Digital Venous (3 page)

Free Time

NAPEANS HAD A lot of free time, yet found themselves to be busier than ever.

After the general introduction of N.E.T. in around 2200, it had only taken twenty years for food to be forgotten—with the absence of cooking shows and body weight programs in the media, a huge gap was left in the collective consciousness.

Political leadership was virtually impossible to organize with such widespread use of telepathy. Individuals tried but just couldn’t build up any power or momentum. It was ironic that in a society where everybody had a “voice,” political action seemed impossible.

Capitalism, also, had run into several major problems: Napeans no longer needed basics like food or medicine; everything they wanted, they could get for free. Like a tired old hawker, capitalism depended on selling things that no one wanted.

Society had experienced the commodification of every action, activity, and object. All aspects of life from the bathroom to the bedroom had been a commercial opportunity, and eventually people just got sick of it. For a long time there had been the circular nature of the “demand” or “tolerance” for these items. But after about fifty rotations of the cycle in several hundred years, people became bored with the variations on the same tired old products. And as the product was inextricably linked to the process, capitalism fizzled, and when status became determined in other ways, the dollar lost its mojo. Money still existed, but was no longer the driving force it once was. It was a problem, because a common political solution had often been to “let the market decide.” Indeed, a great many socio-political decisions had been determined by this principle.

So Napeans existed in a little vacuum, not making any big decisions, their only obligation being to allow the nightly occupancy of their mental real estate while they waited for the discovery of a new and better world. And as rent they were all paid a small pension.

Napeans had a lot of spare time and had become the most pleasant, the most sociable, cosmopolitan, and chatty population to have ever graced the planet. Because of their homogeneity, their affectations and mannerisms grew to be accentuated.

Fashions and trends moved so quickly through the Napean world that groups of people could be following ideas completely at odds with those in another part of the planet. For example, after years of godlessness, the Los Angeles Napean population was going through a hyper religious phase. This was influencing clothing, music, and the massive telepathy industry. The entirety of their population was spending twelve hours a day in prayer and meditation, and some were promoting the salvation and inclusion of Subs in Napean affairs.

Beijing Napeans had all developed an obsession with the color white. Their cities were white, their clothes were white, and their bodies were white. To achieve this, the skin could either be bleach-dipped or tattooed using a process called Zumi-wash where the body was three-dimensionally scanned, punctured thousands of times, and then painted in a glossy white liquid, turning the skin to alabaster.

The same fashion trends applied to game groups to which Napeans could subscribe. They made contributions to a communal fund, for which they were provided with regular updates and the latest software. Anyone could contribute to the development of a game. Sometimes, it went the other way—simply by playing the game, a user could generate an idea and would automatically be remunerated for it.

The game designers became very good at targeting things that the Napeans couldn’t have. They dreamt of freedom, youth, children, and death. Playfulness was highly prized but an anathema to modern Napean life. Most people were old; they had no playfulness, but were extremely sentimental about a time when they had. Many spent hours each day walking around in pleasure centers, playing character games where they lived double, or triple or quadruple, lives as different, more innocent people.

Their games could be played any place—any time. All a person had to do was access the game area via “Iris Navigation,” a contact lens sitting permanently in the eye. It was one of numerous pieces of hardware carried around in the Napean body. The IN lens was a transparent screen, allowing simultaneous normal vision, on which a number of connection points could be accessed and connected remotely with a number of information systems, internally and externally. An arrow seen on the lens was controlled by moving the tongue across the roof of the mouth. Commands were activated by holding the arrow on a desired item. Someone could be looking at a map, reading, or writing while looking you in the eye and having a conversation. A little rude, maybe, but common enough. IN allowed Napeans to use the Service information system to access goods and, most importantly for the Napean government Service, connected people to the Telesync network—mandatory during sleep every night. The Napean body was a self-contained library, communication network, memory bank, and mobile health center. Napeans could request and access free health checks via IN. At any rate, bodily chemical analysis was completed by the Service on a nightly basis during Telesync.

