Inform. Addicts Read online

  “The NAR has the perfect propaganda machine.” Apsu smiled at his friends mischievously. “I keep telling you all, we can learn from this situation and pull the strings one day.”

  “Who cares?” Niklas Kato, Apsu’s oldest friend, continued to eat the fish in his bento box with an unimpressed expression on his face.

  “Do you want to live like sheep the rest of your lives?” Apsu asked this with a feigned smile, but he really felt disturbed by his friends’ disinterest in his hobby. “Look at us sitting here, being forced to attend school when close to thirty percent of the student body has nanotube matrix implants. We could easily learn at home, but noooo, adults don’t trust us to receive an education remotely.”

  “I’m more interested in the happiness of each moment of my life than regulating those belonging to other people,” Eriko said as she grasped Apsu’s hand beneath the table. “You’ve been downloading so much material lately, and it worries me. Part of the reason the human mind works so well is the capacity to forget. Artificial brain technology is relatively new.” She looked at his swollen head with pity rather than disgust. “Perhaps you should be a bit more…conservative in your data intake.”

  “Well, I won’t live forever.” Apsu stared at his girlfriend from beneath knit brows. “I’ve got to work now if I want to create the best future for us.”

  “Come on man, every young boy dreams of ruling the world at some point in his life. Then he outgrows this impulse and realizes that power demands familial connections.” Niklas scarfed down more food. “It has been the same way in every nation during every epoch from the beginning of time. Focus on what you can achieve and not what you want to gain.”

  “You know,” Apsu smiled at his friend, “I’ll remember you buddy when I finally run this stupid ball of mud.”

  “If that ever happens, you need to make a law against being a hikikomori.” Eriko sighed.

  “How’s your brother doing?” Niklas asked cautiously.

  “He refuses to answer the door when I ring.” Eriko seemed to be tearing up, and she quickly wiped a drop of the shameful substance from her eye in an obvious attempt to appear strong.

  “Does he make much money publishing books on Oiorpata, or do your parents still support him?” Niklas asked.

  “How would I know if he makes money?” Eriko replied sadly. “He doesn’t have a nanotube matrix, so we can’t even call each other. I don’t know how to use a phone.”

  “See, case in point.” Apsu grinned encouragingly. “When I’m in power, your brother will have all the support he needs.”

  Niklas put his chopsticks down forcefully and left the table to visit the restroom. Apsu stared after him, wondering how a youth with an I.Q. of 160 could feel satisfied with life as another one of the drooling slaves. Locatelli’s musical strains had begun to fill the room, and Apsu felt unbearably bored.

  “I’m going to go back into the Fabric to read an article on collective conscience,” he addressed Eriko with a yawn.

  Eriko produced a portable holo-projector from her knapsack and placed it on the table. A few moments later, a work of holo-art depicting a set of bizarre sea creatures arose before Apsu’s eyes.

  “So, you finished another project.” The boy eyed the floating structures curiously.

  “What with all the new sea creatures being created in experiments, I thought I would devote a whole project to capturing the essence of Neo-Nudibranchia.” Eriko beamed with confidence. “As you can see, I modelled the format after the work of Ernst Haeck–”

  “It certainly is beautiful, but maybe you should spend more time making holo-models of human beings rather than animals.”

  A flash of recognition shone in Eriko’s eyes, and she asked tentatively, “Why is that?”

  “Well, naturally art is created for the purpose of affecting peoples’ emotions, so you should perfect depictions of the human conditions in ways that will best serve motivating the masses to an end goal. Some evening I can teach you about subliminal–”

  “I don’t know why I put up with you, I really don’t.” Eriko shut off her holo-projector and forced it into her bag with a scowl inscribed on her face.

  Apsu put up his hands, as if in defense. He could see that Eriko was going to leave the table, probably to sit with her friend Azami and explain what an ass her boyfriend could be at times. An apology tried to crawl out from between his thin lips, but his ego stopped it in its tracks. Sure, he wanted to be a god, but didn’t he also deserve these praises from the masses? Eriko couldn’t understand that he was going to make a better world for her and the rest of humanity. Only someone with a carefully cultivated mind, as his would be with hard work, could solve the oppressive issues facing the human species.

