I’m not sure about the format? Also on mobile for this one. Enjoy!

It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside

I’m not one of those who can easily hide

Despite Gwilym being an actor, his fatal flaw was his inability to hide what was on his mind. The entire world knew how he felt about you, except for, well, you. It made his stomach turn, to see you with a man that wasn’t him, holding his hand, kissing his cheek, calling him “babe”. He hoped, wished, and prayed desperately to be that man.

I don’t have much money, but boy if I did

I’d buy a big house where we both could live

He knew you wanted a big house in the countryside. It’d been your dream for as long as either of you could remember. In fact, it was the first thing he bought with his paycheck from Bohemian Rhapsody. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t dream of the two of you living there like Allie and Noah in The Notebook. He didn’t want to buy your love, per se, but if he could afford what you wanted, he wanted to be able to spoil you. For only being your best friend, he treated you a hell of a lot better than that boyfriend of yours ever could. Any of them, really.

And it wasn’t lost on you. You’d lost a couple boyfriends because they felt they couldn’t compete with Gwilym, and they couldn’t. Gwilym was over the top for you and only for you. When he bought the house, you were stunned. He constantly had you over, one of the guest rooms unofficially becoming your room. You’d been by his side before the fame and the fortune, it was only fair in his eyes that you were still there after it.

If I was a sculptor, but then again, no

Or a man who makes potions in a traveling show

I know it’s not much but it’s the best I can do

My gift is my song and this one’s for you

Every performance he did as Brian May was with you in mind. Gwilym was willing to go to the ends of the earth to prove that he was worthy of your love, to prove to you that he was the one you needed. He knew, rationally, you never needed a man to be happy or to succeed. He also knew, selfishly, that he was the one for you. This was a man willing to bend over backwards for you at any given moment, knowing you would do the same.

And you can tell everybody that this is your song

It may be quite simple but now that it’s done

I hope you don’t mind,

I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words

How wonderful life is, now you’re in the world

The day you met was a day he’d never forget. Your eyes piercing back into his own, a stare that sent a delicious shiver down his spine. It wasn’t a malicious stare, it was one of amusement. You were working at a local coffee shop while finishing your bachelor’s degree around the same time Gwilym began filming one of many up and coming projects. He’d come in with an agenda, a man on a mission, but when his eyes met yours, he babbled like an infant. You were so kind, you didn’t make fun of him, you smiled a little and let him compose himself.

Ever since that day, he made a point to visit you at work, seated at one of the tables in the corner as long as he could be without disturbing you, your coworkers, or the other patrons. You found it sweet, and your heart ached to get to know him.

So you did. He’d been to your apartment more times than the members of your family had over the course of the next year. It was around that year mark Gwilym realized he couldn’t live without you. It was also around the time you’d started your string of terrible boyfriends.

Gwilym couldn’t thank you enough for changing his quality of life. You breathed a life into everything that he’d never been able to find. Life by your side was beautiful. You never let him dwell on the bad, and as hard as it could be to find the good sometimes, he always tried. If not for his sake, then for yours.

I sat on the roof, and kicked off the moss

Well, a few of the verses, well they’ve got me quite cross

He had to tell you. He couldn’t say it to your face, but he couldn’t not say it to your face. He wrote letter after letter, page after page, hoping that something, anything would encapsulate his feelings about you. Late night after late night, he failed to document exactly what he wanted to say. He didn’t want to plan out what he wanted to say, but he needed it to be everything he’d had on his mind for years.

When you showed up at his door during one of those late nights, he told himself as soon as he opened the door he’d tell you. What he didn’t expect was to see you sobbing, throwing yourself at him. He caught you before you could hit the floor, catching a glimpse of you before you buried your face into his shoulder. Your eyes were puffy and swollen with tears, your face red and stained with tear tracks. It absolutely broke his heart.

“He broke up with me,” you whimpered. “Almost two years, I thought I was going to marry this man, and then suddenly I’m not good enough?”

