“I’m an early adopter,” Jason insisted. “I’m not trying to stay current; I’m trying to stay ahead.” Peter, who most people just called “Yanks” disagreed with his friend, in keeping with the usual path their interactions took.
“Call it what you will - you’re an underpaid lab rat. They’re taking advantage of you. I can understand taking the nanotech for a continuing education sim or the occasional gaming session, but they’ve got you under full immersion for, what? Six or more hours a day? Your brain isn’t going to be able to handle it. Best case scenario, you’re psychologically addicted to it. Worst case? Who knows? But that’s the point! No one knows, and when they discover all the side effects, they find them on you."
Jason leaned back from his coffee mug in the small diner. Intellectually, he knew Yanks was probably right. There had been huge changes in everyone’s lives after nanotechnology was commercialized. Tiny, nano-sized devices could be ingested in a capsule, travel through the bloodstream, and diffuse through the blood-brain barrier. The “nano”, as people had taken to calling it, had sensors that could detect electrical signals in neurons and their synapses. The nano’s electrostimulation suite could apply what amounted to a small shock to the neural dendrites - the “input” channels of the neurons.
Suddenly, the world had a direct interface to the brain. That was not to say the brain was fully understood - far from that. There were still 200 billion neurons in a single brain, and as many as ten thousand different types, too. Jason’s employer hadn’t invented the nano, but they had been one of the first success stories when it came to software that could interpret what nano scans were showing. Razor, Inc. called itself a “simulation consultancy company,” but at the core of their business was the ability to take neural signals and interpret them as measurable thoughts.
It was a potentially creepy ability, which is why the corporate publicists always focused on the wonders of full-immersion simulations and stayed well away from the “we can read your thoughts” conversations.
“Jason?” Yank interrupted his musings. “How long have you had nano actively scanning your brain, now?
“Just over a year. Fourteen months, I think. And my head still hasn’t exploded,” Jason chuckled. “Or melted, and I’m not a government-controlled zombie.” Yank raised his eyebrows at that.
“How would you know?” he asked, but there was a grin on his face. They both knew that the nano’s signal strength was low power, requiring receivers within a few inches for the transmission to be picked up. Those receivers were arranged around the head and together formed quite the bulky contraption. Due to the weight and bulk, the participant would need to be lying down. The original inventor of the sensor technology, Nontech, was manufacturing “immersion capsules” that also contained an incredibly comfortable pad to lay on, processing electronics, power backups, and a basic waste capture system in the same style as astronaut suits.
As of yet, no one had invented a portable receiver, but Jason didn’t doubt it would happen one day. When that happened, he might want to take a closer look at the nano’s reportedly unbreakable encryption, as he knew that nothing was ever fully secure.
“Either way, Yanks, this is a massive part of my job. I can’t manage the development projects of as many simulations as we’re working on without spending a good chunk of my time in the capsule and within those sims.
“Once I’m there, it’s not efficient to get back out, only to return an hour later for the next session. I can video conference with my developers from my virtual office as easily as I can from the outside. So, while I appreciate the concern, I’m unlikely to quit my job any time soon. Now, tell me about how your beloved Yankees are doing this season before it’s time for me to go back to Sarah and the kids.”
---
The next morning, Jason walked through the glass doors at the front of his office building with his usual energetic smile, as the first snowflakes of the year drifted down outside. The company signage on the lobby wall - Razor, Inc: “Always Cutting Edge” was an ongoing reminder that he was one of the privileged people who had the opportunity to mold the future. He liked that, and he was willing to work hard to keep that opportunity.
“Morning, Aleah,” he called out as he passed her workstation. The Senior Analyst of the Simulations department stuck her hand above her cubicle wall and waved. She was always early, and probably the only person more enthusiastic about her job than Jason was.
Her role was to interpret data and solve problems, whatever they may be. Since most of those problems accumulated on Jason’s desk as the Senior Project Manager, they’d developed a close friendship over the last year.
Today, they had to work through some issues in a fantasy game as well as an educational simulation. The ‘edusim’ was intended for structural engineers, and the bridge simulator portion was not quite realistic yet. When it was perfect, the ability to upload and experience architectural designs first hand would allow course instructors from around the world to give their students the chance to fail - and learn from those failures - without destroying their careers or other lives. One simulated trip across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, aka “Galloping Gertie”, just before it collapsed and no designer would forget to take a structure’s aerodynamics and aeroelastics into account.
Aleah knocked on Jason’s open office door, not ten minutes after the rest of the team had shown up and made their way to their work stations. “Congrats, Jason. I’ve been looking at our neural net prediction rates, and last week yours reached 99.4% consistency. You know what that means, right?”
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“I get to be a lab rat, again?” he joked, but remembering last night’s conversation with his buddy made him wonder how much of a joke it actually was. For Razor, it meant they were getting closer to what Jason’s boss called the “holy grail” of nano simulations - time compression.