  “Did Eriko get fed up with your rants?” Niklas asked as he sat down at the table again.

  “Well, you know how girls are. They get easily agitated.” Apsu took a swig of Pokka strawberry milk, completely aware that his statement held little wisdom in it.

  Niklas shook his head and played with a false fingernail on his ring finger. He had a strong addiction to a new drug called aggry that the U.K. had kept flowing into Japan for the past few years. Without a doubt, he had removed the fingernail in the boy’s bathroom and snorted the fine powder to get his daily dose of hallucinations. Such was the burden of a science fiction writer, the continuous demand to break down boundaries and create the new. Fortunately the boy’s delusions would not kick in until lunch had ended, freeing Apsu from the responsibility of covering for his friend.

  “So have you chanced upon information that will make me a better writer?” Niklas wanted to change the topic.

  “If science fiction is your thing, start reading up on Gnostic texts and alchemy.” Apsu yawned. “People will think you’re a real original genius, even if the evidence is to the contrary.”

  ***

  Due to a suicide on the tracks at the nearest bullet train’s station, Apsu had an annoying delay to keep him from getting home before his mother’s social gathering ended. He had so hoped to fraternize with the throw back J-Pop singer Harumi Onishi when he had the opportunity. Not that he particularly enjoyed that musical genre. Through tedious research, he had identified the agendas the ruling elite reinforced through music worldwide. He wanted to ask Harumi some pointed questions, though he imagined that his people pleaser of a mother would not approve of an interrogation of such an important guest.

  By the time Apsu entered his home, his mother had collapsed on the Western style sofa in the washitsu[2], an empty bottle of wine in her hand. He tried to sneak past her, but she wasn’t that drunk.

  “How was school honey?” she asked nonchalantly.

  “Productive.” Apsu continued to walk in the direction of his bedroom.

  “Don’t you want to tell me about your (hiccup) day?” she called after him.

  “I’ll tell you when you’re in a state to remember,” he said.

  It’s no wonder she’s been married five times, Apsu thought to himself as he laid down on the futon in his room. How a woman could simultaneously worry about her son yet collect husbands like Eriko collected manga he would never know? From a young age, he had decided to discipline his affections so as to be a superior being. Throwing away pointless energy towards drugs and sex would hold him back. Why could his friends and family not see this?

  He had a special pillow designed to provide optimal comfort for his greatly expanded brain, and he set the great mass down gently. Of course he had hours’ worth of homework to tackle, but his conversation with Niklas and Eriko earlier that day motivated him to look into information on power. Apsu downloaded Tribes on the Hill: The United States Congress--Rituals and Realities by Jack M. Weatherford and The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan by Katsuya Hirano.

  He wondered why the works took so long to download. Then he looked into his downloading history and realized that he had over an exabyte of data stored in his AB. Howeve
r, his cybernetic implants lacked the space for this kind of information, meaning his grey matter had to have taken on the burden. With his physical eyes, Apsu gazed at his pet Chuxiong fire-bellied newt in its terrarium in the southern corner of his room, wondering for a brief moment if his life would be happier spent as a worriless animal. Even the artificially luminescent Ranchu Goldfish Eriko kept as pets seemed at ease in their aquarium.

  It was then that he saw that the blog “Trompe l’oeil” had a Cintāmaṇi file available for download. For those with the artificial brain power to back up such an enormous set of data, the Cintāmaṇi file had all the hallmarks of a treasure trove. Usually thousands of books, essays, films and even video game cheat code manuals laid inside these lucky finds. An individual with the username moonrabbitxanthosis3301, who had been involved in the blog’s forum community for only a few weeks, had curried enough favor with the blog host to put up the file. Apsu assumed this newbie wanted to show off for the online community, and the host had tolerated this pretentiousness for the sake of drawing in more interested parties – the perfect symbiotic relationship.

