plitting
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.
* * * * *
An Argument
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.
* * * * *
Grandma
The moon outside his bedroom window glowed bright as a screen in the sky, power lines criss-crossing it like the black lines that crisscrossed the pages of his father’s old books.
And so was there something written in the logic of the universe, encoded in the distance and relation between objects? If his parents had their way, he’d stay trapped above the surfaces of things, trapped in the derivative symbolic world of the hyperreal, where meaning was easy and fast, squeezed and distilled into intoxicating liquor. Hyper-meaningful and therefore meaningless. In that world it was impossible to see into the secret heart of things.
And so he waited until the house was quiet. He touched the suppository mindport at the base of his skull and considered popping it open just to feel the smooth click of it, but then pulled back his hand. If the Mind found out what he was doing, then at the very least he’d have to stop.
He laid down in bed, closing his eyes and feeling for the blindfold, strapping it on in the darkness. When it was in place he luxuriated in the freedom of blindness, the darkness cool like the rolling waves of the sea bearing up his ship.
And now the the Mind’s window into his world was closed. It could still read the emotions of his mammal-brain, but without vision there would be no context for his emotions. And if he prevailed tonight, the Mind would gain no ground.
He moved toward the pillbox and felt, carefully distinguishing the light-coded bacterial suppositories destined for his mindport and slipping them into his basesuit pocket
The carpet was soft under his feet, the doorknob cool against his palm, and the only sound was the soft tick-tock of the hallway clock. He hesitated for a moment, his ears open, mapping the space by sound. Nothing.
He moved into the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen. He keyed in the microwave settings by heart that made it operate silently, dumped the pills onto his palm and then carefully onto the glass carousel. One pill, stuck in his palm-sweat, clinked onto the glass. He froze.
No sounds. He turned the microwave on for just one minute and then waited as it silently nuked the life out of billions of expensive designer bacteria keyed to the frequency of the red-pulsing bacteria that had been selectively injected into his specific neural regions.
Now, the read-and-write fiber-optic pathways that were an integros’ rite of passage, their entrance into the Mindnet, the cables that made it possible for the Mind to influence and read emotions and thoughts, those would fail to be generated. How long would it take for them to catch him?
So tonight he would sleep-walk as usual, under the Mind’s power, open his mindjack and insert the two pills, the glassin and bacteria. But nothing would grow, no busy busy bacteria would climb up and down the silica cabling like termites building a nest.
Instead, the dead bacteria would simply be carried off to be broken down like the alien trash that it was.
He counted slowly to sixty and then opened the microwave, dumped the pills back into their pill-bottle, and keyed the microwave back to its noise-emitting self.
He slid the pills back into his basesuit and crept back to his room to put the pills back where they came from.
But he had to create an alibi for his blackout. After all, what was he hiding? The Mind allowed you a few secrets, as long as they were the right kind of secret. Like walking aimlessly in the suburban dark blindfolded, luxuriating in the eyeless night, all screens dark.
And so he moved back to the stairs with the blindfold on, and moved out into the dark of the backyard. But before he stepped out, the scent of smoke hit him. Grandma.
He quickly stripped off his blindfold to avoid the question, stuffing it into his pocket as he stepped through the door.
“Grandma. What are you doing out here?” Her eyes weren’t very good, and it seemed she’d noticed nothing.
“Well, what does it look like I’m doing?”
“Smoking.” He sat down beside her in one of the white plastic chairs on the old concrete slab where, in the old times when meat was plentiful, his ancestors had grilled. The rows of suburban houses strung out behind him like pearls on a necklace, silent, opaque, and gleaming, the product of a long irritation now soothed.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Well, I’m better than I was but I’m not as good as I was before I got as bad as I am now.” Grandma lived in the downstairs room because, as Scott always explained, it would be easier to move the house than to move her.
“Yeah,” said Isaac. The phrase was a sort of mantra for her, a mental game she played to keep herself sharp. And despite her eighty-two years, she insisted on small rationalities with the same stubborn persistence with which she lit a cigarette in the wind, cupping her bony fingers to create a leaky shield and sparking again and again until the wind itself relented, the fire quavered but held, and she drew the flame in through the cigarette.
