From: HURH@FNAL.FNAL.GOV (Patrick Hurh)
Subject: STORY: Tunnel Runner 1.0
Date: 4 Sep 1993 20:33:12 GMT

The following post is the first part of a story I wrote quite a while ago.
It was part of a Hypercard/hypertext project that I took on.  At this stage
the project has only two complete stories and a third almost complete.  The
idea was to have a central "back-bone" story upon which other stories
branched off which could be reached by clicking on a bold word.  The bold
word for this story was TUNNEL HIGH and the following story is what then
appeared.

The project, which I lovingly called EXPOSURE, is not completely halted,
and it could be ressurected.  I just have not had enough time to create the
graphics and the story and troubleshoot the Hypercard Stack.  I have had
the idea to ftp the _unfinished stack_ somewhere and let the net finish it
for me... adding stories and graphics to my original "backbone" story.  But
as it is, the stack is already close to 5 megs (due to sound bytes and
quick-time movies) and I am hesitant to do this.  Plus it is awfully buggy.
 If I get inspiration and energy however I'll pick things back up and
continue the effort, possibly enlisting some net friends for text and
graphics...

Anyway, hope you enjoy this story.  It is not polished but it is complete
(unlike _Company Man_).  BTW, I will continue _Company Man_, please don't
stop reading it... after all it has been the interest I receive here that
keeps me writing.  (My real time english major friends don't think sci-fi
is real writing!... of course _I_ have an audience...heh) Send all comments
and criticisms to me at hurh@fnal.fnal.gov.

Oh, yeah... I think the only one out there that has read this in it's
entirity (except for the neuro-sci students who helped me with the sci) is
Marcus Eubanks  who offered me some good advice... looks like everyone can
offer me advice now, Marcus!

--patrick.


From: HURH@FNAL.FNAL.GOV (Patrick Hurh)
Subject: STORY: Tunnel Runner 1.1
Date: 4 Sep 1993 20:38:03 GMT

Here's the first installment of _Tunnel Runner_... If you like it or
dislike it let me know at hurh@fnal.fnal.gov!!!

000.  Tunnel Runner                                   by Patrick Hurh
                                                      copyright 1993

        Sharon took a wide turn to round the block corner.  Her left knee
felt just slightly rough in its socket.  She lifted her next stride high so
she could bend the knee a bit more.  On the third try, she felt a slight
click and the knee swung normal once again.   Sharon pushed harder and
picked her pace up.
        I'm getting old, she thought and then smiled.  She was twenty-three
and back home in Macomb for Christmas.  Not really old, but she had not run
this route in ages and to feel this tired this soon along her old running
route depressed her.
        She turned her head as she went over the concrete bridge to stare
at the frozen Lamoine.  The carp her father was going to catch that next
spring lay dormant, buried in the silt and mud at the bottom of the shallow
river.  Sharon remembered flaking doughballs falling off of barbed hooks as
she would feebly cast a Zebco line into inevitable underwater shrubs.
        The return to her hometown was difficult.  The end of school had
her excited and dismal at the same time.  She was about to get her graduate
degree in neurology but, because of her national health test scores, would
not be able to continue medical school and become a practicing physician.
All of her highschool friends congratulated her on her academic progress,
but she couldn't help feeling like a runner-up.
        Sharon had done well on the exams, but only in the areas focusing
on neurologic research and development.  With the advent of the national
health plan and with already licensed doctors flooding the market, she was
asked/forced to take up a post-doc position at a government funded research
facility.  Instead of beginning a tiring but exciting internship with her
peers, Sharon was once again going to be student and lab assistant to
theory minded researchers, the grand academic institution that took pride
not in developing drugs and medical technologies that could save lives but,
as far as Sharon could see, in propelling their own narcissistic careers.
        The climb up Tower Hill Road was slippery with cold, limp leaves.
Sharon's tread was wearing thin and the half frozen leaves shot out from
between her shoes and the asphalt.  Her cheeks alternately filled and
collapsed, propelling chilly air between her puckered lips.  As she neared
the top of the first rise and the slope of the road leveled, she could feel
a renewed energy pour from her chest to her thighs.  The slight downward
dip that followed the rise seemed to give her another push that floated her
over the second and final hill.  Without any conscious effort, Sharon
sailed around the last curve in the narrow road.
        Still breathing hard, Sharon slowed, turned 180 degrees, and
started back down the immense hill.  Her legs felt strong but strangely
distant as they pounded out her rapid descent.  Air whooshed through the
slight smile that had formed on her face.  Through half lidded eyes she
watched the railed bridge at the bottom of the hill rapidly near, jerking
with her long stride.  She felt a euphoric sensation that she hadn't felt
in years.  Muscles in her neck and face tightened as sweat beaded and
caught in the matted scarf at her neck.  The tightness that had started at
the back of her neck shot through her body with a suddenness that was
almost pain.  Her shoulders relaxed convulsively and her arms flew out to
her sides as her running form fell victim to her high.  With a consuming
abandon, Sharon flailed down the last section of hill.

