"Even if we get this down," Dr. Mellings said one day, "the same stimuli will have very different effects on different people."
"You mean because the recipient does not have volition?" Kriti asked.
"True, but I was thinking of how people are just different. One person is terrified of spiders, another person is fascinated by them. One woman likes skinny blond guys, another likes muscular redheaded guys."
"Or skinny blond girls," Kriti added.
"Or," Helen added, "a scene might have completely different meaning to someone, because somebody in the scene reminds them a lot of someone they know. Their father, their jerk of a boss, the creepy dude who followed them around all through high school."
"There was a boy who followed me like that," Kriti said. "I did not care for his attention. I can see how that would debase a tender scene."
William nodded. "All I'm saying is, in order to convey the emotional impact of a scene with any certainty, you would have to transmit the emotions directly, and have another set of transponders in the limbic system to convey them."
"But movies have basically the same problem," Helen argued. "Anyhow, before we worry about exchanging the soaring feeling of being in love," she said, "let's get you and me seeing the same damned test patterns."
* * *
1 There is, in fact, a sanctioned Milliways somewhere in Altworld. People generally came to this one instead because it was slightly cheaper, accepted user contributed content, and didn't kick you out if you showed up as a triple-breasted whore from Eroticon IV.
///////////////////////////////
// IF IT SQUEAKS LIKE A DUCK //
///////////////////////////////
Date: September 05, 2036
The lab had gone dark hours before, but Helen was only now leaving the lab, hoping to go home and relax. Building the prototype neural links had been child's play compared to the herculean task of moving the device through the FDA's approval process. She looked at the thick, poorly-organized cloud of paperwork floating above her bench, and turned away with a sigh. "Stupid bureaucrats," she muttered. "It has to work and not kill people? I'm not a miracle worker."
Her brain was fried, leaving her grumpy and restless. She'd told William to sleep at his place tonight, for his own safety. She popped away from the lab, expecting to reappear alone in her kitchen.
She wasn't alone. "Gaaaah!"
"Squeak!" The rat jumped off the counter, and made a beeline for the hole in the floorboards.
"Hold on there!" she shouted, lifting a hand. The rat was lifted into the air, then began floating back toward her. He continued to thrash, tiny legs flailing in search of solid ground. As he was drawn up to eye level, he stopped, seemingly frozen in place by fear.
"Yeah. I have telekinesis," she said in a gentle voice. "But I won't hurt you, you know." She could see that he didn't know. He was frozen with fear, his tiny, intelligent eyes locked on hers as though she were the biggest, hungriest cat that ever was.
"I don't know what to do," she said. "I leave out cheese, and bits of apple, and only the most un-poisoned peanut butter. I want you to be happy here, I really do. But I can't feel like an intruder in my own home. This living arrangement isn't working out."
A wave of her hand, and eight more rats appeared on the counter before her. "What shall I do with you all? I mean, could you all just try to be a little less high strung? Not scatter when I walk into the room?" She'd known what this speech was leading up to almost from the moment the rat had startled her, but she felt the need to explain what was coming, to herself if not to them.
She worked on calming each rat in turn, slowing their heart rates, lowering adrenaline levels, dampening the screaming fear coming out of their amygdalas. They stopped panicking and began to wander around the table.
"That's more like it," she said. "Now, how do we make this more permanent?"
When she cracked open their skulls -- metaphorically speaking -- she found their tiny rat brains too elegant to leave alone. Fixing their fear of humans was easy, as was dampening their startle reflexes.
Restoring their olfactory life took a while, but Helen felt it was important to give it back to them. The social life of rats is mediated by their sense of smell, from a baby rat's first sniff of the unique scent of its mother, to the enormous stores of highly personal information encoded in a rat's hair and urine. Who is dominant? Sick? Under stress? Horny?
Without their sense of smell, they were hardly rats at all. The rat simulation went barely beyond the brain; the proper neurons were there, but the receptors in the nose weren't. Helen grabbed some neural schematics from the Grid and engaged in a bit of computational biology. When she was finished, and everyone was secreting pseudochemicals to trigger each others senses of smell, the rats rushed around each other in a frenzy of nuzzling and sniffing, as though they had been reunited after a long absence.
But there was still a lot missing, and filling in the blanks distracted her for nearly a week. Unlike Altworld, the real world was a rich olfactory tapestry; it was filled with the smells of food, decay, mold, chemicals, predators, and the thousands of other signals that demanded attention from a rat's faculties. Those faculties demanded entertainment, and it seemed perverse to torment them with hunger signals from their tiny rat stomachs. No, they were Altworld natives like her, and their senses should be compatible with their new home.
By the end of another week, she had blessed her pets with a sense of 'interestingness,' and the ability to interpret a wide variety of data sources as smells. Large crowds of avatars smelled like bananas, spikes in network traffic smelled like sex pheremones, and news about Helen smelled like Helen. She discovered that they were capable of exceptional feats of pattern recognition. She would reward interesting discoveries with bits of apple and cheese. The more she trained them, the more useful they became.
