Carbide Tipped Pens Part 17

"Yes..." His eyes followed the big-bellied purple clouds. "Like this weather. They override the k-fibers."

That fit our ideas but was hard to fit into neural models like the ones I built. The brain has rule-based mechanisms we call selectors that turn on emotions. They sweep k-lines before them, taking over a problem and forcing a solution.

SanJi said, "We build multiple models of ourselves. They fight inside us."

He seemed to be drawing away from me, turning inward. To draw him out I said, "It's hard to model deep-rooted neurotic anxiety, phobias, panic attacks, or obsessive-compulsive disorders. Why?"

"Because some model we have of ourselves is fighting for its life. I-" he said suddenly, then stopped.

I tried to catch his eye. "Look, I'm going into konn with her soon. I want you to know that."

SanJi stiffened but didn't take his eyes from the storm.

Even in the chilly lab context it was strangely intimate. I knew generally about the connectivity issues and the tests they both had to run through. The lab techs were bored and didn't try to hide it.

Aliim lay there and said little. So did I. This was research after all but I felt my heart accelerate in the quiet shadowy pod. I marveled at how small the EEG electrodes were wrapped around our heads. The techs did some run-throughs and then we just went to sleep.

I kept myself distant using the sleep control methods the EEG augments allowed. I felt the konn enter through slow wave sleep. It was like riding a beat-up surfboard in the lazy afternoons of my boyhood. Slow waves rose warm and slow and synchronized. I felt the pulsing surges dominate my cortex. My years of study allowed me to sense that in this phase of sleep, slow wave activities were recorded, filtered, and fed back to Aliim and me. I felt the clock shop effect kick in. Long ago artisans noticed that mechanical clocks placed against a wall that could transmit vibrations would all eventually tell the same time.

I slipped into a sure steady resonance, the clock shop phase, rising fast and then I lost it- * * *

Bursting yellow light fell across on a sheeting blue plain. Speckled green things moved on it in staccato rhythm- I was inside her mind. I knew it was her unconscious because I tried to send her messages and there was dead silence, no response. So I relaxed and let it wash over me.

Twisting lines meshed there and wove into triangles. Frantic energy pulsed along these as they warped into strange saddle-pointed envelopes. Electric blue light played along them as they coiled into new soundless shapes- A shrill grating sound made me turn my head. Flashes of crimson.

Thick, rich red foam lapped against bright yellow lines. Must be circuits, I thought and with that a weathered bra.s.s thing towered beside me. It oozed slime. I felt sudden cold panic. I wanted to watch the landscape below as the tower groaned and spun softly.

I could see through its bra.s.sy skin. Inside it s.h.i.+mmering drops beaded on a coppery matrix of wire. They oozed p.r.i.c.kly flashes with a rattling sound.

I had to force myself to look away from it. Thudding sounds hammered in the air. Salty air washed over me. I s.h.i.+vered.

I tried to watch the intricate play of light along the swarming geometries. In quick pulses I felt in rapid play: surprise, joy, a sheeting trembling fear. I had to ignore these flickers of emotion to see the patterns moving along wiry paths. Trembling sprays of glowing orange fought across the bra.s.s tower and it seemed to move toward me. Knowledge-fibers?

Fear won. I turned and ran. Hot sweat trickled into my eyes- -Upward, toward the watery light- I was awake. Her eyes were closed, face empty.

I came away from it awkwardly on legs of cotton.

I woke in the night, sweating. I rolled over tangled in the bedclothes, muttering in the dark.

I had seen all that again. Not as it happened on konn but in shots of sudden seeing. Not nightmares, not precisely. Something else. Something intermediate.

I had seen now an ellipsoidal sun spinning soundlessly over a silver array that danced with silver glows. A fine-spun coppery matrix simmering on the sharp horizon. The grainy sheen of polyhedra that radiated hard golden light. When patterns merged, I felt my bones hum in resonance.

I got up and made coffee and went for a walk on the beach. This was one of the preserved beaches and I could see the bulwarks holding back the ocean, a flat line on the horizon. The sun was a hazy yellow blob above the heaving sea that lapped nearby.

She came to my home and walked right in without knocking. "I wondered why I did not hear from you."

"I ... took time to process the konn."

"I always hear from those who commune with me."

"It was ... strange."

We were both standing and she simply reached out and cupped my b.a.l.l.s, hefting them. "It can be better if we do other things, too." Her clear eyes looked directly into mine.

"I cannot afford the research expense." This was a lie and I tried to keep my voice flat.

"I will wait." She turned and walked out.

I had not seen SanJi since the konn. I was in a garden on the grounds of the Bezos Inst.i.tute where he and I work, finis.h.i.+ng a small lunch of sus.h.i.+ when I saw him walking toward me.

I got up to greet him. He came toward me with intent and his mouth a flat white line. I said h.e.l.lo and he threw his right fist at my head. I ducked to the side and automatically brought my hands up.

He said nothing. Once I saw his rigid face I didn't either.

I had trained with a virtual-s.p.a.ce exercise sim in simple boxing when I was fifteen and to my surprise in the next half minute it all came back to me.

SanJi jabbed at me with his left but I brushed those aside on my right forearm and shoulder. He was shorter than me and moved fast and around looking for an advantage. His right was hanging back. I knew he wanted to distract me with the left and let the right do the work but he let it out too far. In the sim that had been a whole lesson, I recalled. Why letting your big hand drift away took all the power from it.

He had been a dancer once he had said and I could see it in how he moved. His eyes gave nothing away and his feet were quick as I tried jabs and hooks. I felt like I was just swatting at him.

