Index | First Chap­ter | Pre­vi­ous Chapter

Shinsei’s ‘office’ through those dou­ble doors turned out to be quite the oppo­site of what he was expect­ing. In his mind, as he had imag­ined it lying in bed the pre­vi­ous night, he would have been open­ing those doors onto a labyrinthine cor­ri­dor net­work full of bleep­ing access pan­els and doors that denied access to the unwor­thy. There would have been offices, smooth-panelled and white just like the cab­ins he’d lived in, just big enough for one per­son. Maybe a desk to put a few things on, but oth­er­wise noth­ing but ver­ti­cal sur­face for his Angel to pre­tend it was pro­ject­ing data onto. Though the job came with the grandiose title of ‘Neu­ro­sci­en­tist’, he sup­posed he would have the same cubicle-bound data analysing job of all sci­en­tists; well sep­a­rated from the robots that per­formed any actual experiments.

Rather, it was one huge room that greeted him. The walls were white and smooth, the same plas­tic that the whole ship used, but that’s where the sim­i­lar­i­ties ended. Raised on a pedestal in the cen­tre of the room was a sin­gle chair, comfortable-looking but ren­dered unnerv­ing by its sur­round­ings. Some­thing com­pli­cated hov­ered near the top of the head­rest, from which cables flowed like a water­fall into the floor. All of them were neatly tied and labelled in both Eng­lish and Japan­ese. The whole appa­ra­tus was under­stated in a way that sub­tly drew the eye to it, remind­ing the viewer that it was much more expen­sive than they could ever afford, and also much more com­pli­cated than they could ever understand.

These same cables rose out of the floor again towards the edges of the walls and at free-standing con­soles, where they flowed into boxes that con­trolled giant viewing-screens and blink­ing touch-panels. There must have been hun­dreds of screens, all at heights and posi­tions that seemed entirely ran­dom to Illuminated’s newest recruit, but must surely make sense to someone.

“Impres­sive, isn’t it?”

Shin­sei jumped, and imme­di­ately felt self-conscious for doing so. “Damnit, Shin­sei!” he reminded him­self, “be professional!”

He turned, and met the gaze of a man almost as wide as he was tall, and bear­ing a grin that seemed some­how wider still.

“You’d be Shin­sei Hikari­gawa, right?” the man asked.

“Er… yes. Sir?”

“Easy on the ‘sir’, kid. My name’s Tom. Fol­low me, I’ll get you sorted out.”

“It looks like I’m going to be your men­tor,” Tom con­tin­ued as Shin­sei fol­lowed him across the room.

“Men­tor?”

“It’s kind of like being your boss, I sup­pose, but… friendlier.”

Shin­sei sighed with relief.

“Oh? What kind of boss were you expect­ing?” asked Tom.

“Well, I was sort of… I was wor­ried that the guy in the black suit would be my boss, and I’d have offended him on my first day.”

“Guy in the black suit?” Tom paused. “Oh. Oh, him. Yeah, sorry about that. He’s some toy that the cor­po­rate bunch are lov­ing at the moment.”

“He’s a toy?”

“Yeah. Holo­gram. He’s not real. It’s an image they force your Angel to show you, bypass­ing the request func­tion. Like what hap­pens when the fire alarm goes.”

“Oh. It’s very real­is­tic. Wait, hang on, I shook his hand!”

“Yeah, they fake the touch too. It’s new tech. They haven’t put it on gen­eral release yet — they’re say­ing it’s still exper­i­men­tal, but I reckon it’ll sud­denly be ready as soon as the porn indus­try ponies up the cash for it.”

That was not the best of thoughts to be putting in a 15-year-old boy’s head before expect­ing him to pay atten­tion, and Shin­sei tried very hard to push it to the back of his mind as he and Tom reached two chairs at the cor­ner of the room.

Shin­sei sat oppo­site his men­tor, and the viewscreen on the low table between them flashed awake.

“I should warn you,” Tom said, “you’re already kinda’ famous around here.”

“Famous?” he asked, quickly turn­ing to see if any of the other sci­en­tists he’d seen while cross­ing the room were look­ing at him. They were.

“You grad­u­ated with some of the high­est scores on the Ship in neu­rol­ogy and in net­work sys­tems, and on top of that, to have Cap­tain van der Kierchoff’s per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tion too — no-one’s ever seen that hap­pen before!”

“Cap­tain van– oh,” Shin­sei said, and sighed. How did Johann always get away with pulling strings like that?

“You didn’t know?”

“No,” said Shin­sei, decid­ing not to dis­close that he was friends with the Captain’s son.

“Well, I’m sure no-one’s going to come and ask for your auto­graph,” Tom said with a chuckle. “But if you won­der why we’re throw­ing you in at the deep end, that’s why!

