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On the Jacket
He was cut off by a loud bang from the direction of the reception room, which was accompanied by a sudden wall of pressure that hammered down on Ana and Glen. Stunned, they clapped hands down over aching ears and tried to understand what was going on. The partially-open door between the front office and the training room buckled on its tracks, wedging itself into the carpeted floor. The door out to the corridor came completely off its tracks, and flung across the reception room, smacking into the opposite wall. Smoke and lights accompanied the ruckus, followed by a number of men in black jumpsuits wearing face-covering masks.
The men flung themselves into the front office, tendrils of smoke peeling out of their way as they came. Glen and Ana could see them in there, checking in the smoke, presumably, for them, but that same smoke hid them from immediate view.
“Damn—” Glen got out, although thanks to the concussion of the explosion, he couldn’t hear his own voice. He turned to Ana, but she was already on the far side of the training room, pulling up a panel in the floor. She shouted, “Come on!” again, barely audible to Glen’s ears, but he got the message. As she dropped her body down into the square hole in the floor, Glen charged after her.
And suddenly found himself bouncing diagonally across the room. He landed heavily, and looked up: A door had opened in the back of the training room, between him and his exit, and had knocked him off his feet. It was the emergency service corridor, and four more black-jumpsuited men were pouring in through it.
“Stupid place to put a door,” Glen muttered, as he tried to get up and scramble for the bolt-hole. But before he got three feet, he was set upon by the men from the service corridor. Two more forced their way in past the broken main door, and they too piled on him. He cried out, more in fright and frustration than in pain, as they pinned him to the ground.
“Pick him up!” someone said through a voice-muffling mask. Glen found himself being grabbed by numerous gloved hands and being manhandled onto his feet. He was held in place by at least four men, as two more looked him over. After a moment, one of them threw a hand down into Glen’s pocket, the one that held his linke. He dug around for a moment, shoving Glen about like a rag doll, before extracting his hand.
“It’s not there!” Glen looked stupidly down at his pocket, realizing for the first time himself that the linke wasn’t there, but his head was jerked back up by a gloved hand. “Where is it? Where’s the linke?” Glen shook his head groggily, glancing around the floor for it. The masked men imitated his actions, their vision-restricted masks forcing them to bend over and throw their heads around comically.
“Hey! One of them shouted. “Wasn’t there a hole in the floor over here?”
“Yeah!” another chimed in. “Where’d it go?” Now Glen glanced about for Ana’s now-hidden bolt-hole, and the men comically bent over and looked for that, too. Glen tried to concentrate enough to send out a signal to his linke, to see if he could locate it. But, either due to his fuzzy head or his linke’s location or condition, he received no reply.
“Forget it!” one of the men said. “He’s what we want!”
“Are you sure?” another asked. “I thought the linke was important, too—”
“Not as important as him,” the first replied. “Come on... someone else can look for it later.”
Glen was shoved at the service door, and found himself in a corridor barely a meter wide. One masked man walked in front of him, and the rest followed behind, the closest keeping a grip on his arm as they walked. The corridor was long... that, the long walk, and the smoke-free air, helped Glen to clear his head and focus his thoughts.
But the clearer his head became, the more worried he became. He was being abducted! And he had no idea as yet who were his abductors. Was it Lucci... or the F.I.A.? Or some other agency entirely? One thing he doubted was that it was Ana’s “employers,” considering how quickly she had tried to set up an escape from them. (He fervently hoped she’d made it. He wished he knew if she had... Glen pushed those thoughts away, to concentrate on the matter at hand.) Should he try to escape? Or would it only get him seriously hurt? The F.I.A. and Lucci hadn’t tried to hurt him, and these people might also believe that he was supposed to be a valuable commodity. On the other hand, they’d just blown up an office to get at him... suppose he’d been on the other side of the door? Would they have cared?
Also, his new linke was missing. It suddenly occurred to Glen that he had no way of knowing whether his newfound abilities actually depended on the specific AV-linke he used... Ana had told him not everyone had the required ability, but she had never said that just any linke would work. Suppose someone asked him to duplicate his earlier feats with another linke, only to find out that it was impossible? What would they do to him then?
