eon,
I write seeking representation for my completed 80,000-word neuroscience dystopia novel, bigMind, a work fusing literary and hard science fiction whose world development and sociological ideas do not overshadow plot, character, and pacing. It is written for adults (read: without condescension), but features a YA protagonist. It is not only genre-bending; it consciously subverts genre tropes.
Synopsis
In a dark near-future, Isaac is a member of the elite “operator” class, on the cusp of his Choosing and obsessed with finding autonomy from the AI implanted in him since birth. He can choose to submit himself to the neural machinations of the AI and step into his “privilege,” or he can choose to discover who he really is without it, risking insanity and a life of near-slavery as a member of the underclass, his body remote-controlled for factory labor by the operator class to which he once belonged. But in a world where nearly everyone has fused their brain to the AI, it would seem autonomy is the one thing universally denied.
In his parents’ basement, Isaac finds a book. But writing has been forgotten, replaced by a dream-language that has subsumed and altered all human knowledge. As he presses to understand the book, the AI manipulates his emotions in ways that feel alien, allowing him to differentiate himself from it. And so he keeps pressing, questing out into the world for anything that would help him learn to read and sharpen his sense of self. But in exploring the underclass Isaac is robbed and left unconscious. Hitchhiking back, Isaac meets Sol, a brilliant teenage girl whose mother left to become an operator and whose rage-stricken father is lost to revolutionary struggle. As she teaches Isaac to read in order to learn secrets that could free her mother, they begin to fall in love. But their love is doomed. In a moment of danger, Isaac assumes control of her body to save her life, and she is irrevocably reminded of his identity as the member of the elite: a necromancer of bodies. Without Sol, Isaac is alone: split from the AI, his friends and his future. He ingests a hallucinogenic drug that promises a third way: freedom within the operator class. But choice was always an illusion and at the end of the book the AI assumes control of Isaac’s body, deletes his memories, and moves him off to his dark future. bigMind ends on this note of narrative completion, anticipating a sequel.
Bio
I constructed the neuroscience and philosophy of AI that undergird bigMind out of knowledge pillaged from a degree in Cognitive Science and long research. The novel extrapolates upon today’s technologies for reading and writing to the human brain, always with an eye to limitations rather than technological omnipotence. Throughout the book, QR codes link to a soundtrack created by the electronic musician Spearfisher.
The book’s main character is drawn from my variety of personal experiences: a six-month prison stint in federal prison as a result of a protest action to close the School of the Americas, hitchhiking, hallucinogens, forced teenage drug treatments, and struggles in various social movements like Occupy. These life events are tied inextricably to my platform, glassdimly.com, where I blog as a faith-based progressive radical, contributing to HuffPo, Sojourners, ReadWriteWeb, Good Men Project, and Justice Unbound. I sustain myself as a software programmer, technical project manager, and grassroots organizer / social entrepreneur.
If I don’t miss my mark, bigMind fits well within the interests you’ve laid out on your manuscript wish list profile. I hope the first five pages below pique your interest.
Sincerely,
Jeremy John
bigMind
The wind rippled through the golden grain, heavy heads bowed. The young man watched and prayed his prayer, a silent, nameless thing, yellow and flecked with black. The Mind nagged at him like an uncompleted game of chess, pulling him back. It was less overwhelming out here, but he knew that the closer he got to the city the stronger it would become.
He sighed, looking down. He was already late. He looked back up and then turned toward his Toyota, rust crescent moons above the wheel wells, the sun already sinking toward the horizon. There was no use delaying.
He drove slowly down the empty country road, past the old and young vacs. A female seemed almost to dance from plant to plant, pollinating, her motions precise as a mindscreen surgeon’s. He felt a thrill rush through him as he watched the muscles in her leg flex.
Just as muscly as he would look if he were operated eight hours a day. She must have felt his stare because her eyes shifted to lock onto his, even as he drove. Hot tarry pools with a dull shine. He went cold with shame. He wasn’t the least bit prejudiced, but sometimes the eyes of the operated were less than human.
Now his mind turned toward home, and he again felt the nagging equation unbalanced in him, and he knew that the Mind was telling him that his parents were waiting with dinner. The Mind hated him out here with the vacs and the grain fields, but that was the trade off.
If he could fully distinguish between himself and the Mind, his body could reject it and he’d become a vac. Operated.
They said that when the Mind withdrew from an operator, the personal mind desiccated, collapsing like a tomato dried of its innards.
