Kelsy and the JukeBox of Souls

Kelsy and the Juke Box of Souls

The other day, I went for a run with Kelsy.  Although she has been gone for over six years, she has been my constant companion.  My mind is her home.  Mostly she sleeps, as she ever did, but she is always there, near me.  Now that Kelsy lives in my brain, she is a great running partner.  She doesn’t need a leash.  She guides me along the trail, over tree roots, over talkative creeks.  As Kelsy and I ran through the damp forest, I had the idea of a Jukebox of Souls.  I wanted to take notes on this idea, but I was breathing too hard to use the voice memo app or voice to text.  Instead, I used my memory palace to keep track of the key ideas.

Kelsy’s Forest is a memory palace, or a system of loci.  This is an ancient technique, used by the Greeks.  To use the method of loci, you imagine a building or a street that you know well, and you picture yourself walking through that space.  For each item you want to remember, you interact with a location in a way that you will remember.  For Kelsy’s Forest, the loci are specific native plants along a trail in a nearby park, and at each point, one of the dogs or cats I have had in my life is sitting there waiting for me.  In order, they are Chena, Gizmo, Heidi, Tanzy, Duck, Charlie, Smookler, Norbert, Porter, Max, Boots, Jinx, Wolfgang, Tess, Bear, Kelsy, Olive, Mu, Fozzie, Sky, Viktor, Tino, and Raphael.  These locations are also specific places in my memory or in my fiction.  The first point, Chena ‘s spot by the spruce tree, is also a portal to the Azaela Way Library in the fictional town of Useless Bay.

The first idea I wanted to remember, as I was running through the woods, is that Kelsy is like a layer cake, so I imagined Chena presenting me with a slice of chocolate cake.  (Now I’m hungry.)  When I say Kelsy is like a layer cake, I mean that there are three Kelsys in my head.  The first Kelsy is the actual black Labrador retriever that lived with me for 11 years.  She was my working partner.  I spent all day, every day with her.  She slept beside me at night.  We went on hundreds of searches and we saved the lives of many dogs.  I can picture her clearly, in every detail.  If for some reason I had trouble remembering anything about Kelsy, which I don’t, but if I did, I have thousands of pictures and videos of her.  I have pictures of hiking in the wilderness with her. I have case notes from the searches we did.  I wrote about our work in my book, A Voice for the Lost, and I could reread those stories anytime I wanted to. The real Kelsy changed my life.  She is the reason that I find lost pets, and the reason I have Mu, Fozzie, Sky, and Valentino in my life today.

The second Kelsy in my head is the character from the novels that I write.  Kelsy is a dog that looks exactly like my real Kelsy, except the Kelsy of the books has a microchip in her head that allows her to communicate directly with J, her partner, who happens to be a lot like me.  J and Kelsy search for lost dogs and solve murder mysteries.  Kelsy is featured in The Retrievers of Useless Bay, written 9 years ago. She is also in the books I am working on, The School of Assassins, The Emerald Blade, Freeland, and The Jukebox of Souls.  From time to time, I reread my novel, The Retrievers of Useless Bay, because I like the story, and because I can spend time with Kelsy.  It’s like we lived a second life there, almost as real as the real life of work and adventure we shared.  I spend time with Kelsy as I’m writing the future books.  Sometimes I just write them in my head, and other times I sit down and type out the story.  Always, Kelsy is right there beside me as I type.

The third Kelsy is a spiritual animal.  She is my secular saint.  I pray to Kelsy, after a fashion.  I don’t ask for divine intervention, because I wouldn’t want it, but also because she is not that kind of a saint.  She is an extension of my soul, whatever that is.  I don’t really know what a soul is, and I wouldn’t define the term for anyone else.  All I can say about a soul is that, if I have one, then Kelsy has one, too. Kelsy has an equal soul, not inferior to mine in any way. For me, my spirituality is woven into nature. When I run through the forest with my imaginary Kelsy, that is a form of prayer or mediation for me.  Sometimes at night, when I can’t fall asleep because I am thinking of all of the people and animals I am letting down because I just can’t get to everyone who asks for help, I switch off those unproductive thoughts by imagining that I am running through Kelsy’s Forest with her beside me.  It works every time.  The only drawback of this mental technique is that I become too relaxed, and I usually fall asleep before we can finish the whole trail.

