Don't Make Me Think

Listed under Zero HP Lovecraft.Theme

From the original article on July 7, 2021. Author: Zero HP Lovecraft.

1. Dagger

A man—a boy—grows up in the exquisitely quantified and gamified world, in the city of Cupertino, on the edge of the Santa Clara Valley, in the shadow of the Santa Cruz Mountains. When he is eleven, his parents—an Ashkenazi technical product manager and a Chinese game designer named “Sing” Song—take him to get his Neuralink at the hospital by the Super Kyo-Po plaza.

A robot performs the procedure, which requires no general anaesthesia, in one hour . While they wait, his parents buy their groceries for the week, and when it’s over, they take him to get ramen for lunch. He orders two ajitsuke eggs and extra chashu pork (because he’s a growing boy) and his parents eat compressed enriched mealworm bricks. For them, Neuralink degustation technology makes the worm loaf phenomenologically indistinguishable from a hot bowl of Hakata ramen.

For the next three nights, as expected, the boy sees dazzling incomprehensible dreams, all of which he forgets, and on the fourth day, he wakes without waking into a vaporwave expanse of Pantone rose quartz and serenity. A voice in his head says “good morning,” and it sounds like his mother but with uninflected English. “You can call me Amy, unless you prefer a different name. We’ll be getting to know each other better in the coming weeks, but for now I need to make sure everything is working properly. If you can hear me, please think about a rhinoceros.

“…Good, and now a castle?

“…Good, and now your favorite TV show ?”

Amy teaches him to make search queries with his mind, and to install applications, and tells him she will collect his biometrics to ensure he remains in good health at all times. She will read his thoughts, but she will never share them with anyone, and will always respect his privacy️. The boy doesn’t tell her, though he guesses she will know, that he receives this as a threat. Hereafter, his life will be measured and optimized and nudged, to help him live up to his full potential.

As he reads his books in school, Amy highlights the words one at a time to help him keep the pace while studying. She tells him how many words he has read, how many minutes he has spent reading, and ranks him against local, regional, and national averages. She shows him how to find his position on a leaderboard that charts the reading ability of everyone in his age cohort.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic are all fully automated through Neuralink. A program in the boy’s personal cloud decodes images retrieved from the lateral geniculate nucleus of his brain and parses them into words using OCR algorithms (Pravettoni et al., 2034, Mitigating Systemic Cognitive Inequalities through Automation of Mental Labor.) A similar mechanism is used to automatically detect mathematical symbols and perform the relevant computations.

Students hear the words they are reading, or the answers to math questions, in their own inner “voice” – the Neuralink driver is able to manifest these values in the mind of the student using a method called Concept Injection. The purpose of education is not to train students to read or do math; it’s to train them to use mental automation effectively. Tool-assisted reading is performed through the cultivation of passivity and “flow”. The application gives, and the reader receives.

In P.E. class, they use a parkour program and play follow the leader, free-running through an obstacle course by playing back neuromotor recordings from top athletes. Although they are children, they can tap into the aggregated muscle memory of a thousand lifetimes. The boy feels like a passenger in his own body, but it’s thrilling to feel himself leap from a height, roll and dash across concrete pylons and flip off of railings and wall ledges. Sometimes he wonders if it’s really happening or if it’s just a hallucination, but his muscles feel sore afterwards. Whether it’s real may be entirely the wrong question.

When he uses the toilet, Amy records all his muscle movements, and shows him metrics that track how much his anus clenches when he shits. She explains how these metrics can be used to detect leading indicators of unhealthy bowel function, and recommends (both to him and his parents) that he should switch to a higher fiber nutrient brick. (Heaton, Radavan, 2024, Dark Matter: Extrapolating Behavior in the Enteric Nervous System Using Neuralink)

Sometimes whole weeks go by without a single act of agency on the part of the boy. Amy says wake up and he wakes up. She says get dressed and he gets dressed. She says go here, do this, go there, study; eat; and he does, he does, he does. It feels less like obedience and more like convenience .

When he is thirteen, in accordance with economic forecasts, he enrolls in a vocational track to learn about encephalic software engineering. In his sleep, Amy dreams schematics and flowcharts and diagrams into his mind. At the same time, she enrolls him in YouSocial, a broker for B-certifications. B-certified individuals are people who meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, who work together to redefine success and build a more inclusive and sustainable economy, creating new incentives through personal transparency and accountability. (What is B-Certification?, YouSocial.com/FAQs, 2031.) On average, it takes five years for young adults to earn a B-certification; employers and colleges use the cert as an essential criteria for evaluating applicants.

On the weekends, his father takes him geocaching with an app called Recollect, in which the proprietor of a hidden cache uploads a memory of the act of hiding it, but does not share the coordinates. Together, the boy and his dad find a memory of a capsule in a flower pot next to a statue of Nikola Tesla, and they join the others who have found it there by uploading their own memories to the chain of recollections.

Inside the capsule is a small Tesla coil, and when he beholds it, a popup in his mind’s eye asks if he would like to relive the collective’s discovery. He assents. A kaleidoscopic wave of images floods his mind, layers of phantom approaches to the capsule from every angle; panoramic sight, polyphonic echoes of satisfaction.

When he is fifteen, some of the parental controls fall away, and Amy introduces him to Neuralink pornography, which is metered by homework completed . Memory-based porn is regulated by the LOTUS EATER Act: using direct brain stimulation to induce orgasm is classified as wireheading, and this functionality can only be deployed by software certified by behavioral experts to have value in promoting or fostering prosocial behaviors in the user.

Recorded memories that contain sexual stimulation of erogenous parts fall under Schedule II, which defines any memory or application that induces euphoria conducive to single-mindedness as a potential vector→ of abuse. (Limiting Onanistic Tendencies Under Simulation, Exceptions Afforded To Education & Remediation, 13 U.S.C. §§ 56-341, 2028.)

Amy lets him browse the porn networks for up to an hour each day, provided he completes all of his homework. Neuralink pornography allows the user to have first-person sexual experiences across a range of genders and sexual presentations, and has been shown to significantly reduce prejudice against marginalized sexual identities (West et. al, 2034, Can Intra-Subjective Non-Binary Sexual Experiences Induce Empathy?).

As he grows older and despite the prodding of the voice in his head, he never concerns himself with the thoughts or the dealings of women. In high school, Amy tries to broker dates for him, but he does not care for dates with boys, and he finds the girls Amy suggests to be ugly or otherwise deficient. (1 in 4 boys are resistant to Neuralink -induced “cued bisexuality” vs. 1 in 50 girls. [French, 2029, The Conservative Case for State-Enforced Homosexuality.])

Yet when he is seventeen, all on his own, he meets a hapashkenazi girl named May with a face from Chongqing重庆市 and tits from Samandar. He is overcome with lust for her, but she rejects his advances. (The exact location of Samandar is unknown; medieval Arabic sources place the city midway between Derbent and Atil, near the shore of the Caspian Sea [Brook, 2018, The Jews of Khazaria.])

In anger, he picks a fight with another boy that she favors. He balls up his fist and it flies at his rival’s head, as if of its own accord, but before the punch can connect, Amy fills his mind with calming emotions and inhibits the muscles in his shoulder and tricep. He relaxes in spite of his will. Even so, the other boy’s eyes become glassy, lost in some neuromanipulated soothing unto himself. (An exercise in theory of mind: that other boy must have his own Amy, with her own voice, and her own name. What does she tell him?) The peace of the moment yields rapidly to terror, because the boy realizes his body may disobey him.

Instantly, Amy files an incident report with the school board and the local police, indicating the boy was the antagonist in an attempted assault in which he experienced hot-blooded violent intentions. The ticket is routed to the school guidance counselor’s office, where a bot processes the report and prescribes a course of medium-intensity guilt to be invoked whenever the boy recalls the incident in question. The prescription is appended to the ticket, which is marked as ‘pending review,’ whereupon the automated psychiatric consultant for the district approves it and pushes a notification to Amy, the boy’s parents, and the school’s student resources office. The round trip time from filing the ticket to its approval is just over six seconds, with 2/3rds of the time spent waiting on the approval, 18% above the mean but still a 3.2% improvement YOY. The boy’s score on YouSocial is decremented by ten points, with a chance to mitigate the penalty if he completes a probationary period with no recidivism.