“Grandma, what’s it like not to have the mindscreen?” Technically, his grandma was a natural vac because she had no implant, a rarity found chiefly among backwoods savages or recent illegal immigrants. But she lived here with them, as many of the elderly did, a vac under operation caring for her daily needs.
“Couldn’t really say,” she squinted at the cigarette held before her face.
“Why not?”
“Well, what’s it like not to have your eyes?” She drew on her cigarette, exhaled, and rested her bony hand on the chair’s white armrest.
“I don’t know. I can’t really imagine life without them.”
“Exactly,” she said, exhaling smoke like a vid-dragon.
“Why didn’t you get the mindscreen? Didn’t you want to stop aging?”
“The sooner I get off this rock the better, I say.”
“Did you say that back then?”
“Sometimes.”
“So is that why you didn’t get the mindscreen?”
“No.”
“Well then why not?”
“Bad enough as it is.”
“How?”
“People barging in and interrupting my thoughts. Imagine if they were all in my head.”
Isaac laughed and shook his head. “Grandma, that’s not what it’s like at all.”
“Well, how is it then? You tell me.”
Isaac thought for a moment. “It’s like having two minds. It wasn’t always like that. Before, it was just always wanting to do the right thing, or at least the thing the Mind wants.”
“See?”
“What?”
“I’m already confused enough as it is. Sounds even worse,” she said.
“But didn’t they try to force-chip you?”
“Oh yes. Scott always wanted to stick one of those things in my skull. Said it was for my own good. You can still see it here.” She tilted her head forward, and through the thin grey hair at the base of her skull he could see a white, puckering scar. “Back then, you could just zap it and have it removed.”
Isaac shivered, looking at the wound that meant her severance from the Mindnet and picturing the blood spilled when it was drawn out. “Really? That wasn’t illegal?”
“ ‘Course. I wasn’t about to have that thing in there.” She held up two fingers. “Two times I had to get it removed. Such a nice doctor down on the south side. Very helpful. ‘course it’s not so easy now.”
“Wasn’t it hard to get yourself to have it removed? Didn’t the Mind try to stop you?”
“ ‘Course. But they couldn’t watch me all the time,” she said with a cackle.
“Why didn’t they re-chip you a third time?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really remember the second time much. I just remember the bus ride and waking up in the doctor’s office. I told them I’d rather die than have that mindscreen again.” Smoke trickled around her death-pale face.
Isaac gazed out into the still suburban night and he knew it was true. What was it about his grandma that drove her to wager everything on her own stubbornness?
That she lived was proof that there was life beyond the Mind, but it was hard to know whether she persisted out of some irrational fear of change or if life were truly better on the other side.
As she drew on her cigarette, the red-orange ember glowed like a meteorite burning up in its fall to earth. When she exhaled and tapped it over the edge of the chair, the ash hit the cement, dissolving into pieces that scattered gray to the wind.
* * * *
Operated
Today was Wednesday, one of Sol’s days to be operated, and she was thinking about how tired she was.
Despite that, she wouldn’t let herself slip into the trance, like the lúcidos, because the hangovers just got worse and worse, until you’d spend your credits on the lucids rather than face the evenings. Until you were a wraith, sleeping at the edges of the thickspace.
But she and her dad needed the credits, so they each spent two days a week under operation. Working free was hard enough, but working at the Mind’s pace was grueling for the body and the personal mind both unless you fell into the trance-state. A vac.
She smiled to herself. Empty.
But she wasn’t empty, and she’d never let the Mind have her like it got her mother. Fuck the fake mindscreen. If reality was bland porridge she would rather drink it down straight than be deluded into thinking it was mead. The “lucids” were the place revolutions went to die.
There were nearly a thousand white little cubbies where each worker stood and assembled the mindscreens. Sol wore all green, like the others on the line, breathing through her dust mask, her hair bound in a white hairnet. She sat bent over the mindscreen she was assembling. Her job was to press the thickspace chip carefully into the tiny module being assembled for implant into the brain.
She gazed at the logo stamped small in the silicon: nine imperfect pomegranate seeds. Forever summer, that was the Mind’s promise, the three months of winter deleted like corrupted data. She snorted inwardly.
