John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Jerome’s chip communicated with his brain via an interface of nano-print configured rhodopsin protein; the ribosomes borrowing neurohumoral transmitters from the brain’s blood supply, re-ordering the transmitters so that they carried a programmed pattern of ion releases for transmission across synaptic gaps to the brain’s neuronal dendrites; the chip using magnetic resonance holography to collate with brain-stored memories and psychological trends. Declaiming to itself the mythology of the brain; reenacting on its silicon stage the Legends of his subjective world history.

Jerome closed his eyes and looked into the back of his eyelids. The digital read-out was printed in luminous green across the darkness. He focused on the cursor, concentrated so it moved up to ACCESS. He subverbalized, “Open frequency.” The chip heard his practiced subverbalization, and numbers appeared on the back of his eyelids: 63391212.70. He read them out to the others and they picked up his frequency. Almost choking on the word, knowing what it would bring, he told the chip: “Open.”

It opened to the link. He’d only done it once before. It was illegal, and he was secretly glad it was illegal because it scared him. “They’re holding the Plateau back,” his brain-chip wholesaler had told him, “because they’re scared of what worldwide electronic telepathy might bring down on them. Like, everyone will collate information, use it to see through the bastards’ game, throw the assbites out of office.”

Maybe that was the real reason. It was something the power brokers couldn’t control. But there were other reasons.

Reasons like a strikingly legitimate fear of people going mad.

All Jerome and the others wanted was a sharing of processing capabilities. Collaborative calculation. But the chips weren’t designed to filter out the irrelevant input before it reached the user’s cognition level. Before the chip had done its filtering, the two poles of the link—Jerome and Jessie—would each see the swarming hive of the other’s total consciousness. Would see how the other perceived themselves to be, and then objectively, as they really were.

He saw Jessie as a grid and as a holographic entity. He braced himself and the holograph came at him, an abstract tarantula of computer-generated color and line, scrambling down over him… and for an instant it crouched in the seat of his consciousness: Jessie. Jesus Chaco.

Jessie was a family man. He was a patriarch, a protector of his wife and six kids (six kids!) and his widowed sister’s four kids and of the poor children of his barrio. He was a muddied painting of his father, who had fled the social forest fire of Mexico’s civil war between the drug cartels and the government, spiriting his capital to Los Angeles where he’d sown it into the black market. Jessie’s father had been killed defending territory from the Russian-American mob; Jessie compromised with the mob to save his father’s business, and loathed himself for it. Wanted to kill their bosses; had to work side by side with them. Perceived his wife as a functional pet, an object of adoration who was the very apotheosis of her fixed role. To imagine her doing other than child-rearing and keeping house would be to imagine the sun become a snowball, the moon become a monkey. Jessie’s family insistently clung to the old, outdated roles.

And Jerome glimpsed Jessie’s undersides; Jesus Chaco’s self-image with its outsized penis and impossibly spreading shoulders, sitting in a perfect and shining cherry automobile, always the newest and most luxurious model, the automotive throne from which he surveyed his kingdom. Jerome saw guns emerging from the grille of the car to splash Jessie’s enemies apart with his unceasing ammunition… It was a Robert Williams cartoon capering at the heart of Jessie’s unconscious… Jessie saw himself as Jerome saw him; the electronic mirrors reflecting one another. Jessie cringed.

Jerome saw himself then, reflected back from Jessie.

He saw Jerome-X on a video screen with lousy vertical hold; wobbling, trying to arrange its pixels firmly and losing them. A figure of mewling inconsequence; a brief flow of electrons that might diverge left or right like spray from a water hose depressed with the thumb. Raised in a high-security condo village, protected by cameras and computer signals to private security thugs; raised in a media-windowed womb, with computers and vids and a thousand varieties of video games; shaped by TV and fantasy rental; sexuality imprinted by sneaking his parents’ badly hidden cache of brainsex files. And in stations from around the world, seeing the same StarFaces appear on channel after channel as the star’s fame spread like a stain across the frequency bands. Seeing the Star’s World Self crystallizing; the media figure coming into definition against the backdrop of media competition, becoming real in this electronic collective unconscious.

Becoming real, himself, in his own mind, simply because he’d appeared on a few thousand screens, through video tagging, transer graffiti. Growing up with a sense that media events were real and personal events were not. Anything that didn’t happen on the Grid didn’t happen. Even as he hated conventional programming, even as he regarded it as the cud of ruminants, still the Grid and TV and vids defined his sense of personal unreality; and left him unfinished.

Jerome saw Jerome: perceiving himself unreal. Jerome: scanning a transer, creating a presence via video graffiti. Thinking he was doing it for reasons of radical statement. Seeing, now, that he was doing it to make himself feel substantial, to superimpose himself on the Media Grid…

And then Eddie’s link was there, Eddie’s computer model sliding down over Jerome like a mudslide. Eddie seeing himself as a Legendary Wanderer, a rebel, a homemade mystic; his fantasy parting to reveal an anal-expulsive sociopath; a whiner perpetually scanning for someone to blame for his sour luck.

Suddenly Bones tumbled into the link; a complex worldview that was a sort of streetside sociobiology, mitigated by a loyalty to friends, a mystical faith in brain chips and amphetamines. His underside a masochistic dwarf, the troll of self-doubt, lacerating itself with guilt.

And then Swish, a woman with an unsightly growth, errant glands that were like tumors in her, something other people called ‘testicles.’ Perpetually hungry for the means to dampen the pain of an infinite self-derision that mimicked her father’s utter rejection of her. A mystical faith in synthetic morphine.

…Jerome mentally reeling with disorientation, seeing the others as a network of distorted self-images, caricatures of grotesque ambitions. Beyond them he glimpsed another realm through a break in the psychic clouds: the Plateau, the whispering plane of brain chips linked on forbidden frequencies, an electronic haven for doing deals unseen by cops; a Plateau prowled only by the exquisitely ruthless; a vista of enormous challenges and inconceivable risks and always the potential for getting lost, for madness. A place roamed by the wolves of wetware.

There was a siren quiver from that place, a soundless howling, pulling at them… drawing them in…

“ Uh-uh, wolflost, pross,” Bones said, maybe aloud or maybe through the chips. Translated from chip shorthand, those two syllables meant. “Stay away from the Plateau, or we get sucked into it, we lose our focus. Concentrate on parallel processing function.”

Jerome looked behind his eyelids, sorted through the files. He moved the cursor down…

Suddenly, it was there. The group-thinking capacity looming above them, a sentient skyscraper. They all felt a rush of megalomaniacal pleasure in identifying with it; with a towering edifice of Mind. Five chips became One.