How do you feel about the rush Big Tech always seems to be in these days, providing us with all kinds of devices that ALL have one thing in common – they are invasive? What usually accompanies an invasion? Why, hostages are taken, of course.
He’d never actually thought about where he was from. No consideration of what knowledge he had of life or even how he’d gained insight into life.
He’d never considered unconscious thought as part of his project’s goal of quantifying human recognition and understanding. Until now.
He’d come a long way, having been born into a family that lived in a place visiting relatives would regularly characterize as being “out in the sticks.” One of the relatives referred to where his family lived as the “Dog-patch,” which was the name of the place where the characters in the old Li’l Abner comic-strip lived.
For now, he had no choice but to endure the dread and agony he’d experience in seeing some of those mental vignettes. He’d feel as though he was reliving part of something familiar, but part of it seemed to be a fresh, new experience.
Just how does one “relive” something that never happened to them in the first place?
He hadn’t experienced a whole lot of imagining going on in his brain back then, when he was a kid, because spending so much time outside in raw nature kind of tuned that channel out for him. Nothing imaginary would be or could be as impressive as Mother Nature to someone like him.
The influences of his past and the pasts of people like him, provided just the kind of foundation his project’s baseline needed in order to attempt manipulation of the organized section of human memory, which, according to his theory, would create a new, supplementary position capable of importing real but separate, or even artificial thoughts into one’s memory timeline.
Of course, a discovery of this magnitude, as related to the issue of testing, requires that the unknown variable be fully examined to determine if it may be restrictive, depending on the level of the subject’s surprise factor once a memory’s been altered and/or edited and then finally “recalled.”
At issue is determining what would bring such restriction, and then, to find out how to avoid, alter or repel it while also protecting each affected slice of the human memory in the process.
The development and testing teams began their preliminary tests on the small test sample selected which included his and one other remotely located participant’s thought and experience timelines, recorded by new technology that’s not yet familiar, or available, to the public.
If, from what you’ve read so far, you’re getting a feeling that there could be some danger in science’s interfering with human memory as outlined by the idea being presented here, then perhaps this subject is one you’d rather not explore any further.
If you’re the inquisitive type, you may see the value in pursuing this more than someone who cries foul every time a new idea is exposed to the public, and asks, “Whatever happened to the good old days when we left those things to nature?”
Where might we as a species be if really great ideas hadn’t been ignored out of fear of what may happen, and were instead pursued by someone with enough vision to understand we could be much more than what we were as humans at any point in time?
The uses for this technology and the potential benefits that everyone on earth would reap because of it makes it a very hard plan to belittle, although we’re sure there will be fear-mongers who will ridicule the whole idea and imply all sorts of imagined “dangers” to be spawned by it.
He decided to just forget it for the present and reconsider it the next day. He had a date that night with Lydia Russell, a grad student who had recently joined the development team specifically because she’d idolized him and his work.
At dinner, he charmed her with that wit of his, and he felt more witty than ever. She drooled over every word that came out of his mouth and he knew it. He couldn't stop himself from being so damned charming and appealing that he knew he’d won the prize; the perfect way to end a perfect evening where he’d put on a star performance.
A dog barked incessantly outside his bedroom window. He’d been drifting in and out of sleep ever since the damned thing started barking. Finally he’d had enough and started to get out of bed and then noticed the bed was wet. The room was still dark.
He reached under the covers and felt the wetness with his hand. He thought the worst – that she had wet the bed. It kind of grossed him out, so he turned to her and put his hand on her shoulder to awaken her. But when he touched her, he knew immediately something was wrong.
Her skin was cold, which could mean only one thing; she had died in his bed after they’d had sex the night before. He wasn’t ready for what he found when he opened the drapes and saw a blood-soaked bed. He wanted to puke.
He wondered, frantically, “Did I do this?”
Something inside him told him that he did.
Sources for images used in this post:
