[story] Synaptica: Voltage

“Nine thousand.”

“Nine thousand what?”

“Nine thousand neurons. That’s how many you lose in a day.”

“So?” Mitch asks, taking another stunted drag from his cigarette and turning on me. “What fucking difference does that make?”

The smoke between us curls in naked figures and devouring mouths. Coughing, I wave my hand to clear the smoke. “What difference does that make? It means that every fucking morning you wake up less of you were than the night before. It means all of us are just meaty bags of decomposing circuitry. Falling apart one gigaflops processor at a time. Shit man, I guess it doesn’t mean anything.”

Mitch lifts his mug up to the dim light, watching bubbles rise through his beer. “I’m sure the drinking doesn’t help.”

“No, it does not.”

The saloon we are in is called the Babbage. An art deco rerun tucked into the basement of the Morrison Hotel on 67th and K. An automated piano begrudgingly stroking keys in the corner while the holographic barista waits for another order. She’s loaded up on mascara and wearing a victorian blouse and a feather plumed hat. If you peek over the bar, however you can see that below her tight corset there is only empty space. Only half the woman she should have been. I reach out two fingers to snag her attention, then motion at the empty shot glass in front of me.

“Gimme a minute son.” She snaps, rolling her eyes as she walks away. But a moment later a shot of petrovodka surfaces from the pneumatic tube system underneath the bar.

“So when you ask me,” I continue “if I feel sorry for her, for the woman. No, I don’t. We’re all dying, each and every day.” I throw the vodka down my throat where it cuts like glass. “Some just a little faster than others.”

Mitch pinches frustration between his eyes. “Let me get this straight. You don’t feel bad for the woman who was just murdered and flayed up like a banquet pig? I mean jesus-fucking-christ man. If...if you're not into the whole saving other people then what the fuck are you doing as a police officer anyway?”

“I wouldn’t call us police.”

“Yeah, I get it. Synaptica are paramilitary, clandestine boogeyman. So you guys don’t even consider yourselves cops and helping others is beneath you. Great. Then answer my question. If you’re not here to save others than why are you here?”

“To get answers.”

“You’re hilarious. Look, if you think buying me a drink means this” he points to his broken nose “...goes away, that I just forget you fucking assaulted me, well fat fucking chance. You know why I am here right now? One reason and that is too keep an eye on you while you traipse around my investigation. I am going to be filing my own report and you can bet your ass it is going to spell out in excruciating detail every reckless violation and sloppy mistake I can catch you doing.”

I flash half a smile. “That's fine. Meanwhile I am going to save this city from an android revolt the likes has not been seen. Almost instantaneously my wrist implant chirps on. Flipping it over I check the update.

“Vic’s ID is back” I lament, sliding off my bar stool. “Prostitute. Looks like a she goes by the name May Rajen. Frequents the Burrows. Picked up twice last month alone for out of date sex permits. Also worked at a local haptic brothel called Glenn’s. We still have some hours to kill before for the coroner’s reports is done. What say we pay Glenn’s a visits?.”

Mitch looks incredulous. “Burst into a private establishment with no more than an alias and a hunch? Sure asshole, why not.”

I run my chip across the bartop to pay the tab then we exit the saloon. Outside I have to steady myself because the hallway is lopsided.

“Are you drunk?”

“Not nearly enough.” I slur.

“Jesus…you are. I don’t freaking believe this! You know what I agree, your not a cop. You're an embarrassment.”

“I do some of my best work drunk.”

“Who can I report you too?”

“Your mother.”

By the time Mitch and I have reached the grav-car the seven shots of petrovodka are really beginning to hit their mark, unmasking subconscious processes in my brain like only poisoned sensorium can. The black scissor doors of the interceptor hinge open and I can barely strap myself into the seat before the full effect hits like a freight train. The rain is coming harder now, tormentous rivers that pour across the hourglass of my car. I can count each one. A thundercrack of lightning splits the city, burnt out pixels on the celestial screen.

I close my eyes but the lightning remains, every crooked bend scrawled indelibly for analysis. My Abacampus implant has woken up and is now firmly stuck on record. Another strike of lightning, this one seen through draped eyelids. Three point eight seconds till the crash, four thousand one hundred thirty four feet away, taking into consideration air temperature…

My mind wanders on like this for some time.

I must have eventually slipped off into a dream because I am no longer in the grav-car. I am somewhere else, a place I had not been at for many years. In the white room again. It is muffled quiet here because of the pillow insulated walls. I am looking at a boy, maybe five years younger then me. He is dressed in the same ward scrubs as me, scratching at an angry rash on his skin. The researchers are hooking electrodes up between us, as if we were broken down vehicles waiting to be jumped. Which is exactly what we were.

The boy has Dravet syndrome, a rare disease that causes intractable seizures. Dravet is caused by a mutation in the voltage-gated sodium channel. In a normal person's brain these channels regulate the voltage. However, when a neuron is stimulated that voltage rises, crossing a threshold of fifty five millivolts which in turn causes an inevitable depolarization. The channels open up and sodium ions pour into the neuron. These ions have a positive charge which further raises the voltage in a cascade of signal that fires down the axon. And that is how you get an action potential, the rhythm of your mind.