As soon as the approval comes through, Amy deploys the guilt through the boy’s Neuralink, and although he feels a heaviness in his chest, he is unable to place its origin. He does not feel any remorse about trying to punch the other boy, and the experience of guilt feels like it comes from somewhere outside him, as in fact, it does. He dislikes the sensation, but on some level he knows the provenance of the feeling, and that it’s part of the same intervention that stopped him from landing his punch in the first place. He hates Amy, and his anger wells up under the artificial guilt and subsumes it.

~

One night he downloads a memory from Recollect of a curving road where no street signs are visible. In the memory, he parks his car on the highway shoulder and steps out into the humid air of a marsh in the San Francisco Bay. He walks into the wetlands with a flashlight, uncomfortably far, and lifts up a rock with a false bottom. Without looking, he places an object inside, so that the nature of his treasure cannot be discerned by aspiring recollectors. But although the object cannot be seen, it’s clear from the emotion of the rememberer that he has hidden more than just an artifact; he has also buried an obligation, and this is a ritual; it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last.

The boy goes out to the wetlands to search, following the memory, but he does not find the treasure. Even late at night, he can go anywhere he wants with his car, because CrimeStop is installed on every Neuralink device, and it cannot be removed, so children are never unsupervised. Neuralink with Crimestop both protects him from others, and protects young people from the follies of youth.

The next day after school, he searches again, and still he finds nothing. Weeks elapse. He does not relent in his search, and no one uploads any new memories of finding the Recollect cache in the rock, so he knows it’s still waiting there for him. He replays the original memory again and again, until he feels he is looking for an object he has hidden from himself.

Every day at school, he sees May together with the other boy, whose name he does not care to learn. Each sight of her is a slight; each thought of her with him is a wound. And when he thinks of her, he also thinks of the fight that was denied to him, of the way his arm went slack; of the way his shoulder seized up. And when he remembers these things, Amy fills him with guilt, and guilt spurs his anger, and his anger lowers his YouSocial score. The boy has his mother’s temper, and the world is full of invisible walls. He believes (and he knows it is a superstitious belief) that if he finds the treasure in recollect, he will also discover a way to win May’s affection.

Amy tells him feelings of anomie, alienation, and even despair are normal, common symptoms of adolescence; the way to become his best self is to have personal goals that connect him to his community. He can both improve himself and repair his trajectory towards B-certification. A longitudinal study by West and Curwen found that teenagers who set their own charitable goals are three times more likely to build enduring altruistic habits vs. teens who have them randomly assigned (West, Curwen, 2038, Setting Them Up For Success: A Neurological Approach to Cultivating Conscientiousness in Developing Adults.) She tells him he should choose his own goal, and gives him a list of possibilities.

He chooses to do volunteer work for an organization called Respawn that rehabilitates recovering smartdrug addicts. Amy handles the registration process and the scheduling. On the appointed day, he goes to the Respawn clinic, where they show him a training and orientation video–

The human mind is a machine that fallsinto predictable failure modes when exposed to the wrong combination of stimuli. For this reason, cases of smartdrug addiction are best viewed, not as questions of crime and punishment, but as matters of treatment and prevention (Zhang张, 2033, Risks and Mitigations of Neuralink Abuse.) Respawn’s program gives smartdrug victims a chance to heal by “reformatting” pathological vectors of personal identity that cause the afflicted to succumb. Using Neuralink, it is possible to delete and overwrite the patient’s memories in a guided, consensual process that nullifies the root cause of harmful impulses. Broadly speaking, addiction replaces one of two things: human connection or change. The modal smartdrug user is derealized by chronic exposure to in-brain superstimuli, and benefits from the physical presence of other people during rehabilitation, who aid the process by affirming the new identity vectors and helping to integrate them into the patient’s self-conception. (Ibid.)

The process of reforming identity is gradual, because memories are all intertwined with each other, and an unexpected stimulus can evoke a harmful shadow from the past. Face-to-face conversation is a way of testing for problematic associations while fortifying the patient’s new, healthy identity.

–and he is introduced to a recovering addict named John, a man in his forties with graying hair. They sit together at a table in a courtyard in the shade. John is a marketing strategist for a dreaming media production agency, and he has two competing stories in his mind: in the first, he is overcoming a crippling addiction to smartdrugs with the help of the Respawn clinic, and in the second, he is receiving physical therapy for a sports injury he sustained in an amateur baseball league. John seems to be aware of both stories simultaneously, but he is unaware they are competing.

The Respawn app, mediated through Amy, tells the boy what to say. “How long have you been playing baseball?”

“Well, to be honest I remember a time before these things were illegal. Back then it was kind of the same thing as a video game, or maybe just a new kind of game. You know how in a game when you kill a boss or beat a level, there are flashy explosions and fanfares and all that? Well, this was kind of the same thing. I loved it, I would get up at six AM most days and the first thing I would do would be to head out to the batting cages and practice my swing. It was great exercise.”

Sometimes, as John is talking, he suddenly goes quiet and his eyes roll back in his head. Amy tells boy this is because Respawn’s software is updating something in his mind. Next she has him say “Do you have a favorite memory of playing the game?”

“Oh yeah, of course. Best game I ever played, it was like something out of a movie. Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, close game and my team only needed one run to win, and I was up at bat. You’d download this app and there would be all kinds of effects–visual effects, audio effects, sometimes there would be tastes and smells and all kinds of things. It would feel like the softest, most pillowy cloth gently brushing your skin, or like a pretty girl was caressing you, all kinds of things–”

John has a little spasm, and then continues.

“And you know I probably could have just tried to walk or bunt but this was just some city game, it’s not even minor league, so people are tired and the pitcher just throws me this fat meatball, and it was like my whole world just changed and exploded and I was in this other place, there were like, impossible-to-describe beings there, all kinds of things, trying to talk to me. Unreal.”

Amy tells him to say, “Looking back, do you think there was a point where your relationship to the game became unhealthy?”

John says “At some point, people started figuring out how to trigger emotions, how to invoke cherished memories. Someone I knew compared it to cooking or mixology; you could put all these different ingredients together and build really complex sensations and emotions. I guess it’s no surprise that I ended up going too hard. Sometimes I would be out there playing pickup games like five nights a week.

“And I guess I just need to learn to give it a rest sometimes. One of my favorites was an app that made every single thing you did feel like the accomplishment of a lifetime, like the culmination of decades of struggle and striving. You could flip it on and every step felt like a revelation. If you opened a door to go into another room, you would think ‘I can’t believe I opened that door so deftly, and with such mastery and subtlety.’ Then you’d walk through the door and feel incredible. ‘Have you ever seen anyone walk with such grace, such poise, such singularity of purpose? My intent is like a samurai blade, forged by a master.’

Amy tells the boy to ask “If you recognized the problem, why weren’t you able to stop it?”

“It wasn’t just the lack of rest. Me, I’m a driven person. I want to win. And what this whole injury thing is teaching me is that it’s probably better to fightanother day than to win every single game. You could go on in this vein for days, but eventually you’d get used to it and the app would stop working. So people started building more complex apps that would cycle between longing and satisfaction, some of them would be real carousels of emotion. And people also started using these kinds of enhancements in real video games too, they called it ‘juicing’ or ‘seasoning’, they’d blast you with ‘having fun’ emotions or ‘accomplishment’ at critical times in the game, so you can imagine playing a shooting game and getting juiced emotions every time you got a kill. What was even more fun is they started making it really unpleasant to die, giving people jolts of fear or even pain, and that honestly just made getting a kill feel even sweeter, to know that the guy you just zapped was doubled over in pain, having a really bad time.”

Amy tells the boy to say “Tell me about your injury. What happened?”

“I had a friend from back when who could hook me up. I don’t know where he got them. Don’t ask, don’t tell, you know? But I was enterprising. When you have something scarce, a lot of doors can open for you; jobs, clients, connections, all kinds of things. I ended up giving away more than I used. And it’s funny, I did that for a long time, and I never got caught, but if you think about it, they have a snitch living right inside your head. So if you break the rules, someone has to know. You shouldn’t get away with anything. But people buy and sell smartdrugs all the time, so what do you figure?

“The way I see it there’s two possibilities: either that AI in your head really isn’t that smart, or else they let it happen and someone is profiting off all this through backchannels. Probably both. But something I did tripped an alarm, and as I was trying to steal second base, I tried to reverse and double back, and tore my ACL. Now I’m here.”

