The Silicon Trip

By: Josh K

            Scott was surrounded by an indescribable unity.  Everything breathed with him.  The desk, the chair, even the ground he sat on responded harmonically with his every thought and move.  Everything that he did was reflected in the world around him.  If he talked, things in the room moved in beat.  The music pouring out of the TV screen synched with his thoughts.  The images blasting out of the speaker were manifestations of his desires.  Everything was perfect, waves of euphoria raced through his veins.

            There was a burst of bright red neon.  A stylized image of the robot from "Lost in Space" appeared yelling "Danger, Danger," as an abort button came up in the center of Scott’s field of vision.  An image of a brain with waves of red swelling along the edges appeared below the button.  Automatically, the cut off switch was tripped, and Scott returned to reality.  No euphoria, no sensory crossover, no accord.  All that was left of the experience was a wire plugged into his head leading to a flat rectangular box on the ground.

            Scott shrugged off the residual effects of the drug box and absently pressed a button on the side of keyboard.  Graphics and text indicating the neurological aspects of the last twenty minutes streamed in front of his vision, burning in bright green and red. He had been on the verge of a "Profound Neurological Event," probably a severe seizure. Problems like that were all too common when programming a new trip for the drug box, that’s why they were still illegal.

            Scott looked at his watch; Comparative Vertebrate Biology class would start in ten minutes. He unplugged the drug box from his head and filled his backpack.  As he opened the door he nearly knocked over his roommate, Chris, who was just coming back to the dorm. "Hey Chris," Scott said, "don’t play the disc I left in the drug box, it’s still a work in progress. Very little progress at that."

            "Sure, whatever," the words just of fell out of Chris’ mouth like mud.  He was obviously high on some crude chemical based drug.

            "Hey, you really should be doing the VD.  Good disc’s are cheap, reusable, and better on the brain," but Chris was already through the door.

Scott pulled out a pack of Egypt Reds, removed one of the cigarettes and lit up. He walked the uphill path to Drexler Hall on the other side of campus. The University was big, so there was nothing better to do while walking to class than smoke, though he always resented the way it made you feel dirty.  The virtual drugs never left you smelling like a crowded bar, but it was too big to be a practical replacement for cig.  He approached the building and tossed the cigarette into a storm drain.  Perhaps class was canceled that day, but it was certainly not something to bet on.  He really was still riding a bit of a buzz from his brush with death and he wasn’t going to make a very good lab partner for the day.

             Lab had already started when he arrived in class. In front of him was a half gutted dogfish shark.  His partners had already started removing parts of the Gastrointestinal Tract.  He joined in removing one of the two lobes of the liver.

            The professor held up someone else’s shark liver and said, "Can anybody tell me anything about the features of this liver that are different from the human liver we looked at last week?"

            Scott raised his hand and said, "Yeah, the damn thing’s slimy as fuck and it just slipped out of my hand"

            "Scott, as usual, your colorful response is not appreciated in a serious class setting," the professor said, "however you got it half right.  It’s much more oily than a human liver.  Can anyone explain why?"

            Scott flopped the liver around in his hands for a little bit "I don’t know, maybe they uses it for lubrication when the sharkies are knockin’ fins?"

            The professor was visibly irritated by now, "Scott, just leave, you were late for the quiz so you aren’t getting any points for being here today anyway."

            Scott walked down into the cluster of buildings full of classes in session.  He took off his backpack and fished out a small plug with a wire running back into something in his backpack; he plugged it into his head.  He then grabbed a small headset and put it on, aiming a small laser projector at his left eye.  Then he put on some glasses and pressed an on button obscured by his backpack.  A series of icons appeared amongst the people walking around.  Concentrating on the icon labeled "Global Uplink Carrier: TACHO BELL-LABS," a few seconds passed and a translucent screen popped up reading "Global Uplink Successful."  As he walked back to his dorm, he posted the latest about his drug-in-progress on the Drug Box Forums.  Before long he reached his dorm room door.  He entered his code into the keypad and opened the door.

            The smell was all wrong.  He walked into the room.  Chris was lying on the floor unconscious.  The electrical smell of Ozone was prevalent.  The drug box was there next to him on the floor, a wire connected to his head like a leech.  Scott felt a cocktail of fear and adrenaline race through him.  He immediately pulled the plug out of Chris’ head and checked his pulse.  It was there, but weak.

            He rushed over to his desk and reached under it, pulling out a large grey lockbox.  Frantically, he punched in the code and opened the box.  There was a tray resting just under the lid containing various hypodermics, they were set aside.  Under the panel were all sorts of electronic devices.  He grabbed a screen with a wire coming out of it and set it on Chris’ chest.  He took the wire and plugged it into the jack on the side of Chris’ head where the drug box had been connected.  The screen came to life, a model of Chris’ brain in the upper left corner, EEG and EKG monitors the bottom, and the rest of the screen displayed assorted homeostatic readouts.

            Just then a high pitched whine came from the device as the EKG went flat.  Scott looked through the tray of needles until he found a red needle with the words "Atropine Analog 7" on it.  He injected it into Chris’ arm and started compressions; the EKG fluttered a bit, but remained flat.

            He retrieved a disk shaped device with two long needles and a wire connected to a screen.  Putting the disk on Chris’ chest, he turned the machine on.  Chris’ heart was made visible on a live x-ray screen, and two little targeting sites landed on of it.  Motors whined as the needles rotated their position on the disk until it matched the targeted areas on the screen.  The needles burrowed into Chris’ chest.  The targets on the screen turned red as the needles stopped. Below the image of the heart a button appeared with the words "Start EMS Pacemaker," written in blue neon.  Scott pushed it.  The EKG monitor returned to normal heart rhythm.  Scott retrieved a small oxygen tank from under his bed and attached it to Chris’ face; his readings were starting to stabilize.

            The relief that came after getting Chris stabilized didn’t last long.  The EEG readout was looking like that of someone in a coma.  As Scott adjusted the EEG’s frequency resolution, he found a digital shadow of a waveform; that indicated that the neural interface bio-chips were still fully integrated with the neural infrastructure.

            Scott picked Chris up and set him on his bed.  He removed an IV and catheter from his emergency kit and prepped Chris’ arm for the IV.  The IV was taped on his arm and catheter was then inserted into his bladder.  The phone rang; Scott let the answering machine pick it up.  It was Chris’ mom. Scott started to think about the legal consequences of what had happened.  If Chris died, Scott decided he would hide the body at wait a day to report a missing person.  This was not a happy thought, because his life was very sheltered and he had no idea even where to start on that sort of thing.  However, it was not going happen, he knew that he wouldn’t let it come to that.

            He walked over to the drug box lying on the floor.  Pressing a button on the side, a 2-inch CD ejected from the box.  He took the CD and inserted it into a slot on his computer.  He loaded up a diagnostic program that analyzed the sensory filter data on the virtual drug disk.  After a minute, the computer pinpointed a defect in the synchronization subroutine.  Apparently the code mutated causing Chris’ brain to go into a sensory loop.  He was stuck in his own subconscious.

            Scott loaded his VD editor and started coding a repair for the defect on the disc.  The synch subroutine was a complex design, using a constant feedback from the brain.  It was this feedback that gave Scott an idea.  With the synch routine bound inside the VD, he could access Chris’ brain by projecting his consciousness into the feedback.  Scott made the appropriate modifications to the code that would put him into the loop, while keeping him in control.  He opened his dresser and pulled out a splitter and a spare neural cable.  The two cables were connected from each of their head to the drug box.  Scott pressed the on button.

            There was a consuming sensation; it felt like a seizure was about to come on.  A pale blue bubble materialized ten feet in front of Scott and started to expand until it pushed Scott through.  Everything was a deep shade of blue.  It was moist, and Scott was drenched in a violet puddle of fluid.  Before him was a twisting maze of tunnels. He wandered aimlessly for about fifteen minutes before he found an old 1980’s neon sign shaped like an arrow pointing at the ground.  Scott dropped to his hands and knees, digging at the rock.  It unearthed like gelatin, light was visible below.  The ground opened up and swallowed him.

