Flightsuit (7 page)

In the weeks following the discovery of his abilities, Taylor registered for a neuroscience conference.  He wanted to understand how his timesharing actually worked.

Taylor stood at the conference hall's doorway looking in on rows of
metal frame, soft-padded chairs at the room's near-capacity crowd.  He guessed there might be 400 people in the room. 

No way
, he thought, looking around the room. 
I can't go in there.

Physicians continued to filter past him into the
hotel's Grand Ballroom from the registration table.  Their little "Hi my name is" tags scrawled with names and strings of credentials.

Taylor backed out of the room, feeling the disappointment that always
accompanied disrupted mental connections. 

When he formed new
connections, he always experienced racing thoughts and crystal clarity, as well as a pleasant euphoric feeling.  When the connections were locking in, he sometimes felt an imagined wind and sunlight in his face as if he were cruising down a coastal road, flowing along road curves.  He raced, feeling his foot constantly increasing the gas, the pedal never actually reaching the floor.  Faster and faster.  As the connections increased, the driving feeling faded and in place of the car underneath, he saw the highway itself under and around him as he lifted up and flew straight into open air over endless seas toward the sun.  By that point, he would be immersed in the thoughts and ideas and plans of the people around him and begin to drive them in the directions he chose. 

When he
pulled away from the connections, the euphoria drained, leaving him feeling disappointed and lonely, like a runner sprinting to cheers of the crowd who suddenly finds himself alone on the track, still running but alone.  Without the notes and checklists, the lasting feeling would have been only depression and loss, but reading his notes afterward always inspired and invigorated him.  He knew he was truly special, possibly unique in all the world.  His staff believed him to be a genius, but they had actually underestimated his uniqueness.  There were many with genius intellect and would be more born in the future, but he knew there was no one like him.

Backing out of the Grand Ballroom, he snatched a meeting agenda from the registration desk
.  The agenda listed several breakout sessions.  He selected one with a ridiculous long title and an impressive speaker's biography.  Taylor checked his watch and headed for the breakout room, hoping for an empty seat in the audience center.

He'd learned over the years to avoid large rooms of people.  The connections were completely overpowering.  Any time he found himself in the midst of a large number of people, he kept moving.  The wide neural net he generated didn't connect immediately.  He'd feel an invisible tug toward others as the connections initiated.  As long as he kept moving the connection didn't lock in. 

In his mind, he imagined the neural net
of his timeshare connection hanging a few feet overhead, and slowly descending on those around him in the way a heavy tent drapes around a support pole.  The heavy shroud he imagined fell without slowing from their head until it reached the floor.  The dark heaviness of it left behind a sparkling mesh of pin-sized lights, brightest in a twenty foot radius around him.  Its outer boundary felt indefinite, fading gradually with distance. 

At first, the dark shroud and
sparkling mesh was something he only imagined.  Over time though, he'd become accustomed to thinking of the process this way, and the mesh felt almost tangible. 

Connections took time, so he'd left the Grand Ballroom before an intoxicating flood of information and ideas overwhelmed him. 

When he first discovered his ability, he soon learned that more people yielded greater processing power.  He hadn't realized there was an upper limit until he'd attended a play. 

He'd been testing his limits then. 
The closeness of a theater, with strangers sitting quietly in the dark around him, seemed a perfect opportunity.  As he started to relax in his seat, he felt his arms grow heavy.  He closed his eyes and unpacked himself, stretching out into the minds in the darkness around him.  It was exhilarating, as if his mind had lived in a cramped, confined space and now had a wide-open field.  It wanted to run and keep running.  His thoughts raced away. 

He learned two important lessons that day.

Most of his experimentation was during consulting sessions at Berc.  These sessions all had some purpose, some objective, a focus shared by each attendee, at least to some extent.  The clients spent months or even years, working on a product, or some new technology that had become, essentially, their life.  They thought about their jobs during the day and consciously or subconsciously when away from work.  While they relaxed, their minds wrestled the challenges that dominated their attention during the day.  The Berc consultants didn't have the extensive focus in any particular area that their clients had, but the mental stimulation of learning something new and their desire to identify anything a client might have missed or might find valuable gave them cohesion. 

