He stared into the darkened ceiling.
The concept of “bureaucratic efficiency” had been an oxymoron since the creation of bureaucrats. His request for a separate space to simply sit and think quietly was almost unheard of in that day and time, so the agency disregarded it. Instead, he got a ship like all the others. It was therefore necessary to set the control for sleep mode, darkening the only living space in the ship, while he let his mind wander. Simply closing the eyes didn’t do it. He wasn’t sure why, but it simply worked that way. He would never have considered using the escape pod, as the ship itself was confining enough. Still, it was far better than hitching a ride with a freighter or military transport.
His lack of adventurous spirit was a major factor in his career choice and status. His intellect was unremarkable, but it was sufficient to use the spooler system. His one advantage was what he called “intuition.” By any other name, it was simply the mental trick of leaping across logical steps, even stepping outside the path somewhat. At any rate, the process was not entirely logical, but the results were sufficiently useful to give him an edge. He wasn’t sure he could teach anyone else how to do it, but that was for the neuroscience guys, and he wasn’t one of them.
As with many things, neuroscience had chased a great many false leads before settling into a fairly mature path of progress. As soon as it became possible to make cyborgs by mating computer hardware directly to the neural system, it was performed on a large number of volunteers. Everyone wanted the advantage of improved memory handling and abstract number crunching. But of course, as soon as any hardware was surgically implanted, it was already obsolete. By the time any lab could produce a working prototype, someone else had already discovered a better way to interact with the nervous system.
Then the research chased a rolling upgrade by making the linking hardware modular, but even that became obsolete all too quickly. So they had on the one hand a bunch of test subjects either stuck with unsupported hardware, or undergoing a string of repetitive surgeries. Medical science, for all its advancements, never could find a way to poke artificial holes in people without causing problems of one kind or another. The tissue eventually broke down and refused to heal any more. That, on top of all the times when the process of “welding” man and machine itself went wrong.
Adding wireless technology created a really huge mess, and was still the number one problem some two centuries later. Make the receiver chip too sensitive and people couldn’t easily shut off the mass of background noise from proliferating environmental signals. Automated filtering and range of other attenuations never quite worked. And what any good lab could do with decent intentions, a criminal lab could pervert with evil intent. So the entire human problem with addictions moved to this new wireless receiver neural implant technology, and each improvement only gave the “dope dealers” a new way to addict their victims. It became possible to stream into the mind an entire virtual existence, and the market in pre-recorded fantasy worlds was still the largest economic engine in the galaxy. Connoisseurs could discuss the fine-grained differences between the engines which competed in blending reality with fantasy, so you could be blissfully lost even while normally productive.
It made it also too easy to turn people into the most horrific killing machines. Rather early in the game, some worlds became almost uninhabitable. It helped to confuse things for Dr. Plimick’s research, because of the constant shifting alliances and battlefields, markets, and all the other manifestations of mass human madness. For all it’s good, the cyborg sciences very nearly ended the entire human race more than once. They were currently in a fairly stable and boring cycle, and he greatly preferred that sort of boredom over the alternative.
By the time he was born, Dr. Plimick was in a fairly safe environment. The huge amount of human knowledge which made up the minimum these days required at least some computer assistance, so the spooling system came into use. It was simply a very minimal, very weak wireless receptor which allowed a fairly conservative and routine transfer of actual knowledge into the brain. It did so with a minimum of disturbance to the psyche, and by its very limitations prevented anyone hijacking his mind, though it could hardly help him verify what he was being fed. That was the ancient ways of academia, something which thankfully never died out.
But it was often entirely too objective and factual, and seldom gave meaning to all the mass of data. The very safety of the system for learning also made it essentially lifeless. He would have been the same as anyone else that way, but one day during a localized power outage which hit in mid-stream of a spool, he found his brain went right on as if the data was being fed. Having no actual input, there was something which kept processing — not exactly synthesizing and extrapolating, but pulling sense from some “outside” source which was actually inside. Most importantly, it added a coloration, a value and a sense of demand which mere spooling data didn’t have. He had no words to explain it, so he kept it to himself. Instead, he tested it carefully, and found it worked best when he was away from other people, and in quiet, low-light settings. It didn’t always come to full blown life, but it came most reliably in such an environment.
About the only time he could reasonably do that in the hurry-hurry, high efficiency culture around him was during those times when most people were forced to use the pocket spoolers. One day, he simply didn’t turn it on, but held it in the usual place so no one would notice he was not spooling, but doing something else with his brain time. Eventually, he would go to a spooling booth and simply keep the transmitter just outside the range of his receiver implant. It was this stepping outside, so very carefully, the mainstream of his academic world which gave him the edge among the mass, among whom all were accelerated by spooling to the point only a rare few could distinguish themselves. When others wasted their time with entertainment spooling, he was doing that other thing, which is how he found himself in competitive standing for one of the survey missions.
When he spooled the prospectus listing of what was known or guessed about these “lost” worlds, one jumped out at him. It was the first time he could recall having such a reaction during spooling. Normally, just about everything which wasn’t automated routine physical behavior, or linked to that behavior, was almost smothered by the process of spooling data into his receiver. But that other hidden process seemed to have been waiting in the background, like a trap set for a specific prey, and it sprang on the one, oldest set of data. But its age was not what called up that other process. It was clearly something germane to the way the process worked itself, because nothing he could identify consciously made it all that special. Yet his intuition shouted this was what he had been waiting for, even though he never knew he was waiting for anything at all.
He was hoping that process would activate, giving him some new perspective, during this quiet time in the ship before the alarms notified him it was cycling off the anchor point. He knew it had, but this was the first time he sensed it without any obvious signs in his conscious mind.