But where did winter go? Was it deleted: metadata torn from an inode, left to lay nameless and confused until another season overwrote it?
A woman next to her on the line handed her the the circuitboard. Sol’s hand jerked as it moved accept the component, engaging her automation. She watched as her own hands tweezered a green chip from a clear plastic box and pressed it into place with movements nearly too fast to track. Like tiny ballerinas. Tiny bulimic ballerinas dancing through hunger. Dancing through hunger toward a perfect, beautiful body.
A mosquito landed on her leg. She could see it out of the corner of her eye, compacted against her flesh, staring at it it as it swelled with blood, white stripes dilating as it fattened with blood. Against the automation, she managed to twitch her leg uselessly. The mosquito continued to swell. She willed her body to drop the Mindchip and crush it, but even as she ticked toward it slightly she felt her operator tighten her own fingers against the chip, swiftly passing it to the man on her left and seizing a new chip.
Tighter. Tinier. She tried to breathe in deep but her breath came the breath of a robot-bellows, in and out, in and out, in and out, pressing the exact right mix of oxygen into her lungs
Don’t even try, she thought as her hand moved precisely to tweezer another green circuitboard, relax. But she couldn’t. Her body continued its perfect machinations, neither slower nor faster, while the mosquito ripened on her perfectly oxygenated blood. She felt a scream building in her mind.
Stop! she willed. She was spiraling, spiraling, spiraling. And if her limbic system spasmed, the Mind could cut out her consciousness and play the pleasure dreams across her secondary cortex. But later she would pay the price. In the evening she’d feel the pull toward the lucids like the faint seduction of poppies.
She reached upwards with a silent scream. A prayer?
She felt a tingle rippling through her autonomic nervous system. A peace started in her flesh and gradually moved out to her limbs—a warmth—dissipating the cold feeling of mechanism. Her panic gradually subsided.
She saw the remains of the mosquito on her leg, small droplets of blood around its rent-open body. Had she exploded that mosquito?
As she gained distance from her panic, her thoughts moved upwards into her rational brain. What would it be like to let the feedback panic of powerlessness envelop her? She felt it rise like bile in the back of her throat, but she pushed it down, shuddering slightly. Lunch was coming soon. She tore her mind away from this thought as her hands operated.
She pictured the old vidvertizement: as a young man worked, he smiled. A overlay faded into the top part of the screen, and you could see he was pict-chatting his wife and two kids, who waved at the camera. A voice came, “Keep your mind on your loved ones. Let your body work so you can relax.” A dark and ironic bitterness crept over the disgusted feeling.
Her linemate handed her the next chip. The woman’s hair was grey and matted, and she stank of urine. Her green eyes rolled and quivered slightly.
All of a sudden Sol felt the Mind drop her like released breath of a sigh. Lunch.
She stood up, covered her ears, and walked briskly toward the door. She enjoyed the feeling of movement, in control of herself, even as she braced herself for the lúcidos’ panic response to separation from the dreamspace.
Her linemate had raised herself to full height, her arms toward the factory ceiling, her entire body tight as a guitar string. Half of the factory workers were panicking, and the other half were filing out in silence, ears covered.
Sol felt the terror of that hundred-throat scream in her viscera, just as she did every day. You couldn’t get used to it. For a lúcido, dropping out of that trance was waking from a dream to a nightmare.
Sol shuddered. Soon panic would fade to weeping, and then they’d shuffle, one by one, into the cafeteria.
Eyes for the Mind. Their emotions were always running so high that the record switch never went off. Always streaming back to the Mindnet.
Sol didn’t hate the lúcidos like her friends did. Mainly, she pitied those with nothing apart from the Mind, no family, no way to center themselves, no reading. They were the ones who tipped over.
Ironic that it was precisely those of her friends whose minds had starting to go from too much time in the dreamspace whose hate ran the deepest. Didn’t they know they were just the sort of people who became lúcidos?
But maybe they did. If you’re close to the edge looking over, those that have fallen are terrifying.
Now the gray-haired lady had recovered, and was on her hands and knees, sobbing quietly.