Unfortunately, in Dravet syndrome this does not happen. The voltage channels malfunction and the brain only fires erratically. This leads to seizure and almost always death.

“Read the card.” the Synaptic commands. I can feel him behind me. Frankensteinian, dressed in a mylar trench coat. Craniopagus plates where his eyes used to be. He is holding a playing card over my head so that only the boy across from me can see it. I am supposed to retrieve the answer from his mind.

I focus on the boy’s eyes. Close my own. Picture the face of the card with blurred out symbols. Wrestle with myself for some bit of forced meditation as I search for that neural network that connects my occipital lobe to his. But the card remains blurry.

Sensing my impending failure the Synaptic steps closer. Lays a hand on top of my head.

“Queen of spades.” I guess.

I try to open my eyes but there is only darkness. Worse than darkness, nothing. As if my eyes had never existed. I flail my limbs but I cannot feel the padded walls nor my own body. Open my mouth to scream but no words escape. I had guessed wrong and as punishment the Synaptic had activated the sensory deprivation protocol. I had been locked inside of my own skull until obedience consumed the rest.

Mitch shoves me in my seat and I jolt back to the present. I must have been out for a bit because the interceptor is touching down gently outside of Glenn’s. The brothel, tucked into a greasy back alley, is a syphilitic whore hole with vivaldi decor. Over the entrance towers a projection of a succubus, mouthing a slender cigarette holder while she pours blood red wine into her navel. She turns her head to lazily towards us, lifeless eyes smiling mona lisa while she puffs smoke. We climb the stairs up to the club where a bouncer waits beside a nondescript door. He has all the personality of a rhinoceros but less patience. Inside the door we can already hear the moaning.

“Five bits for the paper bag.” Bouncer demands.

We pay the bouncer and he hands us each a pair of VR goggles. I step into the first room, a cramped lonely space with peeling lead paint and grey carpets. A man is balled up in the corner, tattered shirt and holey jeans, his head is cocked back, mouth ajar with a stale line of drool from before dehydration set in. His bare feet have what look to be rat bites and on his head are the looking glasses. I step over him carefully into the next room.

“I've never understood these places. People want to live out some sexual fantasy why not just use a digital reflection?”

“A lot of people want real.” Mitch says eyeing the place over. “Or, at least, close as they can get. Haptic brothel lets you touch skin. For people that can't afford those kind of sensual experiences through digital this is the next best thing.”

“There's always dating.”

“For these people? They are skimmed fat on a blighted genepool. Not exactly your most eligible bachelors.”

The next room contains wall to wall partiers, sprawled across a floor littered with garbage and crack pipes. All these people have that same ecstatic “Ooh” face beneath their bulky VR headsets. One kid with a scorpion haircut is still holding a stale wedge of pizza in his limp hand.

“What can I do yah for?” A stripper giggles, emerging from a backroom in the direction we just come from. She has voluptuous love handles peeking out of a t-shirt bikini and is missing more teeth than a dentist office. “Lets see, you’re kinda a cutie” she fingers me “so for you, um fifty bits. The old man is going to be seventy.”

“Old man?” Mitch bellows.

She shrugs. “Eh, I calls em how I see them. My names Violet, yours?”

“Cerpin. He is Mitch.”

The slattern looks at both of us, confused. “Aren't you guys going to put on the goggles? Get your money's worth?”

“Actually, we were wondering about a getting private showing?”

She smiles toothless. “That costs extra.”

“We’ll pay.”

This raises eyebrows. “Little shy now are we? It’s fine hun, lots of guys that way. Follow me.”

Violet leads Mitch and I up a narrow staircase to the upper floor. Up here black tarps and canvas have been drapped, sectioning off the floor into makeshift rooms. Grunts and wet noises can be heard uncomfortably close by, just beyond the plastic. She brings us to a cubby hole with a mattress the color of piss and a broken mirror. On the far side is a small balcony that looks out over the wharf.

“Now hun, about payment...”

“First things first, me and my friend have a couple questions. Did you know a girl who worked this place. May Rajen?”

Violet looks startled at the name, then recovers herself. “Who...are you guys? Cops?”

I nod.

“Prove it.”

Mitch lifts his coat lapel to reveal a silver police badge.

“Who was it again?”

“May Rajen.”

“I don’t know anybody by that name.”

“I think you do. And I don’t have time for games.”

“You...” she grabs a fur coat hanging on the wall behind her, covering herself quickly “...can think whatever you want but if you fellows aren't buying than your freeloading. And Antonio doesn’t like freeloaders.”

She moves to slip past me but I grab her by the wrist.

“Hey, let go of…”

With my other hand I grab onto her forehead, sinking my nails into her auburn hair. Her eyes roll up and she sinks to her knees as I begin to open her mind. The room, Mitch, everything around me, fades.

