Snake Eyes | Page 5

it you will, and that's where emotion enters in. But there is further involvement to the neocortex, through the RAS, the reticular activating system, and the corpus callosum. There are also connections to the optic nerve,"
"I've heard this gibberish before. So what?"
"The pseudoneurons are not just implanted--they're now a functional, organic part of your brain."
Innis said, "There's no way of removing the implants without loss of order in your neural maps. We can't remove them."
"Oh shit, man
Charley Hughes said, "Though the snake cannot be removed, it can perhaps be charmed. Your difficulties arise from its uncivilized, uncontrolled nature--its appetites are, you might say primeval. An ancient part of your brain has gotten the upper hand over the neocortex, which properly should be in command. Through working with Aleph, these ... propensIties can be integrated into your personality and thus controlled."
"What choice you got?" Innis asked. "We're the only game in town. Come on, George. We're ready tor you just down the corridor."
The only light in the room came from a globe in one corner. George lay across a lattice of twisted brown fibers strung across a transparent plastic frame and suspended from the ceiling ot the small, dome-ceilinged, pink room. Flesh-colored cables ran from his neck and disappeared into chrome plates sunk into the floor.
Innis said, "First we'll run a test program. Charley will give you perceptions--colors, sounds, tastes, smells--and you tell him what you're picking up. We need to make sure we've got a clean interface. Call the items off, and he'Il stop you if he has to."
Innis went into a narrow room, where Chartey Hughes sat at a dark plastic console studded with lights. Behind him were chrome stacks of monitor-and-control equipment, the yellow Sentrax sunburst on the face of each piece of shining metal.
The pink walls went to red, the light strobed, and George writhed in the hammock. Charley Hughes's voice came through George's inner ear: "We are beginning."
"Red," George said. "Blue. Red and btue. A word--ostrich. A smell, ahh ... sawdust maybe. Shit. Vanilla. Almonds ...
This went on for quite a while. "You're ready," Charley Hughes said.
When Aleph came online, the red room disappeared. A matrix eight hundred by eight hundred--six hundred forty thousand pixels forming an optical image--the CAS A supernova remnant, a cloud of dust seen through a composite of X ray and radio wave from NASA's High Energy High Orbit Observatory. George didn't see the image at all--he listened to an ordered, meaningful array of information.
Byte-transmission: seven hundred fifty million groups squirting from a National Security Agency satellite to a receiving station near Chincoteague Island, off the eastern shore of Virginia. He could read them.
"It's all information," the voice said--its tone not colorless but sexless and somehow distant. "What we know, what we are. You're at a new level now. What you call the snake cannot be reached through language--it exists in a prelinguistic mode--but through me it can be manipulated. First you must learn the codes that underlie language. You must learn to see the world as I do."
Lizzie took George to be fitted for a suit, and he spent that day learning how to get in and out ot the stiff white carapace without assistance. Then over the next three weeks she ted him through its primary operations and the dense list of satety procedures.
"Red burn," she said. They floated in the suit locker, empty suit cradles beneath them and the white shells hanging from the wall like an audience of disabled robots. "You see that one spelled out on your faceplate, and you have screwed up. You've put yourself into some kind ot no-return trajectory So you just coot everything and call for help, which should arrive in the torm of Aleph taking control of your suit tunctions, and then you relax and don't do a damned thing."
He flew first in a lighted dome in the station, his taceptate open and Lizzie yelling at him, laughing as he tumbled out of control and bounced oft the padded walls. Then they went outside the station, George on the end of a tether, flying by instruments, his faceplate masked, Lizzie hitting him with red burn, suit integrity failure, and so forth.
While George focused most of his energies and attention on learning to use the suit, each day he reported to Hughes and plugged into Aleph. The hammock would swing gently after he settled into it, Charley would snap the cables home and leave.
Aleph unfolded itself slowly If fed him machine and assembly language, led him through vast trees ot C-SMART, its "intelligent assistant" decision-making programs, opened up the whole electromagnetic spectrum as it came in trom Aleph's various inputs. George understood it all--the voices, the codes. When he unplugged, the knowledge faded, but there was something else behind it, a skewing of