Case sat in the loft with the dermatrodes strapped across his forehead, watching motes dance in the diluted sunlight that filtered through the grid overhead. A countdown was in progress in one corner of the monitor screen.
Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same, and that the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at least in terms of presentation, but simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the course of a segment, you didn't feel it.
The screen bleeped a two-second warning.
The new switch was patched into his Sendai with a thin ribbon of fiberoptics.
And one and two and--
Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points. Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough. Have to work on it...
Then he keyed the new switch.
The abrupt jolt into the other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color....She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes.
The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if the built in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought.
Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room.
"How you doing, Case?" He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply.
Two blocks later, she was threading the outskirts of Memory Lane. Case kept trying to jerk her eyes toward landmarks he would have used to find his way. He began to find the passivity of the situation irritating.
The transition to cyberspace, when he hit the switch, was instantaneous. He punched himself down a wall of primitive ice belonging to the New York Public Library, automatically counting potential windows. Keying back into her sensorium, into the sinuous flow of muscle, senses sharp and bright.
He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did her know about her? That she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she'd moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he'd entered her, and that she liked her coffee black, afterward....
The future of cyberspace: a world where electronic technology interfaces with the human mind into a continuum of consciousness. This is the world that is depicted in William Gibson's Neuromancer and countless other cyberpunk novels. Is such a world possible? Is it only a matter of time before science can conquer the realm of the human mind enough to directly interface with it? Despite the tremendous advances we have seen in neuroscience over the past decade, many believe that more than scientific obstacles stand in the way of our understanding of the mind. Philosophical revolutions, in addition to scientific revolutions, must occur before the connection between the psychological mind and the physiological brain can be understood. Only then can the scientific innovations depicted in cyberpunk fiction be implemented.
Cyberspace and Neuroscience |
Cyberspace and Philosophy |