A Napean could have one eye on reality while the other was elsewhere. Sitting on a train, walking down the street, or even during sex, a Napean could be in more than two places at once. In the virtual world, extreme activities such as kill sports, bondage, obliteration drugs, warfare, and anything involving high risk were more popular than ever and almost completely safe.

In his spare time, Shane was so far gone into the ETP game world of sex and the plethora of Memorex games available that he could hardly remember, from day to day, what was his latest novelty. A new pleasure in the game world, with someone you didn’t know, could keep him busy for weeks.

He took drugs, which were freely available—not physically, but the experience of them. You could take anything you wanted. Although they were side-effect free, it was easy to get “lost” in a morphine haze or disappear into an amphetamine high that could last for weeks. Shane’s preference was for the downer style, clean obliteration variety. It made him forget everything; the world retreated behind a giant luminescent sheet. No worry, anxiety, or pain. Although a prodigious sleepwalker in his younger days, as an adult Shane could never even remember his dreams. The drug gave that back to him. A wake-up call—a pre-programmed alarm—had to be built into the drug experience so one could emerge, hours later, feeling fine, if a little stiff.

Over the years Shane had known people over who had “left the building”– friends who said they were leaving work and then disappeared—forever. Eternity via obliteration was not illegal. In fact, the Service encouraged it.
If you don’t like eternity here, go find your own,
they seemed to say. Euthanasia was free and readily available on the first of every month and, not just as a last resort, but as a perfectly legitimate response to life.

Motherhood Implant

NO LONGER WAS youth wasted on the young. People did not become grumpy with age. Now youth was exclusively in possession of the aged. They had been awarded a charmed existence; healthy and young, many of them loved to stand out from the crowd.

Because each Napean man looked like every other Napean man, and every woman like every other woman, they went to great lengths to distinguish themselves. Body augmentation was widely practiced through skin implants, tattooing, hair implants, scarring, plastic surgery, and pigmentation. And it was a strange phenomenon that, for example, at a party in a room full of Napeans (all genetically identical), each person knew who the other individuals were. To you and I, they all would have looked the same. But whether it was the voice, the demeanor, or “the look,” or a combination of all three  Napeans never seemed to get one another confused.

Traditionally, human beauty had been about the most average. But when “average” was universally imposed, it wasn’t long before the definition became very broad. A host of physical alterations became popular. Finger removal or extension was performed to provide sleekness or a look of grace. Acid tattoo dips made any part of the body whatever color one desired. Some Napeans ordered a hormone cocktail and grew opposite-sex organs. Ear removal was quite common and apparently had little effect on hearing. Beak-like nose augmentation was thought to be attractive. There was a style in itself known as angularisation. This could involve a suite of enhancements such as elbow and shoulder cap insertions, shin, foot, forearm, and finger elongation—they all served to make people look more spidery. It was beautiful, if that was your thing.

Napeans who wanted to make themselves look like animals was nothing new—lions and horses had always been very popular, but later ideas included insects—spider, praying mantis—and birds and reptiles.

On a social level, this physical sameness and their reliance on ETP led to a particular style of humor becoming widespread among Napeans. When a Napean was talking they tend to over exaggerate their facial expressions to compensate for the sameness and to break out of their anonymity. The ability to give or understand subtle facial expressions had become lost over time. Many jokes then revolved around saying something that was patently untrue and watching the other person struggle to establish the fact. Poker-face jokes.

Although a great many of the physiological problems associated with being human had been solved, evolutionary hangovers still persisted. For example, millions of years of evolution had ingrained a need in humans to reproduce, and with that came a whole array of behaviors such as nurturing. Evidence suggested that in the case of a female, motherhood was a one–off drive, meaning that it could be satisfied with a single experience of motherhood.

Hence the development of the motherhood memory implant. A series of highly detailed, individually tailored programs were given to the woman over a period of three weeks in which she grew to remember the birth and rearing of an infant.

With this simple procedure out of the way, a woman was then free to live unburdened with the discomfort of the motherhood drive.

Mia’s birth experience had been of a caesarean section, as complications had arisen during labor where the child’s umbilical cord had begun to tighten around his neck. However, despite this alarming complication, the child had emerged perfectly from her womb and had been placed in her arms for that special period of bonding before he was handed over to a besotted father, waiting to give the baby his first bath.