        Sharon's flushed face peeked in through the front door window
before she opened it.  She had seen her brother's car in the driveway and
she knew that her parents would be gathered around to welcome him back from
his first semester of college.  She swung the door open to reveal just
that.  Her brother, Paul, standing in the middle of the foyer with head
bent to avoid the low hanging ceiling light.  Her parents' smiling faces
and soft voices.  Paul hadn't even had the time to take his coat off yet.
He looked at her.
        "Out running on Christmas again?"

********************************

        With the covers pulled up around her chin and the side of her head
against the smooth coolness of a feather pillow, Sharon contemplated this
year's Christmas day.  Although the gifts she gave, sweaters to her parents
and computer games to her younger brother, were received well and although
her presents were more or less what she had asked for, the highlight of the
day was her morning run.  Family smiles and good cheer seemed strangely
empty compared to her morning's solitary elation.  Christmas carols and
midnight mass couldn't erase the guilty feeling of enjoyment she derived
from running to her limit on Christmas day.  The second wind she had
experienced on top of Tower Hill was more intense than the highs she
remembered from her highschool track team.  This runner's high was on the
order of a Redbook sexual climax.  Only afterwards, unlike magazine sex,
she had felt confident and almost omnipotent the entire day.
        Sharon realized she was glassily staring at the textbook lying open
next to her head. Reluctantly she reached from under the blankets and shut
the book.  On the back cover was a picture of the older man who had written
the book.  His clean shaven face was overrun by long white hair parted from
the center of his head.  Although he was a publishing professor, he was not
well respected in the neuroscience community.  His approaches to a working
understanding of the brain emphasized irrational psychiatric methods and
seemed to oversimplify the complex, yet logical, chemical reactions that,
as most experts believed, governed the brain's behavior.
        She had to admit that the author's ideas held more excitement in
their explanation of trauma than the plugged receptor site theory of most
conventional scientists.  But without a straightforward causal relationship
Sharon had to reject the idea of axons damping their own neuron's
electrical signals just because the subconscious willed it.
        Her now sleepy mind envisioned the stringy axons winding through
the dense neuron strips of her own brain.  Their free tips bursting
spontaneously, releasing neurotransmitter chemicals to find matching key
spots in neighboring dendritic formations.  Sudden flashes of her morning's
run crossed her mind and juxtaposed themselves with the firing neurons.
Sharon could see the opiate shaped endorphin chemical compounds created in
response to her body's stress as they floated among the interstitial spaces
between her neurons and began to satiate the cauliflower dendrites that
triggered her earlier intense arousal.  Sharon saw herself afloat among the
globular molecules, pushed by unseen currents.  Her drowsy mind placed her
miniaturized feet upon a huge axon strand stretched out before her like a
highway.  She looked behind her and saw the glow of an electrical discharge
within the attached neuron's main body.  The unearthly yellow glow flashed
white and left the neuron to travel within the transparent walls of the
tubular axon she was standing on.  Her footing slipped as the nerve cell
trembled in anticipation of the oncoming charge.  A swell formed in the
axon around the charge and the resulting shining wave rushed toward Sharon.
 Frightened for the first time, Sharon returned her gaze to the free end of
the axon highway.  She began to run along it, hoping to reach the end
before the electrical impulse.  The axon tip seemed to stretch far in front
of her, never quite in view.  Running on the axon wall was like running in
syrup, but Sharon became consumed with the thought of outrunning the
charge.
        As she ran, she waited for the feeling of that morning's euphoria.
She began to feel as if she were floating towards the end of the axon
although she was still aware of her legs pumping into the axon's surface.
She could feel the tightness in the back of her neck and anticipated the
runner's high that should follow.  The axon wall under her began to rise
and she was soon running on the glowing downward slope of the moving
impulse wave.  She pressed harder, almost trying to fall down the
increasing slope.  The wave continued to rise and Sharon could not keep up.
 She needed the missing climax of her high to pull ahead of the wave.
Sharon's breath shot from her mouth as she felt the electrical charge pass
beneath her.
        She struggled on the top of the rushing swell.  The floating
feeling was all but gone, and with anger she realized she would not only be
unable to reach the firing axon's tip first, but would also not experience
the extreme high she had strongly anticipated.  She could not will that
ecstatic fulfillment into her dream and she felt lost without it.  Her
heartbeat was in her throat as she flailed in the now jellylike axon wall
material on the lee side of the swell.  Sharon began to sink into the wall
as she ran on.  With each step she was sucked deeper into the axon.  Legs
and arms barely moving, she was swallowed by the material which had earlier
supported her.
        Sharon woke to find herself entangled in the bed covers.  After
sleepily extracting herself, she turned over and stared at the 60 watt
light bulb before she turned it out.
        It took her almost an hour to fall asleep.