But if only you knew how good enough you were. Gwilym saw the sun rise and set within you. You were the very center of his universe. He couldn’t tell you now, you’d just had your heart broken. He could try, in vain, to tell you how wonderful he found you and about the total joy you brought to his life, but his dark secret would have to wait a little longer.

You climbed out onto the roof outside the guest room window, the full moon hanging bright above your head. There was a gentle, almost imperceptible breeze floating through the summer night. This was your favorite part of the house. It was your hideaway, wrapped around the back of the house with a full view of the river in the background. It felt as though time stood still when you were there. You found yourself lost in the peacefulness of it all until Gwilym squeezed himself through the window frame to sit with you.

“He thought you and I had something going on on the side. I told him that you were my best friend, that you always would be, that without you there is no me. And he was jealous.” You sniffled, the tears of sadness now transformed to tears of resentment. “But maybe he had a reason to be jealous. You’re all I need in my life.”

Gwilym was nothing short of stunned. That was the first time in his life that he was utterly lost for words.

“I- I can’t be your rebound, Y/N. I’ve loved you for far too long to let myself be who builds you up for someone else to tear back down. You mean too much to me for that.” He felt a tear slip down his cheek. His heart was on the line. As much as he wanted to be with you immediately, to hold you in his arms and never let go, he couldn’t. Not right now.

“I’m not saying I want to jump from him to you. But I did a lot of thinking on the drive over here. You’ve always been there for me. You’ve been this support, this rock, and I can’t help but feel I’ve taken it for granted. And for that, I’m so sorry. I know the way you look at me when I’m not looking because I look at you the same way. I always have. And maybe I was too afraid of ruining what we had built up so beautifully. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour, and that’s what we did. We’re still doing it. So if you’ll let me, I’d like to keep building it, I want to know that it’s not going to go away after tonight.”

He forced himself to look at you, your eyes burning with unshed tears. It would never go away. It couldn’t.

But the sun’s been quite kind while I wrote this song

It’s for people like you that keep it turned on

Over the course of the following months, your relationship bloomed into the blossom it was destined to be. The dark cloud that hung over Gwilym’s head had finally given way to the warm rays of the sun, and he embraced them fully. Loving you was diving head first into a pool that had no bottom. There was always a new depth to be reached, and when he thought he’d reached his capacity, there was always more.

You noticed the change, welcomed it, and encouraged it. Gwilym was finally back to the man he was when you first met. The man that you thought you were going to fall in love with. However, you’d hung that up when he brought over one of his girlfriends, unannounced, to your flat the night you were going to tell him how you felt. It crushed you, but you couldn’t tell him that. To know that now, it wouldn’t happen again, he was yours? It was heaven in and of itself.

So excuse me forgetting, but these things I do

You see I've forgotten if they're green or they're blue

Anyway the thing is what I really mean

Yours are the sweetest eyes I've ever seen

He had to ask you to marry him. He made up his mind before the two of you had even been together six months. It took half a lifetime, or so he thought, to get with you in the first place. Hell, you’d moved in together after two months together, what difference would it make?

He found himself in the same position he was years and years prior, back in that tiny coffee shop. Your eyes were focused intently on his, your smile kind and your hand relaxed in his. Gwilym was in his element, at home, alone, with you. And there, in the comfort of your shared bed, he was going to ask you to be his wife, and he couldn’t choke the words out. All he could do was present you with the ring first.

“Marry me. Please,” he added, softening what sounded like a demand.

“Easily,” you smiled, pulling his face towards yours and locking your lips into a breathless kiss. “I would marry you a million times over.”

He found himself in the same predicament when it came to your vows.

“I’m not usually one to forget what I’m saying before I say it, but you look so beautiful I can’t help myself,” he began, chuckling as he bashfully wiped away a tear. “I had this whole thing planned about how you were the one for me and I knew from the moment I met you, but even to this day you render me speechless. So forgive me if I cut this a bit short, but I’d really love to call you my wife sooner rather than later.”