However, the engineers at synapse freedom detailed and personalized though their work was, had not managed to round off the narrative in a sufficiently holistic manner; the memory just ended in the toddler phase. Although from the mother’s perspective there was no grief associated with the experience, women reported more a sense of “awkwardness” around the lack of closure, many seeking compensation. Software developers argued that they had fulfilled their brief, that the implant was not about creating a neat little story but rather constructing a genuine maternal feeling. Most agreed—and synapse freedom proved in court—that it was better than nothing.

Electrotelepathy

ELECTROTELEPATHY HAD BEEN the biggest thing since laser projection building. A company called Telecasa revolutionized the communication industry with a slogan “don’t talk; be heard” and a product to back it up: electrotelepathy, or ETP. Human thoughts were found to have a frequency which, when channeled and amplified, could be heard. Humans had a number of bits and pieces inserted subcutaneously, one of which acted like a tuner and enabled a person’s thoughts to travel on a given, transmittable frequency.

Ways of managing this technology included applications such as the “I am” loop: a thought projection—a mix of words and images summarizing your present self. Also popular was the traditional mass mail-out of your thoughts at 4 P.M. daily. Similar was the “thought blog,” for a more targeted exchange. The “partner program”—one of many such programs— provided couples with an ETP framework and included key questions prompting users and keeping the session on track. These were all popular uses of the technology and led to a huge increase in the homogenization of Napean society.

ETP allowed a tremendous flow of simultaneous conceptual volume, providing Napeans with a very fast way of connecting with and understanding others. ETP provided people not just with information but also with a sense of how other people felt.

People would ask each other: “What do my thoughts sound like? Does it sound like my normal voice? What about when I’m angry?” Mostly Napeans said their friends or loved ones’ thoughts sounded like their speaking voices. Also, paradoxically, there was no voice but more a sense of that person: “I just know it’s you... it feels like you.... I feel differently when I’m on ETP with you than I do with someone else.” Other descriptions: “Your words form in my head in a ticklish sort of a way in a way that my own thoughts don’t.”

There was a theory that because totally new areas of the brain were being used and opened through ETP,  there was a useful hangover effect. So even when not using ETP, some of its characteristics were still present. Regular ETP users reported the ability to not just an increased intuition of the thoughts, feelings, and moods of others, but also an ability to know what was being said—before it was said.

ETP created true empathy. Traditionally it was believed that language creates meaning, but ETP changed this perception. By receiving the words of another as “thoughts,” one received the feeling of realization and awareness of that other person. It was said to bring out the best in people. You could “hook up” with people close to you and virtually share your whole day quickly and with little effort, such as in the partner program.

In the very early days of the network, ETP had its drawbacks. Nefarious uses of ETP sprang up everywhere. It was used to rob banks, subvert the legal process in court rooms, and deceive casino officials, to name a few. Anywhere Napeans could secretly conspire for personal gain, or steal someone’s ideas for profit, they did. The parent company, Telecasa, lost a fortune compensating victims of crime before their programmers reclaimed the mountains of money, re-marketing security products such as Scrambler, Buffer, and White-out, which limited or prevented the use of ETP in certain areas, be they personal or public.

ETP also required tremendous focus. Without concentration it could become very confusing. Training was needed to use the new technology because otherwise any immediate thought one had could be heard by the other person. A sense of calmness was required to be a successful ETP user. Whether transmitting or receiving, open ETP put a person in the telepathic stream of consciousness of another person without editing. Many a romance had its beginnings, and its end, through ETP. It could cause great fatigue; some users reported suffering migraines as a result of using it for more than one hour due to the intense level of energy required.

There had been early instances of Subs infiltrating the network and leaving nasty surprises. They created “trip leaks” where a Napean could accidentally pick up a thought or chain of voices very difficult to control. There were warnings and messages in Napea to “turn off your ETP unit before going to bed or you may never wake up,” and to “never get involved with someone you don’t know.” Some things never changed.

