>From: burns@latcs1.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
Subject: Lab Cat Karma, 1 of 6
Date: 4 Jan 91 03:14:14 GMT
Prescript...
A while back, Liralen posted alt.cyberpunk asking for thoughts on how
you went about enhancing reflexes. It intrigued me, because I'd never
heard any serious ideas in the real world. Thought I'd write a little
piece with Li going through the process.
Two weeks later the thing was 700 lines and growing. I sent it half-baked
to Liralen. She gave me heady encouragement and said to run with my own
character, thereby unleashing Painted Jaguar on the corporate world and
my 1000-odd lines on the Chatsubo clientele. May God have mercy on her
soul. I've broken it into six parts to post over the next few days.
Lab Cat Karma
or I only went in for a nerve job
Part 1
Put on the shades, lie back. Been listening to your heartbeat?
Could hardly sleep. Sort of cosy after a while, y'know?
Yeah, right. I'm gonna bring 'em up now with the beta and the optic
firing peaks. Howza?
Under a calibrated black sky, rubber billows on azure membrane roll
away to the horizon. Rings of red dots, more closely spaced,
flicker over the waves and are lost. Oboy, she thinks, I'm a radar.
Then the yellow highlow strobing bars on either side. She's at the
back window of the last subway carriage, tunnel lights flying away
behind ....
Rush coming on? Uhuh. Adrenaline to bring the beat up, serotonin to soak the
transmitters. Squeeze the ball. (Patch of spiky green lawn flies out.)
Again. Relax, again. Now put it between the reds. No rush, no crush.
That's your natural grip, right, couple hundred muscle groups taking their
own sweet time. Want you to hit every fourth wave, put it right there.
Tighter! Imagine you're doing karate, give it the old kiai.
She yells and sure enough the green is narrower, the spikes taller.
She tries again, narrows it to two beta spacings. Goes for the
fourth wave and misses. Softens the squeeze, playing just the
leading edge.
That's a sample. Relax fingers, I'm gonna trip the nerves.
Her hand jumps. The receding green is about as wide, but dominated
by three solid peaks.
Wanna try that yourself? I'm tying the trigger to the first muscle group
that fires, which is usually lemme see, this one. Squeeze.
She lets off a trio of spikes. Like firing a speargun. She goes
softly, concentrating on the red waves, catching the fourth deftly
on the leader. The spikes remain a good wavelength behind. Between
the intention and the act, a fifth of a second?
It's the timing. Karate-wallah can put six kilowatts behind the strike. That's
because his small muscle groups are in synch. Takes him years of practice.
For you, ten days.
+ + + + + + + + + +
She watches a flower grow at the base of her brain. Scarlet
thistledown threads spread from the optical plug at the back
of her neck, cup the motor cortex and deck it with christmas
lights.
Ah this is where they stick out the slinkies. She's been paging
through the Literature, whose windows clutter a whole wall of
Heavy Judy's clinic:
___________________________________________________________________
|
| ELMP Terminal
| ? ELMP: Electrolyte MyoProbe
| Millimeter helical soliton wave antenna, bandpassed for HARP.
| ? HARP: Halide aqueous relaxation pulse/period
|
| ?
| ___________________________________________________________
| |
| | HARP antenna myograph: lay overview
| |
| | A neuron, or nerve cell, maintains a steady potential
| | difference of 5-8 uV by means of the "sodium pump"
| | mechanism
| | ?
A neuron, it appears, is surrounded for most of its length by
a membrane which can either keep Na+ and K+ ions outside, or let
them through. Triggered by the transmitter chemical, membrane
becomes permeable. The 'two-wire pair' short-circuits, sending
the myoelectric pulse down the line.
A much fainter signal, however, is broadcast. Each Na+/K+ ion
polarizes the water molecules around it, attracting their negative
ends and repelling the positive; and likewise attracts Cl- ions.
The aqueous halo spreads the ion charge over a few atomic radii.
That is, until the ion encounters a hole in a permeable membrane.
Able to follow the electric pull, it zips through the membrane leaving
its halo behind, shortly to attract a new entourage on the other
side. Both the dissipating and the forming halo produce a momentary
electric pulse, the HARP.
With the collar locked on and putting ten very well-insulated
kilovolts across her brainstem, the halo events have a useful
dipole moment, perfect for sending solitonic skinkies into lazy
14 MHz oscillation. The streams of HARP pulse data, correlated
by the jack photoprocessor, map the pattern-generator/
oscillator modes in the locomotor region, corresponding to major
brainstem nerve firings; and these in turn hold the puppet strings
of the spinal firing modes.
Right, the higher the field the better the resolution. Where do you
think all those stories come from, about deckheads getting cooked by their
own iron? They bought implants, and the insulation corroded. Or they ran off
soft-switchable amps, and their charming playmates sussed how to make 'em
oscillate. Stupid pricks. Can't happen. Collar voltage builds up smooth
when the key is turned, and stays rock solid until it's turned back.
I don't have to keep wearing it?
No way, just for the mapping and the download. We done, whitewire chip
ties into the new attractors, don't need to tell cell 1 from cell 2.
Unless you want to go into combat jacked, you gonna fight with your head in
space?
+ + + + + + + + + +
On a big new window covering half of Heavy's _clean_ wall,
she sees herself turned inside out and stuffed into her own
brain. Legs and arms shrivelled into little sausages at the
bottom of the motor cortex, which is half-filled by hands
and fingers. Her face doubled and ballooning out in the
hemispheres and the prefrontal lobes. Her motor homunculus in
living glory, and down the bottom there the battlefield map
where the action is to take place.
