e took his seat at the round table just before the starting signal flashed through his mind like a white flag across his inner vision. The students’ voices started to die down as they prepared for practice. Today was very special. Today, they were to observe the processes of the Assembly itself. This was their first opportunity to experience the centralized processing that ran their world directly.
They merged quietly, gathering together, and the collection vision faded to a ceiling-camera view of the the Mind’s midwest processing center, deep underground.
A black skeleton of racks was loaded tight with row after neat row of servers, fronts dotted with tiny flashing lights, green, yellow, red, and blue. Thick fiber-optic cables snaked from the backs of the racks to climb through the grid metal rafters like vines through a jungle canopy. Ducts of air-conditioning ran along the floor.
They zoomed further up into a wide-angle lens shot of a room the size of six football fields divided into segments. Picto labels hovered, superimposed: dream processing, visual processing, memory storage, spatial reasoning, short-term decision, input processing, monitoring, emotions, dream processing, object recognition, and communications: each a separate region of the room, connected by a massive oil-pipeline-sized mass of fiberoptic cables. Each of sections was analogous to parts of the human brain.
The sheer scale of the processing was incredible. But all the awe at the Mind’s power translated to dread within Isaac. For Isaac, each server represented a power pitted against his real self, channeled through the Mindchip: the seat of the thing that inhabited his will like a homonculus. During the tour he zoned out: plotting out the chokepoints plastic explosive charges would do the most damage. Not that he could do that. The Mind work ceaselessly but without success to pull his personal mind back into a warm, receptive learning state.
Near end of the tour they travelled along through the axons of computing that flowed from one of the blinking computers into an adjoining room filled with human-sized pods: thought-modules.
In each of these pods were Assemblistas, at the seat of the Mind’s power, hard-wired into brainjacks.
They emerged into a single pod where a woman lay in a profound sleep. Her face was without age: totally smooth and tranquil. She wore a brown pant-suit, with large colored earrings and a necklace of wooden beads. From this, Isaac guessed her to be 60, but her body could have belonged to a 25-year-old. Isaac knew that her mind was filled the alpha waves of meditation or prayer, a profoundly rejuvenative state. Her being was in in perfect harmony with the Mind.
He pictured all the vacs he’d seen, seamed and lined. That’s what it meant to live apart from the Mind. Aging.
He recalled an old vidvertizement: the metemotions blunt and without unpersuasive. A sliver sedan glided fast on a road through a sunlit autumn field.
The camera zooms down into the windshield, opaque white with reflections until it enters the car and resolves into the driver, his seat laid back all the way, profoundly asleep, smiling, his face twitching slightly. The camera panned to show the wheel making perfect little course corrections, guided by his operated hands. Then the voice comes in, “Hard at work so you can truly relax.” Yep, that was how he’d been taught to think of himself as an operator.
Each Assemblista was like a neuron cluster in the cerebral cortex of the Overmind, co-participants in the million situational computations that comprised the micro-management of an entire continent. They travelled a dreamscape that represented the moral calculus of governance. The pattern of their minds was the deep weave of the Mind’s will.
In one sense the Mind was nothing more than the collective consciousness of humanity, augmented by racks and racks of servers. But in another sense, humanity had co-evolved with its cyborg consciousness, changed irreconcilably.
But the classmind had moved on until they looked up through an infinite rainbow starscape connected by pulsing threads of light. The dreamscape: each star a dreamer.
Isaac gazed upwards at the vastness of collective thought and chuckled inwardly, picturing them enveloped in the infinity of stars, and yet another being encompassing that expanse, and yet further infinities encased within each tiny infinity. He felt the teacher tugging at his part of the classmind, urging him to join them. Just as the rest had focused, his own thought had dissipated.