He reached over for his baseball cap from the seat and put it on. It had an almost-complete circle on it: the same symbol woven through the indecipherable book he carried everywhere with him.
He remembered when he bought the cap how the old vac had mocked him, “That ‘C’ for Cubs. But I don’t figger you know ‘bout Cubbies.” His green eyes had squinted as mouth pulled tight in contempt.
“What’re Cubs?” he had asked.
The old vac just snorted and looked at the ground on the right. “Thirty bucks if you want it.”
He had taken it. He knew what a “C” was. A sea. He saw the sea in the half-circle tipped and draining an infinite sparkling blue into him like the knowledge of the Mindnet. But human.
He pulled it down low over his eyes against the sun and enjoyed the tightness against his skull. A shield talisman that protected his personal mind from the Mindnet. A rune of power.
“I’m a mystic,” he thought. But would that protect his personal mind from the desiccation of the Mind’s withdrawal? He shivered. He didn’t want to reject the Mind. He just wanted to be free and to understand the world.
He felt a dull resentment in his chest. Once, people had real personalities completely apart from the Mind. Whole lives with private thoughts.
As his car traveled closer to the city the Mind’s emotions started to gnaw at his reason in a dull way as he hit the teeth-crowded buildings of the Cinturón, the great highway marking the edge of the thickspace. He braced himself to drive through into the great maw of the thickspace where the Mind’s power over him would increase until his sense of separation from it would fade to nothing.
Integros, those whose brains were nodes on the Mindnet, lived in the thickspace where they processed data for the Mind in dreams.
As for vacs, their dreams were an escape. Those that could afford it packed into the Cinturón’s buildings at edge of the thickspace as tight as the soldered innards of a mindscreen, cadging the dreaming datastream before it dissipated.
He drove until he reached the edge of the city and the Mind’s bandwidth increased with a trickle of data. The Mind’s pull was a dull, digestive hunger now, totally limbic. He fought the urge to mash down on the accelerator and hurry to the city. He slowed to thirty miles-per-hour, cutting into the hunger with his will.
Finally, the buildings dropped off like the edge of a cliff and in their shadows spread grassy lawns and neat bungalows, with spaghetti-noodle streets that wound and twined pleasantly. His colonized emotions spread like an eager plant toward the sun, chasing the anxious hunger of the Cinturón out of him like water turned vapor.
This was the part he hated the most. The submissiveness that he could not control, a bladder giving way to a warm flood of liquid. It was disgusting to him.
The hunger he could bear, but the sweetness of release to the Mind: the soothing warmth that ran through his whole body… Ugh. Chemicals. Even through the near sexual pleasure of reconnection he felt a conquering wave of revulsion.
A flush of pride came on him at his revulsion. Maybe he could think for himself after all. But then, he wasn’t even fully in the thickspace.
The datastream picked up speed as he got closer to his home connection and he began to calm, the alien sense of the Mind beginning to merge into his thoughts until it became no more than a noon shadow.
* * * *
Twilight lit an empty suburbia in sepia. His parent’s neighborhood was older, more traditional. The sameness scrolled by without triggering Isaac’s conscious awareness. Yards circled each house, each house was ringed by bushes, every tree was lined with mulch, and each yard had a pleasantly curved island of flowers. Families in these old neighborhoods got an operating credit for lawn maintenance, but the scale of the operation ruled out creativity.
He pulled into his parent’s driveway and pressed the gearshift into park. Then he turned the keys slowly, reluctantly in the ignition, drawing out the moment between on and off. The engine shuddered into silence and he looked down at the floorboard, feeling the engine’s quiet. He browsed his mindstream, opening the picts they’d sent him—the picts he’d ignored while he was out in the thinspace. There had been a violence to his disconnection—a family-shaped hole in a picture—all that was left was himself, smiling next to a nothingness.
He looked at the door handle and pulled it slowly upwards until he felt the inward gears of the lock press against his lazy grip. The door’s click as it released open jolted him from his reverie. Right. Time for dinner. He pulled off his baseball cap, tossing it onto the driver’s seat, and got out of the car, walking toward the house.
His father appeared at the door, standing as he approached.
Scott was young for his fifty years—he had been an early adopter of the mindscreen’s limbic connection—but he was old beside the eternal youth of those chipped since childhood. His green eyes were transparent, blazing with anger, happiness, or love behind his wire-frame glasses. During the day, he worked in sales for a lucid app developer.