So, there are three layers of Kelsy in my brain at any moment.  She lives there.  She is woven into everything that I am.  I deliberately and consciously make my mind a home for my Kelsy.  I will never not think of her.  I wasn’t always like this.  Porter and Tess, my first two dogs that I had as an adult, were wonderful people, in no way inferior to Kelsy.  When they died, I felt grief probably on the order of most people’s grief, and I went on about my life, thinking of them occasionally.  Kelsy was different because she was my working partner.  She was an extension of my soul, but she was also an extension of my brain and my senses.  I lived a larger life when I was working with Kelsy, and she allowed me to see an invisible world.  When she died, a part of me died too.  Because she was woven into every part of my life, it is much easier to have her living in my head than it would be to forget her for one moment.

The second idea I wanted to remember as I was writing  this essay in my head as we were running is that, at some time before I die, the technology will exist to recreate Kelsy in the form of synthesized videos with sound.  I will watch these videos either on a virtual reality headset or with a chip implanted in my brain.  If I chose to, which I always would, I could look over and see Kelsy lying near me, and she would look and sound exactly like the Kelsy I spent 11 years with.  This digital Kelsy would be recreated by compiling everything I know about her, and all of the videos and pictures, into an algorithm, an AI that generates a realistic avatar for any person or dog.  We almost have the technology to do this now.  Not too far in the future, it will be commonplace for people to preserve thoughts and memories of their family and loved ones in a way that they can spend time with people after they are gone.  A practical application of this technology would be that, for example, an avatar could be generated for Noam Chomsky.  He has written more than 150 books, on a variety of topics, such an anarchy and linguistics.  There are hundreds of hours of audio and video available.  This AI program would amass all of this information and generate a virtual Noam Chomsky who could read his books to you, as if he was sitting there beside you.  It could be just his voice or it would appear as a video if you chose.  At any point, you could interrupt the virtual Noam Chomsky and ask him a question, to clarify something and make sure you understood it.  In the future, you will have a vast library available at any time, and the avatars of authors and public figures can be generated at any time so you can interact with them. Just as easily as you could watch reruns of Dexter, in which a thoughtful serial killer spends time talking to the image of his deceased father, you could access the entire works of Chomsky or Shakespeare or Cicero. You could also see and hear your pets that you have known over your lifetime, as if they were right there beside you.  Today, I do this automatically in my mind, my own virtual reality.  Someday, the computer will do this for me.  This would allow me to experience my memories much more vividly, in detail, with less expended mental energy.  For example, I could experience The Retrievers of Useless Bay like a movie, but I would be immersed in the story, as if I was there with the virtual Kelsy, working a scent trail.  There is no real technical barrier to doing this.  As software and AI advance, it will bring the cost down.  Every individual will have his own Jukebox of Souls, like an iPhone in your head.  Not only can you listen to any song you like and watch reruns of Dexter, you can interact with a realistic avatar of any person or animal you choose.  It probably won’t be called a Jukebox of Souls, but who knows, maybe it will be.

In my Jukebox of Souls, which would include Chena, Gizmo, Heidi, Tanzy, Duck, Charlie, Smookler, Norbert, Porter, Max, Boots, Jinx, Tess, Bear, Kelsy, Olive, Mu, Fozzie, Sky, Viktor, Valentino, and Raphael, they are arranged along the trail in Kelsy’s Forest, my memory palace.  I could also jump around by passing through the portal at each location.  From the Azalea Way Library, I could jump to the Bottomless Lakes, a location in my story Thunderbird Snow.  If I add enough details to the database of the AI that generates the experience, I can visit locations from my fiction as vividly as real life.  When I die, I hope to have an archive of my digital life and my real world life, documented in case logs and photos and videos and my writings.  Someone who wanted to read my books could select James Branson from the Jukebox of Souls, and an avatar of me could guide them through my books.  I’m not suggesting there would be the same level of interest as there would be with Chomsky or Shakespeare, in the Jukebox, but if someone had an interest in searching for lost pets or forest restoration, they might want to pop my disc into the player and explore. (The relevant details and recordings of my life would probably fit onto a micro SD card of 1 TB, but the archival media might be some sort of disc that wouldn’t degrade over time.) 

If someone 100 years or 10,000 years in the future accessed my file, one of the first things I would tell them about myself, beyond the basic biography,  is that my soul is a shared soul.  Kelsy and Mu and Tino and all the others have overlapping, shared souls with me.  To know me, or to learn about me, is to know about my dogs and cats.  If anyone ever sees me without a dog, these days, their first question is, “Where are your dogs?”  People define their souls and describe their souls through their practices and their religious beliefs.  My religion is nature, and I define my soul, whatever it may actually be, as shared with my sons and daughters, who happen to be cats and dog.