After the Dravet’s boy they had kept me in sensory deprivation for a long time. A month? Longer? I don’t know. Nothing to experience except the crumbling of my own mind. I had no idea where I was. Barely even aware if I was still alive. Then, one day there came a voice from nowhere and everywhere at once.

“Read the card”

My mind searched desperately for some kind of answer. Scared and thrashing like a dying rodent. Didn’t even recognize why I was so afraid. Some part of me had simply forgotten what it had meant to be human. I was just a thing that existed in the abyss. I wrestled my subconsciousness for control before this new fear could dissolve all that was left of my sanity. I hummed on mute to only myself. But ever so gradually, I began to calm down, and as I did I noticed something. In the blackness next to me was a thing. I couldn’t see it. But I knew it was there nonetheless. It smelled like a blood, felt like cold steel against my head.

“Jack of hearts.” I cried out.

Suddenly, as if a veil had been lifted, I was back in the white room. The Synaptic above me holding a jack of hearts. The boy from before was also there, lying on the floor across from me and seizing violently. I watched his tremulant shaking as the researchers carted me off for further testing. All of the researchers were quite pleased. They gave me candy and extra time to play in the courtyard gardens from then on. I never saw the boy again.

I have since learned that children with Dravet’s are particularly good targets for an initiates first mindcrack. Because of their faulty sodium channels they broadcast high-frequency repeats that self-amplify. These repeats can be picked up through the electrodes if you can block out enough extraneous input from your own body. That was what had allowed me to read the boy’s mind and know which card it had been. His loss, my gain.

“I've never seen a Synaptica actually…” Mitch’s voice pulls me from my daydream back to the here and now. He is looking uncomfortably at the prostitute who is crunched over in the fetal position, bawling her eyes out as she hugs the bad thoughts away.

“Never seen what?” I respond “A Synaptic crack someone? Not exactly what you expected I imagine.”

“Yeah.” He turns wagging a finger at the girl. “Don't you need a warrant for that?”

“Technically.”

“Well...that’s going in the report as well then. Shit man. They’re going to nail your ass to the fucking wall for all of this.”

“Guess so.”

Mitch picks at something in his teeth while I lean over the balcony, watching the city that refuses to sleep.

“Mitch, I don’t think you really understand us. What we are.”

“Your pre-crime. Boogie men who use voodoo science to guess at who is likely to commit crimes. Then you lock them up regardless of whether they have done anything wrong...”

“Terrorists,” I cut him off “We prevent terrorism. You know why there hasn't been a single dirty bomb attack in the last twenty years? Cause of us, and only because of us. Now let me ask you, if Crazy Joe is about to turn half of downtown into a radioactive crater do you think I give a fuck about a warrant? Huh?”

“Oh, well ain’t that noble. So tell me. What did you get from her?” He tilts his head 0towards the still crying prostitute. “What was inside her head that was worth that? Do you even realize how much a person screams when your doing...whatever the hell it is you are doing when you are in there?”

Mitch is giving me a hardened stare while behind him Violet is slinking out towards the balcony stairwell. “And what does any of this case have to do with terrorism?

I take a deep breath and tell him “If the IHuman models are exploitable, if they can be reprogrammed to kill, then billions could die. That cannot happen. That's why the government sent me here. That's why we can't fail.”

I watch Violet disappear out the stairwell. “She knew May Rajen. The murdered girl came here frequently. She didn’t have to, with her looks she could have worked much better gigs uptown. But there was this mechanic who lived around here that May was very fond off. He had promised to take her away from this place, buy them a little place near the outskirts. Said he had a plan to make it rich but what John doesn't.” The balcony is freezing but I run my fingers over the course brick anyway. “He had been an engineer, while back, before the company he worked for went under.

“Let me guess. IHuman?”

“Yup.”

“Well, i guess it is a better lead than any else.”

“Tune Ortiz was his name. Violet thinks he now works as a mechanic for the Toshi gang. What time is it?”

“Almost five o’clock.”

“Which means the coroners report should be ready soon. I say we check that out first then go find this mechanic, see what he knows.”

“By all means Sherlock,” Mitch says sarcastically “I’m just along for the goddamn ride. I’ll be waiting in the car.” He stamps out of the room.

I stand on the balcony for a long time, looking out over the bay. Photographically remembering each and every lightning bolt until the sky is all white chaos. However, there is one spot in the city where no lightening falls. Deep out in the cold bay waters I can see the space elevator, Tsiolkovsky. Forty seven kilometers of carbon nanotube teether reaching to the stratosphere. Carbon nanotubes are the ballistic conductors of electrical charge. Means no voltage can build up between the thunderstorm and the earth. And no voltage means no lightening.

Voltage,” I peck at the ledge with my fingernails “Voltage that is the true engine of progress. Voltage is what powers the storm. Voltage is what drives the circuit, fires the neuron. Voltage is the potential difference between two locations, the joules per unit charge. Simply put, voltage is how hard you have to work to change something negative into something positive. And how easy it can be to slip right back down again.

I should know.

Submitted April 24, 2019 at 01:23AM by nullescience http://bit.ly/2W22Q9v