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The paper used in this publication is of archival quality and acid-free.

To Dima Fridman, in memoriam

THE CRYPTIC REGION, DARK AGAINST

THE SOUTH POLAR ICE CAP, MARS

PINK NOISE

Chapters 1–10

NOTES AND REFERENCES

The Other Design

Brain and Evolution

Galaxies in Plasma Lab

Bibliography

APPENDICES

Glossary

Pronunciation Guide

Acknowledgements

Colophon

PINK NOISE

Five senses gained—

what benefits accrue

to them whose spirits lack

perception of the true?

—TIRUKKURAL Verse 354

1

THE GIRL WAS IN A COMA SO SEVERE THAT IT PREVENTED digital upload of her mind. This rescue mission called not for a doctor but an artist. Nathi was one, the best master of brain debugging in his order.

It helped that he had no brain himself.

Almost six centuries ago, the first human mind had been successfully transferred into a digital format, becoming the world’s first official posthuman. No body to age, digital backups—all this translated into a potential immortality. Some of the human race had followed suit. Their cyberspace reality, e-World, had grown in size, with hardware spread out all across the colonized part of the solar system.

But for all of that, every new transfer of a human mind was like an artist copying a masterpiece—by hand and brush. Despite all technological advances, analog debugging of a brain remained an art. One couldn’t simply trap a thread and start examining the stack. What passed for analog threads leaked into each other, slippery, uncertain to pin down, like quantum particles in many places at the same time. Transfer from the analog into the digital, discretization of continuum, implied a loss. But Nathi didn’t feel regret. His own mind had been transferred at more than 99% five centuries ago. He did not believe that the remaining less than one percent may have contained something important.

No, he must have simply lost some noise.

The girl could certainly use losing some of hers. No doctor had been able to unravel the jumbled mess the girl’s mind had become. Three years ago, when the girl was ten, something had happened to the so-called non-specific part of the girl’s thalamus—a football-shaped thing at the base of both hemispheres—causing a mass suicide of neurons. With a good-sized hole at the hub of consciousness…, well, self-awareness was out of the question.

What was he to do?

He moved inside.

Nathi sent billions of nanobots into her brain to form a local network, an extension of e-World, a temporary housing for Nathi’s electronic mind. From his abode in her thalamus, he listened to the girl’s brainwaves. Every specific part of thalamus was talking to the corresponding part of neocortex—visual to visual, auditory to auditory, motor ones to their counterparts for every muscle group. The dialogue between the neocortex and the thalamus continued, their neuronal ensembles oscillating in the network patterns that evolved in both space and time.

But something had to synchronize the oscillating circuits. Something had to bind the separate perceptions into a cohesive whole to create a self existing in a now—just as if one saw, heard, smelled, experienced the world in real time, even if the signals all arrived at different times into different locations in the brain, where they were processed differently and at different speeds.

That was the job of the destroyed part of her thalamus.

Without anything to synchronize the oscillations, there could be no self—as if she were a group of people, one of whom could only see, another one could only hear, yet another one could only move this finger or that toe, none of them communicating with the others.

Without sensory feedback from action—any action, even a slight shifting of eyeballs—the brain could not make sense of its environment. Even an intact brain can’t perceive a true reality, always simplifying its sensory input to be able to process it within reasonable time. For this girl, the outside world simply disappeared, contracted into zero dimensions. No need for self-awareness nor consciousness, so they