I understand you may not want to talk to me anymore after the way things ended. I know I came off as intense, perhaps all-consuming, and it was too much for you. I don't want to offer any explanations or rationalize my behavior. I'm writing with the pure self-interest of thinking more clearly; a letter to you is just a container for the things that have been ratcheting in my brain. All my thoughts have taken the shape of containers in the six months since I started using a Brain State Emulator.

It started as a languid afternoon experiment with Neuralinks in the living room of Dr. Naam. He lamented about knowing all the technical details of making music, the fine details of audio engineering that only the likes of Floating Points might know but being incapable of finding the flow state of a masterful musician that could unlock something special.

Dr. Naam was a sensualist without a soul, and I could sense the yearning in the corner of his eyes when he spoke.

"If I could have the subjective reality of Pharoah Sanders for 60 minutes along with my technical skills...."

Our initial experiments in this vain were rudimentary. We tried to train the algorithm on how Pharoah Sanders might have thought and operated based on interviews, writings by people who observed him in work, and the neural measurements of artists while they played our Pharoah favorites like Journey in Satchidananda. We converged on a neuro emulator signal that would serve as input to the Neuralink that Dr. Naam was wearing. The first several weeks were unproductive yet pleasant. Dr. Naam seemed enamored by the thoughts and pattern of ideas that came to him while he consumed the Pharoah neuro emulator signal. He was like a college kid who had discovered acid for the first time. He lay on the red Moroccan rug in the middle of his dim-lit living room. Now and then, he leaped up like a dog who smelled a new visitor and went up to his workstation to arrange old or piece together new music notes. This pattern repeated and, to an observer, seemed pointless unless they were looking at the neural readings. Then, about two hours into a session, he would prompt me to remove the input signal because he felt overwhelmed by the inputs, sensations, and ideas. For about an hour or so following the experiment, Dr. Naam had trouble making decisions - I believe this was a tussle between the decisions that Dr. Naam wanted to make and the vestiges of thoughts left behind by the ghost of Pharoah's brain.

Being an observer in this experiment gave me plenty of time to think about the worldly implications of this discovery, but I’m fallible, at times weak. I was distracted by what it might mean for me. Every new piece of technology I've worked on has been a way for me to think about what it might mean for my death drive.

This may be why I came off as a zealot to you - for most of my life, I have not been able to see myself being alive one week in the future. It was worse in my childhood and adolescence. I could not conceive the idea that I'd be alive tomorrow. Each day felt like a scrambled loop where every action held the desperation of a man dying of thirst in an arid desert. Everything had to happen in the now and then, and there seemed no point in delaying gratification, remembering homework, or having that cookie tomorrow because I did not believe I would be alive then. So when I fell in love for the first time at 16, I wanted to experience the depth of emotion that people spend years building in a singular moment or two. I could see the fear this brought in the eyes of my unfortunate lover, but I could not see beyond my reality that romantic love had to be all-consuming and in the now.

The seed from which this death drive grew was that my father requested me to spare him the trouble for several years in my youth and kindly end my life by hanging off a tree or slitting my neck. Several thousand dollars of drugs, forms of therapy, and esoteric escapisms helped blunt the growth of this parasitic tentacular critter in my head. It even helped me find some hope in making plans for the next day or the day after. It extended to how I approached romance - I was able to gain some distance and float above the intensity of how I felt. But this rarely felt natural and rarely ever lasted long enough. Eventually, the all-consuming tide of impending doom overtook me. And once again, I found myself staring into the gentle eyes of lovers who suddenly became strangers.

The brain state emulator progressed beyond frivolous experiments into something that found suitors. The start-up simply named The Company, wanted to use the BSE to help their workers collaborate and find more "synchronicity." The emulator induced the same brain state among all the collaborators, and they worked together on a single piece of AI art. It felt like we had invented the Babel fish for creative work, but just as Douglas Adams had predicted, perfectly symmetrically understanding the other can be dangerous. Nevertheless, the momentum of this project meant that the reservations were hard to heed.