Consistency of purpose and mission
proved ideal for Taylor's timesharing.  It was most powerful when his own objectives for the session mapped more closely to the experience and interests of surrounding minds.  When he took knowledge and insights from transportation executives and developed new ideas and transportation services for example, the concepts were market-disrupting and innovative.  Trying to leverage a wide neural network of those same executives to select stocks for a portfolio might produce some good insights, but nothing of the same scale.

The wide neural net of the play's audience was
a tornado of incoherent subconscious interests.  No amount of effort seemed sufficient to maintain Taylor's own determined line of thought.  Without a subconscious unifying focus, Taylor's racing thoughts were pure chaos.  He would focus on one thing, only to find himself hopelessly distracted seconds later.  He couldn't retain a chain of thought long enough in memory to add the next link.  He had massive processing capability with no means to control it.

That was the first lesson - without a unifying background or focus large groups were impossible to focus as timeshares.

The second lesson involved his maximum operating range in a tightly-packed crowd.  Most of his experience timesharing was in the consulting meetings with clients.  The conference rooms were sufficiently large that everyone maintained a comfortable distance from each other.  He'd experimented with his own location in the meetings, moving as far as possible from the others – as subtly as possible, telling them he wasn't feeling well and didn't want anyone else to get sick. 

They mostly ignored him anyway.  He'd made enemies of all but the most charitable and forgiving.  He never tried to ingratiate himself and once clients started to ask for him specifically, he was
ted no time rubbing it in.  The staff was relieved when he sat away from the table for any reason.

When a speaker moved a
round close to him, they stayed connected in the neural net.  As long as they didn't move too far away he could sense their mind and feel his own thoughts speed on.  Those further away could disconnect easily with any movement at all.  He'd become annoyed with people for connecting and disconnecting.  They, of course, had no idea.  It was an unbearable distraction to be forcing a stream of thought through the timeshared minds, frantically taking notes to collect the best concepts and observations along the way and not wanting the stream's flow from one idea to another to slow – only to have someone get up and go to the bathroom.  He'd be disrupted in mid-thought and would sit blinking, trying to remember what he'd had in mind.

He occasionally found himself staring with tight, frustrated eyes at people who left and returned.   He'd catch himself with no idea how long he'd been staring.  Sometimes they were looking at him too.  It wasn't hard to imagine th
is behavior was probably not helping him fit in.

From the consultin
g sessions, he established twenty feet as his maximum operating range.

In the theatre
the seats were much closer than anyone's comfortable personal space.  He found his seat just after the play began, weaving between knees and seat backs to make his way to it.  He breathed in deeply, anticipating an enjoyable experience.  He kept a notebook for notes.  There was no point, Taylor figured, to being smarter than everyone else if you didn't make it pay off.  During the play he planned to timeshare through some of his strategies for the upcoming week.

Deep breathing relaxed him.  He opened his eyes to watch the dark shroud drop past the people around him.  The vision was so compelling, he couldn't tell whether his eyes actually saw it
.  The shroud seemed convincingly real.  As it dropped, the glittering radiance of the wide neural net in the dark theatre was stunning.  Taylor saw a weave of bright glistening webs concentrated and bright over the heads of those beside and in front of him.  He watched as one by one, they lit up and he felt…

He felt confused and anxious.  He'd expected the clarity and calm of the timesharing sessions
he had experienced in the conference room, and he began to understand the importance of shared background. 

His thoughts
ran away from him.  A woman three rows down was thinking about the things she would need to pick up after the play for lunch tomorrow.  Taylor felt her anxiety as she looked at a mental image of her pantry to see if she had used the last of the oregano.  He grew anxious along with her.  He noticed how bright the theatre was becoming as the radiant webs appeared over more and more people.  His mind raced, running a few steps with one mind before jumping alongside another.

He couldn't recall a single thought from the last hour when he blinked awake in the theatre.  People were standing and leaving their seats
.  It was intermission.  As those closest to him left, the timeshare tumbled apart.  The blackout scared him.  He looked at his watch.  He'd lost more than an hour. 

He'd been lost in the expanse of hundreds of minds connected in the timeshare without any unifying background
.  His own thoughts wandered from the fleeting thoughts of one person to another.  He looked at the pad.  He'd scribbled the page over with circles and squiggled erratic marks.  It was almost black.  He'd left marks on his pants as the pen drifted off.  He realized that he must have sat through several bouts of audience applause and laughter, completely oblivious.  He wondered if he'd been drooling or making sounds.  Thankfully not - there were no wet spots on his pants.  There was no way to know if he'd made noises.

