WIRED
Chapter 1
I can think of several reasons why I didn't spot the connection sooner, but really, the why doesn't matter that much. I could say it was the end of a long shift and I wasn't quite as alert as maybe I might be. I could admit to over doing it on the stimulant that week, I could add that I'd been hitting the party stars so hard my head hurt. I could but I won't. Let's just say I was a little slow just when a turn of speed would've been most useful.
Slow I might have been but my equipment was anything but. That's the only reason I took this job in the first place. Stumbling through life with the standard configuration always seemed excessively restrictive, a punishment. I know I sound ungrateful. I know I'm supposed to give continual and everlasting praise and thanks to my parents and the cabling committee for providing me with my link but it just wasn't enough. Not for me anyway. If I could get past the gates and the guards, I'd have entered the red zone myself to get my hands on a direct connect to the hub. I'd have risked the lesions and the dramatic reduction in lifetime suffered by the early zone workers. Not even much of a risk really, don a faralon suit and get in there. Totally acceptable behavior considering the benefits. As it was, I found an easier, safer route. Without even barely conscious action I had started my campaign well before I entered the thinkers for hire market. The early isolation, the abject failure to socialise in direct contact, the total wired immersion made me the ideal candidate before I even knew what I was applying for. Like everyone else, after my first nine years, I emerged fully educated and instructed. A blinking foal in the harsh light of our family unit. It only seemed like a moment's pause though between my first sighting of the expectant family group and an overwhelming urge to jump back in the pod and seal it from the inside.
So, I took the job as a think sink. I was never going to refuse and they knew it. Despite the random hours and the potential brain trauma, there was no way I could pass up the opportunity to get my hands on a fat pipe. This combined with the massive personal storage allocation put me in a position data-wise that could only be matched by a high ranking research professor.
No excuses then really. I had access to more data at higher speeds than my entire collective sink could manage. All the pieces were placed before me, just a matter of gathering the coherent image. Order from chaos. Easy to say, harder to achieve, especially after an exceptionally heavy week.
I'm still trying to make sense of it all my self and looking back confuses the historical accuracy but the events of the last month went something like this :
It must have started on a Oneday, I hate Onedays. I was roused from aimless rambling through the dusty tracks of the history archive by a NewDo alert. A portion of a problem to solve. How to put the chicken back in the egg. No need for alarm but my suspicions were raised when my initial request for a bouncer was denied. Not much time to ponder though as it was also phys-exam day. PhE-day on a Oneday, that's just cruel. I can see the point, I understand the mechanics, but I still dread the point in the cycle when I have to exit the pod and undergo the rigors of the physical exam. The chill hits my bones the instant I crack the pod. It's only the increasing discomfort of the rapidly cooling gel that forces me out. Crawl over to the corner, attach the probes, wave at the actuator and wait for connection to a physic..
"Good morning Albert. How do you feel"
"uhh"
Bitter experience limits my response, the telemetry tells the only story they want to hear anyway so why prolong the agony.
"I'm reading a ten part increase in your methylamine levels, have you been exceeding the recommended stim dose ?"
"Check my records, I'm a titular think sink, level 9, big Do on last week."
A twinge of remorse from my lie of omission slowly surfaces from the depths of my indoctrination. Try not to hold my jaw shut while preventing the truth from springing unbidden. The excess muscle response would show up in a splash of colour across the physic's sensor array. If she knew I'd spent only one of the allotted five days in the last Do then she'd be bound to report my behavior. No great drama though since I completed the assignment, no more than a tarnished record would I suffer. If however she finds out I spent the other four days in a haze of pseudo-stim, engaged in uber hedonism at a permanent and highly illegal star party, then I could very well kiss good-bye to the preferential pleasures of my pro-pod.
But it's fine of course, I live to fly another day. Physical exam safely filed for another month so I'm free to re-enter the comforts of pod world again. Normally this makes me tingle with joy but today I'm nervous. A nagging tug prevents me from relaxing properly, even the neurogel feels clammy and unpleasant now. It's this suspicious cloud hanging over me that's causing my unusual discomfort. Why am I alone on this Do ?, requests for a bouncer have never been rejected before, it's always been considered a positive, scientific approach to share embryonic ideas with a close and closed group before going public with a flood of ideology. Not this time though, looks like this problem isn't to be shared or halved. That's where the suspicion comes in. It's not like we're dealing with radical or dangerous issues here. The spec looks oh so innocent.
##- DO 154385-A71 : Investigate non-local communication in pro-pod analysts.
##- Classification : Eyesonly.
Just your basic occupational health questionnaire surely. So, why the big secret ?, why the E.O. classification ?, and why no bouncer. It's also kind of weird being asked to collect and collate data on my own kind. OK so it's not like we're a separate societal stratum, but we are certainly all in awe of our own status. So much so that it's got to the point where the only sanction my colleagues and I fear is revocation of pro-pod assignment.
Not sure I even understand the definition of the problem. So, it's time to hit the history archive again. Names and theories flash past in ever increasing distance from the present, right back to the early days of bio/quanta field theory. Thanks Dana we owe you a whole big fat whopper of a debt through time for that one. But what's this got to do with me, with us. A pair of twins separated by an ocean raise the same arm by exactly 57.5 degrees at exactly the same point in time. A boson on one side of a laboratory exhibits the same change in spin as it's remote cousin with no perceptible latency. A man goes into an old style 2-D public picture room and has to move seats because he can "feel the eyes burning the back of his neck". There's an obvious connection here, just not one I can return as jobdone for this mission. Maybe that's all they're after, maybe it's as simple as that, just perfectly innocent research into the nature of human-type shared consciousness. It could be, but somehow I doubt it.
