Launch: Chapter 10

  Thirty-five years ago…

  

  When he was thirteen years old, Markus Bowland underwent a procedure which left a significant impression on him for the rest of his life.  In the twenty-second century, the Brainchip had become the most underappreciated technological development in history.  It was such a casual and integral part of a person’s experience that it was easy to take for granted.  Until it had been perfected it was considered science fiction, but within a decade of being widely available most people had one, and a decade later most people wondered how anybody had ever been able to cope without one.  It was as much a part of a person’s body as their eyes or hands, and one thought explicitly about their existence and operation about as much.

  A Brainchip consisted of three small devices each about the size of a grain of rice, and all implanted into different key areas of the cerebral cortex.  The first went into the motor cortex where the summed activity of large populations of neurons could be recorded to collectively indicate directionality.  Individual neurons were imprecise, but neurons always work together, and collectively they could give a very clear impression of something like direction.  The Brainchip was able to record, learn, and interpret these signals, and then translate them into being used to navigate a computer interface or remotely operate anything from a replacement synthetic limb to a shuttle in flight.

  Another of the three chips was in the visual cortex at the back of the head, more specifically in the region most heavily associated with to what and to where in our visual field we are paying attention, amongst all that we see at any given time.  This allowed users to use the location of their attention within their visual field as a kind of cursor to their environment like the computer mice which were necessary before widespread adoption of Brainchip technology.  In this way users could select things in their environment to wirelessly interact with or to indicate to a networked drone a particular location to place or grab something.

  The third chip was located in the left precentral gyrus, which is deeply involved in the generation of speech.  By placing a chip here, narration could be taken soundlessly by one’s PAN, allowing the dictation of anything from brief text messages to entire novels.  It could be used for the silent uttering of passwords as well as a host of other applications.  Collectively all three chips had come to be referred to in the singular as ‘the’ Brainchip, but in reality it was a system of these three marvelous devices working together in all three different brain regions.  Each was able to sample a great deal of information in their particular brain region, but having chips in multiple locations also allowed the system to sample global brain activity to a high resolution as well.

  The Brainchips developed in succession, and were never widely accepted in the first place until the system was proven entirely secure from any kind of hacking or tampering.  Although this claim had been made from the earliest days of their development, from time to time there had nonetheless been breaches in the system’s security which were then quickly closed.  Like any technological system it devolved into a constant cat and mouse game between those trying to breach the security, and those trying to keep the system secure.  Generally speaking though, in almost all cases almost all of the time, the system was indeed quite secure.  The first chip developed was the one which was able to pick up simple directionality, then the more sophisticated visual attention tracking component was developed and perfected, and then later released was the most advanced chip commercially available today, the one which could process the thinking of words.

  The next generation Brainchip currently in development was a far more complicated full visual field mapper.  Current research prototypes consisted of a several square inch electrode map surgically implanted into the visual cortex.  Its promise was the ability to record the entire visual field like a video camera but not just live view, active memory and imagination as well since all three functioned by piggybacking on the processing of the visual cortex.  There was great excitement about the idea of being able to directly show other people exactly what one was remembering or imagining.  The promise of being able to directly project onto a screen, one’s wildest surreal and esoteric imaginings drew great enthusiasm for the project.

  Another promised practical application was in legal proceedings with the identification of criminal suspects, but the problem immediately arose that with this application it could only be as reliable as memory itself.  If someone genuinely didn’t remember what a person looked like, the projection from the visual cortex map would be vague and ill defined.  Likewise, if a person was wrong about who they saw but believed it was them nonetheless, their memory would obediently generate the image of that wrong person.   Although there was much promise and excitement over its development, so far the electrode map required a severely invasive brain surgery to implant, and for years had only been approved for experimental trials.  Prospects for widespread implanting and use were poor unless the device could be further miniaturized, or the risk from its implantation procedure greatly reduced.

  The existing small Brainchips widely used today required very little power to operate, and what little energy they did require they were able to extract from glucose in the users blood, and in a similar way to how the neurons around them did.  The tiny transmitters inside them could only transmit amongst each other and about two meters outside of the head, and the signals were heavily encrypted so that only the user’s authorized devices were able to interface with them.  

  The invasiveness and recovery time of having the Brainchip system implanted had been continually reduced over the decades, but it nevertheless still involved drilling small holes through the skull, and injecting the devices into the outer layers of the brain.   It remained a serious procedure requiring at least two nights of recovery in the clinic in order to monitor for complications, and to begin preliminary training in its use.

  “Markus?  Are you awake son?” his mother asked as consciousness slowly arose in him.

  “MMmm… hi mom,” he groggily responded.

  “How do you feel?” she asked with concern.

  “Hmm… fine, I think... my head hurts…”  He reached up to touch the bandage covering the parts of his head that had been shaved for the procedure.  “It went okay?” he asked.

  “Oh yes, they tell me you did just fine.  Were you worried?”

  “No, not really.  Is it too early to try it out?” he asked with excitement in his eyes as he realized he now had the power.

  “Not at all!” answered Meghan the Brainchip technician as she entered the room.  She was about one and three quarter meters tall and of a typical build, with beautifully pale skin, long wavy red hair and big green eyes; all quite similar to Markus except that his own hair was cut short.  She bounded into the room with an obvious enthusiasm.  This appeared to be her favourite part of her job, to be there with clients during those first few attempts to use their new power, and the eureka moment when they first discover within themselves how it is done.  “Try not to touch the bandage alright?” she asked as she looked over a few things on the monitor above his bed, silently switching by thought between a few different status screens.  “Everything looks good Markus,” she said as she swung a different monitor on an adjustable arm from his bedside table around so he could see it.

