Control Freaks

A stream of electrons trickled down a wire and pulsed through an electrode and ricocheted into a human muscle, which pulled a man to his feet. His whole body was covered in a net of wires lashed into the surface of his skin. Each wire seemed to find its way up limbs and towards his back. The wires were fine, almost translucent, but they reflected light in strange ways when he moved. His body was strong, athletic, yet the wires seemed vaguely medical. They always had to Averill. Perhaps it was that his father was a paraplegic, and the prototype of what this athletic man had built into his body had allowed his father a few more years of use out of his body. Like his father, the man in front of him was bald by necessity. More wires than the mind could grasp glittered faintly over his scalp, each ending in a tiny black speck. The wires glinted slightly almost as if he was sweating.

Averill tried to imagine what the man in front of him had been doing two weeks ago. He looked down at his hands and imagined himself to be holding one of the huge pneumatic fists that the neoball pros used. He imagined himself leaping to impossible heights under reduced gravity with huge springs attached to his legs, imagining his every move to have it carried out by computers lodged in his back, not by his own nervous system. He imagined twirling through the air and kicking a pliable rubber ball at a hoop suspended from the ceiling and supported by the floor, past a goalie and scoring. He blinked at his fist. Somehow, the whole image was wrong. Sports should be man against man, not man and machine against other men with machines.

Two weeks ago, Thorn had gripped his skyfists tightly. They were basically an extension of his arm complete with a large pneumatic spring. His feet were tightly lashed to skyrunners. The original model by XkiX was largely unchanged. Lighter and stronger alloys had been found, but the design was mostly the same, with a large leaf spring extending down from just below the knee to well below a foot beneath the bottom of his shoe. The one thing that made them different was the kicking panel attached to the front of them. The fists were very different, with the only striking surface being at the end. The other difference between the runners and the fists were that the fists were pneumatic, more geared towards absorbing huge amounts of energy, but they could also be used to punch, and viciously at that.

Thorn shifted his weight slightly and then exploded forwards. There is no other word for what happened. One second he was one place, the second he was somewhere else entirely and moving at an insane speed. A ball about the size of a soccer ball was falling surreally slowly down towards the ground. Thorn leaped an impossible 9 feet into the air, revolved gracefully around the ball and kicked it ferociously towards a spot 20 meters in front of a team mate wearing green and gray and landed gracefully using his fists and rolling. The ball moved at a speed barely visible to the eye. Green and gray colors flashed towards the interception and somehow controlled it. A split second latter, the ball was flicked towards a huge loop suspended from the ceiling and supported by the floor. A tardy goalie in black dove towards the ball, but it shrieked by, millimeters from the ends of his huge pneumatic fists.

ESPN camera men and an interviewer stormed over to the man who scored the point. Thorn's team mate towered over them due to his skyrunners. Thorn's body heaved for breath. The game had been going for over forty five minutes and had made it into overtime. Fifteen minutes after the game would have normally been done, they were finally able to kick a tie breaker and end the match. That game had been the last of three games. The Phantoms had won the first game, but Thorn's team, the Shrikes had beaten them twice to come back to a victory. It had been a tense match, especially since the Phantoms had been seeded first in their bracket. The Shrikes weren't really supposed to have won, the supposedly superior creative power of the Phantoms was supposed to have allowed them to easily over power the Shrikes, but it turned out that the Shrikes were tougher.

Thorn didn't feel tough though. He tottered over to a high seat and sat down and imagined a world without pain. Slowly, the computer chips imbedded in his back went to work minimizing the nerve's signals to the brain. It was far from perfect. The wires running all over his body were meant to help him control it, not ignore pain, but they could be used for such for short periods of time. Enough time to help me catch my breath thought Thorn vaguely as he collapsed sideways.

Hours later, Thorn regained consciousness. His eyes swam and he visualized his arms reaching up and unstrapping his fists, but as they came up, in immediate response to his first thought, he realized that someone had already removed them for him. That's odd he thought as he tried to sit up. He got part of the way up, but then waves of pain shot up to him from his abdomen. He grimaced and visualized completing a sit up, and electrodes imbedded in his skin pulsed power into his destroyed muscles and pulled him through a sit up. That has got to be some of the most pain I have ever been in thought Thorn vaguely as he reached down to remove his skyrunners. They were gone as well. In fact, so were his shoes and socks. Wait thought Thorn. What happened? He looked around. Where am I? Just then, a door opened and a woman in a nurse's outfit entered.

    "You mustn't move around yet," she stated authoritatively. "You hurt yourself in today's match, and you are going to take a while to recover. Just take it easy for a bit, eat some food, and sleep, and We'll have you on your feet in no time."

    "I... I did?" Thorn managed as he lay back. I don't think I had any high speed collisions... There was that time where I had a near miss with the ball, and another when a Phantom tried to kill me, but I didn't actually get hit... Did he get me from behind? Who won the game? Didn't we? No. That doesn't make sense. I'll just ask. "Who won the game?"