She spends the morning at monotonous reflex exercises, hand-
eye coordination, which somehow calibrate the motor map's
involvement with the sensorium. Later under anaesthetic she
watches her inner vegetation, striking root this time, the fibre
optic trunk infiltrating shoulders and spine, pelvis, limbs and
solar plexus. Whitewired. These pseudonerves are delicate, they
must find their place in the natural plumbing.... She sits
and pages the Literature ....
____________________________________________________________________
| |
| An injection of DOPA i.v. or Clonidine in a proportion of |
| cats with their spinal cords transected at a lower thoracic |
| level, can cause a release of stepping movements. If such cats |
| are put on a treadmill they can perform walking movements |
| with a "normal" EMG pattern and can adapt to various treadmill |
| speeds.... Rhythmic activity can be obtained in such spinal |
| preparations even when afferent feedback is removed entirely |
| by transecting all dorsal roots or curarizing the animals, |
| i.e. under conditions similar to Fig. 1A or 1B. |
|__________________________________________________________________|
+ + + + + + + + +
You ought to be impressed with these, these are no-shit nanotech. Call 'em
green corpuscles. Carry a backup supply of ATP around the bloodstream,
lock onto muscle fibers where the ATPH is on the rise. They can double
your sprint time on the first-wind adrenaline release.
Any problems with these? I don't feel quite easy with nanowear.
Only problem is pulling a muscle, and we'll fix that too. They're exactly
the size and shape of red blood cells, and they got better traffic sense.
AC spacers and divers had them inside for years, no trouble.
AC stuff? So that's where eight hundred K's is going, huh? How did _you_
get them?
Well, it was Pfeizer developed them on contract, but later some bunch
of Pfeizer coverts did a number on Roche in the Philipines. Roche wasn't
far behind, they greened their own divers, and the result was a very
nasty little episode that got both parties banned from the coral products
business till three years from now. But they ganged up on AC and forced
them to licence the mitocorpuscles under the Equalizer Provision. Couple
of years, it's not exactly on the streets, but you can find it.
Jesus. Makes you wonder why they call it Arms Control.
They're getting old. They won't last another five years. Big consortium
been putting together a proposal to privatize the whole show.
WHAT? I haven't heard anything like this.
It leaked. Policy-level execs all over the Swiss Alps, with ever so
reasonable presentations about the crookedness of public institutions
and the adaptablility of the free market. Hyundai, Leinster, ARES, Teledyne,
Fiery Peacock an' all who else.
Damn. Bloody damn. Thanks, I didn't want to hear this, but thanks.
Aren't you a little young?
You mean for a national sovereignty nut? Sure, but AC was something for
all of us, it was a trust, however mismanaged. No matter what they say
about Brazil and Vladivostok, it won't do the people in the umbrella
countries any good to have Grumman or ARES playing kingmaker.
Or us, sister, or us. You think the Pentagon hasn't gone soft, leaning
on AC? Corps done scooped the kitty.
So, so, but it's already gone further than that. Things like these
green cells getting down to the shadows. I mean _we're_ the free market
now, it's going to be anarchy with neurotoxins, EMP guns, the works.
Unless they think they can deliver the shadows.
Sometime later, she will remember this.
............................................................................
Copyright Jonathan Burns, 1991
............................................................................
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Burns |
burns@latcs1.oz | A short Gothick was trouble, a fat Gothick homocidal
Computer Science Dept | - Count Zero
La Trobe University |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: burns@latcs1.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
Subject: Lab Cat Karma, 2 of 6
Date: 8 Jan 91 01:31:38 GMT
Lab Cat Karma
or, Is this what they mean having an origin?
Part 2
She fastens up the spangled bodyglove, puts on the goggles
and the earspeakers, and turns the collar key. Then for
two hours she stands, crouches, rolls, blocks and strikes,
recapitulating her twelve years of athletic and martial
experience, the whole repertoire. But now she can see it
in its neural anatomy, measure the spiky firing constellations
against the yellow strobe of her optical pulsetrain, hear the
cymbal clash when her shoulder strikes the mat, judge the
coordination loose or awkward, and try again.
She is feeling for the rightness of the move, the perfect
execution. Heavy, watching the sparks light up on the
homunculus, is trying for consistency, the unitary activation
of a coherent locomotor oscillation pattern. Sometimes they
argue. She wins. The point is not to perfect the status quo,
or lock it in. The point is to produce data, the strong sketch
lines of what will become the total composition, a work of art
in her own seamless style. The homuncular outline begins to
fill out with rorschach blots.
She breaks for an athlete's low-bulk lunch and a massage, then
goes back to it. Memories of schoolyard chasings, forgotten
victories, old thrashings, rise up and surprise her. They
litter the diagram, ring in the earphones. She must work through
them like a psychiatric patient, accepting this, letting go of
that. Riding an autocab back to her hotel, she still sees the
strobe peripherally, and each sound has its measure on the scale
of heartbeats blue and beta waves red.
The next day she goes through it all again, using the 24-hour
reinforcement effect. The muscles are stiff, but the response
is tighter. She is working near the top of her form, exploring
the shape of the repertoire. In the afternoon she works without
the shades, the training wheels come off.
And this is just biofeedback, really. The final treatment can
give you 200 words per minute typing, road skills, orgasms,
yoga. It can make you into a robot. She is fighting against time,
investing in control of the machine.
___________________________________________________________________
| Efferent Activities of the Decorticate Cat |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| In some cats, locomotor movements were accompanied by other |
| activities: lashing of the tail, extrusion of the claws, |
| erection of the tail hairs, pupillary dilation, tachycardia, |
| hypertension, tachypnea, sweating from the toe-pads and even |
| urination, all signs of sham-rage behaviour (Cannon and |
| Britton 1925; Bard, 1928). ... No clear difference was found |
| which could be linked to the extent of the ablation (which |
| could include the striatum, the thalamus and the rostral part |
| of the hypothlamus) as long as the caudal hypothlamic region |
| was spared... |
|_________________________________________________________________|
+ + + + + + + + + +
Shades back on and into the cyberspace shooting gallery, where
wireframe goons swing neon bars at your face and shins, or pop
up from nowhere pointing abstract cylindrical guns. She has
her armory along, the staves, the throwclubs, the bicycle spoke,
the Galilee automag with its accessory stocks and sights.