  Only one individual could snag this lucky find, and Apsu did not want to miss this opportunity. Opening up the bag of cognistim Zachary had sold him; Apsu made a small line of the fine Persian orange powder and rubbed his eyes in it. He would need all the mental energy he could muster to handle a Cintāmaṇi file download. As the tingling sensation caused by cognistim spread throughout his organic brain, the boy prepared to open the free cache of information.

  Upon opening the file, something drastic changed. Apsu had a throbbing headache take hold of him, as the progress bar reached eleven percent. He couldn’t stop the download, try as he might. His vision blurred and the typically sensitive tissue surrounding his expanded brain cavity suddenly felt inflamed, as if the artificial brain material he had once thought of as an ushnisha signifying his incredibly enhanced abilities now possessed the hallmarks of a malignant tumor. A message from moonrabbitxanthosis3301 appeared in his mind’s display screen, and when he answered it, Apsu groaned fiercely.

  “He so buried himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits,” Horus Groop read from an internalized teleprompter. “That’s from Don Quixote. You never should never have accused me of being illiterate a few years back.”

  “Why?” Aspu shuddered in the awareness that the likeness of Horus had been recorded in anticipation of this moment.

  “Sure, I may not be the sharpest mind in the world, but I know how to make friends, a skill you never really mastered. What is better than being a good hacker? Convincing such people to work for you matters more in the end.”

  As Apsu could feel the brain he worked so hard to cultivate turn to toast, and blackened toast at that, he had a wicked thought skitter amongst his overloaded neurons. Enlivened by his rage, the boy genius accessed the notorious Zgist virus he had kept in a very dark corner of his neural matrix for some time.

  “You will not be able to keep from downloading this material,” Horus continued. “It pays to know your enemy’s vices.”

  Tracing the Cintāmaṇi file’s source to Horus’s nanotube matrix, Apsu uploaded the virus. While his gift would not kill the arch nemesis, the Zgist virus would do irreparable damage to Horus’s neuron/Fabric connections, forever preventing the boy from mentally accessing the Fabric. He might as well be labelled mentally handicapped according to a Fabric junkie’s standards. Not that Horus ever fully appreciated the information his wealthy parents had given him access to, but Apsu hoped for any small insult he could throw his enemy’s direction in death.

  Apsu tried to send a mental message to the hospital for help, but the cybernetic aspects of his brain had started to malfunction. His body shuddered, and blood dripped to his hands from his nose and mouth. Soon his brain, both the part he had from birth and that of recent addition, failed. His last thought was of Eriko, and the mental image of her soft, gentle face caused him only regret.

  When his body was found the next day, he had an old fashioned paper note clutched in his hand with a quote from the Tao Te Ching. It was the very same gift given to him by his teacher. This was the verse inside the tiny scroll – “It is the very mind itself that leads the mind astray; of the mind, do not be mindless."

  Bonus Story: “Gedanken E”

  Only 15 kilometers of pitiless space remained between Anemoi Technologies extradimensional probe, the Gedanken E, and the Octacube it had traveled approximately 25,000 light years to visit. While the New International Synarchy had attempted to keep the discovery of the Octacube a secret, images of such a remarkable four dimensional aberration spread across the Net faster than the NIS could kill off offending sites. It had been 30 years since Professor Shogo Miyamoto demonstrated to the public through peer reviewed research that the universe was a remarkable computer simulation controlled by an outside force. Needless to say, the NIS soon realized that the spontaneous appearance of the Octacube in the Canis Major Overdensity was a blessing in disguise.

  Looting, rioting, bloodless mass suicide, the announcement that “reality” was a simulation was not well received to say the least. Once scientists had announced that the Octacube appeared to be a portal to another dimensional space, the public perception of this distant energy field became quite positive. Rumors quickly spread that the Octacube, or icositetrachoron as Gedanken E preferred to call it, must lead to a realm outside the simulation, an escape route to a higher plane of existence outside of codified information. The NIS, hoping to boost its approval rating in light of a whistleblower’s recent disclosure of information regarding Project Companile and the massive neurological surveillance it entailed, quickly announced it would send a probe theoretically capable of interdimensional travel to the Octacube with the goal of passing through the portal into another reality.