As the effects of the simulated stimulant wears off, or at least appears to, I briefly consider flicking the sleep switch, but only for the moment it takes me to set up a repeating dose which will see me through the night, the current task and probably the rest of lunar's current phase. Can't sleep properly anyway so might as well work, leaves more time for party if I finish early.
Perhaps I'm looking at this from the wrong angle. OK, try and re-define the search parameters at right angles to reality. That's it, much better, forget this single minded academia, time for a trip through the fiction archive. Not as popular as it was. Has every set of words finally been said and read ?, have the infinite monkeys retired with a fat pension and a golden typewriter each. Faced with the entire recorded output of human-like imagination, where do we start.
"Psycho field theory and multiple consciousness eval". No, just leads back to unsuccessful scientists trying to write novels to gain a little credit on the side
Need a more subtle search. How about "Harmony in Nature". No, worse, just a towering pile of pop-physics of resonance disguised as romance.
Along the right lines somehow though, feels right. Time to just trust intuition and hit it.
"Harmonious Communication", yes, better, punch it in and let it roll. I've got a good feeling about this, and as it turns out, rightly so. 13,722 references, mostly irrelevant, but one gold starred hit on top - "Greetings Mister Bee: 26:02:2003:20:11:41+0000". Now this has got to be worth a look.
...Harmonious communication has already been in existence since the dawn of Man. It was, in fact, the crucial differentiator between the sub-human species. Without H.C., language could never have developed. But, H.C. could never be explicitly explained due to its' sub-conscious nature.
The ultimate evolution of H.C. is the global mind. G.M. would enable travel without substance which would therefore be unlimited by physical law. No need to change the laws of physics and annoy Scotty, just make them non-applicable.
Conscious realisation of the existence of H.C. is usually ignored as it is simply too troubling for the day-to-day mind to cope with ; like meeting a future version of yourself, the moment you experience it, self preservation mechanism takes over and shuts it out.
But, with the ever increasing interconnectedness of high level, conscious communication moving from broadcast to multicast and becoming available to all, the birth of H.C. as a tangible phenomenon becomes inevitable.
...I admit, I skipped to the end at this point ...
... The next stage, what you DO with it, is now up to you, No longer bound by imaginary ephemera, it has been brought into the domain of the ordinary purely by the fact of its' sufficient continuing presence.
Well, that certainly fed thought effectively. Not much good without substance though. All fine in theory, perfectly plausible but no-where near enough on its' own . I needed more, I needed proof, I needed an experiment and for an experiment in communication I was going to need a partner. Not a concept with which I was wholly comfortable. I work best left alone, always have, but this time I was going to have to share the load.
I spent the next two days trying to choose an accomplice. It was impossible. It had to be someone I could trust, therefore eliminating anyone I knew socially since all my party friends were flakey and fried. It had to be someone outside of the think sink org since they'd be duty bound to report my security transgression. It had to be someone with access to equivalent technology spec if they were to have any chance of keeping up. Potential candidates thus narrowed down to less than zero. By 1,000 on the second day I'd pretty much given up hope of finding anyone. Luckily, I didn't have to, in the end, they found me.
Idly flicking round the same feeds, casually perusing my familiar paths across the wired landscape, I almost missed it. Like a gem twinkling under a mass of rubble, the green glow of a new message waiting stayed static, bided its time, waited for me to trip over it. Once I'd pulled it into my locale I unwrapped it and scanned the content.
"Hi, you don't know me but you were holding reserve on some interesting material that I needed. Why. I think you're looking for me. I think I can help. I think we can help each other. Meet me at Ant Joe's"
....Ant Joe's /> Z I hope I'm right, what if if he's squad, what if he just doesn't gerrit, if he is who he seems to be then he'll work it out, he has to work it out. Or alternatively I'm just wrong, plain, bald fat wrong. It just feels right, I can't ignore this, I've just got to know if it's true.
distant. The entire history of reality is turned on it's end so viewed from here it's just a single point. Actually, it's here that's the problem, being back here again, back at this point of perspective. I'm back. It's been a while, ten weeks or more, a parts, some missing, a few left over. I know what I need, I need an assistant, a talented mechanic of selves, someone to help me remake, rebuild from the tattered debris of my shattered certainties. Not quite as easy as getting your pod fixed, there's no instructions with this model, no manual. We just have to trust in the inherent rightness of the design. All we can do is measure and guess. Subject the subject to the ruthless glare of empiricism and prove that we were right all along. How very I'm still getting the flashes, just that instant glimpse, half a dream moment, but that instant conveys so much, shouts so full of everything I need to know, it's all so obvious, seems simple now. It's just one long shot, from here to the end of existence, but it's in focus all the way, no different close at hand or infinitelylot's changed, a lot is just as it was. The table, the chair, the cool solid antique glass in front of me refracting the photonics in a random, animal fashion that carries on regardless, ignoring my perception. Ignoring my discomfort at being broken, just a kit of disassembledconvenient. What's the next step though? That's what we all want to know. What's the link we've been missing that will shine out under the oh-so obvious light of retrospective analysis? That's the absurdity, we already know what it is this time but we're insistently busy ignoring the facts because if we admit to even the possibility of the perfectly clear then our current meaning ceases to exist in one great explosion of bared truth. Like the pent up potential of a river dam, it'll only take the thinnest of cracks, just a hint of a fissure forming and the release will be instant, immense and irreversible. This is one genie that won't fit back in the bottle.
Even though it hasn't happened yet, I can see it all in such detail, as if I'm watching a carefully focused reconstruction of events. The point of ignition, the spark jumps from one to another, lighting the embers in the two of them. in a flash of recognition, two becomes four and once the 16 number's up the pace of progression is beyond measure. A cloud-burst of realisation breaks across the conscious world and in less than a gasp of a breath we achieve the next stage. We reach Harmonious Communication.