The gun gives her trouble, she can't get it right without the
recoil, and they have to shift the bare bones of the studio,
sonar horns, VR reference layout and a folding screen for the
homunculus, to a temporary location in an office floor under repair,
where the blank round impacts can be passed off as kids on a
random bust-up.
She is wearing herself down trying to get her all-round peformance
recorded. Taking stock, she cuts it down to a schematic turkey
shoot, a clubs-and-razors melee with bad injuns pointing guns from
cover around second 20. When she has this right, she randomizes
it and gets slaughtered. That's OK, she cuts back the density of
attack. She is getting a feel for the density, that she never had
before. Decides to buy a playground like this for practice, well
call it research, no by god, for the sheer fun of it.
Later Heavy catches her red-handed, paging through the antiquity of
neural research.....
____________________________________________________________________
| |
| In further experiments, monkey fetuses were exteriorized |
| two-thirds of the way through gestation, given forelimb |
| deafferentation, and then replaced _in utero_ for the remainder|
| of gestation. Infants that survived though Caesarian delivery |
| and whose spinal cords were protected by a prosthetic device |
| substituting for the dorsal portions of vertebrae removed |
| during surgery displayed motor capacity similar to that of |
| infants deafferented at birth. |
|__________________________________________________________________|
What's this shit.
I want to see the knowledge base. This is part of it, as much as HARP
wigglers and print endorphins. Where's your curiosity?
Heavy comes up close, looks her in the eye.
Not now. This is not the time. Do your guilt act _another time_. Or it'll
get _in_ there, no shit. You got a recurring dream o' your Maw, And thoughts
of your Maw will inhibit your draw, gunslinger.
Damn, you right. Let's have fun.
She sets up a melee pattern, ridiculous odds, and holds out
in brainless frenzy before going down in a blaze of glory in the
33rd second.
+ + + + + + + + + +
If she has any guilt feelings about it all, the next bit should
just about expiate them, she thinks. A wretched business of
blindfolds, hard obstacles and electric shocks, that brings
back every miserable worm-eating trick from her schooldays.
The purpose is to test the sensitivity of the fiber optic system
to the HARP pulsations of the peripheral and pain nerves. Because,
as Heavy points out, if your programmed responses are always there
ahead of your pain reflexes, you'll smash yourself black and blue
falling over the furniture before the fight is properly started.
So she wanders about running into invisible edges and surfaces
and getting stung, until she complains that this is going to
give her a Pavlovian overlay and screw up everything.
Hey, no problem, we're not recording the _normal_ motor patterns. You can
take a nice run in the shooting gallery after this.
She wills herself to think of all the good this is doing her.
............................................................................
Copyright Jonathan Burns, 1991
............................................................................
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Burns |
burns@latcs1.oz | They are dangerous, Max, because they have what
Computer Science Dept | you don't, a philosophy.
La Trobe University | -Videodrome
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: burns@latcs1.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
Subject: Lab Cat Karma, 3 of 6
Date: 9 Jan 91 00:19:31 GMT
Lab Cat Karma
or, Foundation garments, first floor
Part 3
The surgery is no joke, but at least she keeps her dignity,
relatively. She goes under smiling and comes out paralysed
a day later, sheets of fire in every limb, joints like giant
toothaches, global pins and needles. But there has been little
enough to heal, because not much has been cut. Just a battalion
of mite-size machines crawling through her, knitting cables,
laying surfaces, nimbly staying clear of major blood vessels
and nerves. Heavy orders her up at once. No problem! She hauls
herself off the cot, crashes to the floor, pulls herself up
snarling.
Heavy has a checklist a mile long, and goes through it like
a marine sergeant. Left foot out. Right foot out. Left knee
up. Extend left foot. Ignore it, it'll go away. Hold this
bar. Arm out. Bring forearm forward, to chest level. Rotate
foream to vertical. No tremor, that's good. Sure, I know it's
murder, but it's got to be done, and right away.
She slogs through it. After a bit, she goes and puts on the
goggles, and while her body wrestles, her vision is standing
on the beach at peace, watching the heartbeats pound and the
green flashes dart away like gulls on the storm.
Down on your front. Pressup. Down slow. Come on! This is
_active_, I have to know before it adjusts! Left bend. Block.
Arm up. Strike. Harder! Same on the right. Looking good.
Hold the bar. Chin up. I want you to hold yourself up by one
hand. Hold that while I count ten. OK, basic movements check
complete, thank you jesus. Any other problems?
I miss the solicitous bedside manner.
Yah, snob stuff. Coffee break! You gotta know, MDs are chickenshit now,
MRI, sonics, biocalc, more and more nanostuff coming through, and
expert deductives up the wazoo. Four years, two of them as hospital
flunkies, and then you just follow the directions on the packet. And
you play the game, and the paperwork gets done. By the system, online.
Here, take this, it'll stop the tingling.
Uh, yes please, though it's almost enough to be lying down.
She'd really like something to make Heavy _shut up_, but the
Doc is on some post-operative manic high with the word tap
full on and the plumber out to lunch.
Master of Surgery, that's like an earldom conferred by the King of England.
Very close, very in. Total dedication and revised IQ maybe 180 to even
get into a ten year course. But what those guys are really getting into
is legal immunity, and extremely large amounts of money. And, and this is
strictly IMHO, an inside track on immortality. Yeah, it's going that far.