            Scott was caught in a web of silk, taut thin lines of it everywhere. The entire point of reference shifted and gravity seemed to hiccup.  The hole he fell through was below him waiting to swallow him up again.  Using all his strength, he flipped himself upright.  He stated climbing up the webbing, away from the hole.  Small translucent half-spider half-crab things were crawling all over the web.  Scott pressed on.  The higher he got, the less dense the web became.  There was a sharp stinging sensation on his ankle, Scott looked down to see a grey spider burrowing into his skin and exiting on the other side.  The pain was dizzying and gravity shifted again causing him to fall up into the ceiling.  Despite the spider, he got up and walked until he saw a grey fleshy orifice.  The walls were reaching out to him, trying to grab him while the ground seemed to sweat little streams of mercury.  In desperation he dove into the orifice and blacked out.

            When he came to, he wasn’t breathing.  A grey gel was surrounding him, holding him in place.  Hallucinogenic figures floated in and out of view.  He could taste Chris’ knowledge; it was seeping into him.  He was slowly sinking through the gel.  As he went deeper, more foreign memories took residence in his mind.  The grey slowly turned white.  He could sense Chris but the hallucinations were getting difficult to bear.  He fell through the gel and he was Chris, all the memories and thoughts were his.

            Getting lost in woods behind his house, discovering his pet dog had crawled under the porch to die, his thirteenth birthday.  None of these memories were his, but he felt them seamlessly grafting into his own.  He was standing in the kitchen of his childhood house, he knew it was his own, but nothing was where it should be.  His family never had a dishwasher, but there it was next to the sink.  All of it felt natural like everything was as it should be, but it was not.  He wandered aimlessly through the house that was some strange arrangement of his own.  None of the rooms were in the right order, and all the doors were locked.  He crawled out of an open window and somehow found himself in a cavernous room.

            The floor was a circular pattern of cobblestone. Chris was sprawled out on a white table in the center. Hundreds of cables ran out of his head and limbs, going into a hole in the floor. Chris was like an ornament, the only decoration in the room. Scott was the room, he could see from every angle at once. He hadn’t only mastered his hallucinations; he had become the hallucination, an abstract construct in Chris’ mind.  Scott concentrated and pulled together a body mass out of the floor.  Using the new body, he walked over to Chris, and removed a thick black cable from Chris’ spine and inserted it into his.  He flew through the cable into another room, as the previous room collapsed into the cable behind him.

            Scott was lying in his bed, an IV in his arm, and a catheter in his bladder.  "What’s going on? Where did…wait," Scott couldn’t continue to speak, he saw Chris remove a cable from his head.  He turned to Scott.

            "I came into the room and found you half dead on the floor," Chris said as he put the cable on the ground.

            "But I walked in on you."

            "That was part of the feedback loop.  You experienced me finding you and your brain translated it as you finding me."

            "I have your thoughts.  I know your memories."

            "Me too, it must be a residual effect but it seems to be fading.  No one has tried what we just did so I guess this is sort of uncharted territory."

            "Then what now?"

            "We market it.  Forget higher education, we’ll be rich."

            "Do you really think this is the kind of thing people would really go out for?”

            “Of course!  Think of it.  With all the advances we’ve made as a society, people are just feeling more isolated than ever before.”

            “Hell even couples seem alienated from each other.”

            “So you’re seeing the possibilities.  We won’t just give them what they want, we will give them something that they lost and have spent years trying to find in all the wrong ways.”

            “Well how do we market it?"

            “Don’t be silly.  We’re in college, hell where do you think the drug culture comes from?  This will be the college drug de’jure.  All we need to do is regulate it."

            “We could encrypt it with a timer, strong code.”

            “I’m already one step ahead of you.”