        On her way out of Macomb the next day, Sharon stopped at the Kroger
grocery store to buy a can of Pepsi and an opcode news disk for the drive
back to NorthWestern.  It had snowed lightly during the night and a store
clerk was in the concrete parking lot sprinkling rock salt on the pavement
as she walked into the store.
        The store didn't have a current national news disk so Sharon bought
the day old Chicago special Christmas edition and returned to her Toyota.
As she approached her car, she heard the raised voice of a man yelling at
the store clerk who was salting the lot.  She turned to observe the
argument.  Apparently, the clerk had been sprinkling salt not only on the
pavement but also on the cars.  Sharon looked at her own car and noticed
small crystals of salt caught along the window seals and above the
windshield wipers.  She returned her attention to the store clerk just as
the irate customer was climbing into his pickup truck to leave.  Sharon was
startled to notice that the clerk who she assumed was a young school
student was actually Brian Donovan, an old high school classmate of
Sharon's from Macomb High.  She quickly got into her car to avoid his
attention.
        Donovan had been an extremely slow student in high school.  He had
tried to please whoever was popular from week to week and even became
Macomb High's first basketball team manager, a position created for him by
a pitying coach.  It didn't surprise Sharon that he would still be in
Macomb and working at Kroger's.  She felt guilty avoiding him but he'd
never know the difference.
        Sharon started the car and began to pull out of the lot.  As she
waited for traffic to clear on 136, she looked in the rearview mirror at
Donovan.  He was walking up and down the parking lot rows, lightly tossing
handfuls of salt on the hoods of each car as if in a religious ritual.  His
motions were slow and rhythmic and he looked at each car just before
throwing the salt as if every car had to gain his approval before being
blessed.
        Sharon realized that traffic had been clear for some time and she
moved the car onto the highway.  She slipped the news disk from the cover
and attempted to insert the disk into her player, but it wouldn't fit.  She
looked down at it and suddenly noticed that she had purchased the wrong
format for her old CD player.  Embarrassed to go back and risk meeting
Donovan, she continued driving on the road out of town.  Maybe she could
swap the disk for a 3-incher at the next gas station.

***********************************
***********************************

Let me know what you think!
Oh, btw, although I grew up in Macomb, Illinois the characters portrayed
are entirely fictional... just in case someone in Macomb knows how to use a
modem.

Tunnel Runner 1.2 will be out in a day or so...

--patrick.


From: HURH@FNAL.FNAL.GOV (Patrick Hurh)
Subject: STORY: Tunnel Runner 1.2
Date: 5 Sep 1993 18:03:25 GMT

Here's part two of _Tunnel Runner_.  All comments and opinions are
vehemently encouraged! Please send them to hurh@fnal.fnal.gov

***********************************************

Tunnel Runner 1.2                                    by Patrick Hurh
                                                     copyright 1993

        "Lane, could you hand me the loop?"
        "Yeah, here."
        "Well put it where I can reach it..."
        "It's right in front of you."
        "Oh...uh, yeah.  Thanks."
        "Shar...?"
        "What?"
        "You know that won't work, don't you?  Doc Polsen's tried that and
although the spectrometer reads the right masses the..."
        "...the bonds are all too tough.  I know that Lane.  I just thought
that if we could introduce a weak link into..."
        "A weak link? You mean try to physically rip apart a similar
precursor and just try to glue it together with some sort of
lysine-arginine bond?  Come on!"
        "Lysine-arginine, lysine-lysine, arginine-lysine...something..."
        "Let's go home, Sharon.  This makes no sense.  You know that Polsen
is just around the corner from synthesizing a biologically active
vassopressin that can cross the blood-brain barrier."
        "Doesn't it mean anything to you to do it first...and better?
Lane, we've been slaving away for this guy, making his decisions for him,
leading him on to conclusions that we drew days earlier!"
        "Well, your conclusions that endorphins and enkephalins excite
pyramidal hippocampal neurons proved to be fruitless.  They can't even
cross the blood-brain barrier."
        "Even so, Polsen still won't pursue my new chemical shunting
efforts to even try to coax the opioid peptides across the barrier and into
the hippocampal region!  The man has no sense of scope of what we're trying
to do...memory enhancement _has_ to start with excitation of the
hippocampal cells and their long term potentiation!"
        "Sharon.   Please take it easy...  We've got until next week to
isolate this peptide and we've almost used up all the ACTH we've got."
        "So a few more camels lose their pituitaries.  Life's a bitch."
        "Sharon...Let's try to keep this professional.  I'm as tired as you
are."
        "Oh yeah, real professional, Lane.  Sleep with the prof and
suddenly you're group leader."
        "There isn't even a leader position.  If you would only listen to
what...."
        "Listen to me Lane.  I'm sick of this lab work.  I want to put our
findings into practical applications. "
        "That's all being done.  The use of endorphin taps as anesthesia is
commonplace for predicted surgery now."
        "Anesthesia!  Is that the smallest jump your mind can make?  Come
on!  We're talking about heightened awareness, memory retention, accessing
goddamn fucking memories!"
        "Sharon, you're dreaming.  Nothing has been proven along those
lines.  Endorphins are the body's way of dealing with stress.  Period.
Reality is the here and now.  What you think in your head is awareness and
memories are just coded chemical reactions waiting to happen again..."
        "Oh... And what I think or do with my awareness and memories has no
effect on those reactions!"
        "Of course they do.  That's what makes us individuals.  The
probability inherent in the outcome of the brain's chemical equations
uniquely creates all of us, yet from the same basic blueprint."
        "Lane, you're loonier than I am."
        "Maybe...but I didn't sleep with Polsen."
        "Now you tell me."
        "You're smiling."
        "You're dreaming."