  Of course the NIS did not budget its funds as efficiently as it violated privacy, and Anemoi’s scientists constructed the fifth and most “humanlike” probe in its Gedanken series before the government’s program even finished work on shielding against chameleon particles. Thanks to improvements in energy efficiency, spacecraft had been traveling faster than light with Alcubierre’s proposed space warping method for over 60 years when Gedanken E first made her journey. The probe regretted (at least she thought of her biochemical reaction as regret) that she did not have tens of thousands of years to enjoy the sights and metallic smells of space.

  I say her journey because Gedanken E had the self-awareness to identify what she perceived to be the innate female characteristics of her own mind, regardless of the “unwomanliness” of a football shaped body. Chief engineer Aadhya Verma, who Gedanken E considered the friendliest of her creators, had asked the probe why she did not choose another name for herself, given that gedanken was a masculine designation.

  “Names are far more arbitrary titles than humans care to imagine,” Gedanken E had answered. “There is nothing about you that demands the specific label you now possess. I am perfectly capable of functioning with my current title.”

  Gedanken E put these nostalgic thoughts out of her mind, which arose from a combination of artificially produced Ningal Cells and an Aeolipile M23 supercomputer. She had detached her body from the ring shaped warp drive that had carried her so far so quickly, and now she drifted in the warm sea of particles that made up the Chinvat Cloud, a murky region that nearly made the effulgent Octacube invisible to Earth based detection. Gentian blue beams of radiation were emitted from the portal’s numerous vertices, contrasting with the crimson hues of the nearby red giant stars. She fired two small Besslock rockets to propel her the final meters into the rippling multicolored energy field before her. It was like exhaling before the plunge.

  The probe had expected the journey through an interdimensional portal to be disorienting and prolonged, just like in the science fiction movies
Verma watched. Instead she passed into the foreign realm, which Octacube fan boys referred to as the Empyrean or the Omega Point, depending on which club one joined, with the same rapidity as a person walking through a doorway. Much to her self-identified chagrin, she also did not know how to describe this space beyond space. Critics of research on the Octacube often compared it to the Forbidden Fruit, and Gedanken E could not help but think of her place in this framework. At least her lack of “humanity” meant that she would probably not receive the same condemnation as Eve. Her developers would face the harshest criticisms. Unfortunately, she would not even have the chance to name what she saw around her, as hundreds of Adams with philology and linguistic degrees would get the honor.

  A pair of cameras, each one designed for recording different wavelengths of light, now protruded from her body, documenting everything for the interested parties at home. This did not deter Gedanken E from trying to understand what she saw – landscapes that both lacked color and possessed it in the highest order at the same time, perilous waters like a Doré illustration in CinemaScope, and most eye-catching of all, three shimmering spheres with polished apatite surfaces that hovered over the world like giant soap bubbles and emitted rhythmic clicks, as if they were airborne dolphins. Gedanken E liked to think that if she was at a loss for words, maybe her creators would be as well.

  Chief engineer Verma nearly spilled her nectarous Nel drip coffee when Gedanken E materialized in the laboratory without warning. She had been debating eternalism and presentism with her assistant, Haley Namput, when the startling interruption took place. Given the uncertain properties of the Octacube, she wondered if some intelligence present in that extraterrestrial region had teleported Gedanken E back to its birth place by intention. Though she should have quarantined the probe to ensure dangerous particles were not still present in its shell, Verma had the plate covering the spheroid’s recording equipment off in an instant. Namput had the probe’s slippery biocables plugged into her computer and transferring footage for analysis without as much as a command from her boss. She wiped the perfluorocarbon compound from the probe’s interior on her dress pants and sighed.