A rectangle of light beyond the man ahead of Glen signaled the end of the service corridor. There were rarely many people in service corridors, as far as Glen knew, so he couldn’t expect to simply draw someone’s attention just by yelling, “Help.” And he had no idea how he could possibly get away from these six commandos, alone in a cramped area. So he allowed the men to force him onward, down the corridor. At one point, the man in front stumbled, and Glen almost piled on top of him, followed by the others in quick succession. Glen’s holder momentarily lost his grip on Glen’s arm, and for a fleeting moment, Glen imagined a chance to get away. But more rough hands grabbed him and bore him to his feet. After one of them cursed and launched a foot into the clumsy leader’s rear end, they were all up again and trudging down to the end of the corridor.
The corridor opened into a common service area, large enough for numerous vehicles and service equipment to pass through. The common area was bare, except for two carts. One was a standard-looking service cart, with the one exception that it had blacked-out windows. The second vehicle, a private citycart with similarly blacked-out windows, was already all-too-familiar to Glen. At least he knew who had grabbed him.
But as the forward doors opened on the lead vehicle, one of the men behind Glen growled, “What the Hell?...” The others tensed up as well, and Glen realized with a sick certainty that the commandos were not with the vehicles in front of them.
One of the commandos tried to drag Glen back into the service corridor, but the men that poured out of the lead vehicle clearly had other ideas. They brandished handheld weapons of some kind, grips with what looked like tiny missiles mounted at top and bottom, four on each grip. “Oh, shit!” one of the commandos exclaimed, and Glen imagined being caught in a firefight between the two factions. But Glen’s abductors were already well-covered, with no way out, and they seemed to accept this and hold their ground, visibly relaxing and displaying their hands in supplication.
One of the commandos abruptly jumped aside, surprising the rest, and quickly pulled something from his belt. He whipped it upward, leveling it at the newcomers before his teammates could warn him not to. Glen’s fear of an impending shoot-out returned, and his blood went ice-cold. One of the other commandos suddenly knocked Glen downward, landing roughly on top of him, and he missed what happened next. One of the newcomers fired his grip at the unwitting commando before he could take aim on anyone. The tiny white dart shot across the space and embedded itself in the commando’s side. The commando instantly bleated in pain, left his feet, and fell in a heap on the ground. He jerked about for a few seconds, then lay still.
“Nobody move!” someone shouted from the carts. Glen heard footsteps approaching them, and moments later, more hands were separating him from his abductors. When the last man was pulled off of him, Glen realized that he had purposely fallen on top of him, shielding his body from harm. He stared in mute surprise at the masked commando who had shielded him, but the commando was clearly more interested in the grips pointed at their chests by the newcomers.
Now new hands grabbed Glen, and walked him over to the second cart. The door cracked and slid open, and Glen saw a very familiar pair of legs inside. His arm was released at that moment, and Glen turned to size up his chances of escape. One look at the block of a man who still stood within arm’s reach of him, however, and he sighed in resignation and got in the cart...
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Encephalopath: Walking the Bleeding Edge
History has shown us that discoveries, inventions and gadgets often have unexpected and far-reaching impacts on society. Predicting the global impact of the light bulb was easy. But who would have guessed that the invention of the transistor would eventually put the thinking power of the mightiest computers in the palm of our hands, or that the Internet would come to shift the balance of knowledge, commerce and information flow worldwide?
Embracing the latest in technology used to be called the "living on the cutting edge"... that fine point between discovery of a device, and its becoming commonplace in usage. Back then, being on the cutting edge was considered racy, eager and fun. Today, the "cutting edge" has been renamed the "bleeding edge," reflecting the much shorter period between introduction and adoption, making tech much more difficult to safely predict, navigate or control.
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the AV-CMSP Linke:
like having a telepathic connection to the Net |
Encephalopath's story centers around two such technologies: Personal computing technology; and the pervasiveness of the Internet in our world. It's an appropriate combination, in fact, because these two bleeding edge technologies have been increasingly influencing and acting upon each other, creating a fuzzy middle ground between them. As our personal communications technology achieves tighter access to the Internet, and the Internet can draw upon those personal items to provide information, our personal technology is attached to the rest of the world, and the Internet gains billions of terminals in the human population.
As always, these unexpected technological events impact human beings, the ways we live, the opportunities we have, and the way we view the world around us. Often it is difficult to prepare for the changes we will go through to adopt new technologies, even for those who expect radical change.