All of human civilization developed after humans began associating with dogs.  It is my contention, and I’m not the only one who thinks so, that our cultural evolution coincides with our partnership with dogs, not just as a coincidence, but because the teamwork of humans and dogs allowed for cultural advancement and the invention of written language.  Human knowledge was not invented by humans.  Most of what we know from science comes from careful observation of nature.  It is the knowledge and wisdom of nature that we have put to our own use.  We could afford the time away from basic survival tasks, to explore and learn from nature, because dogs helped us hunt more efficiently and because they kept us safe at night. As part of the unwritten bargain, dogs handled the scent portion of the work, helping us hunt more efficiently, and humans handled the organizational and planning aspects.  The dog is the human’s nose, and the human is the dog’s big brain.  We function as a unit.  That is how we work today, finding lost pets.  It is my job to drive us to the location and get us started on the scent trail, and then it is the dog’s job to follow the scent.  I am my dog’s brain.  Because I am the mind of my dogs, and because they live short lives, it is my job to remember them and keep them alive in my mind.  Of all the many things Kelsy taught me, perhaps the most important is that it is my job to be a vessel for her soul for the rest of my life.  Because of how I live with Kelsy now, I am acutely aware that I want to capture more moments of my dogs’ lives.  One of my biggest regrets is that I don’t have more pictures of Kelsy as a puppy.  She was a beautiful, sweet puppy, and I should have taken thousands of pictures and videos.  Kelsy died just about the time Tino was born, so, as a result, I have thousands and thousands of pictures and videos of Tino as a puppy and at every stage of his life.  When Tino is someday archived into the Jukebox of Souls, the AI machine will have no shortage of data from which to generate a very realistic avatar.  25 years from now, I will look over and see Tino almost exactly as he is now, breathing gently, resting, beside Kelsy and Mu, waiting for the next adventure to begin.

iPhone, therefore I am.  The majority of my life was lived without computer technology.  Now that we are able to have all the world’s data and knowledge in our pockets, I am highly integrated with technology.  My Apple Watch records every heartbeat and tells me how many steps I walk in a day.  GPS records everywhere I go.  Every case we work, every dog or cat we find, it is all recorded on my phone.  Yesterday was a busy afternoon, with things happening on four different cases I was working.  Having an iphone allowed me to get the right resources to each case in a timely manner.  Sapphire in South Seattle was caught by a volunteer, and I was able to advise and consult in real time.  At that same time, I went and trapped Chilly Willy, who had been on the run for five days.  I was able to navigate and communicate quickly and efficiently.  I could have done it all with a rotary phone, a Thomas map book,  and a 68 Olds Toronado, I suppose, but it would have taken me much longer.  Our smartphones allow us to do things so much faster and easier than we could before.  A child born today can have every moment of his life documented and recorded digitally, in more or less detail.  In fact, to not have a digital footprint would require a concerted effort.  Much more so than in my case, children of the future will have massive amounts of data to preserve in a Jukebox of Souls.  I wasn’t born in the digital age, but even as old as I am, with an analog childhood, I live on my iphone.  My friends are there.  The books I read and the books I write are all there.  My iPhone currently has 138,156 photos and videos, 90% of which are of dogs.  Case notes, newsletter articles, GPS tracks, every breath I take, it is all recorded and preserved on my phone.  Also, most every moment of my dogs lives.  They do the nose work and I do the brain work, including preserving their lives digitally.

I have so much more to say on these topics, and I plan to cover it all in a novel, The Jukebox of Souls, which takes place 10,000 years in the future, when a kid walking in the woods discovers a Jukebox of Souls containing Kelsy.  She tells him how the world used to be, from her perspective.  I won’t try to tackle it all right now. Mostly I bring up this idea of the Jukebox of Souls to say that it is because of Kelsy that I want to digitally preserve our shared life and relive it daily.  It is because of Kelsy that I spend so much time documenting the lives of Mu and Sky and Fozzie and Tino.  Someday, in the next couple of decades, I will share with you a digital copy of Kelsy that will be so realistic that you would feel she is right there with you.  Kelsy will be immortal, as every dog should be.  Dogs helped us build this amazing world of technology, so we owe it to them to capture and preserve their lives for the future.   

As a start for Kelsy’s Jukebox of Souls, below is a gallery of a few of my favorite pictures of her. Of course you can read about her in these stories, too.

Kelsy Finds Reese’s.

Kelsy Finds Thelma.

Kelsy Finds Charlie.