Konsk: The Great Takeover of the Place.

27. Fixing Up.

The new body's stomach jumped as the lift dropped with a hum. Laurence had tucked himself into the corner and stared intently at the panel of buttons, anything rather than look to his charge. Only two guards had entered behind Trueman, taking up positions in the far corners, hands still on their weapons. Trueman wondered what was going to happen next.

There was no jolt as the lift eased to a stop and the door swished open. The delay on the sound effect was obvious. The opening revealed a plain white corridor, illuminated with a gentle, amber lighting, the angles between walls, floor and ceiling softened by curves. Laurence hurried out to put more distance between himself and Trueman, led him to a plain door and waved his security card at it. The door slid open revealing a small chamber, bathed in a soft, green light.

Trueman looked in. All he could make out in the dim interior was an elaborately padded chair, tilted back at an angle. Not unlike at the dentists, he thought in mild panic. He considered his options rapidly.

“I’ll manage from here,” he garbled, the tongue betraying its lack of co-ordination.

Laurence appeared relieved and stood back as Trueman entered. The door closed silently behind him. He let out a long breath, glad for the moment to at least be alone. Though they will almost certainly be observing me, he realised.

Allowed his eyes a casual sweep of the room, he noted the rounding of the lines where the planes defining the small space met. Interesting. Apart from the seat there was nothing else in the room. Minimal distraction.

Trueman made the body stand more erect, folded the arms, right over left, then raising the right and laying the index finger along the side of the nose, supporting the right elbow in the left hand; it was an old habit and the new body was finally adapting to it. Now what, he thought, motionless. He had not a clue.

Perhaps it might be best to just come clean and admit his ignorance but he resisted this. Not yet. It is not misplaced pride; while I maintain my silence, he thought, I still have an advantage over them. Even if I don’t know what I’m doing, he added. His right thumb passed under his chin, supporting it. The tip brushed against the lump on the left jaw bone. Quite suddenly, an idea came to him, an idea that would explain what it was and why he had difficulty talking.

Concealing his excitement he paced slowly about the chair, examining it carefully but unobtrusively, allowing his hands to lightly brush the material of the padding. It was a full recliner with jointed sections to support the calves, thighs, torso and head. And yes, as he had hoped, on the lower left side of the head rest was an additional feature. It was just a swelling in the padding but it was enough to confirm his suspicions.

Trueman lowered himself carefully into the seat, raised his legs from the floor and placed them in the moulded contours of the padding. It fitted the new body perfectly. He could feel the swelling on the headrest nestle against the lump on his jaw. He started to get excited.

Looking up, the lack of lines where the walls met with each other and the ceiling and the soft, overall illumination made him feel that he was suspended within a green sphere of indeterminate size, there being no depth clues whatsoever.

He relaxed as much as he could and allowed himself to just feel the body. The dull ache from the embedded thorns had taken on a more urgent throb but he ignored it. He sensed the muscles in his tongue twitching and smiled. This slight contraction of the facial muscles momentarily halted the twitching until he had relaxed once more. Then the green light faded and he was left in complete darkness.

Trueman jumped. The green light came back on. He chuckled. This might take a bit of getting used to. He tried mouthing a simple command, fade lights. They did. OK, let’s have some music. The sudden, thunderous music made him jump again- he recognised the piece, or at least parts of it and joined in, gleefully- Da Da Da Daaa! He mouthed a further command and the music died. Too much of a distraction, he thought. Now, lets really get this show on the road.

It couldn’t be just voice recognition, he reasoned, or rather, mouthing recognition, what would be the point of wiring up a tongue so you could give verbal commands without actually having to say anything out loud? None. So there must be something else. What have they really done? They must have taken some of the nerves or muscles that control the tongue and routed them to the implant in the jaw. That would be some sort of wireless interface, maybe infra-red or possibly ultra sound. Not important. The question was not one of wiring but rather, what would the control language be?

For almost the first time since his arrival he found he was using his old, familiar, rational thinking in a purposeful way, to solve an immediate goal and he was enjoying it.

Now what would he have done, back at the Little Big Farm, if he could have wired himself directly into his server? His home-built binary gloves came to mind. Yes, he thought tentatively, could be. He'd glued micro-switches into each finger of his old oven gloves, wired them into a parallel plug and connected it to his workstation. Operating the switches with the five digits of his right hand plus his left thumb had provided him with six bits, enabling him to count up to 63 in binary. That had been enough for the alphabet, the numbers 0 to 9 and some useful extras; yes, he remembered nostalgically, even caps lock.

