he turned off of the road on the edge of a stand of trees, and started to drive across one of the old unrestored industrial corn fields, now reduced to dirt that caught the wind and contaminated nearby fields.
He looked back at the road and could see the path that their tires had kicked up, rising toward the heavens like a prayer. But this desolation wasn’t a prayer, he thought. If there was a God, this field was an old, discarded blasphemy.
They continued over the field, turning to the left along the edge of the forest. There, at the fringe of reality, was an old abandoned barn: sentinel over the wasteland of dirt.
Its red and white paint peeled, the right half of the roof split under the weight of a fallen tree, the dirtland spreading forth like a dry yolk from a cracked egg.
She pulled up and shut off the car, the ticking of the engine a tiny snare drum cutting across a musical reprieve. Isaac stepped out and closed the car door with a bass thud. The thirsty land absorbed the sound like water.
He stood there, lost in the vastness of the empty land, the road obscured. The dust roiled faintly like dark magic.
She opened the back to grab some books and was walking toward the barn when she realized he wasn’t following her. She stopped and turned to beckon him.
“Come on!” she said with a smile, gesturing with her head, her body profiled momentarily.
He jogged for a few paces to catch up. The old sliding barn doors were closed, and she grabbed ahold of one side and heaved with her whole body, leveraging against the frame with her foot. It creaked open by a couple of inches. She jerked twice more before there was just enough room for them to squeeze by.
The light streamed in around the fallen tree, beams illuminating glittering particles of dust displaced by the sliding of the door.
An old tractor lay where it had stopped, its hood stripped, bones open to the sky light, rusting.
In the corner was a massive desk of plywood and metal, faux wood sticker peeling at the edges. A grand desk. A desk for a noir hero-queen, facing the world bold, back to the wall, a chipped-chrome office chair reclining, crumbling foam spilling from ancient disregarded wounds.
She seized a pink-faded couch and dragged it to the front of the desk, calmly settling into her recumbent throne, feet on the desk, across from the couch.
Isaac was turning a circle, taking in the space. The half-pegboard on the wall, the old mechanic’s drawers: empty, open and bent.
She watched him for a moment and then spoke, “An old hermit lived here. They say he never had the ‘screen. By the time they found him, he’d been dead for a while. We came for his books. He had really good books. Once, I saw him out there. His ghost. Or maybe some old screen projection of him. I don’t know. But everybody keeps away.”
Isaac shivered. How long was “dead for a while?” And where did they find him? He glanced over at the couch, picturing age slowly creeping over a person until the flesh withered from bones, oozing into the faded pink flesh tone of the couch. But he was cool with old age, wasn’t he?
She saw his look of disgust and smiled, “They found him out in the field.”
“Oh, cool,” said Isaac, relieved but pulled from his reverie into a momentary paralysis induced by girl pheromones.
“Sit down,” said the girl with the pheromones, magnanimously gesturing towards the flesh-toned couch that had not held a decaying man.
“Oh, thanks.” He sat stiff on the couch, not quite able to relax into its fleshy embrace, the desk between the two of them.
He looked at her, seated confidently in this strange place, and his curiosity kicked in, “So, do you come here a lot?”
“Yep. This is like my ‘escape from reality,’” she said with air quotes. “Except it’s actually a part of reality, so I actually get to actually come here.”
“It’s my office. You know. Like when they had everything made of paper and it was really heavy and stacked all over the place you couldn’t bring it home and so you had to commute to work every single day.” Her hand swept across a paper tundra.
Something about all that paper snowing every surface struck him as funny and he laughed, relaxing down one ratchet release, “So, what do you do here?”
“Get out of the thicker ‘space where I live. Farther away from the panopticon, you know? I read and journal and stuff. I walk back and forth, thinking.” Her fingers miming a scissoring walk.
He checked Pictopedia for “panopticon,” forgetting that the fog she was projecting had severed his tether. Bad Isaac, he thought. No Mindnet.
Sol looked at him again. Had he just attempted to check the ‘net? “Look, Isaac. The fog is on here so you can’t upload a data request. You get stuff down but no requests to initiate data transfer. But later, if you start grepping for every single new thing you learn, it’s going to change your profile and you’re going to start attracting attention. Okay?”
“Okay. Sorry. So what does panopticon mean?”
“It’s just like a watchtower in the middle of a big circle of prison cells so the watchers can watch all the prisoners at once.”
“So like the Mind?”
“Exactly,” she said, smiling at him. Obviously he wasn’t a total Mindtool. That’s why he was here to learn in the first place. Why he had gotten robbed. But still, he could probably increase the surveillance around her and Ahab and get them busted for the Library, so she had to be careful.
There were laws beneath laws, behavior patterns that could flag you, standards of normalcy that were fenced in with words like “sane” and “insane.” And even the law itself had accreted like a coral reef climbing sharp from the water, ever shrinking the navigable waters. Most laws were not enforced, but all laws were enforceable. It was easier to sail the cold currents of life, swept along, your neural patterns conforming to routines and rituals, growing older and more boring with each passed day. Which is why she came here.