        Sharon woke at four and rolled away from Lane.  She slipped from
the bed and wandered in the dark toward the general vicinity of the
bathroom.  On the way, she encountered several pieces of furniture that she
didn't remember being there.  Lane stirred.
        "Sharon?..."
        "Yeah, go back to sleep, Lane.  Jus' taking a whiz..."
        The light switch was where she remembered it and she flicked it
after closing the bathroom door.
        Sharon flipped down the lid and sat.  The gleaming white hexagon
tiles stared through her closed eyelids.  Her eyes flickered open to squint
at the spotless floor.  Lane received this corporation clean apartment at
the research facility as part of the stipend awarded him when he was
promoted to lead apprentice.  It seemed the higher you were promoted, the
deeper your living arrangements were placed in the underground laboratory
complex.  Her own apartment was just outside the Abott complex.
        She stood and turned to look at herself in the mirror.  Her
blondish brown hair was now a damp mousy tan and her complexion looked
stark in the bathroom light.  The past year of research work had been hard
on her.  Several attempts to develop an opiate-like cognitive enhancement
drug had failed recently and she knew it was due to her ridiculed methods
of trying to recombine broken common amino acids into new large precursor
chemicals necessary for endorphin and enkephalin production that could
still cross the blood-brain barrier.
        She stared into the reflections of her contracted and bloodshot
eyes.  If she could only concentrate harder and with more energy she knew
she could discover the right assembly techniques.  But not before Polsen
refined his much more expensive and laborious synthesis methods.  Nothing
she did pleased him.  He openly chided her as did her fellow lab assistants
for stubbornly continuing her recombinatory efforts.  It was true that
Polsen's synthesis method for a vassopressin type enhancement would work,
but not efficiently.  The pseudo-vassopressin would enable the
overproduction of certain neurotransmitters in the brain necessary for
acute and fast thinking, but without guidance from the memory intense
hippocampal cells, the overproduced neurotransmitters might only heighten
awareness.  Without a fast access to memories in parallel with the
overactive neurotransmitters, the pharmaceutically enhanced brain would not
be able to draw upon previously experienced knowledge fast enough to act
upon.  Moreover the vassopressin would not likely enhance long term
potentiation of hippocampal neurons which, in Sharon's mind, was the key to
creating memories in the first place.  Cognitive enhancement did not seem
possible to Sharon without learning and recall enhancement also... to think
fast, meant to remember fast.
       She rubbed the back of her neck with her hand and slowly worked it
upwards into the thick outgrowth of hair at the nape of her neck.  She ran
her fingertip over the plastic nub which covered her neuro-tap tube.  It
was strange, but after a year Sharon no longer felt invaded by the small
tube which snaked its way into the pituitary gland at the base of her
skull.  She remembered the eerie feeling of her first neurotransmitter
extraction.  The machine's warm lips on her neck as she watched a live
sonogram of a thin metal tongue slide into her head through the protective
tube to taste the chemicals which made her think.
        She hit the light switch and cautiously entered the now pitch black
bedroom.  She waited for her eyes to dilate and tried to remember where she
threw her clothes.  As she dressed she thought of what she had learned
today in the lab.  Introduction of endorphins directly into the hippocampus
of a rat, triggered an intense increase in NO production; and NO was linked
to long term potentiation and memory creation.  Now if she could just get
the body's naturally made endorphins to cross the blood-brain barrier...
       Sharon grabbed the last of her things and headed for the dark
doorway.  She was afraid the electronic door lock might query her on her
way out and wake Lane but it just winked an LED at her and silently slid
open the door.
        Sharon emerged from Lane's apartment and stepped onto the low nap
of the hallway carpet.  She looked down at her feet and the shoes in her
hand then raised her head and continued down the hallway barefoot.

*********************************

        Sharon burst into the lab hoping no one would be there.  She threw
her towel over the back of a high stool and briskly walked over to the
sample cooler.  She was breathing very heavy and a thin coat of sweat
covered her brow.
        "I thought you'd be here."
         Sharon turned quickly to see Lane as he let the lab door swing
shut behind his thin body.
        "Why'd you leave so early? And what's with the outfit?"
        Sharon looked down at her white shorts and sweat soaked tank top.
        "I went for a run."  Sharon turned to the cooler, opened it and
pulled out a container of sterile suspension liquid.  She walked to the lab
bench and set it down.  Immediately she crossed in front of Lane to a
storage pantry and removed an ancient but functional sterile hypodermic.
        Lane's thin brown eyebrows narrowed with concern.  "Sharon, we
should talk.  You know you have to sleep sometime and, although running may
make you feel energized for a short time, you're basically draining
yourself."
        She ignored him and wrapped a piece of rubber lab hose about her
left bicep and tied it off with her teeth.
        "May I ask what you're doing?"
        She inserted the hypo into her exposed vein and withdrew a full
ferule of blood.  The rubber tube loosened and fell to the floor.  Sharon
turned her back on Lane and transferred the blood sample from the hypo to
the specimen bottle.  "I'm taking a blood sample."  She capped the now red
tinged container.
        "I can see that," Lane retorted.  "But why?  Are you sick?  It's
probably fatigue from what you've put yourself through...and living on the
outside and all.  Why didn't you move in with me?"
        Sharon slipped the bottle of blood suspension into a centrifuge and
set it spinning.  She turned, put her hands behind the small of her back
and leaned back against the lab bench, her hands gripping the countertop
edge.
        "Lane, you know that Polsen doesn't like me, right?"
        "Yeah, but what does that have to do with this blood sample?"
        "Well, I suspect one of the reasons Polsen keeps me involved in his
experiments is because I provide the experiment with more than the average
amount of natural endorphins especially right after I run."
        "The runner's high thing. Yeah, I know.  But it's still only a very
small amount and the synthesized stuff's almost as good for our purposes."
        "Right, but not for his... he always wants the pure stuff... But
Lane, you know how I told you about the euphoric sensation when I run?
Well, after I've been running consistently for several months the sensation
comes easier and easier but with less intensity every time."
        "So?  That shows you've worked up a strange sort of immunity to
your own endorphins."
        "An immunity which normally doesn't develop for other weaker opiate
chemicals... morphine addicts don't build up an immunity, they build up a
dependence."
        "This is crazy, Sharon. We're talking quantitatively about a
euphoric sensation.  What are the units for euphoria... joy-newtons per
passion-degree?"
        "I know what I've felt, Lane.  And now I think I might know why."
        She straightened and slapped the centrifuge off.