And you can tell everybody this is your song

It may be quite simple, but now that it's done

I hope you don't mind, I hope you don't mind that I put down in words

How wonderful life is while you're in the world

When your daughter was born with your bright, beautiful eyes, Gwilym cried more than he ever thought he would. He was so gentle with her, so gentle with you… You couldn’t love him more if you tried.

Despite having your eyes, your daughter was Gwilym’s clone. She had her father wrapped around her tiny little finger from the first cry she let out the day she was born. Gwilym immediately switched into protective dad mode, refusing to let her go without a fight. Unless she was going to you, of course. But even that took a little convincing.

One night, about three weeks after she was born, Gwilym got up in the middle of the night to tend to her. He took the wailing newborn out of her bassinet in your bedroom to the rocking chair in what would be her nursery.

“Alright, love, it’s okay.” He’d done everything he could think of to soothe her and nothing was working, and the last thing he wanted to do was wake you. He unbuttoned the front of her onesie, placing the newborn over his heart. He’d been told to try skin to skin bonding whenever he could, and by some miracle, it calmed her down.

Gwilym didn’t realize he was humming until he started to sing lyrics to a song he didn’t realize he knew.

I hope you don't mind,

I hope you don't mind that I put down in words

How wonderful life is while you're in the world

Your song had had its share of wrong notes and tweaked lyrics. It conveyed a full spectrum of emotions, highlighting the ups and the downs that came with life and love. Your song was unique, and Gwilym was blessed to share it with you.

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun. The road to immortality

In California, radical scientists and billionaire backers think the technology to extend life by uploading minds to exist separately from the body is only a few years away

Heres what happens. You are lying on an operating table, fully conscious, but rendered otherwise insensible, otherwise incapable of movement. A humanoid machine appears at your side, bowing to its task with ceremonial formality. With a brisk sequence of motions, the machine removes a large panel of bone from the rear of your cranium, before carefully laying its fingers, fine and delicate as a spiders legs, on the viscid surface of your brain. You may be experiencing some misgivings about the procedure at this point. Put them aside, if you can.

Youre in pretty deep with this thing; theres no backing out now. With their high-resolution microscopic receptors, the machine fingers scan the chemical structure of your brain, transferring the data to a powerful computer on the other side of the operating table. They are sinking further into your cerebral matter now, these fingers, scanning deeper and deeper layers of neurons, building a three-dimensional map of their endlessly complex interrelations, all the while creating code to model this activity in the computers hardware. As thework proceeds, another mechanical appendage less delicate, less careful removes the scanned material to a biological waste container for later disposal. This is material you will no longer be needing.

At some point, you become aware that you are no longer present in your body. You observe with sadness, or horror, or detached curiosity the diminishing spasms of that body on the operating table, the last useless convulsions of a discontinued meat.

The animal life is over now. The machine life has begun.

This, more or less, is the scenario outlined by Hans Moravec, a professor of cognitive robotics at Carnegie Mellon, in his 1988 book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. It is Moravecs conviction that the future of the human species will involve a mass-scale desertion of our biological bodies, effected by procedures of this kind. Its a belief shared by many transhumanists, a movement whose aim is to improve our bodies and minds to the point where we become something other and better than the animals we are. Ray Kurzweil, for one, is a prominent advocate of the idea of mind-uploading. An emulation of the human brain running on an electronic system, he writes in The Singularity Is Near, would run much faster than our biological brains. Although human brains benefit from massive parallelism (on the order of 100 trillion interneuronal connections, all potentially operating simultaneously), the rest time of the connections is extremely slow compared to contemporary electronics. The technologies required for such an emulation sufficiently powerful and capacious computers and sufficiently advanced brainscanning techniques will be available, he announces, by the early 2030s.

