Bald Locust has also used this story beginning at The Interactive Science Ficion website
Every human baby is now implanted with a tiny computer, which works with and enhances the child's brain. School is no longer necessary. Now, all children need to do is to download the information they need through their implanted computers.
With the invention of brain implanted computers came the new communication medium known as the Mindnet. Through the Mindnet, implanted humans can communicate with each other "telepathically" using radio transmitters and receivers in their implants. People far apart can meet in virtual reality by simply wishing it to be so.
With this huge breakthrough came tremendous danger, when the first "brain virus" was discovered on the Mindnet. Someone on the Mindnet is creating and transmitting computer viruses which do not only infect computer implants, but also the human brain, causing loss of memory, insanity, or worse.
My name is Victor Roth, I am a Mindnet policeman who's job is to prevent
abuse of the Mindnet and ensure the safety of it's users. I have been
assigned the task of finding the "brainbomber", in the real world or in
the cyber world, and bringing him to justice. This is my story.
--Bald Locust (draco15@geocities.com)
I guess this all started when my parents decided to have a child, because I have no implant, the precinct wanted an untainted source to solve thier biggest case, and I, Victor, was the only one. When I was born , my parents chose not to have the Mindnet computer implanted into my cerebellum, afraid for my safety and sanity in the future. They based this decision on past human history.
The human race at the end of the twentieth century had developed a more primitive form of Mindnet, called the internet, which brought the same basic operations to the entire world. I was a revolutionary new way of communicating, until terrorists began to destroy the economy and bend the world powers to their will. Computer viruses and wrong information fed into the internet by these terrorist were the same things that drove my parents to make there decision.
Those who don’t have the computer implants are called noncomps by those who believe that they are superior in every way with the artificial augmentations. It wasn’t till the late 2050’s when the world government laid to rest all fears of terrorist acts using Mindnet, and, of course my parents had another child, which they decided to have the computer implanted in. At this point I was five years old, and already beginning to understand the ramifications of my parents decision, of not to put in the implant, on my life.
I had been opposed to getting the computer implanted when I came an adult, to prove to myself and to others that noncomps, were just as able, as comps. To prove my point even more, I joined the world police force. I was rather shocked one morning when I reported for my patrol assignment, when the captain called me into her office. I had been a lieutenant for nearly seven years, when the force promoted me to detective. I was rather cautious of accepting the promotion, and I had every right to be. In order for me to accept the new rank, I had to get a Mindnet computer implant.
I wasn’t thrilled with this option, I carefully weighed the pro’s and con’s as one does when stuck in situations such as this. It did pay better and it would finally get me into more interesting work other than settling the common domestic dispute. The captain told me to take my time, at the end of the patrol that same day, I had made up my mind. I nervously walked into her office and said yes.
The procedure was rather quick and with only minimal amount danger to older patients, such as myself. The R.N. that assisted with the operation led me to the soft chair in the operating room. A small piece of machinery was attached to the ceiling directly above the chair. A small sharp tube was at the end of a arm that was motorized. She helped me into the chair and picked up a syringe. She pressed it against my arm and depressed the button that allowed the anesthetic to be pushed into my bloodstream. It acted very quickly and my vision blurred, then darkness.
I came to, in a hospital room. I walked to the window on the far end of the room in a complete daze. It was dark outside, except for the city lights on the horizon. I must have stood there for hours, trying to remember what it was that had put me into a hospital. It was difficult to assimilate all the information and background noise flowing through my implant. The implant! I remember now. I turned away from the window and found a sink with a mirror above it. Leaning in close, I pushed my hair away from my forehead to reveal the large scab from where the tube entered my head.
I woke up again, back in my bed. I must have fallen asleep again. This time, sunlight was streaming through my window, an nurse was there, laying my civvies across the back of the chair. A short conversation with her, revealed that I had been in and out of consciousness for nearly three days, and that today was my last day in the hospital. There was a link terminal on a table, I accessed the basic operational information in my computer on how to use the transmitter, and I decided to see what all the hype was about. In the virtual link, I found a news feed, and discovered that the “brain virus” was infecting more and more comps each week. The amount infected was still small, but was becoming a huge threat. I deactivated the link terminal and got dressed, remembering the whole reason why I needed this operation.
