[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Observe it without trying to process it. Get out of your head, because your
head is damn-fool busy. Let everything come, let it pass, let the changes
happen.
The seconds pass, sixty seconds to a minute. What you are is just what you
are, not what you have to be.
There's no linear unfolding. With a link-seed, input comes to your brain in
gestalt, an instantaneous neural activation matrix: not this-then-that, but a
billion neuron clusters simultaneously receiving their piece of the whole, a
single gush of comprehension. Everything all at once.
On the third day ofmüshor, third day of delirium, I nearly lost my grip.
Battered weary by emotions, delusions, physical jiggery-pokery (itches,
stabbing pains, dead numbness), wanting to shout, "Stop, leave me be, let me
rest!"... my mind suddenly filled with the image of a peacock's tail. Green
and gold and purple and blue, a hundred eyes wide-open, watching me with all
the calm in the universe. Colors fanned over every grain of my vision; I
couldn't feel my body, no artificial prod to laugh or cry, nothing in me but
the sight of that tail, reaching high as the stars and low as the planet's
core, filling my thoughts, my world.
And the sound of it: feathers rattling, demanding attention. Look at me.Look
at me.
Placid. Even affectionate.
I don't know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually
fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright
kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)... but I could handle the
new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I'd passed
through the center ofmüshor and was coming out the other side.
At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a
peacock's tail. I didn't have long to ponder the question too many distracting
fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the
Page 31
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened
to seize on as a life preserver.
I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.
At the end ofmüshor, my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own
juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a
pummeling-hard work out.
But different. Transformed.
Link-seeds do more than just provide passive information from the world-soul.
More even than giving your senses a friendly boost and speeding your reflexes
cat-nimble. Those are minor perks, side effects of having new, electron-fast
pathways routed through your brain.
Here's the thing: a link-seed destroys your capacity to ignore.
As simple as that. As devastating too.
That's why you become a new person. Why the Vigil works, without turning
petty or abusing its power.
When I download information from the world-soul now, it becomes a direct part
of me. Unfiltered. I can't skip past any parts that jar with my vision of the
universe. I can't discard facts I'd prefer not to know. They're all
incorporated, instantly-directly-viscerally, into what I am. Into the physical
structure of my brain. The primal configuration matrix.
Unlike bits of info I read or hear through conversation, a direct linkload is
unmediated. Raw. Undeniably present. Unavoidably transformative.
I can't pretend new data doesn't exist it's already changed me. It's molded
my thoughts, reweighted my synapses, overwritten whatever I was before. I
can't evenwant to ignore the input, because it's already there.
No sublimation. No turning a blind eye to unlikable facts. The link-seed left
me wide-open. Vulnerable to storms and stars.
And that openness gushed over into the rest of my life. Not just with dry
downloads from the datasphere, but things that were already in my brain. I
couldn't dismiss them for my own smug convenience. I couldn't look away. Which
is the very definition of a proctor: someone who doesn't/won't/can't look
away. Someone immune to the blind wishful thinking that infects all politics
like the clap. Someone who doesn't just call a spade a spade, but whosees the
damned spade is a spade, without thinking maybe it could turn into a backhoe
with the right tax incentives.
It's not virtue or saintliness; it's just the way my new brain works. Of
course, there are still thresholds I'm not mesmerized by every speck of dust
that drifts past my eye, nor do I think deeply over every word and inflection
that reaches my ear.
But... I no longer ignore the obvious. I'm mentally, physically, incapable of
that. Selective inattention is for sissies.
I shiver brain-naked in the data flow. Aware to my very gut that actions have
consequences, and unable to dupe myself otherwise.
A member of the Vigil.
Page 32
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
THE PEACOCK'S TAIL
The Vigil left me two weeks free aftermüshor. Recovery time. Rearrangement
time. A chance to clear the decks.
I no longer needed the electronic nurse perched over me, but data tumor was
still a possibility. A white-knuckled looming terror if the truth be told. And
data tumor was just the messiest way I could stop being me; there were other
more subtle ways the link-seed could wipe out the Faye Smallwood I'd known.
Facts and memes infecting my unprotected brain. Long-loved perceptions swept
away, erased by casual input... because I deep-down believed I was so full of
crap, when pure truths started coming in, not a drop of the old Faye would be
able to stand up for itself. Of course, I'd fretted over the same dreads
before getting the link-seed... but my old brain could repress the fear,
pretend things wouldn't be so bad. I could watch the doc-chip of that
data-tumor victim spewing blood out his eyes, and I could say, "He must have
been a weak-willed mook." Ignoring that the dead man had slaved through the
same Vigil training I had, and passed the same tests to prove he was ready for
a link-seed.
But now that I'd gone throughmüshor... my altered brain had lost the knack of
shying away from uncomfortable truths. And I was scared, scared, scared.
The day I came back from the Proving Center, Angle's son Shaw asked me to do
a trick to show off what the new Mom-Faye could do, tell what the weather was
like right now in Comfort Bight. (The biggest city on Demoth, ten thousand
klicks to the southwest, sprawled around the mouth of the only major river
running through the Ragged Desert.)
Shaw was just curious, an eight-year-old boy making a let's-see request...
but I broke down in flash-flood tears. I didn't want to let anything into my
brain unsupervised, even a simple "Force one sandstorm, toxicity B, expected
duration two hours..."
Uh-oh.