And this, obviously, is no small claim. We are talking about not just radically extended life spans, but also radically expanded cognitive abilities. We are talking about endless copies and iterations of the self. Having undergone a procedure like this, you would exist to the extent you could meaningfully be said to exist at all as an entity of unbounded possibilities.

I was introduced to Randal Koene at a Bay Area transhumanist conference. He wasnt speaking at the conference, but had come along out of personal interest. A cheerfully reserved man in his early 40s, he spoke in the punctilious staccato of a non-native English speaker who had long mastered the language. As we parted, he handed me his business card and much later that evening Iremoved it from my wallet and had a proper look at it. The card was illustrated with a picture of a laptop, on whose screen was displayed a stylised image of a brain. Underneath was printed what seemed to me an attractively mysterious message: Carboncopies: Realistic Routes to Substrate Independent Minds. Randal A Koene, founder.

I took out my laptop and went to the website of Carboncopies, which I learned was a nonprofit organisation with a goal of advancing the reverse engineering of neural tissue and complete brains, Whole Brain Emulation and development of neuroprostheses that reproduce functions of mind, creating what we call Substrate Independent Minds. This latter term, I read, was the objective to be able to sustain person-specific functions of mind and experience in many different operational substrates besides the biological brain. And this, I further learned, was a process analogous to that by which platform independent code can be compiled and run on many different computing platforms.

It seemed that I had met, without realising it, a person who was actively working toward the kind of brain-uploading scenario that Kurzweil had outlined in The Singularity Is Near. And this was a person I needed to get to know.

Randal Koene: It wasnt like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers.

Koene was an affable and precisely eloquent man and his conversation was unusually engaging for someone so forbiddingly intelligent and who worked in so rarefied a field as computational neuroscience; so, in his company, I often found myself momentarily forgetting about the nearly unthinkable implications of the work he was doing, the profound metaphysical weirdness of the things he was explaining to me. Hed be talking about some tangential topic his happily cordial relationship with his ex-wife, say, or the cultural differences between European and American scientific communities and Id remember with a slow, uncanny suffusion of unease that his work, were it to yield the kind of results he is aiming for, would amount to the most significant event since the evolution of Homo sapiens. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

One evening in early spring, Koene drove down to San Francisco from the North Bay, where he lived and worked in a rented ranch house surrounded by rabbits, to meet me for dinner in a small Argentinian restaurant on Columbus Avenue. The faint trace of an accent turned out to be Dutch. Koene was born in Groningen and had spent most of his early childhood in Haarlem. His father was a particle physicist and there were frequent moves, including a two-year stint in Winnipeg, as he followed his work from one experimental nuclear facility to the next.

Now a boyish 43, he had lived in California only for the past five years, but had come to think of it as home, or the closest thing to home hed encountered in the course of a nomadic life. And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. It had been a while now, he said, since hed described his work to someone, only for them to react as though he were making a misjudged joke or simply to walk off mid-conversation.

In his early teens, Koene began to conceive of the major problem with the human brain in computational terms: it was not, like a computer, readable and rewritable. You couldnt get in there and enhance it, make it run more efficiently, like you could with lines of code. You couldnt just speed up a neuron like you could with a computer processor.

Around this time, he read Arthur C Clarkes The City and the Stars, a novel set a billion years from now, in which the enclosed city of Diaspar is ruled by a superintelligent Central Computer, which creates bodies for the citys posthuman citizens and stores their minds in its memory banks at the end of their lives, for purposes of reincarnation. Koene saw nothing in this idea of reducing human beings to data that seemed to him implausible and felt nothing in himself that prevented him from working to bring it about. His parents encouraged him in this peculiar interest and the scientific prospect of preserving human minds in hardware became a regular topic of dinnertime conversation.

Computational neuroscience, which drew its practitioners not from biology but from the fields of mathematics and physics, seemed to offer the most promising approach to the problem of mapping and uploading the mind. It wasnt until he began using the internet in the mid-1990s, though, that he discovered a loose community of people with an interest in the same area.