People were coming back into the theatre.  Taylor jumped to his feet, dropping the notebook and his pen, realizing he would need to get out before the people around him started to reconnect the timeshare net.  He bent and looked for the notebook, spotting it on the floor of the row below.  He stretched and stepped over the seat into the lower row as people turned to look.  He didn't care what they thought.  He had to get out of there quickly, but the book was critical.  It was filled with dozens of checklists he'd compiled
.  Once he had the book, he hurriedly left.

Reflecting on the experience outside, he'd learned the second lesson of the evening.  His timesharing limits were greatly extended when participants were close together.  If the wide neural net was always there but unnoticed, that made sense.  He was the only person who could see and use the net, but it was always there.  Perhaps people felt it without noticing it, attributing
the effects to themselves.  When they were in a room brainstorming with people of like background, they felt sharp clarity and when they were in a room full of people with diverse thoughts, their minds wandered easily. 

He was glad to have escaped notice and wondered what he would have done if he'd awoke
n in a mental institution.  The adrenalin shakes stayed with him for the rest of the evening.  He avoided theatres afterward and was careful to keep moving in crowds.

He sat quietly in the neuroscience conference breakout session and timeshared the minds of the forty-one physicians.  They never noticed.  No one ever did.  It didn't seem to have any impact on what they were doing.  They just carried on with their presentations and discussions, while his wide neural net draped over them. 

Taylor wanted to understand his timesharing and using the experiences and accumulated knowledge
of this group, he developed a theory.  He had written it all down at the time, of course, and kept the notes, although he could only understand a few of the notes later.  But he had a good enough idea of how it worked to get by, a working knowledge.

The popular model explaining the mind's function centers on neurotransmitters passing information chemically along concentration gradients that are like paths or stream beds between the billions of neurons in a typical brain.  During the breakout session, Taylor pieced together theories from the fabric of experience around him. 

The chemical information could be thought of as a "last mile" connection.  The popular model of chemical information packets might explain how ideas converted to action, but not how an idea formed in the first place.  Taylor was amazed that he'd never before considered how something as intangible as an idea could be created by chemical and biological physical structures.  Sitting there in the breakout session, he imagined shaking a toolbox around and having ideas fall out.  So little was actually understood about the mind that the popular theories for ideas arising from an amorphous concept of complexity weren't all that different.   

It was as if someone looking at a highway saw dozens of tankers and assumed they transported everything, never noticing the telephone wires running along the highway carrying smaller packets of information faster and over greater distances.  The scientists at the conference
just waved their hands as explanations for where the original spark of an idea or concept began.  They were seemingly satisfied attributing the process to complexity, as ridiculous, Taylor thought, as the idea of thousands of networked computers developing sentience, or a thousand jabbering monkeys. 

Sitting in the conference and tapping into the processing power of everyone in the room proved there was some form of information transmission beyond the crude chemical transport within a single mind.  There was something more, obviously. 

There's probably someone in this room who believes there's a unifying connection between all us
, he thought.  He looked at the faces around him.  
Some poor guy that's tried for years to get people to believe him, to get his research funded
, Taylor thought, smiling with only the slightest uptick in the corner of his mouth.  He stared at one of the physicians that was not even looking at the speaker, but taking notes as fast as his hand could move. 
That guy.  He's one.  He doesn't believe every invention, every plan for the future the human mind generates, is caused by little chemical packets dropping from one mechanism we don't understand to another one.  He knows that's not all there is.  But he can't figure out a way to prove it that doesn't give the others reason to mock him.
 

As Taylor stared, the disheveled young physician stopped scratching at his pad and glanced over at him.  Taylor closed his notebook on the pages of notes he'd taken. 
I could buy the guy a coffee.  We could open up my notes and he would be able to move forward.  He could probably convince everyone of his theory.  He'd stop all the other research in this room that is heading toward a dead end and all these people that think he's some hack would have to admit he was right all along
.

Taylor stood up and walked toward him.  As he turned down the aisle toward the door he nodded to the young physician and smiled.  The physician hesitated and then continued taking notes. 

Taylor headed for the parking garage.