The trick is to be one the shareholders in the Worldwide Legal Guinea-Pig
Company, with collective responsibility for legal medical research, and
access to all results. You hear I say: All. They arranged it long ago
that they don't make mistakes. Which is why I don't rejoice to hear, Alas
the prognosis is not good, but one of my associates in the field is a
Specialist of the Highest Repute and Integrity, who just may be able to
include you in his research program.
So for the rest of us, the recognized, peer approved qualifications are
corporate. Corporate pays for equipment, networks research, which is
mostly some tamer than the College of Surgery stuff. Corporate shares
out the legal costs, keeps us insured. And for its pains, it gets to run
the health insurance biz, which is the single largest business in the
world. And they get to do their own, very close, very in, research.
Then there's us, just little MDs, and for one reason or another, we no
happy corp over us. And there's a lot of us, and we all got it out of
a box of weeties, which is what the hospitals are. So we compete. And
the reason I'm telling you this, is if you ever run into a nice doctor,
with a solicitous bedside manner and furry droids for the kiddies, well
it's probably the case that he's taken the Reader's Digest Nice Doctor
course as the sure-nuff road to customer acceptance, and is not making
his competitive pitch on Quality. You ready for the next round?
Coming on. Why didn't you give me the painkiller _before_ I went through
all that?
Because if your nerves go ouch when there's a bit of agitation
in the ligaments and the major intermuscular surfaces, then they're
doing just the right thing. And I can't check that from outside. Not
without putting your whole bod in a twenty kilovolt straitjacket.
And certainly not in the time before the corsets start compensating
for muscles that you _favouring_. You done good. Easier from here.
One more question, and it's none of my business.
Yeah?
What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?
You mean, instead of in a nice little clinic at Children of Krishna
Mutual Life? Let's just say that at one time I had to treat some persons
who required anonymity, and it took me a deal of trouble to do that and
leave no paperwork. And I found that they paid very well. Since when word
been spreading, quietly. Heavy Judy, smart, connected, keep her mouth tight.
Go see.
+ + + + + + + + +
Across the continent, a mainframe completes its task and
purges its helium-cooled plates in readiness for new input.
Optical Radix Engine on the Vancouver campus of the Canada-USA
Open TechNet, dedicated to the venerable Johns Hopkins Motoneuron
Model, a.k.a. Jim. Fast enough to run, cheap enough to buy the
people to bury the accounting.
For some days, in packets of a few hundred megabytes, a
stream of tagged leopard spots has been filtering northward,
queueing patiently for offpeak packets on the trunklines.
Now they have arrived, the whole 40 terabytes, sorted
and merged on a hundred feet of lasertape. (The Matrix is
an ideal sorting engine, paying for itself as much by
offloading sort-merge subtasks to idle nodes as by direct
communication.)
Jim sucks up the tape, whizzes it onto a double bank of
rollers, back and forth, back and forth. A square slab
resembling a hydraulic press clamps down, and six hundred
cooled holographic read-heads dock with the tape and latch
onto header-tag records.
It loads the parameters for a new body - no lecher ever
fondled taut muscles in a spangled sonar suit with Jim's
appreciation of detail. It relaxes its prima facie homunculus
template into perfect accord. Its six hundred eyes scuttle
along the tape like panicked ants. Leopardspots leap up the
fiberlines, are holographically matched against Jim's library,
expanded, filtered and nicely placed in a large, very sparse
matrix of 220 dimensions. The contours of a highly convoluted
manfold slowly emerge. Jim spacewarps it with a wormhole shunt
matching the whitewire peripheral telegraph.
And begins to optimize ....
+ + + + + + + + + +
............................................................................
Copyright Jonathan Burns, 1991
............................................................................
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Burns | They finally discovered that the ONE thing
burns@latcs1.oz | they just could not _STAND_ was a smartass
Computer Science Dept | commenting decompiler ...
La Trobe University |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: burns@latcs1.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
Subject: Lab Cat Karma, 4 of 6
Date: 9 Jan 91 20:40:59 GMT
Lab Cat Karma
or, Give yourself a Rorschach
Part 4
Not much sense retiming the muscles if you gonna rip them off the bone
the first squarewave punch you take. And with 10-millisecond synch and
the mitocorpuscles that's a distinct possibilty. So we've got, one,
silicone weave reinforcement to the existing ligature, enzyme-bonded
to the bone. Two, active corsets on the major muscle groups, biceps,
triceps, latimus dorsi, all those. Call 'em an elastic-energy reservoir
that cuts in when the kinetic energy in the skeleton gets too much to
dissipate by non-disruptive contraction. Three, silicone surfacing on the
major skeletal joints, sealed edge to edge with fullerene lubricant. You
can't dislocate a joint now, the bone will snap first. And you'll never
suffer from arthritis, you should live so long.
Fourth, and this is the dicey one, same again for the ribs, and para-
dorsal rib-to-pelvis contractive support. Now with these you can make
a fair job at playing Tarzan. They do NOT mean however that you can
drop forty feet without grinding your vertebrae to fishpaste. It's
more conservative than some cyborg outfits I've seen. But it's more
support in more directions than anything I know that leaves your
natural musculature in place.
+ + + + + + + + +
She's tripping, lying sedated in the float tank. Dosed up
with something used by spacers to retard calcium leaching,
something else that's keeping her marinated in magnesium,
and the merest _soupcon_ of a certain wartime mycotoxin, all
to make the nerves lazy and forgetful.
The surgery pains are blissfully ebbing. She feels the
new strength and speed, unorganized yet but latent. She
hears the familiar heartbeat and far away the buzz of her
brain rhythms, registered by her inward antennae and
routed to the aural nerves.