    "You did. Don't you remember?"

    "Yes...Did I get hit? Did I hit anything? I don't think anything is broken."

    "No, no. Nothing is broken; you just pushed yourself a little too far in the game. Ran a little too fast, jumped a little too far. You have to know your own limits, you know. The NSMCS can make you do what you imagine, but if you push yourself too far, you can get hurt. I think you just went a little overboard today and your muscles are more exhausted than they normally are."

    "Is that all?" asked Thorn as he considered his NSMCS. Neural Simulating Muscle Control System. It reads your neural impulses and stimulates your muscles with more energy than your synaptic clefts can generate. The tougher you are, the more pain you can take, the more games you will win, he thought as he tried to roll off the bed. Somehow he was entirely unable to move, but the nurse noticed.

    "You mustn't move at all, you have taken a pretty good beating, and if you give it a day or two, most of the kinks should start to work themselves out. Just take it easy," she said soothingly. Thorn decided to go against his grain and ignored her and visualized himself rolling out of bed, but nothing happened except for a light flashing on and off next to his bed. "I have disabled your NSMCS system for now, and it will alert us if you try to move around, so just take it easy for a while, and get some sleep. Would you like anything to eat?"

    Thorn grunted in irritation. He hadn't been bed ridden for a long time. The insane level of physical activity kept him in fairly good health, and the Shrike's dietitian had him on all organic high energy foods, so he had been quite healthy for a very long time, and then noticed to his mild surprise that he was irritated. That didn't happen very often either. Mostly he just went with the flow.

    "No…" he said vaguely. "Not hungry."

    "Is there anything you require before I leave?" the nurse asked.

    "No thank you" he replied.

    "Very well then," said the nurse. "If you need anything, just imagine a movement and it will trigger an alarm that we will receive. Sleep well." And she was gone. Thorn slowly drifted to sleep and dreamt dreams of neoball heroics.

    Averill shivered and looked at Thorn again in something of a new light. That he could simply will himself to endure more pain to outperform others… Averill shivered again. There should be a limit Averill thought to himself. He shouldn't have been able to do what he did to himself. There should be some gauge that prevents him from hurting himself. But what if he got into a situation where he was at his limit but he wasn't safe? What about paraplegics? What is their limit? Do they feel limits? These were old questions to Averill, old questions that he hated.

    The game was in a sense inhumane. There were always things about it that didn't make sense. For one, NSMCS systems were insanely expensive, and for good reason. Controlling a human is not something that can be done easily. Competitors were always odd in ways Averill didn't understand. For one, almost all of them were as care free and as pacifistic as you could hope for. Often more so than they should be, thought Averill to himself. Why would someone so evidently… lazy go to all the time, the effort, the pain, the expense of getting an NSMCS system when you don't need one?

    There were on occasion fierce animals of men who played neosports; men who were easily enraged, and who played for fame, and who played for it hard. They were dangerous types. Several had gone insane, or at least partially insane, and tried to steal from businesses and banks and things. It made no sense when you were getting a huge paycheck from whatever neosport you were playing, and when you could easily be tracked by the NSMCS system that you couldn't ever take off.

    The only thing that can be happening here is someone, probably the managers, are manipulating these people. I have to make sure and stop this animalistic sport, thought Averill as he considered the case of Thorn.

    Thorn had come from a rich family. Both of his parents were driven individuals, both were on several executive boards, and Thorn senior was the president of a well off concert venue. They were both creative, Thorn senior conducted music from time to time, and they both played several instruments. They had enrolled their son in the best educational systems available, and had only managed to get an apathetic flunk for all their effort.

    Thorn had been smart enough, he had played guitar for a time, and his sketch book was beautiful, but he had never really cared about anything enough to get him truly engaged in any one subject long enough for him to master it. When Thorn's coach had approached him with the job offer, Thorn accepted it, more because he didn't want to offend the coach than any real care for the sport. Thorn's parents of course thought it was wonderful that their son was finally doing something, and footed the bill on Thorn's NSMCS system.

    Now, instead of simply being a flop out, Thorn had a life. He had a huge following, a multimillion dollar contract, and almost anything he wanted. In exchange for all this, his coach, a man named McAry, controlled almost everything, simply because Thorn couldn't care less about anything other than neoball. McAry was something of a sneaky individual. Averill suspected that he was probably watching his interview over a hidden camera somewhere in the room, but at the moment, that didn't bother him very much.

    Averill suddenly realized that he wasn't here to interview an injured famous athlete, but to try to find basis to shut neoball down.

    Once the interview was over, Averill left and organized an accurate research paper on the rights of neoball players revealing how they were psychologically abused by their coaches to the point of self injury, but on publishing, his work was laughed down. He was called a sports hater. Several newscasts questioned his testosterone production capabilities, and three years later, Thorn died of a heart attack.