****************************


        Julius Polsen rummaged through the piles of paper on his desk.
Four or five layers down he found the surface of the mahogany desk.  It
took him several more seconds to clear a space around the circular groove
in the square foot of desktop he had uncovered.  He placed his thumbs on
the far edge of the wood disc and leaned downward with all of his
considerable weight.  The front edge of the disc flipped up reluctantly and
scraped the front of his overhanging belly.  Sucking in his stomach
permitted the door to flip completely vertical.
        Polsen stepped back and sat in the overstuffed leather chair behind
the desk.  He stared at the revealed video screen.  It was a small cathode
ray tube attached to the bottom of the trap door.  In his present position,
Polsen could see the screen but could not reach the controls.  He sighed
and looked about the room.  It was an exercise in organized chaos.  All the
furnishings including the antique bookcases and the oriental rugs were
genuine.  Most of the books, models and papers which covered them were not.
 Polsen wondered if, had he had read all those books and studied all the
models, would it have made him more sure of what he was doing or less.
        Polsen leaned back and dimmed the calico stained glass shaded lamp
standing behind him.  He then inched his chair forward laboriously closer
to the desk.  He fingered the controls on the side of the display unit and
a pixelated image formed in steely grays on the tube.  The scene displayed
was a digital still life of Lane Walters' bathroom.  Lane was probably
asleep and with any luck Folger was in bed with him.  Polsen adjusted the
contrast of the picture but since the lights were out in the bathroom, he
would have to settle for the high contrast resolution of the multichannel
plate mounted to the front of the concealed CCD camera.
        A clock somewhere in the office chimed two o'clock.  Polsen looked
for it but couldn't decide if the clock was behind a pile of books on the
left bookcase or under one of his lab jackets on the couch.  After three
years of pretending to be absentminded, it was easy to actually be so.  He
wondered if actually designing peptide chains was now easier also.
        The right hand drawer of his desk held Folger's file.  Polsen
pulled the drawer open and removed the battered envelope without seeming to
 move the bulk of his body.  He pulled the sheets of data from within.
        Sharon Folger.  Extremely bright and driven neurologic chemistry
student.  She was brought up in a fairly common nuclear family without
undue trauma during her adolescence.  In depth psychiatric analysis had not
revealed any major deficiencies to exploit except the normal tendencies
toward addiction, success and revenge.  With her budding ideas for an
unacceptably inexpensive method of cognitive enhancement, Sharon Folger
was, without a doubt, going to be trouble.  But Polsen knew if he couldn't
bend her, Lane probably could.  Polsen decided to up the pheromone levels
in the clean room a notch or two.  After all, he wanted to keep her around
as long as possible; her endorphin production was incredible.

       The large window behind Polsen's desk revealed a dark, somber
landscape.  With the inside lamp off, Julius could just make out the
rolling horizon.  Jagged tree tops blurred into smooth, sloping hills.  The
enhanced windows picked up the low glow of the ultra-violet security lamps
on the periphery of the lab.  If the op-amps had been calibrated properly
he wouldn't see their presence at all with the window sensitivity tuned to
null.  As it was, Julius cursed the security system for tainting his one
view of natural splendor.  Though southern Illinois was underdeveloped it
still had survived glacier leveling and retained a sense of innocence.
Innocence could almost describe the feeling Julius derived from gazing
through his office window.
       A flash of white static filled Polsen's vision before the window
damped its internal reflective properties.  Polsen whirled heavily on his
leather chair to view the flashing images suddenly come to life on the
hidden crt.  He did not utter a curse or exultation as he did so.  He knew
that the lights in the bathroom had been turned on and, as soon as his
pupils contracted, his vigilance would be rewarded with another view of one
of Folger's slightly psychotic, midnight mirror dramas.
       Sharon Folger's digital figure moved in front of the camera.  Her
white shoulder blocked three-quarters of the view, the wide angle
perspective of the CCD distorting the moving image like a fish eye.  She
leaned over the miniature sink and concerned herself with some small
objects that were concealed from Polsen's view by Folger's boney back.
       Sharon's left hand snaked around the back of her neck under her
shoulder length hair.  She lifted the hair from the back of her neck to
reveal the shiny plastic nub of the cover of her neural tap.  Her right
hand joined her left and then slowly descended to grasp the tubule cover.
Sharon removed it with a slight twisting motion and placed it on the
ceramic tile in front of her.
       Julius thumbed the iris control to let more light into the CCD and
zoomed in closer to the back of her neck.  His eyes were wide and his lips
were pursed.  The wrinkles of his neck began to jiggle with low hints of
laughter.
       Sharon's right hand returned with a modified hypodermic, the tip not
sharp but blunted to fit the soft plastic tip of the tap.  She used the
fingers of her left hand to guide the needle into her head.  Her right hand
was shaking as she depressed the actuator of the hypodermic.
        Julius Polsen ran his hand over his lower pink lip and turned
slowly around to grin at the dark landscape.  He could see the glinting
reflection of the thin woman's body bent over the sink of Lane's bathroom,
shuddering with the spinal shivers of her forced rejuvenation.