During this time, I got curious about using the brain state emulator on my aging father. I wanted to see what could happen if I could map out his entire brain state - not just the creative or the destructive states but everything. Maybe if I fully understood how he operated and what made him ask a helpless 12-year-old to kill himself, then perhaps I could move on and see myself beyond the next week or two. Then, I could make plans and fall in love gently.

I went about my plan by first establishing contact with my estranged family and then feigning care so that I could get him to agree to wear a portable MRI that would record his brain signals throughout the day. If I continued this long enough, I would have recorded most of his brain states.

The first time I tried on my father's emulator brain signal, I could not clearly grasp any pattern of thoughts. Perhaps because the amount of information in the brain signal was so high, it felt like a bumpy ride on a spaceship, only that it did not seem like the spaceship was going anywhere. It lifted off and got stuck in a liminal space, uncertain of its destination. I gave up 45 minutes into the emulator session. My sleep that night was interrupted by bizarre dreams of dismembered bodies, blood, and loneliness. I've had dreams of dismemberment before, but this time I did not wake up startled. Instead, I lay there observing what I felt as my limbs got taken apart. The cycle of dismemberment continued again and again and I could remember the pain in my left shoulder when I woke up. A tingling where my arm had been cut from my body.

Dr. Naam had in this time found that the experience of the brain state emulator is enhanced if you could practice a core daily habit of the person who's brain signal you were trying to emulate. He was still on his quest to master the art of emulating Pharoah Sanders so he tried to simulate Pharoah's life in NewYork. Just as Pharoah had done when he arrived in NewYork city, Dr. Naam wandered the city on the subway empty handed. He wanted to become intimately familiar with the city as quickly as possible. Although his attempts to find gigs at jazz places by loitering outside and enquiring if they were hiring saxophonists had more comical and anti-climactic results.

I attempted to piece together some of my father's habits from my childhood

• reading a newspaper in the morning

• long leisurely walks in the evening

• the slurping sound he made when he drank coffee

• watching the Tour De France while imagining myself in Europe

• Not talking to anyone for several days at a time

This accompanied hour-long sessions on the Brain State Emulator every day. On the third day, I felt my relationship with the external world had shifted. I felt a growing resentment toward the people I interacted with every day. The world was not reciprocating my good-naturedness and considerate behavior. On the 7th day, I sensed the relationship with my thoughts had shifted to another plane. There was a clear line dividing how I felt between the 6th and 7th days of this experiment. I cannot quite describe the passage of time during this phase because I lost the precarious little distance I had built with my thoughts.

My sleep got worse in the days that followed. On the 10th day, I noticed my legs had started to twitch and my jaws clench when I sat still for more than a couple of minutes.

On the 14th day, I was able to sleep for several hours during the day, and I dreamt of a beating heart. I tried not to touch it and observed it from a distance. As I followed more closely, I saw a notch on the deep red surface. The closer I looked, the more details emerged - a hardened red canyon that ran across the seemingly gentle surface. As the surface of the heart came into view again, it revealed more notches, each similar to the other but a closer look revealed varied contours - some deeper than the others. Some smooth, others rockier. An inventory of the notches revealed there were 9 of them.

When I woke up the next day, all my memories of the person, I was before I started the BSE emulator experiment seemed like it happened to another person. I had access to them, but I no longer felt the same emotions in my body. The goal of understanding my father felt like a half-remembered dream. I went about my daily routine, and through the unpleasantness of inhabiting someone else's brain, I was more aware of the details of everything that I interacted with or maybe I was aware of different details than what I remembered being aware of.

I stopped the brain emulator sessions on that day. I still felt like my brain emulated that of my father's, instinctively reaching for the same habits as he did, feeling a distance from the world and from my previous self. Then on a Monday afternoon, while I lay on the rug in Dr.Naam's office, I had the vision of a man behind my eyes. He seemed familiar because I had created him in my dreams; his outline glowed like a photograph that was set alight

When I opened my eyes, I felt I had come back into my own again, and I felt something burgeoning up from my abdomen, and then I suddenly burst out laughing. I spent the next 20 minutes on the ground holding my stomach and laughing, like a baby laughing at a new pattern that broke its reality. I am an observer on top of a lighthouse - the tides come and go, ships cross the channel mostly safe, I hear birds, I'm just here observing patterns and reporting back on them.