MEMOIRS OF THE UNREALISTIC CHAPTER 4
By '059, Grampa had lost touch with the family. He was able to maintain relations with himself, however, and persisted in keeping a journal. It traces much the same tragic arc followed by so many superstars: a meteoric rise to fame, then a slow but certain descent into the gutter. With his innate sense of economy, though, Grampa skipped the rise and cut straight to the plummet. It was undoubtedly less painful than falling to the gutter from a great height, having to drop only from the relatively humble level of complete obscurity. More like rolling down a shallow incline, really, and coming to a gentle stop at the bottom. There, Grampa at last found a trade suitable for a man with his species of idealism: dirty old bum.
Earlier that year, the Firearms, Drug, and Entertainment Administration (FDEA) had okayed consciousness extrusion for experimental trials on human subjects. So began the most concerted cooperation between academic, medical, and corporate interests in recorded history. Physicists were quick to perceive the implications of a technology that handled consciousness as a modulation of the gravitational field; consciousness could be conducted along curvatures in Planck-scale spacetime dimensions as easily as electricity through a copper wire, yet the theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of the process were still up for grabs; here, for the first time in over a century, observable phenomena had appeared in advance of any calculations that could explain it. Psychiatrists, too, were all over the process, vying with each other to develop its therapeutic uses. And money migrated everywhere, backing research projects, buying stock in any remotely promising application, capitalizing start-up companies run by chimpanzees who'd barely mastered algebra. It was the beginning of a cultural renaissance reminiscent of the tech bubble of the 1990s, but with even more starry-eyed confidence behind it, fueled by pop culture pundits cheerleading a consumer revolution.
How pathetic, then, that the most common manifestations of the new technology were virtual sex pellunculas and sleazy porn pockets. How tawdry, how typical, how squalid, how human. Meanwhile, Grampa's destitution had brought his self-hatred to fester like Mr. Hughes' raisin in the sun, or, rather, like Mr. Hughes' running sore. Whichever, having his dreams deferred had rendered Grampa the perfect sucker. He lived on only the pittance paid to research subjects, and on the simulated human warmth he found in pornuncraphy. Thus, Grampa's relationship to the blossoming cultural renaissance was the perfect marriage between vulnerability and opportunism. And, lest you thank your lucky stars and think, There but for fortune go I, consider for a moment that Grampa's situation represents nothing more nor less than the marketplace at its least varnished. Our own circumstances differ only by the degree to which they are dressed up as civilized. In this, at least, we are all equal.
There were few regulations governing the nascent industry, and no enforceable safeguards protecting research subjects. Ethics in this environment ran the gamut from negligent to Tuskegee-syphilis-study unconscionable. Grampa writes, "I keep having to sign these 'recursion echo' risk waivers. I don't know what a recursion echo is, but apparently it's a risk I take every time I'm in one of these studies." A few weeks later, he's found out what a recursion echo is, but writes that, by then, it was "an acceptable hazard. I've never loved or felt so loved before. Everything's changed. Life would be meaningless without Maria."
Maria. He'd just met a girl named Maria. She was a first-generation autunculus. Of course, being first generation, she could only meet Grampa in a prismatic micro-three-brane, a complex warping in Planck-scale spacetime along xyz vectors 5-7. This was a nice piece of fraud on the part of the porn provider, by the way. There was absolutely no reason autunculi and cosmorganics couldn't have cross-projected through the interstitial matrix by this time, except that virtual reality providers wanted to retain a monopoly on the process. The porn guy Grampa was dependent on to provide him and Maria a prism within which to rendezvous was selling both of them a bill of goods, a pig in a poke. Maria was a starving artist who had auditioned for her role in the pocket, and Grampa was a low-wage guinea pig. Had the two of them been allowed to find their own ways through the interstices of the spacetime fabric -- had they understood that there was really no division between the two of them at all, in gravitational terms -- the pornuncrapher would have had no way to justify his research grants, no hope of an IPO, no corporation whatever. The porn guy, and thousands of providers like him at the time, colluded to defraud such people as Grampa and his autuncular beloved, letting them believe they needed to continue risking their lives to be together. Grampa bought the pig in the poke. So did Maria; hook, line, and sinker.
The recursion echo is a thing of the past, but in the past it was a thing of dread, albeit a rare phenomenon. The recursion echo was what happened when the gravitational frequency of your extruded consciousness happened to sync up exactly with the resonance frequency of the gravity warping the pocket dimension into which you were being projected. If that occurred, your consciousness would dissolve into the structure of the pocket and, as soon as the quite temporary dimension ceased to exist, so would your identity. "You" would disappear into the universes' general flow of gravity, and your body, in the virtual reality booth, would simply die. It's analogous to the Placido Domingo tragedy, in the '020s, when the great tenor sang the F that happened to be the exact resonance harmonic of the newly built Chernobyl Opera House. The note vibrated at the exact acoustical frequency as the very structure of the building, which set it resonating like a tuning fork, and, although he'd stopped singing, the echo of the note built in intensity, focused on poor Domingo at the center of a bombardment of wave after reverberating wave of sound, until finally his skull imploded under the barrage.