******************************************
******************************************

Please let me know what you think.
--patrick.


From: HURH@FNAL.FNAL.GOV (Patrick Hurh)
Subject: STORY: Tunnel Runner 1.3 (Conclusion)
Date: 6 Sep 93 16:17:10 GMT

Well, here's the last part of Tunnel Runner.  Sorry to disappoint anybody
who expected it to be a little longer.  I think a really good treatment of
the plot would have to at least be a novelette and not a short story...

Hope you enjoy it and please e-mail me any comments you might have... I
haven't received much feedback on this story yet and I think it would be
interesting to hear from those that have read some of Company Man to
compare the two stories...

Tunnel Runner 1.3                                     by Patrick Hurh
                                                      copyright 1993

        Metallic glints sparkled through leaded glass and kaleidoscoped
onto Sharon's face as the multi-jointed arm moved through its programmed
motions.  The view through the window revealed the white walls of an
operating room.  A central robotic arm hung from the high ceiling, its base
concealed by an inverted stainless dome.  A small silver whisker protruded
from one of the arm's tapered fingers. This sliver twisted slightly over a
face down mannequin head secured to the end of an operating table.  The
mechanical finger manipulated the probe into a small hole at the base of
the model's neck.
        The operating room was remarkably small compared to the surgeon's
control room where Sharon sat and watched the trial operation.  Inclined
consoles fanned out before her.  It was almost ridiculous.  Sharon often
thought that the control panels were this extensive only to impress the
government dignitaries who seemed to always be present during Polsen's
operations.  The control room was over twice the size of the blaring white
operating room seen through the small, thick window.  It made the control
room feel like a darkened auditorium.
        Sharon turned her head to view the sonogram display since the rest
of the operation was hidden inside the mechanics of the arm and within the
skin of the mock head.  Although the mannequin was a poor representation of
her own head (it was made to mimic one of the few human patients the
research lab treated) for her it was ideal.  The head had been installed
with a neuro-tap similar to her own.  Once keyed to the tap the medic arm
would not be able to fail in redirecting the tube and its new aluminum
based carrier capsule into the hippocampus area.  Any minor physiological
differences between Sharon's head and the dummy head should be
insignificant.  Hopefully, if Sharon's research guesses were correct,
injecting dilute quantities of endorphin precursor into the area of her
brain which controlled her memories, emotion and sense of place would allow
her to press on with her breakneck schedule without the distracting intense
euphoria of injecting opiates directly into her pituitary as she had been
doing. She would sacrifice the high for the enhanced cognitive recall
ability.  Red lights twinkled on as the display indicated that the new
position of the neural-tap tube was indeed where she had programmed it to
be and that the capsule was lodged correctly within the hippocampus.  The
capsule would time release an aluminum-based carrier chemical which would
shunt the large endorphin precursors through the tight interstitial spaces
of the blood-brain barrier and into the long term potentiated neurons of
her memory.
        Sharon stood up from her chair and watched the arm withdraw the
wire probe from the dummy head.  The head jerked slightly as the sliver
pulled free of the tube.  She leaned forward and hit the goto button.  The
now limp wire dragged across the plastic dummy neck as the arm pulled back
into its rest position.
        The steel bar she had brought with her was an ill thought out
precaution.  The door to the surgery was handleless.  Still, Sharon knelt
in front of the sliding door for several minutes trying to wedge the bar in
a hindering position against the door.  She could have tried to jimmy the
elec-sentry that controlled the door but most likely that would have set
off an alarm.  Most of the alarm circuits in the old laboratory were analog
and if she tried to splice into them the resulting  contact current spikes
would probably set off silent security signals.  She finally settled with
the bar wedged low across the door frame.  It didn't look like it would
stop the door from opening, but by the time she got it right the operation
would probably be over.
        She returned to the console and picked up the qwerty keyboard
plugged into the main surgery computer.  She turned it over and examined
the small indentations that held the molded plastic case together.  She
unplugged the keyboard from the ADB port and lifted the board with both
hands over her head.  Her downward stroke cracked the edge of the keyboard
against the corner of the stainless console frame.  A number of keys flew
off the board and clattered to the floor.  Sharon repeated the action and
was rewarded as she felt the casing suddenly loosen in her hands.  She
pried at the now split housing and managed to separate the two halves.  She
set the bottom half on top of the console in front of her and quickly found
the contacts for the numeric pad enter key.
       Sharon fished in her apron pocket and removed a small chrome colored
box trailing two wire leads and a nine-volt battery.  She quickly crimped
the leads to the contacts using her teeth for pressure and saw the green
LED on the top of the box light up as the leads sensed the increased
impedance of the keyboard.  She carefully placed the box against the window
and, leaning across the vast console, proceeded to tape the box against the
window with black electrical tape.
        Jury-rigging the infrared device triggered the memories of kluging
together experiments during her graduate years.  Then it had involved
strapping together equipment and data to predict a known outcome.  Now it
involved altering the way her brain received neurotransmitter precursors
from her blood stream.  What the hell was she doing to herself?
        She let the roll of electrical tape drop from her hands and bounce
along the inclined console to the floor.  After plugging the keyboard back
into the surgery computer, Sharon turned quickly and entered the sealed
operating room.  The bright lights stunned her and she walked with
hesitation to the operating table.  The door sucked shut behind her as she
cradled the dummy head from the table in her hands.  She lifted it lightly
and set it face down on the floor.   Sharon straightened up, looked at the
back of the head for a moment and then reached back down with both hands
and carefully turned the head over, face up.
        She approached the table, leaned over it to grasp it with her hands
and then swung one leg at a time onto its heated surface.  Her face fit in
the stainless steel lattice work of braces with only minor adjustments.
        As Sharon pushed the button on the makeshift remote hidden in her
apron pocket she sensed two distinct events in the neighboring control
room.  A red pinprick of light appeared where she had taped the receiver to
the portal and a clang rang out as someone kicked or knocked the steel bar
from its low perch in the door frame.
       Anxiety rose through her strangely calm body.  What have I done?
...... Why didn't I go straight to the industrials? ......Why haven't they
stopped the surgery yet?
       The robotic arm jerked to steely life and she watched its shadow
cross the floor.  Seconds later she felt a cold sliver of metal slide over
her neck.  The euphoria that followed was incredible and ...unstoppable.