When they got good at sniffing out information, Helen took a stab at telepathy. She hacked a new class of neuron into her simulator, neurons which could reside in more than one brain at a time, and act as a bridge between her and her rats. With practice, she could know immediately when one had found something interesting, and direct her attention to the source of that interest.
Her first week of training her new minions, they uncovered seventeen mostly harmless Helen-stalkers, three previously unknown affairs between UCSD staff, a web of industrial spies targeting a Chinese solar manufacturer, and a half-baked plot to assassinate Governor Wright when he stopped in Detroit on his presidential campaign.
Helen toyed with the idea of not reporting this last one, and just wishing the conspirators godspeed. She cursed the one patriotic bone in her body, then forwarded the evidence to the Secret Service.
//////////////////////////////////
// JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID //
//////////////////////////////////
Date: November 13, 2036
Helen sat in a lotus position, eyes closed. She heard nothing but the steady trickle of four small waterfalls surrounding her, felt nothing but the beat of her heart and the rhythmic cycle of her breath, and thought nothing at all.
Hot damn! she thought. I think I've got it!
Nope. Lost it.
She tried for a while to get it back, but couldn't. The harder she tried to shove thoughts from her mind, the bigger they got. It was like trying to drive a sumo wrestler away by throwing nerf balls at him. Do they have female sumo wrestlers? Great, that's going to bother me for the rest of the day.
Meditation seemed to be going nowhere. Her mind was just too noisy. For the thousandth time, she asked herself why she was here, but each time some eternally patient subprocess in her mind answered, "Because you've only been pretending that you're fixed."
She had staunched the flow of new neurons into her brain shortly after returning from Kortatka, and her mind seemed to be settling into a more grounded state. But the whole last year, she had often felt extremely fragile. She hadn't even told William the full extent o
f her problems.
A gong sounded three times. When the hum of the third gong had died away, she opened her eyes. She was in the center of an elegant rock garden, inside an airy glass enclosure. The windows were open, letting in gentle breezes from the outside. Water flowed through the pools around her, and from time to time she would see the golden flash of a koi.
Helen could think of worse places to go crazy.
A tiny, middle-aged woman sat across from Helen, in the same lotus stance. She opened her eyes and brushed a stray bit of light-brown hair from her eyes. "How did that make you feel?" she asked, picking up her notepad.
Helen laughed. "I told you you'd use that phrase."
"A wise woman once said, 'if you wish to take your enemy by surprise, you must begin by doing exactly as she expects.'"
"Who said that?"
"Dr. Janet Featherstone. Just now."1
Helen smiled. "So am I your enemy, Dr. Featherstone?"
"Please, call me Janet. And no. You know who your enemy is." Unbidden, the blank white face of Wolf359 appeared in Helen's mind. The thought was unexpected, and it troubled her. "There are patterns of thought in your mind, patterns that you know are self-destructive, but that your mind returns to time and time again. These patterns must be unwoven, a bit at a time, and strung back together into something that fits you and your aspirations."
"Thoughts can be sneaky, insidious things," she continued. "That's part of why I ask my patients to practice transcendental meditation. It's a bit unorthodox, but the process goes more smoothly when we can sit with our thoughts, listening to them."
"You didn't tell me to listen to my thoughts. You told me to keep my mind clear of them."
"Yes, I did. But as you practice, you may find that the best way to get an unwelcome thought to depart is to let it have its say. When a thought intrudes, don't shove it back out. Let it pass through, and it won't stay long."
"Got it. Can we try again?"
"Perhaps next time. Right now we have some work to do. Tell me about some of those intrusive thoughts."
Again, Wolf359 came to her mind. She dismissed it as a spurious mental link, perhaps a holdover from when she'd been adding neurons so fast. Anyways, she thought, that would sound crazy.
"I'm sleeping with my boss," she blurted out.
"Your boss?"
Helen considered. 'Boss' wasn't the word. Really, she was in some bizarre no-man's-land between employee and maze-running, cheese-sniffing lab rat. Certain thorny philosophical issues were already arising over her lack of a salary, and she had better things to do than hash those issues out with a university bureaucracy. "Dr. Mellings," she clarified.
"Oh," she said, though the look on her face hinted that she had no idea how to process this. "I can see why you would think about something like that," she offered.
Helen threw her a lifeline. "We have the technology," she said simply.
"I am officially too old to keep up with things," Dr. Featherstone sighed. "Give me just a second to regain my air of professional composure. Now, what sort of thoughts are you having about your relationship?"
"My thoughts go something like, 'He's thirty years older than me,' 'The sex is great,' 'He's my boss,' 'The sex is great,' 'He bailed on me when I needed him,' 'Did I mention the sex?'"
Featherstone jotted something down in her notes. "'He bailed on me.' We may have to explore that in a future session. Is there anything but sex keeping you together?"
"Of course. I made it sound so shallow. I've just been thinking about sex a lot lately."
The therapist nodded. "What do you hope this relationship turns into?"
"Me and him, tangled together in a ball of conscious energy, exploring each others minds for eternity, not knowing where I end and he begins." Seeing the freshly-dumbfounded look on Janet's face, she added, "We don't have the technology."