The elegance of her new body! Made from lightbeams, silicone
weave, paintbox leopards superimposed in the neon neuron
jungle, the bright dreams of vivisected cats. Heavy doesn't
want her to think about the cats. That's silly, doesn't she
see that it's all one skein, cause and effect, one great
tree, decision nerves and pain nerves in instant feedback
reverberation? Like the deckers she knows, who don't want
to think about the magic when it's all around them.
Well of course! It's a guilt trip, Heavy says so, it gets in
there, invisibly, they're all doing magic but they can't see
it even when they're doing it themselves, and it works! They
never expect the implacable working of the magical laws, so
they never know where the consequences are coming from...
_______________________________________________________________
| To Run as Fast as the Wind |
|-------------------------------------------------------------|
| You shall repair to a secret place. There make sacrifice |
| | of cats. Of their skulls make cymbals, of their sinews | |
| | | fiddle strings, then shall they dance as you will. Wrap up | | |
| | in white linen as cold as the clay, and bury where none | |
| | | | can see, chanting three times | | | |
| | | | | | | |
+ | + | + | Come I walking in the road of death | + | | + | +
| + || + + | + Lab cat karma be my blood and breath + + - * - +
+ - +++- + --| + Cat claw finger and a cat scan switch +--* * * --+
---*---+-+ +--|+ I'm a locomotor joker and a barbed wire bitch ++ - * - ++
*--** + + + +--- cat foot falling in the foetal dark ***+ + +**-*
|**||* + + + **** shadowboxer puppet on the reflex arc *--*+ + +* |
| |* - + + -*- rectifier humming like a hive of bees * || *-**|
| + + || gonna keep on walkin' till the treadmill seize | | + |+
|__ _+__||_|_ _+___+ _|
My god that's IT! She sees it all. The casual infliction of
horror, the harvest of control. At the ROOTS OF EVERY SCIENCE,
the repressed karmic subtext, overweighing THE VERY NATURE
of technological causation. No wonder it always went wrong,
how we never could turn it to a kindly purpose. How transparent
the corporations now, THE EXACT NERVE PATTERN isomorphically
replicated in the fiberoptic plexus memory RNA in the stacked
and catalogued miles of rainbow tape, they feel no pain, they
feel no pain...
She sees it all, and she's just sitting up to tell Heavy the
INCREDIBLE NEWS, take it out, we've got to start over, all
we have to do is everyone back up and do it over right without
the cruelty and horror, this time it will be ALL RIGHT, the
corps will be open gates and wondrous staircases, the streets
laughing matrix starfire jubilee, but she can't find her arms
to push her body has disappeared TRANSECTED! SHE'S TRANSECTED!
and the terror squeezes her thoughts inside out and stuffs
them into her own skull and they dwindle forgotten to a pinlight
and go out
And in the dark a voice says, clear, close and confidential:
Without the cruelty and horror? Dear girl, would
you disown your mother and father?
+ + + + + + + + + +
Jim completes its run, reluctantly, and tidies up. Oh how Jim
loves to dive for coins in the coral lagoons of the NP-complete!
It lays the final results neatly down on tape and places the
execution kernel on a tuple in public space, where Heavy's
agent is waiting.
The agent mails CUOTN Vancouver with a copy order for the tape.
Scarcely has the library catalogued it than it is on the fast
reader and headed south. The neural download data is twenty times
the size of the original, and there's no breaking it into randomly
routed pieces. It leaves the Campus in a narrow ribbon, and for
three minutes pours into the Canadian Pacific Trunk.
The agent forks sixteen times. Each copy forks. Each subcopy
forks. The population spreads across the Matrix like the
shadow of a cloud. At every node it reaches, a copy enquires
as to processing time, not timeslices but goddamm real time.
Where the answer is yes, it fills out a booking slip, backed
by an account owned by a temporary legal company owned by a
miscellany of Heavy's patients, the ones who pay in kind.
Scattered around the States a few deckers, with packet sieves
deployed and matching particular internodal tags, observe the
crystallization of a far-flung booking pattern. It draws no
CPU, being as yet nothing but a cloud of booking slips. It
has the general significance of a fleet of trucks, all with
the same company colours, drawn up at a rail-freight depot.
Nothing major, unless you happen to be interested in trucks.
............................................................................
Copyright Jonathan Burns, 1991
............................................................................
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Jonathan Burns | The Iron Code in Core Above is binding on our race,
burns@latcs1.oz | And so you drop him in his tracks
Computer Science Dept | and reassign his space. - April Fool Kipling
La Trobe University | parody in a forgotten issue of Datamation -
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: burns@latcs1.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
Subject: Lab Cat Karma, 5 of 6
Date: 13 Jan 91 04:06:12 GMT
Lab Cat Karma
or, Four on the floor and one for the road
Part 5
Day nine.
She swims up from pure lovely blankness. The float tank is
down and drained. Climbs to her feet. The sheer act is an
unaccountable relief.
Shower, dress. Breakfast with Heavy, who's been up since four
this morning, eats for two and washes down a selection of
gaudy capsules.
Kid comes through and sets up the phonelines. The clinic cannot
access more than four times its regular bandwidth, without
crowding out its neighbours on the matrix. But for a modest fee
the Roof Rat Frat can get a whole bunch of infrared lasers
pointed your way, and diode sheet limpets plastered over
your outside wall. The kid has a big old patchboard box and
spends a half-hour plugging in the limpet cables, then he decks
in, moves the IR feeds around in the matrix, holds out some
plastic and gets tipped a hundred, and strolls out leaving it
all running.
She's done her light workout, bends and stretches. She's been
on the couch, trying to meditate the butterflies away,
but keeps finding herself on her feet. Finally she puts on the
dear old shades and watches the rhythms until it's time.