For Shane it was something he would use with his wife after work—it was a quick and painless way of letting Mia know exactly how he and his day had gone. Aside from work, he seldom used it for communicating with anyone else. It was too intense for him to use socially. Mia, on the other hand, used it more often.

She would lie on her bed, eyes open, and activate IN and remotely contact one of her friends. There was no greeting. No “hi, how are you?” There was a period of listening for meaning, and then a faint click like a change in air pressure from an altitude shift. Whispers. Echoes. Today it was Linda. Mia was mid-stream in her consciousness and at point of contact knew exactly what she was talking about. Linda was obsessed with a new man, and of course, not just any man.

Linda:
His soul, a youth mix… a wisdom… physical qualities are not like the bond I used to share with Harry, but it’s there instantly… whenever I know he’s there like with you, Mia… it’s been a long time, Mia… come and hear him speak… hear Aiden… he speaks about how we can all be… all one… …and the Subs… we are Subs too. He talks about how we can achieve it. Through collective contemplation… they travelled lightyears, and as a group they soared beyond the Milky Way… an end in itself. No, of course Aiden’s not the first, but under his guidance, we can make sense of the enigma. You don’t think he’s genuine, which is why you must come and share his space. It builds on traditional meditation—not demotivating but empowering. That there is no right or wrong—analysis creates evil. Everything that will happen has already happened. It’s not fatalistic because there is still beautiful chaos. Come experience Aiden; he makes it all clear.

This information passed from Linda to Mia in seconds. And although Mia had “said” little, her presence and acquiescence were also clear to Linda. For Mia, each space between each word gave an image and a feeling. Where face-to-face verbal communication was two-dimensional, ETP added the third.

Mia now knew what this “Aiden” looked like and felt like she knew him. For Linda, like many Napeans, religious and metaphysical ideas came in and out of fashion. The guru, Aiden, had reinvented an older idea based on the “one moment” philosophy. The roots of the religion were many and varied, but the main inspiration had come from a physics equation which proved that linear time was a fallacy. Many Napeans chose to interpret this as a type of fatalism where the past, the present, and the future were all happening at the same time.

Aiden was one of the new non-materialist Napean philosophers. The ancient concept of nirvana was just around the corner, if only people would stop playing pointless games. Aiden believed that if Napeans could be rid of these facile desires and be rid of the thirst for novelty, amazing phenomena could take place. A world of pure intellect, spirit, and transcendence could be attained. He believed that it could be reached as a whole population, simultaneously, and that this would evolve the human species to a higher wisdom. Part of their doctrine was a belief that more should be done to help the Subs, to guarantee a place for all in the new world. A place where traditional forms of humanity, such as death and aging, coexisted with Napean lifestyles.

Lifestyle applications of the One Moment philosophy tended to revolve around meditation, harmony, and love. Unfortunately Napeans weren’t quite ready for One Moment. Many of them still had over-bearing sex drives, destructive urges for personal power, and continual but fleeting desires for novelty. And all of these hungers could be easily fed by pressing a few buttons or navigating an arrow around the roof of one’s mouth. In fact, the Napean sex drive had been shown to have been accentuated—whether as a result of N.E.T. or boredom, no one was quite sure.

Aiden was another in a long line of idealist visionaries, the type of guy that Linda was attracted to, that Mia found amusing, and that Shane couldn’t stand. To Shane, their main activity seemed to be inactivity.

Mia liked to keep in touch with friends but in a world full of novelties and amusements, she was still bored. There was one thing she wanted but was not allowed to have.

Mia responded:

He sounds fascinating. I’m happy for you. Where? When? Right now I just am... no passion… enagagement… lacking spice… depression. Shane is elsewhere. I’m out of endorphins. I know I look great but can’t shake this feeling.
Mia could feel her friend’s disappointment and desire to fight the depression. Was he there? No? She was on her way around, on a mission to show her friend the root cause of the problem. It was, and always would be, Shane.

It was wrong of her to deflect the cause of the problem onto Shane. But it just wasn’t safe to discuss some things in the public domain. You never really knew who might be listening. Shane wasn’t the cause of Mia’s discontent. Mia’s real problem was a Napean taboo.