***************************


Light and sound blurrily coalesced.  Sharon looked up through the thick
water of her eyes at a small crowd of faces.  She hadn't opened her eyes,
they had already been open.
       She squinted and several faces resolved into Lane's face... and
Polsen's smirk... and that dark haired grad student from NorthWestern.  She
fixated on the student's face.  With amazing clarity she studied his cheek
bone, following it forward to his nose.  The pores of his skin were black
and wide.  The skin's sharp image seemed to magnify rapidly and she was
swept into one of the pores she saw there.  A darkness surrounded her as
she fell into the soft, warm hole.

Sharon extracted herself from the dense entangled fibers of the carpet.  As
her view of the anti-bacterial floor receded, she realized she had not been
lost at all.  Just looking a little too deep.
      "Sharon."
      She looked up from her prone position on the floor.  A brown and
battered leather shoe swam into view.  She rolled onto her back and stared
glassily at the huge standing figure and the seemingly tiny head perched on
its top.  Her eyes narrowed.
       "Lane?"
       "Sharon."  Someone else.  She propped herself up on one elbow.
Polsen was standing on her right.  The dark haired student was gone.
       "Sharon, I just wanted you to know that you succeeded in showing me
the error of my ways..."
       "I ...don't like what... hey..."
       "You're still pretty high, but I think you'll understand...I let the
operation run its course... with minor alterations."  Sharon looked around
at the still medic arm, the clinical white of the room. "You were on the
right track, you know.  Of course we already knew that endorphin precursors
were responsible for much of the memory enhancement attributed to the other
synthesized chemicals we have produced.  You were not unique in discovering
that little gem.  You also realized correctly that a body under stress
produces inordinate amounts of beta-lipotropin, the mother of all endorphin
precursors.  Good thing the beta-lipotropin secreting glands are on the
blood side of the barrier isn't it?  Just think of the uncontrollable high
that would result... fate worse than death, I suppose... but more
pleasurable.  No, the one thing you didn't think of, Sharon, was the loss
in profits if people knew they were funding research to synthesize a smart
drug that their bodies already produced an excess of.  The blood-brain
barrier was, and is, a singularity of the human endogenous system that is
ripe for exploitation.  All the drugs people...people like you... want, all
held back from them by the innocuous blood-brain barrier, nature's safety
net."
        Polsen crossed to Sharon's feet and lowered his weight onto one
large knee.
        "Your work for me did pay off though.  It seems your assumptions
about the blood-brain barrier were correct, although easily passing many
opiate-like chemicals, it actually filters out the large endorphin
precursors, preventing them from entering the brain and breaking down into
their active components... lysine, lysine, eh?...All those wonderful drugs
and nowhere to go.  Unfortunately for you, endorphins are very addictive,
no matter what you convinced yourself of.  Hard to believe isn't it?"
         Sharon felt a supportive hand on her shoulder and stiffened her
back as she realized the gesture from Lane was not empathetic.  As she
tensed, she became aware of a pinching sensation at the back of her neck.
        Polsen sensed her discomfort.  "The pressure you probably feel is
actually allowing you to assimilate this conversation."  Sharon reached
behind her head and felt a strange cold device suctioned over the plastic
nub of her neuro-tap.  "You see,  we decided that you really just wanted to
be happy rather than alert and driven. In fact, Lane and I thought you'd
rather be happy most all the time.  Your surgery program never ran, Sharon.
 I overrode the doctor with my own prescription.  Oh don't worry, the
internal end of the neural tap is still sunk into your hippocampus.... only
now the other end is permanently sutured to your circulatory system.  With
a filter of course, to let all the good stuff in and keep the bad stuff
out.  Any sign of stress and, well..."
        Sharon rocked forward and reached behind her head, now with both
hands.  Her fingers splayed uselessly at the seam of her skin and the
foreign, slippery device.
        "Oh, don't fret, Sharon.  We'll take that off for you in a
second... just think of all those opioid peptides created by your own
body's responsive glands, coursing through your veins, directly into your
brain..."  Polsen glanced over Sharon's shoulder, "Lane?"
        Lane reached down for the back of her neck.  Sharon twirled on the
floor and grabbed his descending hands, but Polsen was already at her neck.
 He pulled the clamping device from the top of her spine with a deft
motion.  Sharon's arms immediately grew lax with only a few spasms.
        Julius Polsen enfolded Sharon with his puffy arms.  "I almost
forgot... You gave me a wonderfully entrepreneurial idea.  How about a time
released chemical shunt ...a tunnel through the blood-brain barrier... much
like your ingenious aluminum capsule?  Of course, only made available for
public consumption through yours truly and associates for a low nominal
service charge...The true opiate of the masses..."
         Sharon heard the words: true and masses.... true
masses.....massive truths....mastiff tooth.....sugar roof...