I returned to the precinct. The captain, had obviously been apprised of my condition, because she was waiting for me at my new desk with a file chip in her hand. It contained all the known information about the unsolvable “brainbomber” case.
My first case, was where the file left off, on Los Angeles Island...
--Kimura1@aol.com
Having not quite recovered from the implant, I still needed more sleep than usual and found myself dozing off several times during the next morning's flight to southern California. The doctor had warned me that as my brain adjusted to the mindnet connection, I would experience discomfort. This was an extreme understatement. In my dreams, thousands of voices shouted at me in an endless roar as multitudes of people trampled through my skull. I woke up terrified and in pain. I attempted to practice using the implant, but this proved more complicated than I ever imagined. Children raised with the connection mastered it without trying, but as an untrained adult the process of receiving and transmitting information confused and frustrated me to no end.
I distracted myself from the stabbing pain in my head by concentrating on the view from the plane. We passed over the Mojave desert and started downward as we approached the Los Angeles gulf. Rising ocean levels and the great quake of '67 had isolated a large stretch of California's coast from the mainland. In the back of my consciousness, voices from the implant babbled incoherently. I forced myself to ignore them.
Having landed, I took a transport from the airport to Beverly Hills. The daughter of the famous holoactor Darius Mills had been driven into insanity by the virus. I needed to trace the source from which she had recieved it.
--Argus Skyhawk
For the time being we Isolated Darius Mills from the rest of Mindnet in a portable Isolation chamber the precinct was lucky enough to afford, just in case this wasn't just a random hit.
Tracing the connection Mills' daughter had made before contracting the debilitating virus was no easy task, we mainly got our answers from the mindnet relay stations nearby. When Mills' daughter Sylvia would speak it would be nonsense, then in bursts. She would blurt out names that her father certainly never heard of. The names could be years old or simply days old, but for now there were clues along with the mindnet relay logs.
Darius is becoming impatient in the chamber, we keep telling him it's for his own safety but he doesn't believe us.
Just as I was walking out of the Isolation chamber after I tried to reason
with Darius, I noticed through the window a strange vehicle, one that wasn't
authorized to enter the Darius estate.
--B_Sisko
I did a quick--mind bogglingly swift for a noncomp!--check of my files
and traced the ownership of the car to Sylvia's best friend, an
entertainer by the name of Vita Hershey, one of the last people Sylvia
had been in contact with before being struck by the virus.
Understandably, I decided to follow the lead.
--Ruv Roo
Darius walked up to me and said, "Look, Detective Roth, I've spoken with our psychiatrist about the Isolation Chamber. He says you don't need to hold my daughter, and I agree. He says a purely psychological virus only spreads where it's invited -- you have to choose to accept it at some level, and I'll be damned I ever choose to go insane."
I held up my hand, "Mr. Mills, Sylvia will be released under doctor care as soon as we've ruled out the possibility of a biological agent. Now what can you tell me about Vita Hershey?"
"Ha! What a worthless human being...", Darius began in disgust.
"Just the facts, Mr. Mills."
Darius paused, sighed and tiredly looked around for a chair. "I'm sorry. I've been up all night with this thing." He rubbed his eyes and leaned back, absently rubbing the stubble on his chin.
"Vita has one thing going for her, she's charming and I mean that literally: she has a highly developed skill for manipulating other people. Sylvia met Vita about a year ago in an antique bookshop, the one near the pier in Santa Monica. Vita shares my daughter's love of old books.
"On the minus side, Vita is unemployed, unemployable and is at present living in my home. She comes from a decent family back East but nothing seems to motivate her except the promise of something for nothing.
"Detective Roth, I'm an actor so I make it my business to know how people work. I collect personality profiles like some people collect butterflies, and I can tell you Vita is one interesting specimen.
"Her mind is unusual. She seems to have an odd compulsion that drives her to veer towards the truth but always miss the point. It's uncanny. With Vita, two plus two equals three one moment, five the next, anything BUT four. I think she downloaded her education from Berkeley."
"Mr. Mills, I'd like to talk with Ms. Hershey if she's in," I said.
"No problem. She's probably out by the pool reading "Siddhartha" or
some fool thing."