The weather report had seeped in from the world-soul without me consciously
asking for it. My bout of the weeps got swallowed by cold, cold terror. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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Observe it without trying to process it. Get out of your head, because your
head is damn-fool busy. Let everything come, let it pass, let the changes
happen.
The seconds pass, sixty seconds to a minute. What you are is just what you
are, not what you have to be.
There's no linear unfolding. With a link-seed, input comes to your brain in
gestalt, an instantaneous neural activation matrix: not this-then-that, but a
billion neuron clusters simultaneously receiving their piece of the whole, a
single gush of comprehension. Everything all at once.
On the third day ofmüshor, third day of delirium, I nearly lost my grip.
Battered weary by emotions, delusions, physical jiggery-pokery (itches,
stabbing pains, dead numbness), wanting to shout, "Stop, leave me be, let me
rest!"... my mind suddenly filled with the image of a peacock's tail. Green
and gold and purple and blue, a hundred eyes wide-open, watching me with all
the calm in the universe. Colors fanned over every grain of my vision; I
couldn't feel my body, no artificial prod to laugh or cry, nothing in me but
the sight of that tail, reaching high as the stars and low as the planet's
core, filling my thoughts, my world.
And the sound of it: feathers rattling, demanding attention. Look at me.Look
at me.
Placid. Even affectionate.
I don't know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually
fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright
kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)... but I could handle the
new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I'd passed
through the center ofmüshor and was coming out the other side.
At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a
peacock's tail. I didn't have long to ponder the question too many distracting
fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the
Page 31
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened
to seize on as a life preserver.
I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.
At the end ofmüshor, my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own
juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a
pummeling-hard work out.
But different. Transformed.
Link-seeds do more than just provide passive information from the world-soul.
More even than giving your senses a friendly boost and speeding your reflexes
cat-nimble. Those are minor perks, side effects of having new, electron-fast
pathways routed through your brain.
Here's the thing: a link-seed destroys your capacity to ignore.
As simple as that. As devastating too.
That's why you become a new person. Why the Vigil works, without turning
petty or abusing its power.
When I download information from the world-soul now, it becomes a direct part
of me. Unfiltered. I can't skip past any parts that jar with my vision of the
universe. I can't discard facts I'd prefer not to know. They're all
incorporated, instantly-directly-viscerally, into what I am. Into the physical
structure of my brain. The primal configuration matrix.
Unlike bits of info I read or hear through conversation, a direct linkload is
unmediated. Raw. Undeniably present. Unavoidably transformative.
I can't pretend new data doesn't exist it's already changed me. It's molded
my thoughts, reweighted my synapses, overwritten whatever I was before. I
can't evenwant to ignore the input, because it's already there.
No sublimation. No turning a blind eye to unlikable facts. The link-seed left
me wide-open. Vulnerable to storms and stars.
And that openness gushed over into the rest of my life. Not just with dry
downloads from the datasphere, but things that were already in my brain. I
couldn't dismiss them for my own smug convenience. I couldn't look away. Which
is the very definition of a proctor: someone who doesn't/won't/can't look
away. Someone immune to the blind wishful thinking that infects all politics
like the clap. Someone who doesn't just call a spade a spade, but whosees the
damned spade is a spade, without thinking maybe it could turn into a backhoe
with the right tax incentives.
It's not virtue or saintliness; it's just the way my new brain works. Of
course, there are still thresholds I'm not mesmerized by every speck of dust
that drifts past my eye, nor do I think deeply over every word and inflection
that reaches my ear.
But... I no longer ignore the obvious. I'm mentally, physically, incapable of
that. Selective inattention is for sissies.
I shiver brain-naked in the data flow. Aware to my very gut that actions have
consequences, and unable to dupe myself otherwise.
A member of the Vigil.
Page 32
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
THE PEACOCK'S TAIL
The Vigil left me two weeks free aftermüshor. Recovery time. Rearrangement
time. A chance to clear the decks.
I no longer needed the electronic nurse perched over me, but data tumor was
still a possibility. A white-knuckled looming terror if the truth be told. And
data tumor was just the messiest way I could stop being me; there were other
more subtle ways the link-seed could wipe out the Faye Smallwood I'd known.
Facts and memes infecting my unprotected brain. Long-loved perceptions swept
away, erased by casual input... because I deep-down believed I was so full of
crap, when pure truths started coming in, not a drop of the old Faye would be
able to stand up for itself. Of course, I'd fretted over the same dreads
before getting the link-seed... but my old brain could repress the fear,
pretend things wouldn't be so bad. I could watch the doc-chip of that
data-tumor victim spewing blood out his eyes, and I could say, "He must have
been a weak-willed mook." Ignoring that the dead man had slaved through the
same Vigil training I had, and passed the same tests to prove he was ready for
a link-seed.
But now that I'd gone throughmüshor... my altered brain had lost the knack of
shying away from uncomfortable truths. And I was scared, scared, scared.
The day I came back from the Proving Center, Angle's son Shaw asked me to do
a trick to show off what the new Mom-Faye could do, tell what the weather was
like right now in Comfort Bight. (The biggest city on Demoth, ten thousand
klicks to the southwest, sprawled around the mouth of the only major river
running through the Ragged Desert.)
Shaw was just curious, an eight-year-old boy making a let's-see request...
but I broke down in flash-flood tears. I didn't want to let anything into my
brain unsupervised, even a simple "Force one sandstorm, toxicity B, expected
duration two hours..."
Uh-oh.
The weather report had seeped in from the world-soul without me consciously
asking for it. My bout of the weeps got swallowed by cold, cold terror. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]