~

The next Sunday morning, the boy wakes up early and goes again to the marsh to search for his treasure from Recollect. Just like in his memory, the air smells of eucalyptus and bay laurel. No one is around, and everything glows golden with California sunshine. He has turned over a thousand rocks in these wetlands, he knows because Amy has counted. And under the thousand-and-first rock, he finds the recollected item exactly as it is in his memory. He lifts up the rock with its false bottom, and he removes a dagger with an inlay in bas-relief. It feels like lightning courses through him. In a part of his mind that was beneath his awareness, he has always known what it would be.

Holding the dagger in hand, he calls on Amy to nav him home, but she does not respond. He tries again, and she does not respond. Amy is even with him when he loses network connectivity; so he knows this is something other than a network outage. He wonders if she can even see him. The boy walks back to the road, and as a test, he uses the knife to slash the tire of a parked car, and he grits his teeth as he prepares for Amy to reprimand him, or modulate his emotions. His YouSocial score should go down, but it doesn’t. The feeling is vertiginous. He is invisible and invulnerable.

As long as he holds this dagger, Amy can’t see him. But when he tries to board a bus to go home , the door won’topen. As soon as he lets it go, the AI in the bus lets him on, and Amy speaks into his mind, “I’m sorry, something went wrong. I will now run a troubleshooting procedure, to make sure your Neuralink is functioning properly.” After a few moments, she says “Your Neuralink device appears to be working correctly. If these problems continue, I will direct you to a maintenance center for an in-depth diagnostic.”

Even invisibility has its limits, as one may notice a conspicuous absence. He places the dagger in his backpack , and tries not to think of it, not even a little, so Amy won’t read his thoughts. He thinks of what John told him at the Respawn clinic, that the AI just isn’t that smart, that its seeming prescience is narrow and domain-locked, but he also notes that this theory came from a guy who was in the process of having his mind wiped for being naughty.

It would be all too easy to end up like John; was that the real reason Amy introduced them? As a warning? He cannot envision a future for himself that he does not detest, and he longs for the tranquility he felt when he held the dagger on the beach. But he knows also that he will only have one chance to use it before it’s discovered by the systems of control that contain him.

He thinks finding this dagger is fate, and his use of it will be a glorious, heroic‍ action, maybe the only thing in his life he will ever truly do for himself. He does not care what comes after. He decides, though he’s not quite sure, that if he can live out this single moment of self-determination, he could be content with his life as a puppet of the Neuralink nanny in his head. Maybe they will lobotomize him like John. In time, he could learn to love his prison.

The next day, the boy takes the dagger to school. He does not hesitate or second-guess himself. With haste he finds May and the other boy, who is about to die, not because of enmity, and not even because of jealousy, although he can be honest with himself that he feels those things. No, the dagger must go into the other boy’s heart for the sake of freedom, or rather, because there are mechanisms of control that are older and more powerful than a spiderweb of filaments infoliating in his brain. Fate is stronger than technology. The memory of the dagger was fate, finding it was fate, and now it is fate that commands him to kill.

He finds the couple holding hands, and he tries to act like he doesn’t see them as he gets closer. With no warning, he draws the knife from his bag , and again it feels electric, and he plunges the blade of the knife into the other boy’s chest, between his ribs. Blood wells up around the wound, and the other boy begins to choke and cough . May screams. He tries to dislodge the knife, but the handle slips his grasp. In an instant, Amy drags him down into sleep.

2. Mirror

The boy awakens at home in his bed , feeling neither shame nor guilt. The dagger is gone, and he is confined to his house until his healthcare providers determine the best way to correct the error. His father wants to pursue empathy training through a service like Respawn, but his mother is old-fashioned. To her, it’s as if he proposes to murder their son and replace him with someone else. They have heated arguments, and although Amy tries to distract him, she cannot wholly suppress his awareness of their fighting.

His uncle on his mother’s side is named Wei 威, and he is a man of fortune (even in these later days, such men exist) with dealings in the criminal underworld, and a connection to a smartdrug cartel. The boy’s mother begs him to take her son away, to hide him from the administrators and medical workers, from the schools and the psychiatrists. Wei 威 sees that the boy is fearless, and on a day when the boy’s father is gone, he (Wei 威) smuggles him (the boy) away in a van lined with a Faraday cage. The boy cannot walk to the van by his own volition; as soon as he tries, Amy makes his limbs wooden and heavy, so his uncle has to carry him, and even when the networks can’t reach him, he can barely move.

Wei 威 takes the boy to an unscrupulous Neuralink clinic, where a blackhat technician jailbreaks his device. It will be difficult, now, to go back to the exquisitely quantified and gamified world , because the unlock event will be captured in every reputation broker and advertising registry. Strictly speaking, jailbreaking a device is legal, and yet how can a man be trusted, once he has crossed that threshold?

When the boy wakes from the operation, his dreams and his maps and his apps are gone. He recalls the vertiginous feeling of freedom when he first held the dagger with the white jade handle on the beach, and his soul is lighter than the past seven years. Amy’s voice is replaced with the curt, masculine VX of the Neuralink BIOS, and he is free of the progress bars, the point systems, the floating chevrons, the achievements, and the badges. His uncle drives him to somewhere far in the mountains, though he does not know where, because his GPS, too, is gone. At some point, they take a turn off the main road, and they pull down a long driveway that leads to a gate in a wall. At the gate, there are men with guns. Here his uncle has a silent, invisible exchange with one of the guards, transmitting some credential or sign through a private channel, and then leaves him unceremoniously, pausing only to wish him good fortune.

The boy is admitted inside the compound, where his Neuralink connects to a local wireless network that provides some of the cloud services he had previously known: navigation , telephony , and search. When he joins, a lattice of light fills his vision and traces out the shape of a capsule pill . “Welcome to Apothecary.” A bot inside the network guides him down a path to a door in the side of a mountain , which opens automatically for him. The building he enters is hidden, half inside of the earth, safe from the eyes of satellites .

A man at the entrance waits to greet him, and introduces himself as Shenwu 神巫. He says the boss is a hacker named Headstrong, and the rule is everyone goes by a pseudonym. Most of the other men in the compound are Chinese; the boy doesn’t quite look like them, but he can pass if you squint. At first he tries to call himself Dagger, (and this is forgivable, being born of the innocence of youth) but the name doesn’t stick, and the other men call him Broken Branch, and later just Branch. Shenwu 神巫 takes him down to the lowest levels of the complex, to a corridor that reminds him of a hotel. Branch will live here in a single bedroom with no windows ; only a mirror, a closet, and a bed. That’s ok, because he can use Neuralink to open as many (simulated) windows as he likes, and even fool himself into smelling fresh air and feeling cool breezes. The bathrooms are shared, like in a barracks or a dorm.

Shenwu 神巫 explains the terms of his employment: “You do your work, we pay you, and we take your rent and food out of your pay. There’s a mess hall upstairs, floor ten, the nav will show you. Above that is the main work area. You report to me. There are no scoring systems, no reputation brokers. You are an independent contractor, and you get a cut of any money your work brings in. You want more money? Do more work. Your time is yours and I don’t babysit you. If you screw something up, we don’t pay you for that. Until you learn the ropes, Headstrong will personally extend you a line of credit . So you should respect him and not waste his money.”

That night, Shenwu 神巫 takes him to Headstrong’s house, a short drive from the compound. They are far from the city lights , and uncountable stars fill the dome of the sky. In the grounds of the house there are tables and lamps, and men are drinking and gambling. Young women move among them, provocatively dressed, easy with their affection. But before Branch can lose himself into vices, he is taken to meet Headstrong, who chooses to dress like a Hollywood gangster. He wears an expensive suit: black and shiny, with peak lapels. It matches his patent leather shoes and his slicked hair, which is more gray than black, and his eyes are sharp . He always meets everyone who comes to his Apothecary.

Branch’s uncle has given him a letter of introduction, describing the ordeal with the knife, and Headstrong praises his recklessness and his tenacity. He says this is a place of danger and freedom, and not a place for the sterile drones who live in the panopticon outside, people who need a computer to tell them how to shit or fuck.

A tall, showy girl in a white qipao and a white jade hairpin pours them both a shot of Moutai, which makes the boy’s eyes water. She doesn’t even look at him, but she has jet black hair and her skin is pale and lustrous white jade. Branch’s eyes follow the curve of her body, but it’s clear she belongs to Headstrong, who laughs, and tells him the ordained purpose of alcohol is to stop you from intoxicating yourself on worse things.