-- chrispt@hotmail.com
I found Vita exactly where Mills had said I would. She was relaxing in a lounge chair beside the pond-shaped pool, her tanned body almost exotic in an apricot swim suit. I frowned inwardly at Darius' s description of the entertainer as "unemployable". Anyone with a figure like that was certainly employable in MY book.
She looked up at my approach, her eyes shielded by the rayban glasses she wore.
"Ms. Hershey?" I inquired flashing her my identicard, "I'd like to question you about the present condition of Sylvia Mills."
"Sylvia?" She said, slowly, lazily. "What could I possibly know about Sylvia?" She smiled , her teeth glinting in the sun. What else had Darius said? CHARMING?
"You were the last person to speak with her, before her unfortunate--er--illness. "
Vita removed her glasses, revealing two very swollen and
blackened eyes, marring an otherwise drop-dead georgeous face.
"It was an--interesting--encounter." she remarked' still in her
lazy drawl.
--Ruv Roo, Teri
Just as I was about to ask Vita what happended to her face, I recieved a Mindnet Comm Call Request from the precint. I had been little worried considering the investigation I'm on, and how new the Mindnet implant was too me. I remembered a feature in mindnet that the nurse taught me during my stay at the hospital was to request a verification password that the precint only knew.
"Vita, hold on one second" I told vita. Then I walked a bit and armed the request verification password feature. It had been the precint. They let me know that they Caught a Mindnet User cloning Mindnet Indentity Records that each mindnet user sends out in each communication, the mindnet indentity records are similar to Celluar Phone indentity but siginificantly more advanced and has several security lockouts that this person managed to get by, which after I heard that most certainly complacated things. Then I rembered in the past that Celluar Communication devices were being cloned at emormous rates causing a communication nightmare and that was now the reason for the security lockouts, but this was the first time we had caught a person cloning mindnet. Now I wondered whoever did this maybe set up Vita Hershey, or not.
I decided to talk to Vita under the assumption that she could have done
it and not let her on to my knowledge of the mindnet cloning.
--Falbe
"Interesting?" I repeated, shocked by her appearance. "Please elaborate"
Ms.Hershey seemed about to answer, then her beautiful but disfigured brow puckered. "I--that is---I seem to have forgotten what I was about to say.....Who did you say you were?"
I could feel my face drain, and I had to force myself not to back
away, the implant in my brain screaming the symptoms of the virus at me.
MEMORY LOSS!!! Was
Vita Hersey infected also???
--IrulanAtreides
I was getting the same message in many forms. I heard it, saw it, and my whole body felt it as subvocal vibrations. I read the words etched in red laser light on the back of my retina... "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" I heard a vacant voice asking, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" My whole tactile sensorium was stimulated with a the rumbling words, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?".
"What is the sound... what is... sound... what is... what...".
And then there was silence, a silence so complete that it seemed to exclude even the possibility of sound like being in a bell jar after the air had been pumped out. Then nothing.
"Oh, so you've decide to rejoin us.", a familiar voice said.
I opened my eyes to see Darius Mills and the gardener looking down at me. I felt the warm pavement on my back and my head hurt like hell. "What happened?", I said.
"Good question. I was going to ask you the same thing.", said Mills.
I queried my implant computer and got no response, it was down.
Apparently the dead-man switch kicked in. I had it set up so that
I would have to send it a coherent sentence every five minutes or
it would shut itself down, taking me offline.
Chris and Falbe submitted sections of this story about the same time. I've used Chris' because it arrived first, but you can also read Falbe's alternate addition.
--chrispt@hotmail.com
It took several more days for me to fully recover. What turned out to be a simple implant rejection was finally under control. The doctors encouraged me to use the interface, but I refused. Why chance fate. As long as I didn’t use it, I was back to my old self. The precinct was anxious for me to make some progress, so I tried to get back to work.
A few strings were pulled, and we got access to Mindnet’s internal project reports. I was going over them when Deaver walked in to my office. He was over 6 feet tall and handsome, a problem it turns out.
"Sir, we’ve completed our preliminary tests. At least one NSA tester may have uplinked," he reported.
"And why exactly are they limited to the test domain?"
"Aside from Mindnet’s testing protocols, it's standard corporate policy."
"You said ‘May have,'" I responded curiously.
"Well... one of the simulations showed an anomaly, but only one out of 200."