As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at Montreals McGill University, Koene was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies, for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.

I didnt hide it, as such, he said, but it wasnt like I was walking into labs, telling people I wanted to upload human minds to computers either. Id work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map for whole brain emulation.

Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology startup funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit company aimed at advancing the cause to which hed long been dedicated: carboncopies

Koenes decision was rooted in the very reason he began pursuing that work in the first place: an anxious awareness of the small and diminishing store of days that remained to him. If hed gone the university route, hed have had to devote most of his time, at least until securing tenure, to projects that were at best tangentially relevant to his central enterprise. The path he had chosen was a difficult one for a scientist and he lived and worked from one small infusion of private funding to the next.

But Silicon Valleys culture of radical techno-optimism had been its own sustaining force for him, and a source of financial backing for a project that took its place within the wildly aspirational ethic of that cultural context. There were people there or thereabouts, wealthy and influential, for whom a future in which human minds might be uploaded to computers was one to be actively sought, a problem to be solved, disruptively innovated, by the application of money.

Brainchild of the movies: in Transcendence (2014), scientist Will Caster, played by Johnny Depp, uploads his mind to a computer program with dangerous results.

One such person was Dmitry Itskov, a 36-year-old Russian tech multimillionaire and founder of the 2045 Initiative, an organisationwhose stated aim was to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individuals personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. One of Itskovs projects was the creation of avatars artificial humanoid bodies that would be controlled through brain-computer interface, technologies that would be complementary with uploaded minds. He had funded Koenes work with Carboncopies and in 2013 they organised a conference in New York called Global Futures 2045, aimed, according to its promotional blurb, at the discussion of a new evolutionary strategy for humanity.

When we spoke, Koene was working with another tech entrepreneur named Bryan Johnson, who had sold his automated payment company to PayPal a couple of years back for $800m and who now controlled a venture capital concern called the OS Fund, which, I learned from its website, invests in entrepreneurs working towards quantum leap discoveries that promise to rewrite the operating systems of life. This language struck me as strange and unsettling in a way that revealed something crucial about the attitude toward human experience that was spreading outward from its Bay Area centre a cluster of software metaphors that had metastasised into a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being.

And it was the sameessential metaphor that lay at the heart of Koenes project: the mind as a piece of software, an application running on the platform of flesh. When he used the term emulation, he was using it explicitly to evoke the sense in which a PCs operating system could be emulated on a Mac, as what he called platform independent code.

The relevant science for whole brain emulation is, as youd expect, hideously complicated, and its interpretation deeply ambiguous, but if I can risk a gross oversimplification here, I will say that it is possible to conceive of the idea as something like this: first, you scan the pertinent information in a persons brain the neurons, the endlessly ramifying connections between them, the information-processing activity of which consciousness is seen as a byproduct through whatever technology, or combination of technologies, becomes feasible first (nanobots, electron microscopy, etc). That scan then becomes a blueprint for the reconstruction of the subject brains neural networks, which is then converted into a computational model. Finally, you emulate all of this on a third-party non-flesh-based substrate: some kind of supercomputer or a humanoid machine designed to reproduce and extend the experience of embodiment something, perhaps, like Natasha Vita-Mores Primo Posthuman.

The whole point of substrate independence, as Koene pointed out to me whenever I asked him what it would be like to exist outside of a human body, and I asked him many times, in various ways was that it would be like no one thing, because there would be no one substrate, no one medium of being. This was the concept transhumanists referred to as morphological freedom the liberty to take any bodily form technology permits.

You can be anything you like, as an article about uploading in Extropy magazine put it in the mid-90s. You can be big or small; you can be lighter than air and fly; you can teleport and walk through walls. You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling.