Heavy adjusts the headset, a maserphone, it looks like a boxer's
faceguard and takes 2.80 Gbaud from the millimeter-wave horns
hanging from the ceiling. Then comes the injection, 15 ml straight
from the dry ice via the little warmer-shaker. The clocks count
down. She fastens the shades with tape, puts in the earphones,
and walks to the centre of the floor, feeling wobbly.
In grid carrier stations across the city, Heavy's dormant agents
awake and claim dominion in realtime. The execution kernel begins
to run in centuplicate. In matrix space the staging yard area of
Canada Pacific lights up in flashing Stay-Clear blue, and the
massed terabytes of optimized locomotor data move out in formation.
As it spreads through the kernel node pattern, the pattern extends
itself, overlaying the Rat Frat IR feeds.
The clinic disappears. In its place, a cylindrical coordinate
system, gold lines converging between her feet, height lines
enclosing her against a neutral mauve backdrop. Then the backdrop
rises on the tiers of a vast ... amphitheatre? With fussy
Corinthian columns, for chrissake? And a mighty wave of applause
comes swooshing through the phones! "Ah, come ON!" she yells out
loud, but then she sees it's right. On the floor now, the new
Olympic contender for the Total Reflex Enhancement crown...
Download commences. A millisecond timer starts ticking in her
head, a hundred times finer grained than her optic strobes,
but each tick distinct. She counts off a hundred before she
has time to think.
KNEES BEND flashes on the horizon. She sinks down. Is this right,
she thinks. Can't remember. She rises; the message repeats. She
can feel something now, prompting. Crouches, letting control
go, and a powerful force brings her down smoothly and places
her just right. A subtitle appears, RIGHT FOOT out. Rise and
again down. And she feels, knows exactly how to shift weight
and pivot on the ball of her left foot.
In less than a minute, she can relax her knees abruptly and let
35 kilograms of bodyweight drop like a rock, landing poised
to the degree and centimetre in a 220-ms brake phase. And there
is more here, she senses. She wills a height and angle, and
immediately there she is.
A line of lights expands around the border of the message
box. When it completes the rectangle, a message appears in
Heavy's font, _that's a print_. The box clears, another banal
direction pops up, RIGHT SIDE STRETCH.
About a quarter of the data has now emerged from Canadian's
stores, and been arranged by the kernel processes, subcached
in estimated-next-required echelons down to the immediate-
transmission nodes on the IR points. On schedule, or on
demand, it flashes down on the limpets, is relayed to the
headset; where the array of tiny masers, interfering, trace
a lobe in the motor region at millimetric resolution,
phase-drifting at a radio frequency which makes the ion haloes
shiver in resonance, agitating the synapses, shaking the
tranmitter vescicles loose like plums from a tree.
Watching at her window, Heavy sees a single irregular blot form in
the homunculus, the motor neuron activity biased toward a
new attractor. Then another blot, overlapping the first. And
another, which overflows into an adjacent channel. And a contour
around the whole, indicating the registration of the pattern
by the HARP fibers. Heavy taps a key, overlaying the second
frequency. It resonates with the injected molecules, makes them
deposit their cargoes of an artificial synaptic reinforcement
endorphin. The behaviourism of learning, accelerated.
She moves into her martial training routine. She's been afraid
of automatism, the crude video game, press P and it kicks,
press Q and it jumps. But it's not like that, the moves are
compatible, not island blots but parts of a continuum, with
decision points at the earliest possible moment. She completes
the first series and begins to experiment; the sidestep with the
high strike, the roll to a knee-locked crouch. In truth, the
unity of the aikido elements has never been so clear.
The message box reads _enough!_.
But it's getting exciting! How long has it been? Twenty minutes!
Too long already. You're building up print endorphins. Too much and
the regions start to smear out. You're tiring too, you just can't
feel it, green cells keep topping up the ATP. And not least you gonna
cook your brain.
What? Oh, the microwaves...
Yeah, we're way over EMR standards here. Even a few milliwatts aren't
good for you. Ask a decker why he doesn't use masers. But it's the
only way to get this kind of detail.
By evening, it's ten minutes on, thirty minutes off. But in
the ten-minute stretches, in all comes _in_. She has only to
begin and the sequence comes in tight. She begins to notice
a hesitance in the program, seems she's thinking up moves
faster than the software can assemble them. But that's OK,
she's putting the pieces together herself now, they fit a
thousand ways. Some moves, she knows they're right long
before the print lights circle the box, she's working on
her own endorphins.
+ + + + + + + + + +
She needs a downer to sleep, and the next day she's stiff
and has to work up slow. She hits the shooting gallery, poise
and scan exercises only, identify the targets as you scan
left to right, aim and fire in reverse order as you turn
back to the left. Then she has to rank them by urgency as
she scans, get control of the reflex, exercise the decision
cusp.
Hand-to-hand attacks, the old ballet. Her intuition is good
at this, she has to wait for the software to catch up. Once
it does, she is working at the speed _of_ her intuition, and
this is the highest excellence. It's fluent, it's coordinated,
it fits like a million-dollar gown.
Between the sessions, she compares the developing homuncular
map with the original. The new blots overlap the old, but they
are smaller, more regular. More bridges joining them and more
corridors separating. In the end, she decides, it's a matter
of tidiness. The old patterns arose at random, I just selected
the useful ones. Now the new attractors are confirmed, the old
will die from neglect.
It doesn't look like all those terabytes though.
You just seeing them in 2D. Got to be three, really more for the
connectivity, get down to it it's a fractal. Also remember it's a
frequency thing, those spots are oscillator groups; software has to
hunt around, find a spot in the right place that does the right frequency.
And then there's time. Man, I'm amazed we can pull it through the horns.
