Chapter 9
Anand Ramasubramanian boarded the flight in Shanghai heading to San Francisco.
He felt light. Light as if his presence on the flight would contribute to the overall aero-dynamics of the airplane. He settled into his first class pod and slept soundly for many hours. When he woke, it was dark in the cabin and most of the other passengers were sleeping. Anand felt energized. The stewardess brought him dinner, which he enjoyed completely. While he ate, he watched an old style action movie where the hero blasted away with guns in each of his hands, while at the same time, crashing through a plate glass window. For dessert the stewardess brought him strawberry ice cream with gummy bears. He delighted in each fluffy pink bite.
When the old style movie ended, Anand asked the stewardess to bring him a glass of whiskey. It seemed very late. Anand figured he was the only passenger awake in first class and he was enjoying the extra attention from the attractive stewardesses.
Anand sipped on the gold colored whiskey. With each sip he allowed the strong whiskey to linger on his tongue. He savored the smoky flavor.
The taste of the drink made him think about the slogan they used to advertise Wild West Alive. The marketing department was emphasizing sensual stimulation that a user could not get with a traditional video game. Before Wild West Alive and RSI, all computer games played over a network were visually oriented. At Wild West Alive, in addition to controlling a real human host, the player would indulge all of his senses in the fantasy.
The slogan was, “Kiss the Saloon girl, taste the whiskey, smell the gun smoke.”
Thinking about this slogan now, Anand realized he had done all three, except Sahdna Singh was no Saloon girl. Still, using synaptic derivation he had explored a world that was previously closed to him. He had opened a door in his personality that he did not know existed. He was no longer sure who he was, or was confident in his place in the world. He looked out the window and all he could see was darkness. The land below was obscured by the darkness and there were no stars or moon in the sky. He was unsure how long he had slept, so he had no concept of where the plane was positioned currently, relative to Shanghai or San Francisco. It was easy for him to look out the window into the darkness and imagine that the world he knew before, when he landed at Wild West Alive only a few days previously, was no longer below him. Looking back into the plane, he could only see the dim silhouette of the nearby first class pods. There were no other passengers in sight. In his musings, he imagined he was now alone on this flight. A flight that had departed from the world he knew and was taking him somewhere else. He was going to a new world. A new world that would be governed by the rules of Synaptic Derivation. A new world that was envisioned by Christopher Mark and Al McKnight. A new world that, for better or for worse, he had helped to create.
Anand sipped on the whiskey and admired its golden color.
Anand began reading a paper that Christopher Mark had forwarded to him while he was networked into RSI systems during his lay-over in Shanghai, and started reading it. The preface was written by Al McKnight. McKnight delved deeply into his ideas around the application of the Synaptic Derivation between humans and animal hosts.
Anand sipped lightly on the drink while he read and let the strong flavor linger in his mouth.
In McKnight’s preface, he described how he envisioned animals as new attractions in the Rome Alive game that RSI was preparing to launch next summer. Al McKnight described how a controlling player would Synap into a Tiger host, for example, and then battle a human host gladiator in a reproduction of the Coliseum. The idea of a modern day battle between Tigers and Christians together with McKnight’s enthusiasm for the idea amused Anand.
The body of the paper was a technical treatment on how the Synaptic Interface with an animal could actually be achieved. It was written by Dr. Sadhna Singh. It was clear to Anand that she was preparing the document for publication in a scientific journal. In some places she had made additional notes in the margin where she intended to return to shore up her theories with new data and preliminary testing. It was dry, intensely scientific, writing that involved the interruption of neural transmission by the subject animal and the capability of the brain stem interface device to translate the signals from the animal’s brain into something that a human brain could interpret. As Anand read, he learned that Tigers, and other predators, perceive the world differently from humans.
Therefore, the brain stem device that they would implant into the animal host would need to compensate for these differences. Some of the problems were olfactory differences and feedback from claws and whiskers.
How the brain stem interface would handle sensory feedback and control of the animal’s tail was a critical discussion point. The author was not sure how these impulses could be translated by the device into a sensation that could be interpreted by a human brain.
Reading the paper for Anand was like indulging in a second bowl of fluffy pink ice cream. He consumed the paper, phrase by phrase, and savored the hand-written notes in the margin. Notes that were written by Sadhna’s own thin delicate hand.