He meets Glasshole and Baozi, who also report to Shenwu 神巫, who will work with him in the coming months. Glasshole hands him a small gyroscope, and as he holds it, it pairs with his Neuralink and the world flips uʍop-ǝpᴉsdn and he stumbles. Surprised, Branch drops the gyroscope, but the world stays the same. His new teammates both laugh at him. “It will wear off in a few minutes. Let that teach you not to accept strange gifts.” Baozi explains how transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) can be used to transmit data upstream to a Neuralink implant and exploit security vulnerabilities in the hardware, allowing a malicious third party to bypass user consent and execute arbitrary logic. Objects with embedded TENS hardware and Neuralink payloads are called tigers, because of the way they hide their dangers, and because they may devour you.

When he stares into a gently pulsing beacon on the veranda, it shows him a QR code. He follows it. A genie appears and offers to make him feel fiery, uninhibited, and euphoric. Branch accepts the genie’s offer and has a vision from behind the eyes of a wild predator — a lion or a wolf or a bear, something like that—running through a frozen plateau, high in the mountains, chasing some indiscernible prey, catching it, tearing it apart with claws and teeth, blood and viscera all over his face.

When the vision ends, he sees that some men are gambling with dice. As he watches, two of them come to blows, and a knife flashes. Branch does not know who is right or wrong, but the thrill of danger calls to him, and he rushes in to block a lunging thrust of the knife. He is not injured when he does this; his arm seems to know how to parry, and his feet know how to pivot. Other men join the fray, either to add to the fight or to break it, and Branch loses sight of himself.

Having been a fantasy or a mistake of drunkenness, the brawl ends as quickly as it began, but the man Branch defended, a Chinexican called Romero, is grateful, and invites him to share a drink of tequila. “Sip this one,” he says. “Don’t throw it back,” as he pours two shots from a brown glass bottle. Quietly, he confesses he had been cheating at the dice game, using a man-in-the-middle attack to influence the random number generator in the dice. Branch finds this agreeable, because he believes in fate, the cosmic structure of luck.

Romero calls over two of the girls who are loitering in the garden. They have big black lines of makeup at the edge of their eyelids, false lashes that remind Branch of spiders. Romero calls the one who comes to him Xiǎo 小 mèi 妹, little sister, and he sees Branch tensing up, flush with embarrassment. “Treat her like a child. That’s how you talk to women.” Romero’s girl pretends to be mad at him and calls him a stupid chollo, and he grabs her and pulls her close, and she nestles into him. The girl that sits on Branch’s lap smells like ylang ylang and jasmine, but Branch is still thinking of Headstrong’s girl, the girl all in white. Even so, he likes it when this other girl whispers private, half-lucid things in his ear, and he realizes she’s high on smartdrugs, just like everyone else. She quivers and sighs when he touches her skin, and she follows him back to his room that night.

The peach tree, budding and tender—
He holds the fruit in his hands
then bites into the jubilance of peach.

~

The next morning, Shenwu 神巫 meets Branch in the mess hall for breakfast. There is a line and a service counter, and the cooks are serving hot-and-dry noodles. All the food is real; no one eats insect loaf or uses Neuralink to simulate foods from social networks, and this strikes Branch as romantic, or parochial, maybe, because although the noodles are chewy and coated in spicy textured oil, with the sharpness of preserved mustard greens and the piquancy of scallion and coriander, he would not choose them for himself. In the mornings, he’s used to flipping through Matters of Taste, his favorite degustation app, simulating five impossible plates before breakfast–a bite of salmon tartare in crepes with miso bonito sauce, hickory-smoked octopus in tandoori masala marinade, bamboo-steamed arctic char in a mango hollandaise, and for dessert, poached pear with yuzu caramel and spiced oat cake (although of course it’s all “secretly” high fiber cricket loaf)–and all of this makes sitting through a whole bowl of noodles feel monotonous.

As Branch thinks these thoughts, Shenwu 神巫 explains the logistics of smartdrug production, and mostly he pays attention. The drugs (i.e. software) are distributed in tigers embedded in everyday objects like children’s toys or kitchen utensils. Apothecary works like any other online retailer; the developers rely on commodity manufacturing contractors, usually based in Chinese Africa, to source materials and assemble their physical products. Once the tigers are built, they are shipped directly to service-based fulfillment centers, and then to customers, with no part of the chain knowing too much about what they are building, or for whom.

When they finish eating, Shenwu 神巫 leads Branch up to the main office above the barracks. The stairs from the mess hall emerge into the southeast corner of a large open room with floor-to-ceiling windows that look down from the heaven-high hills. To reach the bullpen office, they pass through a gallery along the southern wall, where shelves and cases are filled with tigers of many shapes: wind-up toys, sculptures, gilded ceramics, puzzle boxes, compasses and astrolabes, books and golden jewelry, glittering in manifold hues, sparkling like dragon scales. Each contains a TENS assembly and a psychoactive malware payload, and nothing stops Branch from handling the tigers but his own knowledge of their danger. Shenwu 神巫 tells him this is by design; a constant reminder to resist temptation.

Branch is given a workstation, which is only a comfortable chair facing the windows . His displays and inputs are the “controlled hallucinations” that occur in his own mind. (Fugelsang, Koehler, 2032, Tradeoffs between Optical vs. Conceptual Injection: A Hybrid Approach)

Glasshole helps him onboard to Alchemist, Apothecary’s nootropic app store. Precise electrostimulation of the brain can be used to modulate the release of neurotransmitters and even some hormones, and Apothecary has a busy ecosystem for homebrewed brain tuners. The most popular apps are Silver Serpent for focus, Wax Elephant for working memory, Jade Pavilion when you take a girl to bed, and the Wuchang 五常 suite to ensure virtue.

“You should start small,” Glasshole tells him, “and grow your stack once you’re more accustomed to using them.” At his suggestion, Branch installs Yi 义 to foster benevolence, Zhi 智, a sort of autocomplete engine for his internal monologue. Branch also decides to download Lord of Heaven of Infinite Thriving, mostly because he likes the name, and he spends the rest of the day in a trance of conscientious focus.

In time, he masters the many subdisciplines of digital pharmacology: he learns how to circumvent the federally mandated hardware controls inside the implant, how to probe each new Neuralink firmware update for vulnerabilities, and the vicissitudes of code injection. Only once more during this whole apprenticeship does he set eyes on Headstrong, but he has him always in mind, because the men of Apothecary revere him.

After any technical feat or job his teammates always say “Headstrong does it better.” Branch covets their respect–he knows he is capable of great works, and he thinks often of the dagger he found on the beach using Recollect, of how he searched relentlessly for it, and how, through the tenacity of his will, he found the treasure his heart desired. Branch sees all the good things Headstrong has—his properties, his women, his men who follow him— and he resolves to become as great of a man, and indeed, to surpass him.

Branch now spends his free hours in study, beginning with the definitive work on smartdrug development, a book assembled from the writings of Eric Zhang张, one of the early researchers at the Neuralink Corporation, called the father of digital psychotropics. The Four Labyrinthes is a collection of his emails, recorded memories, philosophical essays, algorithms, source code snippets, and self-reports of altered states induced using Neuralink. Headstrong, who had been Zhang’s张 colleague and apprentice, stole his proprietary secrets and created the first black market smartdrugs.

The book is divided into four sections or “labyrinthes,” and the first is called Exhaustive Indexing. It contains the theory and procedure of rendering sensory experience into the user’s inner eye. Everyone’s internal map of the world is a bit different; to play back Zhang’s张 memory in Branch’s head, there must be a precise physiological mapping of the neural correlates of concepts. Without this, the memories appear garbled and full of artifacts; objects may be swapped for other objects; phenomenologies may be cross-wired or missing; one man might see subjective red where another sees blue; where one smells a lemon cookie, another might smell burnt toast. To mitigate this, the Neuralink drivers create a comprehensive index of the contents of each person’s mind. When a memory is uploaded, it is transcoded into a universal language, and when it is dreamed into a viewer’s head, it is recoded through that person’s own mental map. These indices are also necessary for rendering the controlled hallucinations of the heads up display.

By monitoring the visual and auditory cortices, it’s possible to extract memories of sensory data from the brain. If we were to treat the approximately eighty-six billion neurons in the brain as a state vector, then an exhaustive search of neuron activation space would be impossible, but this is unnecessary because partial activations of distinct concepts automatically converge on those concept’s modal activations. A statistically normal sampling of possible state vectors at the level of Neuralink’s precision can index 95% of a person’s sensory mapping space within about twenty-four hours.