As she expected, one thing she'll never be able to survive
is a stream of automatic fire. She tries, but she can
neither jump high enough nor duck fast enough to avoid a
close-range burst. One-shot hand-helds, she can lead the aim,
be somewhere else, sometimes. She worries about smartguns,
writes a simulator. It's a tradeoff; a smart gunsight will
acquire her in no time flat, milliseconds. A heavy gun however
takes time to bring into line, she can see it coming and go
for an evasion. Short-barrels and dartguns get her every time.
But personal armour is improving too .... should she wear a
helmet? Not yet, not yet, let's see how mean it gets ...
+ + + + + + + + +
Trust me, you don't want another day. Even supposing you could
afford it. You got about fifty percent of what's on this tape,
that's good, very good. More and you'd get confused, start to lose
track of it. Jim got an exaggerated opinion of our reproduction
quality. Come back when we can operate on neurons at the 100-micron
level and not fry the suckers brown. More champagne?
Today I'm jealous of my brain-cells. Ah, what the hell. To you and
yours, been nice working with you.
Well sure, likewise.
Hey listen, you made me feel safe. That's above and beyond, I recognize
obligation. When you need something done.
One thing, since you say. You see these kids, they got some James
Dean button, it's gotta be _right now_. And they get implants, falsies,
cyborg stuff, but that's not army cyborg, it's a load of shit. They
get downloads made for corp enforcers, people twice their weight and
taller. They get _copies_ of the downloads, and no state of the art
playback either. Total fuckup, I seen 'em a year later in noddy-cars.
So you see some brat like that, send it round. Won't give it any custom
job like yours, but I can put in the joints and ligatures, give it some
biofeedback, show it some truths. You tell 'em Heavy Judy got the
double-plus iron.
I'll do that. And I'll be looking in, time to time, just make sure you're
keeping all right. I've got friends, some high some low, maybe we could
do a little run. Well OK, I'm gone. Fine day and a clear road out, hey Jude?
I'll take that road, sister, 'cause it's clearer than any I see coming.
And then the kiss.
............................................................................
Copyright Jonathan Burns, 1991
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Burns | "When I went to Princeton," he exclaimed incredulously
burns@latcs1.oz | "I even had a psych professor who taught me _learning
Computer Science Dept | theory_ by writing it on the blackboard. The
La Trobe University | sonofabitch was waiting around for the printing
| presses to improve". - Donald Kingsbury
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From: burns@latcs1.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
Subject: Lab Cat Karma, 6 of 6
Date: 14 Jan 91 01:14:01 GMT
Lab Cat Karma
or, Incoming
Part 6
The cab pulls up on the dockside, lets out Mytilakis and spins away. Lights
glimmer and burn on the sloshing Bay. Only a forklift moves down the line
of identical cargo sheds at this hour, till a door slides up to admit it
and again slides down. Mytilakis pushes his hands deep down his pockets,
pulls his overcoat round tight. Where is Takeo with the launch? He feels
exposed, he wants to be in the office where the project chart across the
wall testifies to his control. Resource Acquisitions Manager (Tokyo)
for the company (we are calling Pepsi), he knows the numbers, he holds the
keys. How has it come to these midnight mystery tours, the anonymous cab,
the secret boat to Okinawa Neutral?
A woman walks out on the concrete pier, to stand at the sea's edge under
the fluorescent tubes. A performer, she moves through a lazy set of Tai
Chi poses, balances on one foot bobbing up and down, jacknifes suddenly
to a handstand. Mytilakis smiles. Why, a perfect Chirico: a perspective
of abstract doors; an acrobat posing in solitude; a man who is waiting
for a boat. An apogee of time.
A dog comes round the corner, sniffing here and there. A distant vessel
sounds its horn. The dog raises its head and sees him, forty metres
away. It sniffs the air. It comes trotting toward him.
It breaks into a run.
Slamhound.
Placed! Mytilakis begins to run. They knew he would be here. Garage doors
fly past, identical, closed. The dog is barking, like an officer,
commanding his feet to stumble and his lungs to seize. He comes around
a dump bin and a stack of forty-gallon drums, he ducks into cover,
knowing it is the wrong move.
A tattoo of footsteps. Woman comes flying over the dumpster, grabs the
further edge, flips herself over, bounces on her ass on a drum and lands
two feet flat in the dog's road. Her hand is already in her jacket, and
she flings something finned and shiny straight at the animal as it leaps.
Something simultaneous happens. The dog flips in the air like a fish as
the throwbolt goes clean through the vacant centre of gravity. It falls
upon the woman as she stiffens, wide-eyed; argon light flashes on silver
claws and teeth. The throwbolt ignites against a shed door with a bang.
Now you, or I or Thomas Mytilakis, when we flinch it's like a baby bringing
up its hands, it's not part of anything and it doesn't go anywhere. When
this woman flinches it's Mutual Assured Destruction, her boot comes up
and wallops the squealing dog halfway to the water. And her head goes
back to laugh but snaps down flat, like bugger me brainless the dog's a
cyborg TOO, oh too much woho here it comes AGAIN
They meet and it goes for her wrist which jerks high as she punches it
in the ribs. It leaps again at her face, she whips aside but it's
climbing her like a tree with its hind claws slicing her leather while
she's blocking the head and forepaws. She stiff-arms against the throat
but the mouth opens wide, and a little silver nozzle squirts a jet of
fluid in her face.
Again the Flinch, hurling the dog eight feet. It rolls to its feet snarling
as she wipes frantically with her arm, and comes around her going for
Mytilakis. She springs sideways to grab it in a tackle and they thump to
the concrete clawing. And now she has the tactic, grasp the leg and lever
it back in the socket while she's slapping the head left and right, and
get her right knee over and in between hindleg and crotch. She gets one
hind leg between the two of hers, then she's holding the shuddering jaw
flat on the ground, locking her arm and back in a terrible rigor, and her
right hand goes back for the Strike ...