With persistence the use of the gloves had become automatic, in the same way as the keyboard. He had even learned to control a seventh digit, giving him 127 options but had only been able to manage an eighth bit occasionally, the memory requirements becaming too great, even for him.

So, he reasoned, implementing the same interface would be possible with facial nerves, particularly the tongue with its large bundles allowing a very precise control. He wondered how many nerve groups they’d employed, or rather, how many bits to the interface?

He thought on. Whoever this body belonged to must have used this interface many, many times. That was its purpose, after all, or at least part of it, otherwise, why go to the trouble of giving up the use of your tongue? So it would be automatic, like making a fist or standing on one leg. It wouldn’t require thought. Could he then simply access the body’s automatic responses to operate the interface?

He settled himself more into the chair. It was very comfy; he had almost forgotten it was there. The tongue began to flicker and the hint of a glow appeared on his left, as if the sun was about to come up through a window. Trueman resisted the impulse to jerk bolt upright to look and instead paid attention to the flickering sensations in the mouth. It felt as though the tongue was highly active but there was no real physical movement. A virtual tongue, he thought.

Dawn arrived late that day, for Trueman. He breathed in sharply but the image that appeared before him, around him, remained stable. Incredible, he thought! It was clear that the whole room must be a screen or capable of receiving projected images. Excellent graphics, he marvelled, a totally convincing three dimensional representation of a study or studio. There were framed pictures, some moving, showing various scenes including landscapes, abstracts and portraits. Some he even recognised from Dawn’s books; wasn’t that maiden lying in snow a Pre-Something or other?

And shelves, laden with a clutter of objects including many books, what looked like bones, stones, crystals, pieces of wood, materials like velvet, satin, metals, a clock, a ship in a bottle, small stuffed animals. Work surfaces with tools, machine parts and underneath, trunks, cases, bags, sacks; the detail was boggling. Something clicked; of course, he thought excitedly, this is just a front end, some sort of a user interface.

And there’s a cursor! Where his gaze rested momentarily upon the framed Pre-Something painting a bright jewel appeared, flashing as it rotated occasionally, just enough to catch his attention. The cursor followed his eye movements. He tried the extremes; looking as far as he could to the right swung the whole room, or presumably its image, around. Looking upward- Whoa! The room spun giddily. Good, he had control of movement, he was getting somewhere. Now how do you select an object?

He looked back at the painting and as the tongue did something it leapt toward him, appearing to hang before his eyes in space. It was possible for him to move it closer or further away. He could remember it now, at least the subject matter, not the artist. Some saint or other, Dawn had said, a twelve year old martyr, burned alive by a Roman emperor, from what he could remember, sounded horrific. He frowned and brought the image closer.

Why was this particular image here, he wondered? Then he got it. Of course, this was just an entry point to a collection or database, like a book cover. Perhaps the new body had been interested in late nineteenth century art movements? His tongue did something else and several rows of smaller images appeared, apparently floating in space beside the martyr. They were rather indistinct, possibly more figure paintings. The artist appeared to have made considerable use of red. He let his tongue select one at random and it sprang to full size before him.

He stifled an exclamation and sat back in the seat, the heart pounding, trying to turn away from the new image as he vainly attempted to get the tongue to close it, but it swung around to follow him, the thumbnails trailing behind it.

It depicted another figure, he wasn't sure if it was a man or a woman, half sitting in something like a hospital bed. It was not entirely clear what had been done to her or him but the large areas of skin and flesh appeared to have been peeled back and bundles of fine wires inserted somehow.

It looked more like a photograph than a painting and began to change before his eyes. Trueman realised that it was a video file. As it continually hung before his eyes, the cursor hovering over it, a small text box popped open giving a name, date, time and other details. Simultaneously a soft, feminine voice began to speak.

“Volly 14 was especially sensitive,” the voice said calmly, “throughout the initial processes. After the exposure of the nerve ganglia the insertion of the control processors and connective tissues was achieved without difficulty.”

Finally he managed to make the tongue do something that closed the image. He shut down the thumbnails and banished the original painting back to the wall and then sat sweating in the seat. The pace of the flickering red lights in the new body's internal display began to slow.

Trueman closed his eyes, breathing deeply, forcing himself to slow the rush of adrenaline and think carefully, precisely. Clearly this was a personal interface, perhaps locked through some password or recognition system embedded in the jaw interface. What secrets lay concealed here? And what or who was a Volley? If the image he'd called up by mistake was number 14, how many more might there be and what was their purpose? He considered the interface in the new body's jaw; had volley 14 and others, been hardwired into... what, a computer? A network?