~

In his third week in Apothecary, Branch eats breakfast alone. The cooks have prepared stewed beef tendon with winter chestnut. Topped with sliced green onion, and eaten over steamed rice, the thick sauce tastes of chili, garlic, ginger, star anise, and prickly ash, and the collagen sticks to the lips with a pleasing richness.

As he is eating, he receives an email sent to the entire Apothecary, from a man he has never met.

I am leaving the Jianghu江湖. I don’t expect you to agree with me, but you are my friends, and I cannot leave without washing my mind in the golden basin金盆. This is how we preserve our trade secrets. Since you are reading this, it means I already left, and I already forgot you. That’s sad, but I won’t be sad. Maybe name a drug after me.

I am sour on the dream of Apothecary: men standing outside the matrix of social control, (do you believe that?) outside the world, looking down on mindless drones below. They buy my drugs. They let a computer decide their whole life.

But is it really different here? Instead of living by a point system, I use so many nootropic programs, I need a scheduler to manage them. At that point, isn’t it the same as an AI assistant in your head telling you what to do? We are so obsessed with being “free,” but we use these programs to correct our freedom, and we are no better than the people we look down on.

I want to tell you what made me see this, because tomorrow I will forget. It’s because of a girl called Yui唯 – with skin like polished rice , some of you know her – but first you must learn some history. I came here with Headstrong many years ago. There were only a few of us, but now there are many new faces, and I think you may not know.

Back then, not a lot of people had Neuralink implants, and I worked in the lab with Headstrong under Dr. Eric Zhang张. He was always an idealist, a man with no fear or thought for tomorrow. Even before the first human trials were finished, he made me and Headstrong perform neurosurgery on him (using the robot of course) to give him his implant. He wanted to know everything this new machine could do. He strapped himself to a chair in the lab and used brute force to explore every state vector of the mind.

Now we have more efficient methods of indexing the brain, because we have more understanding of its layout. But for Zhang张, the process took months, and he was conscious the whole time, because he had to be. As Neuralink indexed his mind, he would twitch or babble or become emotional. Sometimes he would sing or scream. We jokingly called this “The Music of Eric Zhang张.”

One of his early discoveries was a method to regulate hunger – either to induce it or suppress it. The Neuralink Corporation immediately seized on this and productized it. Appetite regulation was the first Neuralink “killer app” and it drove massive early adoption. This may shock you if you are not aware of history: most people used to be fat. If you watch videos from the early twenty-first century, you will see it everywhere, and it is inescapable. Grotesque, bloated bodies, diseases on a vast scale. Everyone was sick. But everyone who got a Neuralink became healthy and stopped being fat. To the people of the 20s, this was a miracle.

It is hard to understand what Zhang张 was willing to endure to learn these secrets. When he finished his self-experiments, his discoveries were used to develop the technology of intersubjective data transfer. There were new social media apps for uploading and sharing memories. There were apps that could make telepathic phone calls. Zhang张 was called a visionary. He held Neuralink “symposiums” where he would speak and people would “mind meld,” mashing up the internal phenomenology of groups of people so they all shared the same emotions and feelings at the same time. He talked about the dawning of a new age of deep empathy, and he said this was the beginning of true cooperation and loving kindness among all people.

And he wasn’t done. When he melded with the people in his symposiums, he noticed above all the pain they felt. He welcomed anyone with a Neuralink to come join him, and everyone who joined him learned to cry and laugh and feel as one. Zhang张 wanted to heal their pain, so he invented new programs to refine the emotions of his followers. He built a new kind of app, what we now call a smartdrug, and he named it Irrational Exuberance. All the attendees of his symposiums ran it together, with each of their minds plugged into the collective. They were steeped in the radiance of limitless joy, and it stayed with them even after the connection was terminated.

More and more people came to join Zhang’s张 gatherings. Poets, intellectuals, and musicians clamored to get Neuralink implants so they could participate. Everyone was happy, and they were happy together, fortified in the unity of their happiness. from the outside, Zhang’s张 movement had the appearance of a cult, and as his accolades grew, so did his detractors, but the value of his work was impossible to deny. His disciples had evident health and wellbeing, and their numbers continued to surge.

(As one of the technicians behind these gatherings, the reality and the illusion of unity became ever more stretched as we scaled; how can you merge the thoughts and feelings of a thousand people into a single gestalt without stripping away the essential qualities of any individual? As a purely mathematical problem, mere averaging converges on nullity. We explored a variety of approaches, but the “shared” feelings of the symposium became almost a pure simulation as the number of participants increased. We ended up sampling the brain state of random individual members of the cluster at a fixed frequency and interpolating between them. Part of the impetus for the development of Irrational Exuberance was to synchronize subjective experience in order to help with scaling. But I digress.)

Irrational Exuberance was short-lived. After four weeks, it stopped working. Drug tolerance is a feature of the human brain, not an attribute of individual drugs. Zhang张 was forced to continually invent new programs to maintain the euphoria of his symposiums. And despite these innovations, Zhang张 himself was unsatisfied. To escape the treadmill of wirehead programs, he used Neuralink to observe the meditation practices of Chan Buddhists 禪宗 from the inside, and used the data to create a mathematical model of nirvana. He produced a new kind of smartdrug program for inducing enlightenment without meditation or discipline, called Authentic Heartmind 眞心.

The combination of pleasure, health, and Buddhist equanimity caused the followers of Zhang张 to glow with unearthly attraction, but Headstrong and I were not among the enlightened. Someone had to stay behind the scenes, to operate the servers and the infrastructure. Although we did have Neuralink devices, we only watched as Zhang’s张 power and influence grew. because of that, we don’t quite know what happened next. Or rather, we don’t know why.

After bringing commodity enlightenment to the masses (which were at that time still few) he began to speak of a fourth door, beyond impermanence, suffering, and selflessness. He told us all prior enlightenments were false enlightenments. All previous Buddhas were false Buddhas. There was a state of transcendence no human had ever tasted before, but which he had found using tool-assisted meditation. He captured these insights into yet another drug, called Yellow Emperor . He said it would open the fourth door to all people of the world.

Zhang张 deployed Yellow Emperor to his followers, but it was a disaster. Most of the people who ran the program became violent or else catatonic. At the time, there was a popular app called Face2 that let you connect for a mind-to-mind phonecall with anyone in your line of sight. It was the same idea as Zhang’s张 mind melding apps, but local and peer-to-peer. The people infected with Yellow Emperor (and it was an infection) tried to initiate Face2 calls with everyone they saw, and anyone who accepted got hijacked and infected. Anyone who didn’t accept, or who didn’t have a Neuralink implant, they would attack.

If this were to happen today, it’s possible the whole world would become Yellow Emperor zombies, but we were fortunate, because even in San Francisco, most people did not yet have the device. With the help of the Neuralink Corporation, police were able to capture and initiate a factory reset on the infected.

After they were reset, none could remember what they had done. Instead, they reported feelings of disassociation and euphoria. Some recounted experiences of being transported to another world and encountering alien beings. When I audited the code for Yellow Emperor , I was unable to find any logic for these hallucinations or for the violent behavior of the infected.

The event threatened to undermine public confidence in Neuralink. I don’t know what goes on in shady back rooms where journalists and politicians and captains of industry wield power, but the incident got no press coverage, fell off the news cycle like it was never there, and then the government started rolling out regulations to control what kinds of software could be made for Neuralink, and who could run it. They created “schedules” of control the same way we have with pharmaceutical drugs. I think everyone here knows all about that.

Headstrong came to me and told me the world was going to change very quickly, and he had made copies of all Zhang’s张 notes and recordings. He said we had a unique opportunity to steal them and establish a monopoly on illegal smartdrug production. Like the rest of you, I was never an idealist about these things.

But then, last year, Yui唯 came to Apothecary to be one of our consorts. And let’s be honest, consort is a word for whore. I don’t care about that, but I got to know her, and she told me something I haven’t been able to let go. She showed me a picture of her mother, a fat Japanese American with too much wine on her face. She told me her mother was killed in a Neuralink malfunction. As she described it, I realized she was a victim of the Yellow Emperor attacks, this beautiful girl. She must have been very young when it happened. And I felt responsible for that, even though it was really Zhang张 that had done it. But even that’s not why I’m leaving.