  “Alright, so you remember what we talked about before the procedure right?  I’m going to make sure your chip is properly interfaced with the training system and then you can run through the programs by yourself, okay?”  She looked at his mother and invited her acknowledgement that soon she too would leave her son to his exercises.  She obliged with a nod of understanding.

  “We’ll start with the simple directions then,” she said as the word ‘UP’ appeared in bold white letters against a solid black background on the monitor.  Markus focused on thinking ‘up’ and after a few moments the screen switched to ‘DOWN’, and he obediently held the thought  for a few moments before the screen switched again, the next time to the left, and then finally to the right.  The Brainchip system was interpreting the different patterns of brain activity which resulted from him thinking about the different directions.  The actual word ‘up,’ in conjunction with his sense of the direction up and his sense of the upper part of his visual field were each measured separately.  Over the coming days and weeks, his personal computer network would learn how to separate and interpret different combinations of the multiple layers of information.  All of the practice programs were necessary because the network had to learn how to understand his brain, as much as he had to learn how to use the system.

  “Ok,” Meghan said, again reviewing some readings on the monitor above his head.  We’re getting good strong signals… let’s run through that a couple more times.  And they did, twice more the screen flashed the four directions for a few seconds each, and Markus did his best to think of that direction, and only that direction.   Once finished those simplest trials, they went through another set of three, but this time with bold arrows pointing in the directions between the ones he had just done, first up and to the left,  then up-right, right-down, and finally down-left.

  “I think we have enough for you to try to start controlling a simple cursor Markus,” she said, again regarding the screens above his head.  A small circle appeared in the middle of the monitor in front of Markus.   “Move it,” she said, “try to move that cursor around a bit.  I think you should be able to, start with just trying to move it up okay?”

  Markus focused for a moment, trying to get the cursor to move, but nothing happened.  “Nothing,” he said, somewhat deflated.

  “Very few get it on the first try hon, it’s okay.  Try again and remember, try not to think about moving the cursor, try to just imagine about the idea of up, like before.   Think about where the cursor needs to end up and what direction it needs to go to get there.”  Markus closed his eyes and slowly took a deep breath.  He opened his eyes, and tried to think about the concept of ‘up’ in relation to the cursor.  It suddenly lurched up a few centimeters on the screen and all three of them erupted in cheers at his accomplishment.  “With time,” Meghan told him, “you’ll be able to move beyond single discrete commands like that, you’ll learn how to command it continuously and be able to steadily move the cursor around the screen.  You’re well on your way for sure though, and hey!  Look at you go!” She encouraged enthusiastically as he set to making the cursor lurch in a variety of directions a few centimeters at a time across the screen.

  “Alright hon, you’re all set up, there’s a lot of training programs in the system here, there’s the basics like numbers, more directions and simple commands, but there are also more challenging ones all the way up to the expert levels.  You’ll do most of that at home, but we want you to get started and be well on your way before you leave the clinic.  If you get stuck in a program somehow and can’t think your way out of it do remember that all these screens still operate by touch, but hopefully you won’t have any problems though.”

  “Thanks Meghan, I’ll do my best!”   He responded, eager to please her.

  “Oh I know you will,” she said as she tousled his hair, “Good luck Markus, I’ll check back in with you a bit later.”

  “Thanks again Meghan,” his mother added, to which she smiled and nodded in response, then turned to leave, off to help another Brainchip virgin.

  “Well,” his mother said, “I guess I should leave you to it as well.  I’m going to go home for the day and I’ll come back this evening with your father and brother to visit you, alright kiddo?”

  “Thanks Mom, bye.  I’m really looking forward to practicing and getting good at this!” he said with a smile.

  “Just remember Markus, while it can be fun, it’s not a toy.  It’s a tool, a tool that represents a lot of responsibility and which takes a lot of diligent practice to master.”

  “I know Mom.”  He had been told as much many times before already, “Bye.”   Markus sat up straighter and started touching the screen in front of him, scrolling through the different beginner programs available to him, and selected the numbers program.  His mother smiled.  She said goodbye again, and then left him alone.

  At first the sensation of using the Brainchip was very bizarre to Markus, unlike any feeling he’d ever previously experienced.  It was the feeling of being an integrated component of the technological infrastructure around him; it was like reaching out with a hand he couldn’t see and had never had before.  The boundary between him and his technology, was no longer as sharply defined as it had been before.

  Humans used to be very afraid of becoming so intimately interwoven with their technology and of somehow losing their humanity in the process.  But the nature of humanity continually changes over time, as the circumstances of its existence changes.  In the world Markus grew up in, and was now being fully initiated into, the state of humanity was one which was very intimately interconnected with the technology around them.

  It was frustrating to learn how to use the Brainchip at first, since one could only move the cursor intermittently and in uncontrolled lurches.  As one practiced and eventually mastered its use though, the technology similarly improved its ability to accurately interpret the commands issued to it.   There was a fine line between a command working properly and not though, and Brainchip users all developed their own unique relationship with them, their own way of parsing fine particulars in their thoughts.  Markus was a quick study and it wouldn’t be long before he was well beyond simple commands, and able to operate any device his PAN was synched with, and able to dictate text by thought far faster than he could ever speak it aloud.