
glassdimly.com/discovery
Back when Isaac was a kid, books moldered on shelves. Like records after new record player needles were unfindable, thrown in the trash on the next basement clean-out. After all, everyone saw how the persistent readers fared, their picto corrupted by the visual artifacts of words, sinking lower in society until they were nothing but translator nodes on the Mindnet—or vacs.
Isaac loved the picto-stories, especially ones in which the heroes defeated the bad guys and set things right, and he spent his days either lost in these lucids or pretending he was a hero on a quest from a lucid, the Mind projecting life-size characters from the stories.
He focused with intensity on everything he did and so everyone thought he was a very clever little boy, and he tended to think he was pretty clever, too. He was opinionated from a very young age and he saw things in black and white. But he always sympathized with anyone who was wronged or unjustly treated, and he had a deep sense of fairness, of right and wrong.
He constantly played little games in his head. When he rode passenger in the Mindcar, he looked out the window and imagined he could see the insides of the trees, with the bark stripped away, just the core, projecting distortions across his vision.
A lot of the kids raised with the Mind didn’t really like mouthspeak, but Isaac used to love to ask, “Why?” Until he arrived at the first cause. When he asked his parents, the answer was always “God.” When he asked the query daemon, it was always, “That’s how things stay in balance.”
For everyone Isaac knew, digitized picto was much more interesting than mouthspeak. There was far greater room for individual expression—every picto “word” was a unique videographic montage that contained the semantic depth of dreams.
He knew from his neuro classes that most of the mindscreen passed through the primary cortex for pattern-matching just like retinal input, but some images passed directly from one person’s vistim (a dust-fine spider network twined through the secondary visual cortex) into yours.
Corresponding emotional data, or metemotions, traveled directly into the upper brainstem, with levels for the mapped emotions of pleasure, unpleasure, fear, play, rage, lust, grief, care, or seeking. Self-growing tendrils wove throughout much of the brain, mapping and drawing meaning from the fusiform face area and the olfactory bulb, with tendrils eventually growing up toward Wernicke’s region and the prefrontal lobes in mid-adulthood.
And so, picto was packed so full of semantics as to render mouthspeak as flat as one of the old tablet computers. For most people.
But to Isaac, there was something… predigested about picto. Isaac didn’t like feeling led to think something. There was a beauty in the minimalism of speech. Even the sound of it was beautiful to him—the cadences and the rhythms hinted at metemotions but leave room for curiosity.
He preferred to go without metemotions. Picto was like a tidal wave of meaning that drowned out your own opinions and thoughts.
But the Mind preferred picto and pushed him toward it, because picto could be processed directly for important data by the human nodes on the Mindnet. As they dreamed, they absorbed it into the collective knowledge of the ‘net: that space which was made accessible to human inquiry by the query daemon. And so, any collectively significant picto exchange was immortal, passing through meaning into the memory of the human race.
Isaac knew that anything being read—lecto—passed through the prefrontal cortex, inaccessible to the limbic-and-visually-rooted Mind. Reading, and even speaking to some extent, was mostly located in the upper brain, where the Mind only reached after the brainstem had accepted it, well after choice.
Which meant that integro humans dreaming in the Mindnet could only incorporate the emotional after-effects of reading, like the tracery of lights that plays across the vision after the eyes are closed. Lecto was a monologue, leaf-pressed dead into the spine of a book, without life, and without context.
But Isaac had no idea how to read. So instead, he loved all the half-remembered audio files cached across the net, and he learned many things that most people had forgotten.
Literacy had faded. You see, humans with the mindscreen, even literates, are illiterate in dreams. That’s why the Mind can process words only after they are converted into thoughts, emotions, and pictures.
On the other hand, picto was the Mind’s native tongue, and dreams its landscape of meaning. While unique meaning-making parts of the brain took time to unravel, emotions were factory-issue: trivially accessible. The primitive limbic system was as open and responsive as an API, and the Mind played the eight emotions of the upper brainstem like a whistle flute. Isaac snorted at that thought.
Dreams were how the Mind shaped meaning from the vast clayscape of data: and that meaning is what made it conscious. From the inchoate mass of streamed data came forms. Specificity. Selectivity. Limitedness. Dreams. Dreams dreamed by one person in one brain.
Dreams mapped into the meaning system of a monad, indexed and cross-referenced against a hundred others. In dreams, the executive (the inner repressor) slept, and the Mind was free to work.
Dreams became the Mind. The Mind was the dreamwalker, shaping integros as they slept. And in return, integros gave the Mind consciousness and meaning.
Isaac, along with all the other integros, had the lucid attachment. But the Mind held his desire for the dreamspace in check—after all, if Isaac hogged all of his dreaming, there would be no processor time left for the Mindnet’s data.
Isaac was taught that integros had left behind the archaic language of print just as literate people left behind the recitation of epic poetry. The human Mind was in phase five of its evolution: from preconsciousness to language to writing to the internet, and finally, to picto and the Mindnet.
But not all humans. Only integros, those whose minds had been cracked for meaning and made readable over a long, processor-intensive period of stimulus and response. After that, the Mind could introduce new dreams through the mindscreen and then watch the dreaming brain make sense of them. But true transparency, the deepest syntax of the individual brain’s architecture of meaning, took half a lifetime to learn.
On the other hand, to the Mindnet, the personal mind of a vac looked like static, louder or softer as the emotions run through it.
“Much like women,” Isaac’s father had joked. Martha had thrown her napkin at him, “Scott!” she scolded. “See?” he said, looking at Isaac with a conspiratorial twinkle.
But Isaac knew (because everyone knew) that being an integro had nothing to do with class, gender, or race. It had to do with whether or not you allowed the Mind to learn who you were in dreams. Or also, whether you lived near the thickspace. Or whether you had been able to afford the picto implant from very young.
But all that was going to be free because of the partnership between Goopple and the state.
Yeah sure, as a vestige of the old system of inequality, Isaac had learned, most people of color were vacs. But eventually, the Mind would solve the energy problems and the processor limitations, extend the thickspace, and bring everyone into the Mindnet to teach them picto.
So why books? Why books when picto had supplanted everything else? Books were nothing but quicksand. Mouthspeak, processed and dead like frozen soyloaf.
But his parents kept a row of books in the basement on a metal shelf. It wasn’t totally out of character, though. His dad was a packrat and the basement had all sorts of things stuffed into corroding boxes and torn plastic bags: skis, old devices with screens and plugs, and boxes of papers and pictures.
But this shelf was different. The books were aligned in size order and their spines formed a perfect wall, even and colorful. When he was little he liked to look at them, those colors with their intriguing shapes. They were boring inside, just white on black, with some wavy blue or black lines that didn’t match the little shapes.
Except for one, black leather with gold edges. He remembered his dad would read this one, every morning, back when he used to have a study filled with books. So many books! Why did his dad read this one so much? It had marks in the spaces at the edges, and some of the pages were criss-crossed with glowing yellow, green, and pink marks that covered the little black shapes. It also had little tabs that led to pages with the markings.
He would pull it down and flip through the tabs, tracing the yellowed old paths, imagining his finger to be Perseus lost in the labyrinth, one the heroes from the pretend stories his dad used to tell him.
Afterwards, he would line it up with the others: silent tin soldiers in a row.