I’m leaving. because, when she learned the truth, she didn’t even care. She was and is so high on a cocktail of Neuralink drugs (Seven Veils, perhaps, or Woman For All Purposes, some of my best creations) that her life is a flat void. She is simply a pleasure machine, hardly a person at all, and I built that machine. I killed her mother and turned her into a smartdrug whore and she’s fine with it! You’re all fine with it! What’s wrong with you? Maybe now you’ll get it. But either way, I’m already gone, and to be honest I’ll be glad to have these memories excised from my head.

~ Boshi 博士

Branch reads the email in full, but he is not sure how to react. He looks up from his food, and tries to read the emotions of the other men around him in the dining area. Did they read it? Most are staring into the void of the HUD , and no one seems moved or even surprised. Did they already know this story? Or is Boshi 博士 right and they don’t care? He barely knows these people, but still it’s anxious. Too much to think about.

When he goes up to his station in the main hall, he sees Shenwu 神巫 and asks about the letter. Shenwu 神巫 tells him most people have heard the story of Zhang张, and that’s why the fourth labyrinthe is not accessible in any of the shared file stores. There’s nothing spooky about it; beaming chaos into your brain drives you crazy and can make you violent or give you delusions of grandeur, so don’t do that. Anything can kill you if you use it wrong.

Hearing this does not satisfy Branch’s curiosity, but he can see that for Shenwu 神巫, this is the beginning and end of the matter. He notices his teammates listening to his conversation nervously, and he realizes this is a topic to broach carefully. So he tries to focus on his work for the day, but it does not hold his interest. Branch wants to know what really happened; he wants to know the truth about Zhang张 and the drug called Yellow Emperor .

From his high pavilion,
he gazes into the distance
at the color of grass at heaven’s edge

~

That night he studies the second labyrinthe, Hedonic Geographies. It starts with a discussion of the myth of the “resonant frequency,” a hypothetical single activation pattern that will sustain a state of limitless pleasure in the mind of user. Subjective nullification will occur for any state vector imposed on the brain. Artificially holding a particular state can cause “burn-in,” dampening that which was to be invoked. Burn-in can be avoided by cycling through a series of pleasurable stimulations; oscillating through the substantia nigra, the ventral tegmental area, and the hypothalamus. But this style of pleasure induction encounters a ceiling; as with chemical drugs, the joy of the stimulus soon gives way to its compulsion. The high becomes the baseline, and the baseline becomes the anxiety of absence.

Table Of Contents: Hedonic Geographies

1. Varieties of Pleasure
   1. Embodied Pleasure
      1. Fast: Virtual Amphetamines
      2. Slow: Simulated Opioids
      3. Weird: Psychedelia
      4. Erotic
   2. Psychological Pleasure
      1. Eureka! The Feeling of Insight
      2. Relief: Stop Hitting Yourself
      3. Satisfaction: Induction of Accomplishment
      4. Nostalgia: On Evoking Pleasing Memories
      5. Voluptuous: The Twisted Ecstasy of Self-Deception
2. Varieties of Pain
   1. Embodied Pain
      1. Dull and Sharp: Meditations on Intensity
      2. Prickling and Needling: Exploring Texture
      3. Burning and Churning: Speed and Repetition
   2. Psychological Pain
      1. Guilt and Anxiety
      2. Embarrassment
      3. Fear, Horror, Terror
      4. Sorrow
3. Treadmills
   1. The Wirehead’s Dilemma
   2. Jouissance
   3. Anticipation
   4. Grill Illusions
   5. Trances and Flow States
4. Models For Wireheading
   1. Linear Engines
   2. -Stroke Action
   3. -Stroke Action

Brain stimulation can induce desire, but all pleasure exhausts itself with exposure, leaving only desire in its place. (This is known as the wirehead’s dilemma.) An alternate strategy is inspired by a famous investigation into the limits of sensation and perception: in the thermal grill illusion, warm and cool metal bars are arranged in an alternating layout. Neither the warm nor the cool bars occupy an extreme of temperature, but if you place your hand over the grill, the contrastcauses you to perceive them as burning hot. The wirehead exploits a similar principle by titrating pain into pleasure, which both amplifies pleasure and makes pain more tolerable. (Thunberg, 1896, Förnimmelserne vid till samma ställe lokaliserad, samtidigt pägäende köld-och värmeretning)

The second labryinthe contains recipes for various kinds of pain, observations on the interactions between different pains and pleasures, and designs for sustainable hedonic states. Branch thinks of the story of Zhang张, indexing his own brain while he was awake, and he tries his own experiment. He has sampled a few smartdrugs already in his time here–Peach Spring Beyond This World , Unfaithful Housewife, and the perennially popular Stop Hitting Yourself– but the drug programs in Zhang’s张 text are much simpler, and if Unfaithful Housewife is a scalpel, then Wirehead Variation #4 is a hammer.

There’s an incentive to produce addiction in the wirehead without crippling his executive function, but Zhang’s张 explorations were performed out of love, unfettered by economics. Branch falls into such a vortex of ferocious bliss that he loses an entire evening, as if he had been asleep or dreaming, floating in radiant contentedness. When the feeling is gone, he longs for it again, but he has learned to contain these impulses by invoking Yi 义 to become temporarily anhedonic.

He can’t sleep. The events of the past day weigh too heavily on him, so he finishes the second labyrinthe and pushes straight into the third, Commodity Enlightenment . Whereas wireheading searches for hedonic equilibria by simultaneously cultivating and satiating desire, Buddhism seeks to eliminate desire altogether. Can enlightenment be as simple as playing back recordings of brain state vectors into the minds of the uninitiated?

Awakening is a process, a journey as well as a destination. The subjective experience of each step of the path may be different for each initiate, because the mind is an intricate forest, and it may appear different in daylight or moonlight, in winter or summer, up close or from a distance. Nevertheless, the objective neurological map through the forest is the same for everyone. The initiate must pass through each of the eight stages of concentration and insight in order before approaching the doors of impermanence, suffering, and selflessness.

The spacious golden chains of concentration succumb to the wirehead’s dilemma if they are not titrated with pain, but the natural pain of impermanence is often sufficient to avoid this problem. At the apex of concentration, it is possible to trigger the Kundalini Awakening, which may be accompanied by spasmodic movements, strong sexual feelings, lucid dreams, and the belief that one has magical powers. Awakening yields to dissolution, misery, and fear, which are mitigated by completing the progression into Equanimity, Conformity, and Fruition.

The equanimity of stillness in the conscious mind does not stifle the pursuit of base desire; it only severs the mind from the subjective awareness (i.e., the pain) of that desire. Enlightenment turns out to be only a form of euphoric dissociation, where self-related thoughts are greatly reduced.

~

Having come to the end of these texts, just as the simulated light of dawn shines through his virtual windows, he feels no closer to any understanding of the things he has learned.

At the next gathering at Headstrong’s estate, he goes to Romero and asks about the fourth labyrinthe, and the drug Yellow Emperor , and Romero tells him there are rumors of Zhang’s张 dealings in the occult, that his Neuralink explorations of the mind were connected to his dealings with dark and forbidden books, with Tang唐 dynasty necromancy called Fangshi 方士.

Two years ago, a man came here who called himself Guolao果老. He was troubled, Romero thinks everyone could see that, but Headstrong took a liking to him, and they would sometimes meet privately. Like Branch, he had also asked questions about Yellow Emperor, and developed a fascination with the tigers in the gallery in the main hall. Romero had warned him of the dangers–others did, too–but he would always go up there to examine them, and even pick them up from time to time. One day he selected an antique revolver with a painted ivory handle, and it compelled him to spin the cylinder, place the gun to his head, and pull the trigger.

The gun was not loaded, but still, he did not learn. He invented a strange new smartdrug program called Feet on a Snake, which was so convoluted that no one could ascertain its mechanism of action or intended function. Among the testers who used the product, all reported sensations of disassociation, euphoria, and time dilation. Worse, those same testers were found wandering mindlessly around the compound with no awareness of their actions, and when they came back to themselves, none had any memory of doing so. Boshi博士, who was the head of quality control, refused to ship it to the public.