Teleportation Anyone?

High-energy physicist Daniel Isaac stood in front of a very large mechanism. It stood about three meters tall and seven long, and was roughly three meters wide. He and thirty other physicists had been working on it for four years, and it was finally ready for testing. It was a quantum teleportation device, designed for masses of up to a hundred and fifty kilos. Tests started, MRIs were made of many objects, organic and inorganic, and every time the machine worked flawlessly, transporting the objects across the room into the receiver instantly in a flash of bright, white light.
The physicists were ecstatic: four years of hard work and sleepless nights had paid off so beautifully that they were nearly drunk with happiness. The mathematicians were hugging each other shamelessly, and the physicists were just standing there grinning foolishly at it as the room was lit by one blinding flash after another. Several people dragged new and interesting things to teleport out, and the machine responded perfectly, depositing a pile of dust with a pattern traced in it exactly as it had been set in the tray. Someone turned up with beers, and the party started for real. The flashes were repeated more and more often, with less and less care taken between each flash. Eventually, someone brought in a guinea pig from the biology section of the university, and it was transported as well. The guinea pig stumbled around for a while, but seemed none the worse for wear.
Through a hazy vision, Dr. Isaac saw his friend, Dr. Antoni step onto the transportation platform as his friends drunkenly cheered him on. Daniel yelled for them to stop, but the men around the transporter were too drunk to care, and to excited to bother listening. There was a flash of light and Antoni disappeared from the transporter and reappeared, grin and all, on the other side of the room. The flock of physicists around the machine turned around and dashed drunkenly off to the other side of the room. Cries of “What’s it feel like?” were punctuated with yells. Antoni didn’t seem like he was hurt, but the grin was slipping off his face. Suddenly, he simply toppled, falling over sideways.
The shouts became alarmed as Antoni began to whimper. Dr. Isaac joined the mad rush towards Antoni, who was now trying to stand up. He slipped sideways again and fell over. When he saw the rush of people he screamed and thrashed on the floor, apparently trying to slide himself away from the mad rush. The atmosphere in the room sobered quickly. Questions rained down on Antoni worthlessly,
“Are you okay?”
“Can you stand up?” and
“What happened? Are you alright?”
Antoni’s only response was to wail piteously.
“Let’s get him to the hospital,” said Daniel. They picked him up carefully, and carried him out of the room towards the university’s hospital wing.
Once in the hospital wing, the doctors found nothing wrong with him, a physical gave no new unknown information. Full body MRI’s were of no use, it was not until an EEG was run that something came up. What it was, the doctors were unsure, but there was something wrong.
“There is something missing,” said Dr. Kolliner, it appears that there are no Karmachian waves being processed at all.”
“Lay man’s terms please?” asked Dr. Isaac.
“The part of his mind that deals with memories is completely dormant. There is no activity. Even under normal conditions, some memories are being unlocked, but in this case there are none at all. At least, none that our instruments are picking up. Those should have been firing all along, to decipher what we were saying at least, but there is nothing. It’s like looking at a severe case, over the tops case of Alzheimer’s disease, or something similar. Maybe Down syndrome.”
“Doctor, do you know how memories are stored?” inquired Dr. Isaac.
“Back in the twenty first century, scientists believed that memories were stored as proteins that were accessed by the brain whenever needed and produced and edited on the fly. However, memory is not apparently affected by the disability to produce proteins, subjects heavily dosed with protein synthesis inhibitors. Additionally, there is no evidence for large amounts of protein synthesis within the brain itself. Routtenberg was somewhere closer to the truth than his forerunners and colleagues. He realized that there was some change in the synapses of the nerves in the brain. However, he believed that these changes were protein based.
“Present theory seems to indicate that proteins have nothing to do with memory. Somehow, events change the very shape of the synapses themselves, memories are etched into the cells. That aside, is there a reason you asked this?”
“Actually, yes,” said Dr. Isaac, “As you have been told, our friend here was teleported, and I wondered how the events were connected.”
“Could you clarify how exactly the teleporter operates?” inquired Dr. Kolliner, “it may help me understand what happened.”
“In essence, the body is destroyed in one place are reconstructed in another. There is no dangerous amount of radiation involved, no chemicals, nothing. An instant scan copies every detail of the object to be transported, constructs it from large bricks of pure elements, and then vaporizes the original, sorting the elements and storing them so that they can be used again.”
“I see. So this isn’t really Antoni, just a carbon copy with none of the memories?”
“You could say that I guess, that is what it looks like anyway.”
“How do you scan the object exactly?”
“It’s a tad complex, but in essence, it is all tied in with the reconstruction. Each atom is read with very precise lasers. The lasers are so powerful that they vaporize the original at the same time as they read them. The machine is very accurate, electron spin and location are preserved, getting around Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was a trick, but it should have worked perfectly.”
“Did you test it on anything else and get a strange result?”
“No, not really… No, wait. We tested a guinea pig. Came through fine, only it didn’t seem to be able to walk very well. Antoni can’t walk either. I guess with the guinea pig movement is more an instinct than a learned attribute. Practice would improve performance, but only marginally.”
“I think I understand what happened then, as well as anyone can. We can do further tests, but somehow I feel that this is a lost cause. I think that somehow, the brain has a method for categorizing the way memories are stored. When you transported him, the ‘memory,’” Here Dr. Kolliner made quote symbols in the air with his hands, “of the memory was somehow corrupted. That was not very succinct. Let me try again with an analogy: the catalogue of memories was destroyed, leaving the warehouse full, but invisible and inaccessible, if you follow my meaning. This is the result. Of course, this is only conjecture…”
“Of course. It does seem to explain things though.”
“It’s a pity really, a bright young man in essence died, and we have created the semblance of a man, thirty years into life, with no real reason to hope for his mind, memories, and past life to return.”
Dr. Isaac could only nod.