"Fine, reset the counter to 2000 and rerun it", I responded quickly.
"Why? The results'll be the same?"
"That’s what I’m afraid of".
"What do you mean?", he paused a second. "What are you looking for?"
"An oxymoron", I said proudly.
"Oxymoron?"
"Just run the test."
"Okay, 10 aberrations out of 2000. What do you think it means?", Deaver asked.
"Anomalies aren’t consistent".
"Sure they are. Chaotic systems...?"
"You just made my case; Mindnet is buggy or worse. The integrated AI may be better than originally intended. Even if it's flat, we can’t base our entire society on it."
"Victor, the system was tested for years. As long as the risks are acceptable...".
I interrupted, "Yes, and who decides what’s acceptable, 1 infection out of 10,000, 1 out of 1,000,000. What? You sound like a Mindnet spokesperson. Oh, that's right you were implanted at birth... sorry. But, the whole thing reminds me of when utility companies had a monopoly. With no competition, conglomerates become arrogant. The majority should decide things like available services and failure stats. Things haven’t really changed that much since our grand-parent's time."
"Victor, we are a capitalistic society too."
"Believe me, I know. After reading some of the court-ordered Mindnet documents, I found out they were testing an upgrade... been in the works for some time, doesn’t say whether the code was designed before the virus."
"Maybe the upgrade was an attempt to purge the virus risk."
"Perhaps. They also use a separate network, but it doesn’t say if any testers have been infected. We need to talk with Mindnet's project manager in charge of the upgrade. See if you can set it up."
"Okay", Deaver responded.
--Michael Walker
The Hours around the Mindnet rejection were a blurr. I started walking down the hall to get a bite to eat. Then images flashed before me. Then the blurr began to clear. I remembered where I was when I blacked out; I was at the pool going to talk to Vita around 15:00, but the reports say I was found at the Old Transit Station at 18:50. I started worrying and I started feeling like I needed to account for the lost time and maybe it had bearings in the case. I made a trip to the hospitial and asked the doctor what situations cause an implant rejection, and a few other questions pretaining to the subject. I tried accessing my investigation logs to find that the password had been changed.
I went back to see if Deaver made any progress, but I wasn't about to
stop my personal investigation of my whereabouts. During 3 hours and
50 minutes I was missing.
--Falbe
Long after Deaver left I sat mulling over the case. The sun went down, the city lights came on but I just sat at my desk staring out the window.
I'm a cop. Catching criminals is my job. But right now there didn't seem to be any.
If Deaver was right then the mental virus phenomenon was traceable to the nature of the MindNet itself, a structural error rather than a criminal act. That would take me out of the picture -- no crime, no criminal; no criminal, no cop; no cop, no Story #9 and that was unthinkable.
But there were a few things that didn't add up. If you step back and look at MindNet as a whole you see two major parts, MIND and NET.
Deavers' focus was on the network, the technical side but the network is just a medium of communication, essentially a formal element like a wire or a piece of paper without words on it. And everyone knows that the medium is not the message, it's just how you convey the message from one person to another.
In other words, the network provides the FORM of the communication but it doesn't determine the CONTENT.
Which leaves the other major component of the MindNet system: MIND.
"So what do I, a beat cop, know about mental matters?", I said out loud. To pursue the mental angle I needed a guide who knew the territory.
I switched on my implant computer and called up the search engine.
"KEYWORD SEARCH: Please submit your key words.", said the computer.
"Psychology, philosophy, conceptual virus, and specialist", I said.
"Are you looking for a psycho-epistemologist?", asked the computer.
"Say what?", I said.
The computer was silent for quite a while. Finally it said, "Psycho-epistemology is the science concerned with how humans acquire and process knowledge. Are you looking for a specialist in this area?"
I said 'yes' and there appeared a list of five names.
A quick background search of the candidates yeilded a single individual with everything I was looking for, an Austrian named Dr. Code...
...the lovely and enigmatic Dr. Bianca Code.
--chrispt@hotmail.com
"Place a Communication to Dr. Bianca Code," I asked.
"Dr. Bianca Code's implant is currently offline," the computer replied.
"Did Dr. Bianca Code leave a message?" I asked.
"Yes, do you wish to access?" the computer replied.
"Yes," I replied.
--Falbe
Continue on to Page Two.