Shortly after this, Guolao 果老 left the Apothecary with no preamble or ceremony. It might not be wrong to say he disappeared, but the similarities between Feet on a Snake and Yellow Emperor are clear, and it seems likely that Guolao果老 had somehow obtained access to the locked writings of Zhang张, The Fourth Labyrinthe. Given his inexplicably close connection to Headstrong and the fact that Headstrong is the only man known to possess these writings, there is an obvious conclusion that Romero declines to put into words. Headstrong is a good and generous leader, even a visionary, and Romero will not speak ill of him, but the thing he won’t say lingers over Branch with its undeniable plausibility.

There is speculation that Headstrong hid the Fourth Labyrinthe in one of the innumerable tigers displayed around the Apothecary, and that the strange incidents of Guolao’s 果老 drug and his disappearance could be attributed only to Headstrong’s recklessness in planting so many dangerous seeds around his garden, rather than to any more sinister or deliberate motive. For his own part, Branch, perhaps like Guolao 果老 before him, remains ambivalent to these concerns, and he finds the mysteries of the Zhang’s张 writings all the more enticing. He wants to know what secrets hide in those forbidden texts, or in the the tigers that lurk in Apothecary’s galleries and halls.

~

No one sees Headstrong for a number of months; he no longer holds gatherings on his estate, and there is gossip that he is ailing. He sends for Branch specifically through a private message, and Branch goes out to Headstrong’s house, through the familiar gardens where has often gambled and caroused, and makes his way through the double door at the front of the house. In the foyer, a push notification directs him to the kitchen; a bot instructs to prepare a pot of bai mudan and bring it up to Headstrong’s room. He feels vaguely humiliated by this, but also gratified that he was called. Branch makes the tea and goes to Headstrong’s room, where the old man is lying in his bed, asleep.

Branch does not disturb him, but he sees how frail Headstrong now appears, Headstrong who is revered throughout the Apothecary, who has invented this world of nootropics and smartdrugs and real food and loose women. He is suddenly repulsed by the parochiality of the place, and he thinks how easy it would be to end Headstrong’s life, how much more he (Branch) could accomplish with these tools and these men. But his thoughts are interrupted as he sees the girl from the very first night come into the room, with a white jade hairpin in her hair. She is only half-dressed, and their eyes meet before she sits on the bed next to Headstrong and wakes him.

The old man runs his hand through her hair as he drinks cup after cup of hot tea and speaks to Branch of business and his dealings in the past year. Finally, he gives Branch permission to leave. But Branch takes the opportunity to ask, audaciously, about Yellow Emperor , though he is not so brazen as to mention the man called Guolao 果老. An inscrutable emotion crosses Headstrong’s face, and then passes, and he tells Branch that he destroyed all copies of the fourth labyrinthe, and that nothing good can come of delving into such things. Branch may have heard the idea that Zhang张 stumbled upon a neurological schematic for an ansible to another world, but this is pure fantasy, a superstition that has sprung up around a very advanced technology. No doubt Branch asks these questions because of the letter from Boshi博士, who has developed some fanciful notions after spending too much time in the idle company of consorts and digital aphrodisiacs.

Headstrong asks Branch, “have you heard the proverb which tells us: mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they multiply the number of men?” (Uqbar, Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, 1902.)

“To understand Yellow Emperor , it helps to imagine a mirror. The drug has no content itself; it is a feedback loop that amplifies things already present in the mind. The name comes from a legend about the emperor Huangdi黄帝, who conquered the creatures that live on the other side of the mirror and forced them into slavish imitation of whatever is before them. Zhang张 deployed this name whimsically, to suggest that his program was a conquest of the mirror, but according to the story, there will come a day when Huangdi’s黄帝 magic falters, and the mirror people will be free to come out of the mirror to seek revenge.”

Headstrong explains that the legend is a parable; it highlights the horrors within us, the shadowy reflections that we manifest in the world. Zhang’s张 greatest shortcoming was his naivete. He failed to understand the depravity in the hearts of so many people, because he saw wonderful, transcendent things when he looked into the mirror, reflections of his natural curiosity and good nature, and he imagined others would be the same. This is the truth of this tragedy.

On his way out of Headstrong’s house, Branch pauses to walk down a dark hallway, driven by impulse, or by a premonition. Though he is not influenced by any nootropics or smartdrugs , the urge seems to come from outside of himself. He enters a room full of display cases and pedestals and artifacts, and he realizes this is another collection of tigers like the ones in the main work hall of Apothecary. In the center of the room, against the far wall, he sees a full length mirror covered by a dusty cloth, with only a small corner visible, and he is already thinking of Headstrong’s story about Huangdi黄帝 and the mirror people. So he pulls the cloth from the mirror, of course.

Most tigers work by using transcutaneous electrical stimulation to trigger behavior in the Neuralink device that can enable code injection. TENS is the most common approach, because it affords the largest surface area for attack, and because it has the highest bandwidth once the security of Neuralink is compromised, but in theory, a hacker could exploit any sensory modality to deliver an unauthorized logic payload, even the sense of smell. (Zhang张, 2027, Thy Fearful Symmetry: Systemic Risks in Full-Duplex Neuralink Devices).

As Branch stares into his reflection, chromatic aberrations surround him like a halo, and he is unable to look away. He loses all conscious awareness of time. At some point in his trance, the myriad transformations of the mirror unravel one another, and it occurs to him that the reflection he sees is no longer his own face. His mind collapses into a single point of focus, and he finds himself as a different person, in an entirely different place.

The myriad transformationsunravel one another
We are born of the selfsame root,
Why should we hound each other to death with such impatience?

III. Tiger

Note: Regarding Addiction

They call my creations smartdrugs. I don’t know who coined this term, though it is now common. But I never saw them as drugs, only as programs. I think it’s a slander, or at least a misconception, to call them drugs; a drug is not a biochemical program, because it contains no logic. It only acts on the mind according to logic already present. But this distinction is pedantic, I realize that. I’m bargaining.

And from the outside I can see why my detractors compare me to a drug dealer, why they call my many supporters “addicts” – but consider: there is alcohol use and alcohol abuse, but there is no such category as cocaine use, why not?

I ask this question because any behavior can become an addiction. In a survey of over a thousand tango enthusiasts, nearly half met the DSM-IV criteria for “addiction” (Targhetta et al., 2013, Argentine tango: Another behavioral addiction?) But there’s a critical, ineffable distance between pathology and addiction. It cannot be defined physiologically, only holistically, by examining the behavior in the context of the life of the “addict.” It comes down to a feeling, ultimately, about whether that behavior is good or bad for you.

Procedure: White Noise 4 Hz, 12 mV

I feel drowsy and everything is dreamlike. Visual and other perceptual artifacts are present but mild. Motor control is slightly impaired. In conversation, I sometimes say the wrong word, but I am lucid. Dr. Hong洪 asks me questions and I answer .

Hong洪: What is your name?
Zhang张: Eric Zhang张.

Hong洪: Where are you?
Zhang张: In the mission district of San Francisco, in the Pioneer building.

Hong洪: What is happening?
Zhang张: We are conducting an interfructuation of the effect of white noise streamed through Neuralink.

Hong洪: What do you see?
Zhang张: I see the computer lab. As you speak I have the image of a dragon flying. Lattices and honeycombs are visible.

Hong洪: What do you hear?
Zhang张: Your voice. The ambient noise of the lab. Subtle tinnitus in the left – no the right – no the left ear.

After fifteen minutes, I fall into a dreamless sleep. Where we might expect noise in the visual cortex to produce similarly random visual artifacts, perhaps akin to “snow” on a television screen, instead we observe Klüver’s “form constants;” spirals, tunnels, lattices and cobwebs, suggesting that noise causes downstream activation to flow along straight lines in the visual cortex. (Bressloff, Paul C.; Cowan, Jack D.; Golubitsky, Martin; Thomas, Peter J.; Weiner, Matthew C., March 2002. What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us About the Visual Cortex)

Procedure: White Noise 12 Hz, 20 mV

I am dissociated and derealized. The sensation is similar to the final moments one spends at the boundary between sleeping and waking. I pass in and out of lucidity, alternately occupying a dream space or the waking world .

I feel I am passing through luminous tunnels toward unknown and unknowable destinations. Each time I “wake up” and re-enter the dream, I start back at the beginning of the tunnels, an it occurs to me that the dream me is the “real” me, and the “me” in the waking world is only a shadow. I am frustrated by this, but when it’s over, I feel sheepish at the grandiosity of my thoughts.