But it was lunchtime, and she wondered what they’d be having today. She was so fucking tired of soyloaf sandwich.
She stood in line alone and took out her book. She felt a pang of sadness. It really wasn’t the same since mom had left them. She looked over at her father, waiting at the table, reading. It wasn’t easy for him to handle the trays with his leg the way it was.
In fact it was soyloaf sandwich again. And it wouldn’t taste good to her because she had neither the constant drip of positive emotions like the fucking operators nor the reality-bending hallucinations of the dreamers.
She set the trays on the table. As she sat down, her dad tented his book and picked up his sandwich. “So,” he asked without preamble, “you liking that ‘We?’”
She looked up at him, his cane resting against the empty chair like a severed spear. Ahab. And like his namesake, he quested for a leviathan: the revolution, his eyes scanning horizon after horizon of printed text. But unlike the mad Ahab, his sailing days were over. No revolution had surfaced from the dry and papery deep. He was the lamed lighthouse keeper: close enough to taste the sea salt, but shallow enough to swim to shore.
He had taught her how to give her emotion rein in the hypothetical and the fantastical, to hook it on the quizzical horn of an “if” and keep apart from it: prodding, analyzing. Her mother had taught her how to exist in herself, to laugh and learn from her dreams, to revel in the poetry of the everyday. But her mother was gone now.
“You in there?” He angled his head to peer up at her.
She looked up, snapping from her reverie. “Uh, yeah.”
“So, ‘We.’ What do you think?” When he had caught her eye he seemed to lose interest in retaining it and bit hard into his sandwich, chewing.
She looked down and picked up her sandwich, jumpstarting her brain. “Totally weird. But amazing.”
“Has he fallen for her yet?” he asked, taking a bite of his sandwich.
“Yes. But now she’s MIA,” she says. “It’s kind of a hard book to read, actually. The whole language register is totally rational and dry, but he’s talking about all these intense emotions. Just kinda strikes you as wrong. You know what I mean?”
“Mmm, no,” he said, contrary. “It strikes me as right.”
“C’mon, dad,” she rolled her eyes. “There are certain words that connect to your limbic system and other ones to your neocortex. He’s using all the wrong ones.”
“Exactly,” he made brief and piercing eye contact. “D-503 has no emotional lexicon because his whole world has become mechanical, pseudo-rational. He’s a genius to invent a new way of talking.” He had baited and caught her attention now.
“No, D-whatever-his-number is not a genius. Zamyatin is. D is just doing what the brain does when half your language is cut out: filling it back in,” she said, taking a bite of from her sandwich.
Ahab smiled drily, “There you go,” he turned his own book back over and starting to read. Sol sighed and followed suit. Alone together, papering off the world.
* * * *
“Dude, go on. Take it. You know you want it,” said Billy.
Isaac sat on the end of his bed with his chin cupped in his hands, his back and neck a thoughtful “C,” his thought and attention in thrall to the chessboard as surely as a magnetized pawn.
Billy sat across from him, bolt upright on a stool, his hands stroking a beardless chin, his eyes the manic blue of a lightning-lit sea. He was a white guy like Isaac, and he was always telling Isaac that the same Viking had reaved their mothers long ago, leaving them blond.
“I’m gonna let you screw up again,” said Isaac as he accepted King’s Gambit. Billy moved through the trade, accepting the loss for tempo.
“Where’s your Viking blood, dude?” said Billy.
“You’re not Morphy, man.” Isaac counter-attacked with his queen’s pawn. “That opening has been discredited for centuries.”
“That’s what she said.”
Isaac shook his head. “What does that even mean?”
“If your mama didn’t teach you the birds and the bees, the query daemon can.” Billy’s eyes were on the board.
Isaac moved, struggling to protect his ravaged king’s side. If he could just hang on and develop, the material advantage would carry him through.
Chess was dead. But both of them had learned it from their fathers, and they were playing natural: their chess engines were off, and they didn’t even consult the query daemon for moves. In fact, they had their picto implants entirely off. Totally analog. Throughout the week, though, they’d pit the machines they’d written against one another, tweaking code here or there, investigating new lines of attack, exploring the dormant possibilities. But for now it was just one natural Mind against another.