"I find myself relieved. Where do you fear this relationship will end up?"
"With me alone again, sitting around the house in my sweatpants, watching 1950's romances, downing tub after tub of pistachio ice cream, and wondering why the hell he hasn't replied to any of my Yourface messages."
"Is that what you do when one of your relationships ends?"
"No, but I usually go out with guys I don't really care for. Knowing that the relationship is doomed adds a great deal of certainty to my life, and frees me to worry about other things."
"At the risk of conforming to stereotype," Janet said, "I'm just going to nod and say, 'Hmm, that's interesting.' What does it free you to worry about?"
"Annihilation," Helen said, without thinking. She wanted to call the word back, but it was too late.
Janet nodded dispassionately. "Go on."
"Do I have to?"
"No, but if you don't, then you're paying me a steep hourly rate to not solve your problems. I would be fine with that, by the way."
Helen swore to herself. "Fine. I think about death. A lot, especially during bad times in my life. Not that it's crazy to think about death. If anything, it's crazy not to."
"Helen, you're going to find that I set a much higher bar for 'crazy' than most people. But I notice that before, you didn't say 'death', you said 'annihilation.' What does the word mean to you?"
"Obliterated. Wiped out. Erased from time and memory. Uncreated. Disappeared into the water without even a ripple."
"You're afraid that's what will happen to you?"
Black squids came at her, menacing blades for their mouths. Stabbing her, again and again.
"Not me," Helen said. "All of us."
"You mean, extinction? Of mankind?"
"Yes."
"How do you see that happening?" Featherstone asked.
It annoyed Helen that the woman was making a pretense of taking her seriously, but if she saw value in playing along, Helen had to grant it some weight. "There are lots of ways to do away with our species. Plague, meteor strike, nuclear war, environmental catastrophe. It seems like we've steadily increased our ability to destroy ourselves, and we practically revel in being too stupid to handle that power. I mean, look who we just elected president, for god's sake!"
Janet nodded, and motioned for her to continue. "But the scariest one is when our destroyers have minds to use against us, when those minds can think their way past our defenses, when we can't appeal to their compassion because they have none. When we're hunted by merciless killing machines. And before you ask, yes I did see Terminator when I was nine, and yes I had nightmares for years afterward. Is that a problem?"
"Why would that be a problem?"
Helen glared. "A patient comes to you, rambling about the things that scared her as a little kid, as though they were real, present dangers. I'm not a psychiatrist, but that seems like a big red flag waving around."
The therapist held up a finger, and Helen stopped talking. She took a long sip of water before continuing. "Several times now, you've expressed concern that I might think you're crazy. You don't need to worry on that count. I'm not here to be your judge, and I hope you'll learn to trust me enough that you can stop playing lawyer for the defense. I'm here to help you uncover the thought patterns that have troubled you, and the more easily you can reveal your thoughts, the better this process will go."
Helen nodded. "You know I'm not a trusting person."
"I'm beginning to see that."
Helen had to admire the woman's candor. "In the dream, my family was usually eating around a table, or sitting watching TV. Something quiet, normal. A terminator -- not a Schwarzeneggy skin job, a full-fledged metal robot with glowing red eyes -- bursts through the door, shoots them all in the head, and grabs me to take me somewhere. I just know he's going to turn me into a robot. But I always woke up before it came to that."
Janet nodded. "There are two separate issues to deal with. First, is this fear a rational one? Next, is this fear, as it manifests in you, having undue or unhealthy influence over your life? I have no opinion on the first question. I'm a doctor of psychia
try with a minor in English literature. I almost never go into Altworld, except to meet the few patients who can't make it to the office. I still use e-mail, if you can imagine. So you really can't ask me what's technologically plausible."
"The other question," she continued, "is one that I may be able to help you answer. Can you think of ways that this fear manifests in your life?"
"It's definitely a factor in which technologies I research, and how hard I work in researching them. You know I've turned into a workaholic, right?"
"I've heard rumors to that effect. Can you think of anything else?"
"I think I may be taking too many risks in my research. I convinced two colleagues that we could bypass animal trials entirely, and install our latest gizmo straight into them. I believed it was perfectly safe, but what if that was just my own impatience getting the better of me?"
"We are capable of great self-delusion. It's good that you recognize that. But self-awareness doesn't count for much if you don't act on that knowledge. It sounds like you may be putting yourself and others in danger, which is a red flag." She looked at her watch. "That's probably not the best note to end on, but I need to prepare for my three o'clock. We'll continue this discussion, same time next week. In the meantime, you can use this room for your meditation practice."
Helen wondered that the woman hadn't asked her if she wanted to undergo another session. She was nothing if not arrogant. But Helen knew that she'd be there. "Janet, why did you decide to take me on as a client?" she asked.
The doctor gave a mischievous smile. "When Professor Watkins suggested that I take you on as a patient, I laughed. I asked her, 'Do you really expect me to psychoanalyze a bank of computers?' She just looked at me like... well, you probably know the look, and said, 'Not the computers; the mind inside them.' It piqued my curiosity."
/*****/
Date: November 15, 2036