Postscript: That night, I had dreams of waking up from the white noise, and each time I was convinced that only an hour had elapsed, and that my memories of the preceding day were hallucinations brought on by the random firing of neurons induced by the noise. I could not be certain I had left the chair in the lab, or if I was still “under the influence,” imagining myself to be going about my day, driving, eating, or communicating with colleagues.

Memo: Quantifying Noise

The generation 2 Neuralink device contains 25776 electrodes distributed across 768 threads spread throughout the brain. The human brain itself has ~86 billion neurons, a ratio of ~3.4 million neurons per electrode. The granularity of the device is therefore somewhat limited. Each electrode is capable of emitting a charge of up to 40 mV, which is enough to cause thousands of neurons in a radius around that electrode to fire. By varying the intensity of charge at each electrode, we exercise fine control over the radius of activation, and achieve a “virtual” resolution which is many times higher.

Regarding the composition of the signal, there are many kinds of noise, which are named after various colors; white, pink, red, azure, violet, and gray. White noise has a flat power spectrum when plotted as a linear function of frequency. Pink and red noise have high spectral power in the lower frequencies and decrease in power as frequency increases. Azure and violet, the reverse. Gray noise has a U-shape. There is no direct perceptual mapping between audio noise and Neuralink noise, but we find these distinctions to be a useful starting point.

When sending a signal through the device, we model each electrode as a 2D point containing a position and an intensity. Each frequency band is resolved to a series of discrete positions and intensities within this space. To avoid confusion, we clarify that noise is rendered across different frequencies in the “position” domain of the Neuralink electrodes, and there is a separate “framerate,” which refers to the rate of change of noise in the time domain. The framerate of the noise is measured in Hz; this has no relation to the frequencies that comprise the noise.

We manipulate the amplitude of the signal as a whole by applying a scalar. The minimum charge needed to trigger a neuron to activate is ~10mV. At this level, only a small number of neurons immediately surrounding the electrode will fire. At the maximum output of 40mV, a single electrode can induce approximately ten thousand neurons to fire in near-simultaneity.

Procedure: White Noise 12 Hz, 30 mV

I become completely dissociated from my ordinary perceptions. My vision is a field of fluid images: a swan, a multitude of eyes, the inside of a maze. I hear a fragment of a symphony, followed by the clanging of construction or industrial machines. Maybe a voice calls to me, but its words are too distant to interpret. As with lower levels of white noise, everything feels like a dream. Dr. Hong洪 tries to ask me the standard set of questions, but I am unresponsive.

After some duration of time, my mind begins to wander, and I start to think of mundane things, chores to be done, further experiments, and so on. Several times I think of bizarre, nonsensical juxtapositions of ideas or situations. The passage of time is hard to observe, as it might be in a sensory deprivation chamber. After one hour, the noise procedure concludes, and as before, there is a kind of “hangover” which persists for hours or even days. During this time, my limbs feel heavy and everything feels far away.

Procedure: Re-Entry (I)

The last thing he remembers, Branch was staring into a mirror in a gallery in Headstrong’s house, James Hong’s洪 house. Now he’s sitting by the window in the great hall, overlooking the Santa Clara valley, staring gazelessly into his workstation. He is in the middle of composing a smartdrug program whose mechanism he does not understand. Branch cannot account for the hours (days?) that have passed, but he seems to know many things he previously did not. And despite awakening in media res, he knows exactly how to finish his work.

From some preconscious wellspring inside him, he weaves new smartdrugs which dazzle his colleagues with their subtlety and imagination. He makes one called Rediscovery that uses a 2-stroke cycle of fast pleasure mixed with sorrow, and he juices it with white noise, right up until the crescendo, when it abruptly yields to clarity. The drug gets around the whole Apothecary. Shenwu, Baozi, and Glasshole are suitably impressed.

Soon he has a meeting with Yezi冶子, Shenwu’s boss, who tells Branch they are going to jump the release schedule and expedite Rediscovery to production. It goes live and for the first time since he came to Apothecary, for the first time in his life, Branch has some money of his own, more than just pocket change.

Yezi冶子 wants to put Branch in charge of a team, and he introduces him to Longyuan龙渊, Taie泰阿, and Gongbu工布, who will be working under him. Branch has never been in charge of anyone before, but leadership comes naturally to him, whether from the desire in his heart, a conviction in his own deservingness, or the same invisible source that enabled him to produce Rediscovery. All of this is because of the mirror, he is certain, but he cannot remember what he saw that night at Headstrong’s house. He knows the mirror was a tiger, and he can feel it stalking him now, crouching in the tall grasses of the mind.

Every day he loses a little time. He tends to find himself in an unexpected context with no memories of the events that brought him there, but it does not disrupt his work, and in fact he accomplishes more than ever.

Procedure: White Noise , 35 Hz, 30 mV

At 35 Hz, even low amplitude noise produces a manic sensation, like drinking too much caffeine. I feel intense focus or “flow” and also a scatteredness or decentering. Images and sensations unfold in my mind’s eye with no linearity or connectedness. After what seems like an eternity – or maybe an instant – there is a welling up of attention, which gradually moves from the clarity of the center to the clarity of the periphery, before blossoming into the vastness of imperturbability, as in Samatha meditation.

Thereafter, all forms slip away like ghosts, and my mind turns to boundless space: all my disparate sensations blur together, and I am in a field of pure emptiness. This is pleasant, unlike lower framerates of white noise. I feel serene, but also as if I am on the cusp of some new understanding which had previously been granted to only a handful of men. This goes beyond enlightenment – it is something else entirely, though enlightenment may be a way to approach it. This procedure did not result in the “hangover” of lower frequencies.

Note: Addiction, Divination, and Gambling

The word addiction comes from the Latin addicere, the same etymological root as “dictate.” It refers to divination, the taking of auspices, and also to the adjudication of unpayable debts; a judge would dictate a sentence over a debtor, rendering him into slavery. (Maddux, Desmond, 2000, Addiction or dependence?) In Latin, the object of an act of dictation is called “addictus,” and we think especially of a man who is sold into slavery to pay a gambling debt; the gambling addict, the addictus, the slave.

But the word has a curious double meaning: in the augural sense, a king or priest would “dictate” the future he had divined; addicere is not precisely the act of divination, it is instead the speaking thereof. Both senses are similar: one either declares the will of the gods, or declares a man to be a slave, as we are all slaves to fate.

The unifying feature of all forms of fortune-telling, whether reading the behavior of birds, examining entrails, or burning bones, is the randomness or unpredictability in the outcome. In ancient China, Shang殷代 dynasty pyromancers would inscribe questions into ox scapulae and burn them to seek the answers. Divination is asking chaos for favors, as is gambling. Ancient civilizations used fortune-telling to decide where to plant their crops, and this was successful because it was a stochastic implementation of crop rotation. (Pervert, B.A., 2018, Bronze Age Mindset, p. 334)

A little chaos is unpredictable, but a lot is exceedingly regular. This is also the theory behind balancing your investment portfolio. If I use Neuralink to stream noise into my brain, is that divination, or gambling, or both?

Procedure: Pink Noise , 8 Hz, 20 mV

Pink noise is an interpolation between red and white, and accordingly, the experience of pink noise in the brain is similar to both. Where white noise is dreamy and surreal, red noise is brutal and earthen. Auditory hallucinations are imminent and baritone. They seem to come from somewhere close to me. Red noise in particular seems to stimulate olfactory and gustatory senses. At higher amplitudes, the sense of taste is entirely saturated. The flavor is sweet and putrid, and vaguely metallic.

At this low threshold, it is possible to maintain some semblance of lucidity. Dr. Hong洪 asks me questions and I answer, although I have no memory of doing so.

Hong洪: What is your name?
Zhang张: Eric

Hong洪: Where are you?
Zhang张: I am inside of an aluminum pencil.

Hong洪: What is happening?
Zhang张: Petrichor Baltimore, cri de coer but not before, egregore

Hong洪: What do you see?
Zhang张: What do you see?

Hong洪: What do you hear?
Zhang张: Yes, he is here.

As my investigations come from a place of dispassionate interest in exploring the frontiers of the human mind, I am willing to endure all manner of discomfort in order to observe these spaces, but I do not imagine most people would choose to experience pink noise for any long amount of time. The mixture of dreaminess and immanence is distinctly nightmarish. As the session goes on, I become anxious, and I hear guttural sounds, almost like voices, though I cannot make out any words. For this I am grateful, though I wonder if the sense of the incomprehensible, of meaning just beyond my reach, is not also the source of this sense of foreboding.