ESP Lockdown

Dr. Kolliner stood before a blinking, flashing terminal. On the terminal blinked two screens: the brain wave patterns and vital statistics on the two men sitting comfortably in large easy chairs facing each other. The one on the left was a dark haired individual with longish loose hair swept back from his high forehead. He had an aquiline nose, green eyes, and a thin-lipped mouth. On the right was a blond man with short-cropped hair, gray eyes and an open face. Behind each of the two seated men was a large silver machine with a few dials and lights and large umbilical attaching it to the other box and to the terminal. On the two men’s heads were a network of wires and small pads. A technician stood beside each box, and several more paced the room. Dr Kolliner adjusted one dial before looking up at the two men, his hands resting on the sides of the terminal as he leaned against it.

“Are we ready gentlemen?” He inquired. Both men nodded, carefully due to the net of wires, and all the technicians gave all ready signals. “Here we go then,” said Dr. Kolliner as he threw a switch and twisted a dial. Lights flashed, several of them red, before another large light lit up. It backlighted a large screen that flashed ‘ESP link connected.’ Dr. Kolliner smiled grimly as the two separate jagged lines that were the men’s individual brain scans merged and converged. Here, years of his time and effort had paid off. The two men in front of him were in perfect and total communication. He took a deep breath and almost laughed with happiness. All those years of ridicule! All those mocking voices! He had shown them, laughed in their faces.
Both men had closed their eyes, but now they opened them, both at precisely the same time, turned to him in unison, and said,

“It worked.” After a moment they said, “You may turn the machine off now.”

Dr. Kolliner deactivated the device, rapidly spinning dials and pressing buttons. The lights flashed once, and then went dead. Technicians began unfastening the net of wires from the two men’s heads.

“Well?” asked Dr. Kolliner.

“It worked,” said the two men, standing up from the chairs they had been sitting in, “total communication. I don’t have any secrets anymore,” he joked.

“You mean you had no control over what was being transmitted?” asked Dr. Kolliner, looking at the two men suspiciously.

“None,” they answered in unison.

Dr. Kolliner chuckled. They are being funny. This is a joke. Thought Dr. Kolliner to himself. This is all a masquerade, all this synchronized talking and whatnot. The machine is off, any ESP link that was there has been erased. I saw to that personally in the programming.

“We have some tests we would like to run, if you would step this way gentlemen,” said Dr. Kolliner, leading them towards another room.

In the second room, which was just as white paneled, professional and emotionless as the first, were two more chairs, also with brain scanners behind them. Between the chairs was a chess set. The two men were seated in the chairs by several more technicians, and the brain wave scanners were attached. As the game progressed, a computer recorded their moves. After they had finished, the wire nets were again removed, as the computer analyzed the chess game.

Several tests later, including psychoanalyzation, the men were detained in a room while attached to life sign computers that recorded pulse, breathing rate and other similar functions. Dr. Kolliner sat down at a white linoleum table and spread sheets of brain wave patterns and computer analysis across the table. After a few seconds of observation, he gasped. He lined the brain wave scans up next to each other, with the times synchronized. The result was several sets of parallel waving, jagged lines. They were locked in a state of ESP.

“Their minds didn’t want to give it up!” he gasped. He looked at the sheets again. “No,” he decided, “no, the machine locked them into it. They are stuck as one entity!”

The chess game had stalemated, and computer analysis showed the game to have progressed on such an insane level that the men were as close too perfectly logical as they could get. The only thing left different between the two of them was an individualistic desire to win.

“I have killed two men, yet their bodies go on living, their minds tortured by the inner sight of the other,” he said as he stared at the pages in front of him. “To have no secrets at all…” he whispered.

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