“Dinner’s on the table.” Scott’s eyes were mild, but a microexpression of reproach cut briefly across his face.
Isaac rolled his eyes. It was an almost friendly entrance into their landscape of argument. “You got my pict? Because I said I was going to be late today.” The fact was they just didn’t want him out there in the thinspace, and they were waiting to eat to make a passive-aggressive point.
“Did you really think we’d eat without you? You can’t isolate yourself until you fail your choosing and wind up a lúcido.” His father stood in his path, demanding address as only physical things can. It annoyed Isaac: physicality was so pushy.
The Mind pressed at him to feel remorseful, to change. It was always like this. The thickspace was smothering.
He knew that his parents worried when he went out to the thinspace—but they were creating a feedback loop. He needed out or his brain would explode. Or he’d stay and it would implode and he’d lose himself to the Mind completely. Which was precisely what his parents wanted. Implosion. He felt anger rising inside him at the thought.
“Aaah!” Isaac said in exasperation. “Don’t wait for me. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even breathe here. We don’t need to eat dinner together every single night. I can just eat soyflakes or whatever.”
Isaac’s mother, Martha, came up behind Scott and pulled on his shoulder, making room in the doorway. She taught children the piano forty at a time by playing through them so the shape of the keys became part of their muscle memory, following up with personal lessons.
Her smooth face was marred by some gentle wrinkles, laugh lines at the mouth and worry lines on the forehead, the product of late chip adoption. Just now, it was her worry lines that stood out, “Of course you’re going to feel like you can’t breathe when you spend so much time in the thinspace. You’re splitting and being divided impairs your judgement. The personal mind doesn’t work the same out there. You can get confused and—”
“Mom, I’m not going to ‘get confused!’”
“—then start making bad choices. You might decide to just keep driving until you’ve ran out of gas and then a lúcido would find you. We’re so worried about you out there!”
“Mom, I’m fine. I’m not a different person than I was. I’m doing fine, I’m just trying to figure out what’s me and what’s the Mind. I’m not going to fail my choosing. I’ve got fine grades and I can operate better than anybody in my class.”
Scott shook his head in frustration, “Why do you still not get it? You’re already choosing each day. All the times you allow yourself to be conscious of it. All the times you ignore the metemotions. All the times you drive out into the thinspace. You should know by now that choice doesn’t happen in a single moment.”
“So what do you want me to do?” Isaac’s voice crescendoed to the end of the sentence. “I hate it. I hate how small everything is. I hate how nobody knows anything that matters. And I hate how it’s either operate or be operated. Well maybe I don’t want either. Maybe I don’t want to choose anything,”
His father broke in, “You’re living in a fantasy vid, Isaac—”
“Fantasy vid, huh?”
“—Let me finish. You know that for an operator turned vac, there’s only operation. When are you going to wake up?”
Isaac ground his teeth. “Even if I can’t choose to be an operator, I’m not going to become some cog in the machine. I’m a mystic. I’m training my Mind to overcome my flesh.”
Scott snorted, “But seriously. You want cog in the machine? Try being an operated vac. Maybe the Mind is even letting you think you have a choice. But I’m not the Mind, I’m your father and I love you.”
His face softened, “Look. I know you think you choose. But choice is an illusion. You are who you are each moment because of your brain chemicals. You can’t get away from that. If you could, the Mind would never work.”
His ideas began to animate him, “You think your rational brain has top-down power? No. It’s your mammal-brain that bubbles up. Emotions. And those have been shaped by the Mind since before you were conscious. It’s woven so deep inside you that if you pull it out, pieces of you will fall out with it.”
“So why did you put it inside me then?” Isaac’s anger rose. “Why did you ever chip me?”
Scott opened his mouth to respond, then deflated, looking down. When he looked back up his eyes were hard and sad, “Son, this is the world we live in. And we’ve always wanted the best for you here.”
“That’s not a fucking answer!” Always the same. Did they think they were protecting him by keeping him in the dark?
“Cool down!” his father glared at him.
“Come inside and sit down,” Martha put her hand on Scott’s shoulder to pull him inside.
And so Isaac ate in silence until the Mind healed over the word-sliced rift, dialing down the upper brainstem’s agonistic response to the testosterone hormones swimming through his blood, calming him, bringing him back into the family, back into the collective intelligence, gradually digesting the conversation into something that could be integrated back into the self.