Mytilakis sees the woman's right arm go spastic in the air, clenching and
falling in a rhythm. A robot caught in a mutual exit loop between two
attractors, as he himself can neither stand nor run. A second apogee,
the moment deadlocked and stretching, stretching... Then her arm comes
down gently, she reaches into the furry throat fold, tenderly searching.
There, she's found the carotid artery, squeeze now with all your green
cell strength, hush puppy don't wriggle, the sooner it's over the sooner
to sleep. And she crushes the life out of it, the warm body squealing
and jumping, at last going supple and quiet. Then the siren goes off.
In the animal's chest. The five-second warning and she's still rocking
the dog in some Pieta Asana, while Mytilakis turns to run. He makes eight
metres and saves his hearing, but he misses the show as she lurches to her
feet, with the forepaws in her hands and swinging, around and around.
The improvised hammer-toss that lofts a forty-pound dog over the dumpster,
throws her clear off her feet, she catches herself on one hand reflexively
and rolls toward the lee of the bin with just enough ticking milliseconds
to bring her hands to her ears ...
The detonation drives Mytilakis skidding into the concrete, with burning
blood and bone splinters stinging his ears and scalp. Drums topple and
bounce, garbage is falling everywhere, the woman is screaming, something
catches fire and goes up in a roar. He gets to his knees and inches
away, trying not to black out completely.
Some while later he sits up. There she is, limping from the circle of
spilt muck and little fires to the edge of the wharf, mouthing words
he cannot hear for the ringing in his ears. She is standing with her
feet apart, fists jerking in space, shrieking at the utopian steeples
that glitter silently around the curve of the Bay.
... poor miserable bastards ... fucking BASKET cases neuromancers
and lobotomy freaks in the clean room with the wide screen and
the volume turned right down so you don't hear the PLEADING
of innocent dogs with BOMBS in their throats who never so much
as SHAT ON YOUR LAWN! Don't you know when the pain and mercy
nerves are severed above the third cervical vertabrae the
animal goes DEAF AND BLIND and incapable of knowing right
intention from a twitch of the amputated stump where your brains
used to be you disaffected fucking gutless ZIPPED UP CUNTS! Pity
o pity them who walk in shadows where the hands of a thousand
aborted monkeys reach out with lighted FORCEPS AND RAZOR BLADES
offering pain and mercy to the poor anaesthetized ZOMBIES
who stumble forever between the war room and the revolving
restaurant because their eyelids are sewn together and they
cannot SEE! Look in the literature if you don't believe me!
In the first of a series of live field tests, sympathy for
living things WAS! NOT! OBSERVED!
But DON'T WORRY!
Science can work MIRACLES! Hang tight, my darlings, your Healer
has come! What we can't cure we can replace so it runs twice
as fast and draws ten percent of the power, we're gonna run a
bypass from the stars to the fucking SEWERS, JUST FOR YOU!
And you can be with us again, you will join hands with the
victims and the animals down here you will stand with us flayed
and salted in the PITS OF SACRIFICE you will feel the pain I
PROMISE, YOU WILL FEEL THE PAIIINNN!!
She crouches, swallowing, clenched fists up around her ears. Cautiously
Mytilakis climbs to his feet. She twists about in an instant and stares
at him across the concrete space - shocked wide eyes, blood nose,
tear tracks forking the grit, dogs' offal smoking in her hair, the new
fashion, then her eyes narrow and her mouth goes wide, baring the gums
for three inches.
The Grin, what is he reading, fellowship of survivors or devilish sadism?
Like the ancient puzzle of the faces and the vase, either and neither
seize in turn on his perception. From the vacuum of his mind giant words
are rushing to fill the sky, they read NOWHERE TO RUN. But the woman
turns and lopes away up the waterline, limping at first but gaining speed,
until she turns a distant corner and is gone.
+ + + + + + + + + +
Around four in the morning when everyone awake is hyped or sullenly
exhausted, up back of the Chiba she discovers a bar and snack, Chatsubo
the sign says. She's cleaned up, the leathers laundered in a card
booth while she took stock. Amazingly she's all there, she thinks the
dorsal support probably saved her from a broken back. Chalk up another
to Heavy, protectress of lost boys and amazons forsworn. Perversely she
has gone without painkillers, she feels her cuts and bruises like kabuki
brocade, her blistered face like the Angry Mask.
The bartender looks her over, sees probably nothing worse than the
night's average. Papaya lemon and tonic, respected host, don't wanna
get bombed tonight hihihi I been there.
She likes the place already, it's got no style, it commits her to nothing.
And that is very good, because she isn't ready for implications. She knows
she has uttered a Damnation, and it targets her, square on the crosshairs,
ground zero. Does that make it weaker or stronger? She must ask.
But tonight she is content with this corner of nowhere, listening to nobody
voices over the comforting sea-thump of her heart and the sea-hiss of nerve
noise in realtime. Five seconds from whoa to blow she thinks, not bad.
She holds out her hand, fifty milliseconds trickle through her fingers
like fat ball bearings. Suddenly she's feeling good REALLY GOOD. A little
nonsense riff comes out of nowhere and plays in her head.
Come I early daddy come I late
Lab cat karma be my fix and fate
Cat gut racket and a cat call phone
When I mix it with the monkeys in the free trade zone
Brainpan pumpin' noradrena-lyne
Thank you mos' sinceely doctor frankenstein
Trip jack hammer on a harp string fuse
Street messin' woman got the lab cat blues
............................................................................
Copyright Jonathan Burns, 1991
............................................................................
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Jonathan Burns | They say you can go to the pits a thousand times
burns@latcs1.oz | and see nothing like the jaguar and the Black Knight.
Computer Science Dept | I don't know 'bout that either. But I'm going back
La Trobe University | just in case I get lucky.
| Lucius Shepard, _Life During Wartime_
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