*****************************


        Sharon examined the red speckled bruises on her thighs.  The light
from the overhead security lamp was dim, but she could still feel the
pinpricks that defined the damaged regions of her skin as she prodded.  She
raised her right hand and slapped it downward against the inner surface of
her right leg.  The pain only evinced a slight shuddering from her.  She
bent low over her leg to look at the minuscule beads of blood that appeared
on her reddened thigh.  The blood droplets floated towards her as the white
skin drifted away...
        Sharon saw her bloodied knee, a small knee, framed by yellow-green
grass.  She heard the rhythmic squeak of her training wheels rotating on
the upturned bicycle.  Her eyes teared and a tightness in her throat
rose...but she fought it down with an exhaled breath.  She studied the knee
as the exhausted pores welled up with tiny pools of dark blood.  Footsteps
sounded behind her and, over the roaring of her blood, she heard her father
calling her.
       "Sharon....are you okay?....everyone goes over sometime... Honey?...
 You don't look so hot...  Come on let's see what mommy can do for your
boo-boo..."

       "Dopey.  I'm tellin' ya, that's what she is... dopey..."
       "Yeah, but look't her.  She don't know what happening to her."
       "Uh-huh, but she's smilin'...She knows what she likes.  I seen the
'zact same grin on lotsa girls."
       "Ya think she's one o' them upper class tunneler's?"
       "All I know is, if she wants it, no mattah what she's flyin' on, she
wants it..."

       Sharon stumbled in front of the diner window.  She could smell the
thick spices of greasy food frying... She fell to one knee and rubbed the
back of her neck at the flaking sore that was there.  What had been there
anyway?  She scratched at it and removed another layer of annoying
epidermal.  It seemed vaguely important to remove all traces of the scar on
her neck.  Her fingernail caught underneath an edge of the scab and her
fingertip felt a fluid warmth.
        She sensed a slow panic rising in her.  She envisioned an unholy
scab lifted by her fingernail letting loose a torrent of bile liquid,
squirming with viral infection.  Her face tightened in panic and then
slowly eased into complacency.  The vision gradually metamorphosed into an
endless waterfall, pure and clear.  Her fingers played at the back of her
neck as she attempted to coerce the innocent, glinting water into beautiful
streaming sculptures of her own creation...

         She woke to rhythmic pounding of footsteps... Why did everyone on
this street march in time?  It was extremely annoying to her.  She raised
her head and remembered....Polsen... Lane... She felt a warmth come over
her, centered on the back of her neck.  Shit, here it comes again.  She
grabbed the edge of the window.  Okay, be calm, don't think about it, take
your mind off it.
         The window was full of degenerate diners, crouched in vinyl booths
over processed food plates.  She felt the rise of hunger in her stomach and
started to feel the euphoria of starvation again...Wait, she had to calm
down... better do something repetitive.  What was that old mantra Paul had
taught her? ... Laasincamprah... Laasincooptah...stop, that isn't working.
Just trace the painted letters on the window.  Trace the D, trace the I,
trace the N, slowly, not too fast or you'll get excited.  Trace the
letters, trace the E, trace the paint... when you get to the end trace it
over again... the soothing repetition will keep you calm... nice easy
tracing... over and over....
bless you, letter....trace... bless you, letter....trace... bless you,
letter....trace...
god bless these letters....

*****************************************
*****************************************
t   h   e                       e   n   d
*****************************************
*****************************************

Thought I'd better mention again that this story was written to explain the
term 'tunnel high' used in another story that is part of a hypertext
project that I was working on a while ago (it's on extended hiatus at the
moment).  The long winded ranting of Polsen at the second to last scene was
intended to spell out what a 'tunnel high' is.  The story doesn't stand as
well on its own, but I think it does all right.

Please let me know what you think... All comments are welcome and
encouraged!

--patrick.