“Look Isaac. Here’s what we have do to here. I have to teach you to push out the mindscreen. Then you have to fall in love with the world. Know what I mean?” She leaned forward, her brow wrinkled with the serious question, searching in his eyes for the answer.
“Umm, kind of,” he said. Falling in love? He tried not to look directly into her eyes but found it too difficult, so he focused on thinking about things like poop, jellyfish, and men impaled on spikes, which all occupied a different neural region than the neurons stuck auto-firing, “beautiful woman.”
She nodded, satisfied. “It’s like this. You’ve got your neocortex, right? All the things you can consciously control. Your tool-making, language-making, change-making brain,” she made an upside-down bowl-like gesture with her hands.
“Then you have your animal, your subcortex, your emotions, firing from beneath with all its desires, monitoring chemicals like hormones and peptides in the blood. You know. Making you aware of your needs. That’s where the Mind is working,” she made a fist cupped beneath her hand.
“You want to fire downwards and rewire parts of your lower brain’s associations. But what do you want to rewire it to? Love. You want to sit and stare at the fall colors and love them. You want to sit with people and love them. Love is an emotion, and when you have it, you can drive out the other shit the Mind is putting into you.”
“Love?” he cleared his throat, managing to unstick his eyes and fix them on the corner of the desk.
“Oh, not romantic love, like between two people,” she said, gesturing between the two of them, unaware of her effect on him. “Like, you know, kind regard. Compassion. Affection. Appreciation and awe. You got to love stuff if you want to stop doing something. You can’t just deny old pathways, you have to build new ones. Strong new ones.”
“Right,” he said, managing to look back at her.
“You have to confuse the Mind so it doesn’t know how you’re remapping, or it will want input. And the first way to do that is to unplug from it. Then you have unplug your top mind from your bottom mind: silence. Alpha waves,” she said, pulling her fist out from under it’s bowl.
“Then you have to rewire, re-associate,” she said, moving her hands in a circular motion. “And you focus on building different connections, with different emotions. But they have to be good ones that light up your happy places, so the old reinforced ways atrophy and fall into disuse. Thus, love and affection.”
“But won’t the Mind just rewire my brain in dreams?”
“Think of how many cells there are in a panopticon the size of The Americas. Can they all be watched? No. The Mind is listening for noise,” she said, motioning towards her ear with a cupped hand. “Emotional noise. It’s a good enough heuristic for change, right? But not the kind we are talking about.
“Like, lately I can’t even dream Mind dreams. All my dreams go to processing the emotions it can’t push down during the day.”
“Right. So you are kind of worthless to it right now, and it’s trying to fix you,” she pantomimed a ratchet. “But what if you start performing well? You start having free dreamwidth to process data because your brain isn’t always trying to cram the trauma of non-adjustment in?”
“Hmm.” He was skeptical. “So why do I want to be a better little mindnode?”
She smiled widely, “Think of me as your personal industrial psychologist. We get some grease on your cog, and you quit jamming up the conveyor belt. Then, when nobody is looking, we can start to rewire, and the Mind won’t be paying as much attention. Until your brain starts to fade to static. Too late!” Her hand made a small explosion, fingers out.
“I like it,” said Isaac. He started to finally feel a little thrill of hope. Maybe if he followed this way, the Mind would quit forcing emotions on him.
And so she began to teach him what he would need to do every day.
Most of what she wanted him to do was to try to ignore anything that came from the mindscreen. To sit in silence and to try to imagine a place where he could rest and be at peace.
To listen and feel the pull away from the Mind.
At first he was bored. It was excruciating. He kept wanting to check his notifications, go on Pictbook, or turn on his inphones, at least. Some “pull away from the Mind.” Silence would be so much more epic with a sweet soundtrack.
But after an hour, the silence started to feel thick all around him. He felt suspended in crash gel that pressed all around, a warm cushioning force. When she broke the silence it was like the rupturing of an amniotic sack, and he came tumbling out into reality.
As Sol drove him back, before they came into thickspace, Isaac asked, “So, is this going to stick, or is the Mind just going to re-form me in dreams?”
Sol paused, looking out at the road, “Back before the Mind, humans used to dream together. It’s not possible of course. At least based on what we know. It was called the collective unconscious, and some people called it God. It was more a shared experience than an article of faith. Maybe it was the soul of the cosmos. Or the echo of a race of pan-dimensional universe-builders who transcended reality. Whatever. It was the Mind before we fused with the machine and drove it out.” Her voice was contemplative, her hands still against the wheel. “It’s there, as a small voice, underneath the stillness.”
“Hmm. So is it going to work?” asked Isaac.
“Or nothing will.” Then the space started to thicken and they lapsed into silence.