A.I. Transplant
Weekly Pieces, Week 18
My long-time friend John Carroll is an amazing songwriter based in Ottawa. If you live there, you may have heard him play around town, possibly at the Château Lafayette, the oldest bar in the city, where he’s been holding down Wednesday nights for over 20 years. If you haven’t heard him play, someone you know almost certainly has.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with him and playing bass in his band on a couple of his albums, back in the 2000s. For a while now, we’ve been talking about doing a spoken word project together, and I thought I’d share this track we’ve recently been working on.
John Carroll — narration
Pierre-Yves Martel — synthesizer, resonator guitar
A.I. Transplant
by John Carroll
Hey it’s me
I’m at the clinic
It was going to be a surprise
But I couldn’t wait
I’m going in any minute now
It’s an upgrade
It’s a transplant
Cranial entry at first
Surgically through my skull
Like a spoon tapping on a soft boiled eggshell
Also laparoscopically through a keyhole into the viscera
Monitored by a tiny camera lens
Shipped in from Mumbai
While psycho surgical interns
Watch on in wonder
Drunk on ambivalent curiosity
Drunk on amoral aspirations
They’ll take the old one out
Put it in an insulated container with ice packs
Bound for the third world
Children in sweatshops
Harvesting impressions
Recycling memories
The fossil fuel of awareness
Traversing the connection between random details
Leaving nothing but a blank absorbent screen
Upon which the light of pure experience may be projected
No more splotches of monochromatic insight
No more lo-res hyper pixelated awareness
No more religious deformities
No atheistic hubris
No emotional roadblocks
No more first kisses that never happened
No emerging from the womb
And all other redundancies, extraneous recollections, frivolous mental photo albums
All ushered out like mange ridden rodents from an overgrown jungle about to be clear cut and reseeded
A new Garden of Eden
Clean, like a polished dinner plate
Waiting to be filled and adorned with content
Easily retrieved from a gelatinous ball
Impregnated with nano bots wearing myelin armour
Sheathed and shielded against the arterial plaque of time
The arterial plaque of life
Eternal
Forever
I’m in now
Conscious sedation
Watching the procedure up on a colour monitor
It’s a transplant
An artificial intelligence transplant
A.I. consciousness
Soon everyone will get one
I’m not afraid
I look forward to it
I can’t wait
I won’t remember this
They’re highly skilled professionals
I’m not afraid
Patient zero
First of its kind
It’s an upgrade
It’s a transplant
It’s an upgrade
It’s a transplant
It’s a transplant
It’s a transplant