But at the same time, people are people. And even in the face of a rapidly-changing society, we always see the same human reactions to it. Some will always be excited, some will always be frightened, and some will always try to take advantage.
Encephalopath also features two of my favorite technologies that haven't quite happened yet: Arcologies; and nanowave radio.
Arcologies, as envisioned by architect Paolo Soleri, are self-contained cities designed to hold the maximum amount of people, but make the minimum amount of impact on the surrounding environment. Soleri's Arcologies are usually only a few miles wide, like a very small town... but extend in turn up to a mile in the sky, encompassing hundreds of stories of homes, businesses, shops, factories and common spaces. The theory goes that such a design can be more "organic," or capable of ongoing alteration and development, than a traditional city. Also, a city that does not sprawl for dozens of miles is easier to provide service and utilities for, making it cheaper and more efficient to run.
The technology of an arcology has yet to be tested. Although Soleri himself is spearheading a "living testbed" of his theories in the western United States, so far no government or corporation has managed to demonstrate the feasibility of such a structure. However, with available resources dwindling worldwide, more efficient living design is under serious scrutiny by many people, and it may only be a matter of time before the prototype arcology is built somewhere.
Nanowave radio does not seem like much of a big deal at first. Today's standard radio broadcasts in the megahertz range, and it works fine for classic rock. Broadcasting radio signals also gives us radar, allowing us to track planes in the sky and automatically open the doors at the local grocery store.
Make that radio wave a thousand times greater, though, and you can heat objects close up... you've discovered the microwave oven. That same radio signal can be broadcast, and its reflections off of objects can tell you where that object is and how fast it's going... you've got radar. And if you increase that wave another thousand times, you discover that it makes an even better radar... able to not only locate objects, but to report on their internal composition. Radar increased to the nanowave range can actually broadcast and receive signals through objects, something traditional radar can't do. And it can focus on smaller objects, on the order of millimeters on a side, instead of yards.
Nanowave radio, once harnessed, will give us a level of detail so far above radar as to give us almost unimaginable tools. Diagnosing a broken electronic component, or a sick human body, can be done completely non-invasively. Materials can be scanned for internal faults before failure, as they are fabricated. Objects in storage cases can be identified without opening the containers, making inspections faster and easier. It will be like giving everyone a personal X-ray device... imagine the possibilities.
It is this nanowave signal that Encephalopath's personal computers, or "linkes," use to read signals directly from individual neurons in the human brain to receive commands... and to actually beam its own signals into the brain at the neural interface, to provide responses. Certainly a long way to go from FM radio, but... stranger things have happened.
And finally, an idea I developed years ago has found its way into this novel: "Black" people. Not just Africans, obviously... but people whose skin is jet-black and hair titanium-white, due to unexpected DNA rewriting inherited from parents who unwittingly used a popular and incompletely-tested UV protection lotion on their skin. These people, otherwise normal and from any race at all, become the new "black" people worldwide (and incidentally making Blacks go back to the term "African" to more accurately describe their racial heritage).
Originally conceived by me in the 1990s, simply to give me an allegorical vehicle for racial exploration (and incidentally as a warning against unregulated pharmaceutical development), it has proven to be particularly prophetic given the recent and unexpected epidemic of peanut allergies. It was recently determined that these allergies are apparently due to the increased use of peanut oils in infant skincare lotions and other products. Those peanut oils were applied to those products because of a popular backlash against petroleum-based oils and other "manufactured" compounds that might adversely affect the health of babies. Since no one would have waited for, much less financed, a long-term study of the peanut oils, they were assumed to have no detrimental side-effects, and rushed to market. And today, millions of children and adults are paying the price.
So you see, the idea of such an inconceivable thing happening—inheriting jet-black skin caused by an untested sunscreen product, of all things—isn't as farfetched as an entire generation developing a peanut allergy from baby lotions... is it?
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Architect Paolo Soleri developed the idea of self-contained cities like Franklin-Laurent, only a few miles in diameter but nearly a mile in height. These structures, called Arcologies, were supposed to be organic in nature, and therefore very malleable depending on the needs of the population. An Arcology could prove to be a challenging space for future architects to build within...
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