“Now, don’t worry,” he con­tin­ued, not­ing the look of alarm that briefly flashed across Shinsei’s face when he men­tioned the ‘deep end’. “The first few days will just be ori­en­ta­tion, get­ting to know peo­ple and what we do, yeah? And I might as well start now, and explain what this room is all about, and what you’ll be work­ing on.”

“First off, you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing why there are all these screens about the place,” said Tom. “Well, we don’t use the Angel sys­tems a lot for work here. Of course, you’re free to have yours on and do what­ever you like with it, but for our main job, you won’t be need­ing it. Now it’s not that we’re low-tech — I’m sure you know, Illu­mi­nated prac­ti­cally invented Angels way back when. It’s pretty much that we’re too high–tech. Our big project chucks out and con­sumes so much data that it’d just over­load the Ether net­work, so we built our own. Most of the cables you’ll see around the room do the same job as the Ether, just within a small local net­work, and a thou­sand times the data rate.

“Now,” he con­tin­ued, wav­ing a hand across the table. The viewscreen switched from out­putting a flat muted grey to a blue-white schematic of the human brain. “Here’s the brain, yeah? Yours, mine, generic human brain. Here’s where your Angel sits.” A tiny red dot appeared on the screen next to the brain stem, with tinier fil­a­ments extend­ing out of it. When a fil­a­ment touched another area of the brain, that area turned pur­ple. “The pur­ple areas you can see rep­re­sent areas that the Angel maps into, has I/O to.”

“I/O?”

“Input-Output,” Tom explained. “It can read and write data to clumps of neu­rons.” His fin­ger stabbed at each of the pur­ple areas in turn. “Visual cor­tex. Audio cor­tex. Hip­pocam­pus — that’s short-term mem­ory, though I expect you already know that.

“Now the Angels have arrays of elec­trodes, at the end of each line, which mesh with the exist­ing neu­rons, right? So we can insert impulses to make you think you can see and hear things, and we can mea­sure and cause deple­tion pat­terns of neu­ro­trans­mit­ter vesi­cles in the hip­pocam­pus, and that gives the Angel I/O to your short-term mem­ory — it knows what you’re think­ing, and can remind you of things. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Shin­sei after a brief pause — not for the infor­ma­tion to sink in, but just because he hadn’t been expect­ing Tom to ever stop talk­ing. And, true to form, the older man imme­di­ately continued.

“Well, that’s the limit of what Angels do at the moment. It’s pretty sim­ple stuff, really — we just inter­face with the bits of the brain that we under­stand in what are fairly sim­ple ways.

“The idea of going fur­ther, bet­ter inte­gra­tion, has always stalled shortly after this point. We just don’t under­stand long-term mem­ory, or autonomous func­tions, that kind of thing very well. We can’t reduce their func­tion down to some sim­ple set of things we can inter­act with.

“But what we could do is a full block read — that is, we stretch the Angel out so that it can read from every area of the brain rather than tiny lit­tle areas. And if we can read that, we don’t need to under­stand what each tiny bit does at the start — we can just induce exter­nal stim­uli in the per­son, watch what changes in the brain, and try to improve our under­stand­ing from that. And of course, in doing so, we pretty much have a func­tion­ing model of a human brain rep­re­sented as data. A copy, in fact.

“Now peo­ple have thought about this for hun­dreds of years, yeah? Not a new idea. But there’s not been the pro­cess­ing power, or the stor­age, avail­able for that kind of thing. The num­ber of neu­rons in the brain is sim­ply so vast, there’s no way we could store it all.

“But, and this is not some­thing that can ever leave these four walls, some very advanced com­put­ers were devel­oped for these Ships, the Celes­tial Fleet. Way back, before you were born and almost before I was. They’re very advanced proces­sors that run pro­gram­ma­ble pro­cess­ing net­works con­nected to huge stor­age banks. Most of them are mon­i­tor­ing parts of the ship right now — it turns out those proces­sor net­works are remark­ably good at pre­dict­ing and coun­ter­act­ing prob­lems in com­plex sys­tems. The other com­put­ers? We have them. Turns out, their inter­nal archi­tec­ture is very sim­i­lar to what we have in our brain, that’s why we call them Neural Nets. They have bil­lions of tiny soft­ware neu­rons strung out in com­plex pat­terns. And that archi­tec­ture is pretty effi­cient at stor­ing the entire sum of what’s in our heads.

“So that’s why we’re doing this research now, we’ve finally got the hard­ware avail­able that can cope with the data. We’re call­ing it the same thing that they called it when they dreamt up the idea cen­turies ago.”

Tom reached over the table to shake the boy’s hand.

“Wel­come to the Con­scious­ness Upload project, Shinsei.”

To be continued…