Many a layperson has heard of (and variously misinterpreted) the thought experiment of Schroedinger cat, but few (even among academia) have encountered its equally perplexing cousin, the Schroedinger brain, first conceived of (and built) by a team of graduate students at the ill-fated MIT "B" Laboratory in the mid-1960s as an experimental marriage of computational theory, neuroscience, and quantum-informed philosophy. It is known that a certain K. Schroedinger (unrelated to the more illustrious original) provided the plans for a set of decay-triggered logic gates nicknamed -- in the style of their more deterministic cousins -- QOR, QNOT, and QAND. [These are functionally identical, but computationally (and thus philosophically) different, from conventional random switches; further discussion is best left for a more erudite, and more interested, audience.] From there, a complete technical blueprint was devised by a pair of graduate electrical engineers, allowing for no more than three-hundred-and-fifty-six of the gates to be independently controlled by a singular decay source; the opportune theft of a spare cyclotron from the department of high-energy physics is commonly acknowledged to have been the final step in precipitating the device's construction.

While the eponymous cat was intended as a disparaging critique of the innate uncertainty of a quantum universe, the Schroedinger brain instead celebrates it, revels in it to its most illogical (almost mystical) extreme. It poses the simple question: in a continuous mind comprised of continuous conscious decisions, what if each part -- each thought, daydream, visage, and half-baked concept -- was entirely and truly controlled by a quantum random process? Thoughts would live and die by the vibrations of a single radioactive speck, as fickle as the, well, Schroedinger cat itself; but while the cat's conundrum rests in its status of either alive or dead, Schroedinger brain explodes the possibility into the million, billions, uncountable x-illions of uncertain results. This is how it worked: the initial prototype was modelled using a microphone as audio stimuli, and fed into itself, eventually spitting its data out onto a warm roll of ticker-tape. One-hundred-and-forty-four needles punched holes into the output at a rate of about an image a day. Each output was dictated by a mechanical configuration of the quantum brain; every image it produced was a logical, rational representation of the day's audio input. When viewed in its entirety, one can't question the truth of its functioning: the minuscule dots converge and diverge in great symmetrical flowers, at times resembling points of dark on an undulating grid, or a constellation of dust. The output of the final week of May 1963, when arranged in order, resemble the contours of a human face. [Each output has been lovingly traced onto a bound sheet of printer paper, with handwritten commentary containing a poetic description of its arrangement: the Flower of Blatant Lies, the Maddening Sun, Old Smokey, the Bound Kaguya, Hope. One can only imagine these names were conjured under an extremely particular set of chemical circumstances, perhaps owing to the "B" Laboratory's proximity to MIT's infamous psilocybin-laced Senior House.]

Yet the far more curious thing about Schroedinger Brain lies not in its output, but what comes prior to it. It is in the quantum superposition of unknowns that the mystery of Schroedinger zombie cat lies; the same holds for Schroedinger brain. Every output, however sensible, is never predictable. In the span of all possible thoughts lies along some axis the projected outputs of one Schroedinger brain, having collapsed an infinity of choices to reach its final product, while along another axis lies the thoughts of another iteration, equally explicable yet entirely alien to the first. In a sense, the Schroedinger brain thinks all possible thoughts at once, exceeding even the considerable intellect of its inventors. It could be, as K. Schroedinger poignantly wrote, "the vastest being in the universe". But the Schroedinger brain is also the most silent, its vastness collapsed in the tick of a Plancksecond into pinpricks on paper. The tyranny of consensus reality is that the Schroedinger brain can never be allowed to dream, and only represent itself as a speck of dust represents the universe: an instantiation of all the beauty within and without it, a metaphor of a metaphor of a metaphor ad reductio.

It is also conceivable that a Schroedinger brain, if made sufficiently complex, could conceive of the possibility of itself. We would never be able to decipher what that possibility was, or even if that thought had even happened, owing to the Schroedinger brain's quantum-imposed opacity. What we might hypothesise instead is that the Schroedinger brain's imagination, in comprising of multitudes greater than itself, necessarily contains in each of its parts more than the sum. In this infinity of all infinities the Schroedinger brain could contemplate itself contemplating itself, each nested subsequently in one of the many quantum creches of its minds. Maybe one of these brains will contemplate its maker, a representation of K. Schroedinger himself etched onto a representation of ticker-tape in a representation of the MIT "B" Laboratory somewhere. Then in an eternity, the Plancksecond will tick, collapsing all of the three-hundred-and-fifty-six decay gates, the one-hundred-and-forty-four etching needles, the scavenged emitter, its particles, the "B" Laboratory, and even the world outside it. In writing this fiction I have mused upon the futility of trying, as a layperson, to represent accurately the workings of an already-scientifically-shoddy thought experiment; to have that thought experiment conduct further thought experiments about itself would be to invite recursiveness (and thus ridicule) ad absurdum. I find it laughable that I have invented a moniker for this rogue thought experimenter at the cost of attributing it to myself, without even changing his name. [And just as I have reached this conclusion, K. Schroedinger ceases to exist.]