Time couldn’t truly be compressed, squished, or stretched, of course. But people’s perceptions of time could be accelerated, at least theoretically. When in a typical simulation, nano would write sensory data to the mind and tweak memories to make the experience seem more real. For the core simulations that Razor worked on, active thought processes were typically only read, not written. Psychologists were also using nano to overwrite traumatic memories in victim’s brains, but they had started to go farther - actively writing specific thoughts to the brain.
Those individual thoughts, if the process was continued, could turn into thought patterns, and those patterns could change a person’s entire outlook on life. Depression would likely be a thing of the past within the decade, scientists said. The technology was incredible, but the theory didn’t stop there.
The question Razor asked its engineers was this: What if a supercomputer could use a nano brain scan and the neural network associated with it to predict what your next thought was going to be? What if it could make that prediction faster than you were able to complete the thought yourself? Could it then write that resulting brain-state back to the subject, and the associated memory of having that thought?
If that process was repeated, and a user experienced many more thoughts, more discrete “mental states,” in the same amount of time, would time effectively be compressed? At least from the perspective of the user, who was now able to think and perceive faster in the same amount of time?
Jason thought so, and so did a good portion of his team. They and their stock options were counting on it. A company that allowed the world to get five times as much done in a workday would be incredibly valuable. It would also mean extra days of gameplay for gamers, more time at simulated vacation destinations for overworked families, and more simulated field trips to historical events for college students.
The world was changing, and as Jason took a deep breath to steady his excited nerves, he reminded himself that this was his place - at the forefront. When a digital neural network could anticipate virtually all of someone’s biological neural reactions, it would be time to attempt limited time compression. And since he’d been in the capsule almost every day for the last 14 months, with active brain scanning across a wide range of simulations and their varied experiences, his neural network was the most accurate in the company’s databanks. The most accurate in the world, too, he assumed.
“Thanks for the news, Aleah. I’m going in now. Before I review what’s wrong with the engineering sim, I’d like to check out the game Rick was working on yesterday. He said he was having issues with the elves’ appearances - their facial expressions just didn’t look right or something like that. I’m hoping a few pointers will clear his roadblock.”
“I’ll monitor your entry from my desk,” she called over her shoulder.
Jason changed into the immersion suit and made sure the waste disposal sections were correctly aligned. Laying back onto the capsule’s pad, he slid back until the transmission and receiving array surrounded his head. They called it the target, and Jason was sure that was an acronym for something but hadn’t cared enough to remember precisely what. “Enter immersion,” he commanded.
Jason’s immersion home space was even duller than his real office. Upon entering the office, he stepped out of his virtual recreation of the immersion capsule (they’d discovered this decreased disorientation and nausea) and walked over to his desk. On it was a tablet with which he could check emails, surf the web, and do essentially everything he could have done in the outside world on any other piece of tech. After verifying nothing urgent was in his inbox, he sent the command: “Start Project Greasewood simulation, latest stable revision.”
A cool, almost disinterested voice spoke back to him. “Starting fantasy game simulation codenamed Project Greasewood. The latest revision is Beta 1.7.5. Last modification yesterday, 3:17 pm, by Rick Hanson. Would you like to see a changelog before entering the simulation?”
“No, thanks.”
The world faded to black as a 5-second countdown appeared in front of Jason’s face.
When his senses returned, he sat up on the hay-filled tick. He exited the room and quickly made his way down the steep staircase. A smile at the innkeeper polishing his glasses got him a grunt in reply, and he walked out into the blazing light of the day outside.
“Admin mode, path find a route to nearest elf village”.
The cool voice returned. “Nearest elf settlement nineteen minutes away if walking. Do you wish to teleport to this location?”
“No, thanks,” Jason responded. “I think I’ll take the scenic way.”
No further response came, but Jason imagined a frown on the Guide’s face for his less-than-efficient choice. It was a ridiculous notion - the Guide was programmed to be an interface, not an intelligence, and did not display emotion. “Admin mode, start a video call to Aleah. Dock in upper-right of HUD.”
With an “Acknowledged,” a communication window popped up to the upper right of his vision, appearing to float several feet in front of his face. “Hi, Jason.”
“Aleah, were you ever able to…” Jason paused as the sound of metal bending and glass shattering in the distance caused Aleah to look over her shoulder. The lights in her office flickered, then stabilized. A frown grew on her face as she jumped up and ran out of her cubicle and out of Jason’s sight.
“What’s going on out there?” Aleah returned to view, with concern in her eyes. “It looks like a driver slid into a telephone pole. The road was pretty slippery…” her voice trailed away as she noticed the red, flashing alert on her screen.
Urgency filled her voice. “Jason, we’ve got to get you out of there. Your pod’s acting up.”
Aleah snatched the tablet off her desk and ran to Jason’s office. She finally heard the stream of short, continuous beeping that was emanating from the capsule. The tablet was forgotten on the floor as she pressed the emergency logout button located prominently above Jason’s head. His head slid down into view, but he did not sit up. Aleah tapped his shoulder, then shook it. No response.
Jason was breathing, Aleah noted with relief, and he still had a pulse. She turned to see that a couple of the other team members had followed her into the office and told them, “Call 911!” much louder than was necessary. In the scramble and commotion that ensued, no one heard the voice from the tablet asking, “What’s going on?”