I glanced aside to see if anyone would break this up but there was n.o.body else in the little garden. So we would just have to have it out.

"What's this about?" I said to make him think about something other than my left hand.

His slice of a mouth didn't change and he said nothing. I let my left dance in front of his nose and then brought my right around hard against the side of his head. I could feel his ear crunch but he showed no reaction. He just backed off a bit to get himself together and then came in again with eyes narrowed.

SanJi tried a flurry of punches that I rode out with my forearms but took a hard shot in my left shoulder that rocked me around some. I used some footwork I recalled from that sim training to get him worked around with his right hand even farther out. The way he held it out long told me he wanted to use it, so before he could I made a swipe with my own right. He blocked it well enough with a quick left. In that thin slice of time I brought my left hard into an uppercut that tagged his nose.

I could feel it squash. Blood spurted into his eye and I caught him hard in his left cheek with a knuckle punch. He staggered back and wobbled and I hit him in the gut. He went down in a sprawl. Not a hard fall, more like he just realized he would be more comfortable sitting down.

He looked up and me and still said nothing. I turned and walked away. Later, I realized I had left my lunch behind.

I was sitting in a harborside restaurant where tourists did not go, doing a watercolor of the harbor and islands beyond. A little girl came up and said, "What are you doing?"

"Painting a picture," I said. I showed her my palette.

She studied it."You're not very good, are you?"

That made me laugh. She was quite right, of course.

I felt better now than I had in days. After the fight I had pursued a sort of Zen mindfulness, purchased with pain. I finished the watercolor and saw what the little girl had seen but I in my quick moves to capture the light in color had not. I crumpled it up.

The dreams from the konn had blown away and this morning I had an idea when I awoke. That was the first time in many weeks and to celebrate I had come out for a long breakfast and the watercolor. The idea I would test in my lab later, but I knew enough to just let my mind nibble at the idea first while I did something else.

Only then did I see that Aliim was sitting on the far side of the restaurant.

My first reaction was a quick flash of chilly dislike. Her face swam before me like a pillar of Freudian nightmare. She was playing with the foxy thing and sipping coffee. As usual, she elegantly wore an ivory sarong and simple green sandals, no more.

As I approached her table she looked up and a flicker of wary evasion pa.s.sed in her face. But she put it away and even gave a thin smile. "How goes your research?"

"Quite well," I said and did not sit.

"Mine as well."

"And what is...?" I felt tense and her eyes never left mine.

"I, too, am mapping knowledge-fiber networks. My method however is not yours."

"No doubt." She had never declared her research area before. "I did gain some insights from our konn."

"I, too. Perhaps another session would be useful?" She lifted her cup and I saw a tremor there where none had been before.

"I am quite busy just now."

"I would require a higher fee, of course. I gave you the introductory session at a low rate and already I am well booked."

"I doubt that I can afford you then."

"That is too bad. I had hoped to help you."

"As you have helped many."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing. I gather that SanJi has worked with you?"

We both knew he had but she said, "I am not responsible in any way for his work. Or his reactions."

I did not know what to say and her fox was nipping around my shoes. It stood on its two hind legs and looked up at me with its hard gleaming eyes and yipped little words I finally noticed were "yeee!" and "go!" and "bad!" and "hurt!"

"I never said you were."

In a flinty way she said, "That is good. No matter what others may say."

As I looked back the fox was still dancing and the restaurant owner was coming over to her about the noise.

I did not see SanJi for a while though he worked near my lab. I was in there a lot working on the notion that my unconscious had given me. It had proved to be quite a gift. The layered approach I worked out gave simpler pathways to understanding how our k-fibers organize prior ideas in the cause of new solutions. It demanded that neurotrophic factors cohere in a way I could model with appropriate cofactor mathematics. There were geometric a.n.a.logies to this that made the whole idea easy to visualize. That is what had come to me that morning when I awoke with the odd notion buzzing in my mind. It was a while before I realized that the geometry came first and the images were like those I had seen in the konn.

I was mulling this over and my conversation with Aliim in the orchid garden one morning before walking to the Inst.i.tute to begin anew. I was finis.h.i.+ng my coffee when I saw SanJi sitting nearby.

I decided to ignore him but he came over and deliberately sat down near me on a bench. His face was drawn and pale and he had lost weight. "It has been a while."

I looked at him squarely and readied myself but caught myself balling up my fists. I made myself relax them. "Your nose shows no damage."

"It did not break."

"I am glad."

"I want to tell you that was not me you were hitting."

"Felt like it."

"I was in a state I cannot describe. I did not know what I was doing."

"Your right hand didn't but your left sure did. I had bruises for a week."

He allowed himself a flat smile. "I came to that state through that woman."

We didn't need to say her name. "For me the konn with her was useful."

"She was in some vague way planning to do research. Meanwhile living off the earnings from her talent."

"Research? Into neural nets? I had the impression she was some sort of mathematician but-"

"The incubation period is several weeks."

"What do you mean?"

"She is not just an unusual konn patient and resource. It develops now that she has a neuvir."

"I thought that was just theory."

"It is real. I have it."

"From her?"

"The only possible path. It made me do this." He swung fists in the air.

"Why me then?"

"I do not know. Some anger she held against you? The neurological virus term is only an a.n.a.logy. The constellation of ideas somehow becomes self-propagating. The knowledge-fiber can leave one unconscious and install in another. It infests."

"Under konn."

"The theory was there but I find the experience is very different. It was a frenzy."