What really interested me about this idea was not how strange and far-fetched it seemed (though it ticked those boxes resolutely enough), but rather how fundamentally identifiable it was, how universal. When talking to Koene, I was mostly trying to get to grips with the feasibility of the project and with what it was he envisioned as a desirable outcome. But then we would part company I would hang up the call, or I would take my leave and start walking toward the nearest station and I would find myself feeling strangely affected by the whole project, strangely moved.

Because there was something, in the end, paradoxically and definitively human in this desire for liberation from human form. I found myself thinking often of WB Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium, in which the ageing poet writes of his burning to be free of the weakening body, the sickening heart to abandon the dying animal for the manmade and immortal form of a mechanical bird. Once out of nature, he writes, I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing/ But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make.

One evening, we were sitting outside a combination bar/laundromat/standup comedy venue in Folsom Street a place with the fortuitous name of BrainWash when I confessed that the idea of having my mind uploaded to some technological substrate was deeply unappealing to me, horrifying even. The effects of technology on my life, even now, were something about which I was profoundly ambivalent; for all I had gained in convenience and connectedness, I was increasingly aware of the extent to which my movements in the world were mediated and circumscribed by corporations whose only real interest was in reducing the lives of human beings to data, as a means to further reducing us to profit.

The content we consumed, the people with whom we had romantic encounters, the news we read about the outside world: all these movements were coming increasingly under the influence of unseen algorithms, the creations of these corporations, whose complicity with government, moreover, had come to seem like the great submerged narrative of our time. Given the world we were living in, where the fragile liberal ideal of the autonomous self was already receding like a half-remembered dream into the doubtful haze of history, wouldnt a radical fusion of ourselves with technology amount, in the end, to a final capitulation of the very idea of personhood?

Koene nodded again and took a sip of his beer.

Hearing you say that, he said, makes it clear that theres a major hurdle there for people. Im more comfortable than you are with the idea, but thats because Ive been exposed to it for so long that Ive just got used to it.

Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov wants to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individuals personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP

In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation. One morning, I was at home in Dublin, suffering from both a head cold and a hangover. I lay there, idly considering hauling myself out of bed to join my wife and my son, who were in his bedroom next door enjoying a raucous game of Buckaroo. I realised that these conditions (head cold, hangover) had imposed upon me a regime of mild bodily estrangement. As often happens when Im feeling under the weather, I had a sense of myself as an irreducibly biological thing, an assemblage of flesh and blood and gristle. I felt myself to be an organism with blocked nasal passages, a bacteria-ravaged throat, a sorrowful ache deep within its skull, its cephalon. I was aware of my substrate, in short, because my substrate felt like shit.

And I was gripped by a sudden curiosity as to what, precisely, that substrate consisted of, as to what I myself happened, technically speaking, to be. I reached across for the phone on my nightstand and entered into Google the words What is the human… The first three autocomplete suggestions offered What is The Human Centipede about, and then: What is the human body made of, and then: What is the human condition.

It was the second question I wanted answered at this particular time, as perhaps a back door into the third. It turned out that I was 65% oxygen, which is to say that I was mostly air, mostly nothing. After that, I was composed of diminishing quantities of carbon and hydrogen, of calcium and sulphur and chlorine, and so on down the elemental table. I was also mildly surprised to learn that, like the iPhone I was extracting this information from, I also contained trace elements of copper and iron and silicon.

What a piece of work is a man, I thought, what a quintessence of dust.

Some minutes later, my wife entered the bedroom on her hands and knees, our son on her back, gripping the collar of her shirt tight in his little fists. She was making clip-clop noises as she crawled forward, he was laughing giddily and shouting: Dont buck! Dont buck!

With a loud neighing sound, she arched her back and sent him tumbling gently into a row of shoes by the wall and he screamed in delighted outrage, before climbing up again. None of this, I felt, could be rendered in code. None of this, I felt, could be run on any other substrate. Their beauty was bodily, in the most profound sense, in the saddest and most wonderful sense.

I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realised, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.

To Be a Machine by Mark OConnell is published by Granta (12.99). To order a copy for 11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99