Trueman went cold. The painting was of a martyr. So were these poor folk being martyred for the purpose of some awful technological development? And was he, or rather, whoever had previously controlled this body, a part of it, perhaps an instigator? He considered the way people had reacted to him, or rather, the new body, on his travels and more latterly, in this dome and felt even colder.

The old country people had not been enamoured of him, that was for sure. Only Rhia had shown him any real warmth, as though willing to accept him on his present behaviour rather than any past misdemeanours. And possibly that Saxon, though they had both described him as dangerous. The thought that this new body might be responsible for atrocities made him shudder.

Trueman took a deep breath and opened his eyes. The room appeared unchanged, the same jumble and clutter of objects.

Lets be rational about this, he intoned, I need to find out what is going on.

Yet he didn’t like what he was finding.

He examined the room once more and avoiding the stuffed animals he selected a pale blue crystal. Again, as with the painting, it appeared to spring up close to him so that he could see in detail the many facets, each containing a single icon which he now recognised as mathematical symbols. Yes, there were the familiar signs, the arithmetic and logical operators, set theory and differentials. He was able to rotate it in any dimension, revealing more and more facets and icons, Lagrange's notation for the derivative, Linear and multilinear algebra and so on.

Fascinated he selected a facet and the crystal changed colour, becoming a lustrous semi-opaque orange. He selected more from a familiar equation and a silver pointer appeared and wrote in the air in shimmering gold. Trueman studied the resulting formula in astonishment. He put it away and tried out several more, ranging from the simple Pythagorean to the complex non-linear sets of relativity. It certainly beat a chalk board, he thought appreciatively.

Once more Trueman closed his eyes. Where was all this taking him? It struck him that this maths crystal could be an off-the-shelf item, so others possibly were too. Presumably some of these might contain histories and the equivalent of newspapers, bulletin boards, news feeds, or whatever they might have in this time, which would give him the necessary background to what was going on. And surely, somewhere amidst this stuff there must be a personal record, related to the new body and its history, perhaps locked or hidden.

He was encouraged but also concerned. He had certainly come across the help he required in order to answer his many questions, but did he have the time to complete this task? There was obviously a vast amount of information available to him in this graphical construct; more than just gigabytes, more like terabytes or even petabytes! He was boggled by the thought; it certainly made his 10 megabyte workstation with its tape drives look primitive.

That much information could take him weeks, months to research. How long had he got? The dome people presumably expected something from him, perhaps some piece of work, a report on an important task. They were almost certainly monitoring his actions, perhaps observing what he accessed. Even now there might be armed guards waiting outside the door, on the point of breaking in, having discovered his deception. In the end he just didn’t know what was expected of him.

Well, he thought, let’s be rational about it, I will just have to keep looking until they stop me.

He considered; presumably some of this information was based on older collections or databases that had existed in different forms in the past, forms that he might actually know from his own time. Like videos or floppy discs. Or books. He began to examine the room carefully for objects that suggested age. A brass astrolabe with a green patina caught his eye and he opened it only to close it down almost immediately. Even though it looked old it contained only astronomical data including ephemeris. The dates ran backward and forward in time as far as he chose to look but offered no clues as to when now was. He gave himself a psychological kick. Surely there must be something as basic as a clock and calendar.

He began another pan of the room and then stopped, his attention caught by an object under a workbench. On the bench itself appeared simple woodworking equipment, hand-tools such as a block plane and moulding planes, a brace and bit. The detail was exquisite. Curls of pale yellow shavings had gathered in the well in the centre of the bench top. Some had fallen from the bench to lie in the shadows below. Here it was dark, cobwebbed. He could even make out a spider, suspended in its web, busily repairing some damage. And there, almost invisible, lay a book. It looked, somehow, familiar.

Hardly daring to breath, Trueman clicked the tongue on the book and it sprang forward, hung before him in space, rotating slowly, accumulated dust falling from its surface in volumetric showers, glowing as the motes danced in the light.

The heart began to beat more strongly, awakening flashing red on the HUD and Trueman drew in a deep breath. He had been right, it was familiar. The complex fractal cover seemed to swirl and mutate as the book rotated in its gleaming dust cloud. Though he could hardly believe the synchronicity, there was no doubt. It was the book with the attractive cover, the book written by the supposed madman who it now seemed clear, had not been mad at all, the book that had got him here in the first place; Learner’s book!

Thanks for reading. Next up, back to the real world (or is it?) and part one of Designing in the Face of Fire. A warm welcome to new subscribers. As always, please feel free to offer your comments, suggestions, requests etc. Till then, hwyl! Chris.