I said the phenomenon was rare. In the medium of sound, Domingo's fate was probably unique. In the medium of gravity, however -- in the world of consciousness extrusion -- recursion echoes were not quite so rare. They happened just often enough to require the signing of a recursion echo risk waiver.
In Grampa's case, that was too often by a factor of one.
Earlier that year, the Firearms, Drug, and Entertainment Administration (FDEA) had okayed consciousness extrusion for experimental trials on human subjects. So began the most concerted cooperation between academic, medical, and corporate interests in recorded history. Physicists were quick to perceive the implications of a technology that handled consciousness as a modulation of the gravitational field; consciousness could be conducted along curvatures in Planck-scale spacetime dimensions as easily as electricity through a copper wire, yet the theoretical and mathematical underpinnings of the process were still up for grabs; here, for the first time in over a century, observable phenomena had appeared in advance of any calculations that could explain it. Psychiatrists, too, were all over the process, vying with each other to develop its therapeutic uses. And money migrated everywhere, backing research projects, buying stock in any remotely promising application, capitalizing start-up companies run by chimpanzees who'd barely mastered algebra. It was the beginning of a cultural renaissance reminiscent of the tech bubble of the 1990s, but with even more starry-eyed confidence behind it, fueled by pop culture pundits cheerleading a consumer revolution.
How pathetic, then, that the most common manifestations of the new technology were virtual sex pellunculas and sleazy porn pockets. How tawdry, how typical, how squalid, how human. Meanwhile, Grampa's destitution had brought his self-hatred to fester like Mr. Hughes' raisin in the sun, or, rather, like Mr. Hughes' running sore. Whichever, having his dreams deferred had rendered Grampa the perfect sucker. He lived on only the pittance paid to research subjects, and on the simulated human warmth he found in pornuncraphy. Thus, Grampa's relationship to the blossoming cultural renaissance was the perfect marriage between vulnerability and opportunism. And, lest you thank your lucky stars and think, There but for fortune go I, consider for a moment that Grampa's situation represents nothing more nor less than the marketplace at its least varnished. Our own circumstances differ only by the degree to which they are dressed up as civilized. In this, at least, we are all equal.
There were few regulations governing the nascent industry, and no enforceable safeguards protecting research subjects. Ethics in this environment ran the gamut from negligent to Tuskegee-syphilis-study unconscionable. Grampa writes, "I keep having to sign these 'recursion echo' risk waivers. I don't know what a recursion echo is, but apparently it's a risk I take every time I'm in one of these studies." A few weeks later, he's found out what a recursion echo is, but writes that, by then, it was "an acceptable hazard. I've never loved or felt so loved before. Everything's changed. Life would be meaningless without Maria."
Maria. He'd just met a girl named Maria. She was a first-generation autunculus. Of course, being first generation, she could only meet Grampa in a prismatic micro-three-brane, a complex warping in Planck-scale spacetime along xyz vectors 5-7. This was a nice piece of fraud on the part of the porn provider, by the way. There was absolutely no reason autunculi and cosmorganics couldn't have cross-projected through the interstitial matrix by this time, except that virtual reality providers wanted to retain a monopoly on the process. The porn guy Grampa was dependent on to provide him and Maria a prism within which to rendezvous was selling both of them a bill of goods, a pig in a poke. Maria was a starving artist who had auditioned for her role in the pocket, and Grampa was a low-wage guinea pig. Had the two of them been allowed to find their own ways through the interstices of the spacetime fabric -- had they understood that there was really no division between the two of them at all, in gravitational terms -- the pornuncrapher would have had no way to justify his research grants, no hope of an IPO, no corporation whatever. The porn guy, and thousands of providers like him at the time, colluded to defraud such people as Grampa and his autuncular beloved, letting them believe they needed to continue risking their lives to be together. Grampa bought the pig in the poke. So did Maria; hook, line, and sinker.
The recursion echo is a thing of the past, but in the past it was a thing of dread, albeit a rare phenomenon. The recursion echo was what happened when the gravitational frequency of your extruded consciousness happened to sync up exactly with the resonance frequency of the gravity warping the pocket dimension into which you were being projected. If that occurred, your consciousness would dissolve into the structure of the pocket and, as soon as the quite temporary dimension ceased to exist, so would your identity. "You" would disappear into the universes' general flow of gravity, and your body, in the virtual reality booth, would simply die. It's analogous to the Placido Domingo tragedy, in the '020s, when the great tenor sang the F that happened to be the exact resonance harmonic of the newly built Chernobyl Opera House. The note vibrated at the exact acoustical frequency as the very structure of the building, which set it resonating like a tuning fork, and, although he'd stopped singing, the echo of the note built in intensity, focused on poor Domingo at the center of a bombardment of wave after reverberating wave of sound, until finally his skull imploded under the barrage.
I said the phenomenon was rare. In the medium of sound, Domingo's fate was probably unique. In the medium of gravity, however -- in the world of consciousness extrusion -- recursion echoes were not quite so rare. They happened just often enough to require the signing of a recursion echo risk waiver.
In Grampa's case, that was too often by a factor of one.
posted by yosephus at 8/14/2006
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