In a couple of moves, Isaac fully entered the midgame, his bishops lancing lightning, his knights snapping their pincers as they crabbed their fibbonacis, his queen’s pawn side the wall against which the sea broke. He let it all wash over him, lost in the emerging pattern. He loved the midgame, and he was gradually absorbing an even greater material advantage.
“Move, dude.” Billy sighed, “I just sprouted a chest-hair while you eye-fuck my queen.” He smiled wryly.
The voice registered in the corner of Isaac’s brain reserved for discarding Billy’s impatient blasphemies. “Mmm,” he said, declining the offered trade for a strategic advantage.
But then, Billy did something on the lunatic fringe of brilliant, and caught up materially. Then they were in the endgame, and Isaac’s sole material advantage was that same pawn that had he’d snapped up in the second move of the game. Billy’s fast calculating won him Isaac’s other bishop
“Bam!” Billy struck the leg of his chair.
“Do you ever think about the war, man?” Isaac asked.
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Dude, from class today.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Billy’s voice was flat and disinterested.
“No, but like, seriously. What do you think about the war?” Isaac glanced up at Billy penetratingly.
“Like, nothing. I already said, man.” Billy’s eyes calculated as he moved a piece.
“People are dying right now to get energy to power the Mind.” Isaac looked back down to study the position.
“Yeah, so?”
Isaac looked up again at Billy, “So dude. People. Dying. Bad.”
“Yeah man, that sucks. But nobody I know has ever died.” Billy’s mind was still on the game.
“Yeah, that’s because the soldiers are all vacs. So we run out of energy and vacs and we just decide to take more of it? What if I run out of dreamcreds and just steal yours? How the hell is that right?” Isaac’s words were angry but the chess-spell of rationality kept his tone level.
“Dude, if you’re so against the war why don’t y0u become a Junior General and win it? We’ve got the thickways: the sun has limitless energy. We’re going to be totally fine. The Mind is hyper-intelligent and it will come up with the next super-intelligent tech thing.” Billy traded to win one of Isaac’s advanced pawns.
Isaac sighed, “That doesn’t even make any sense,” he studied the position.
Billy bridled, “Yes it does, dude. You can sit around and complain about the war and the energy or whatever but unless you’re going to do something about it you might as well just chill out and follow the metemotions. Why does it matter to you anyways?”
“Look around. This system is totally fucked. Our country is in a war for more resources. Eighty-five percent of the country is operated, and like half of them have the full-on lucid implant and don’t even know reality from dream. Our school is just indoctrination. And all we do is dream off. All we do is just dream it off.” Isaac shook his head slowly.
Billy rolled his eyes and queened a pawn. He was quiet for a moment, gathering his wisdom, “You need a chick, dude. That’s what you need. And also I think we need to buy the weapons upgrade in Wizard’s Castle. I keep telling you we’re stuck until we get the gemstones.”
“Right.” Isaac moved his knight to attack Billy’s king. “Check,” he said.
Billy moved his King into the corner. Now, thought Isaac, if only he could move that rook, he could get back there.
But Isaac had forgotten that his knight had been holding down a key defensive square. “Sweet. Check!” said Billy.
Isaac moved away. “Check.” Billy’s voice rose.
Then Isaac looked at the position and saw the inevitable mate. Better play it out, he thought. Billy could still stumble. He moved out of check.
“Checkmate, dude! Bam!” Billy struck his palm with his fist.
Isaac shook his head and studied the position.
“Yeah dude, so now who’s dreaming off… and losing!” crowed Billy.
“I should never have moved that knight. Too early. Man.”
“Yeah, man. That was dumb. You’re always thinking too hard about stuff that’s way above your pay grade. You should have just kept choking me slow. Want to go back?” asked Billy, the magnanimous victor.
“Nah, let’s start over. This time I’m white.” And so, they reset the board. But Isaac was left with the lingering cloud of doubt. Was he the one dreaming off, complaining about the way things were? And, even if he was right about how fucked up things were, what good would he ever do toughening it in his mind like an re-microwaved piece of soyloaf?
* * * * *
Curiosity
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.