Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [10]
That was when gaps in his memory began to form.
Could he have done it to himself, erasing the angst and pain of war? Of war—perhaps. But memories of home? No. Physician, heal thyself! But he had lost his own brain five centuries ago, and one could not debug oneself. Right now, he had more important things to do.
He slid through the girl’s synapses, assuming his place in the thalamus, and tried to weave himself into the song, to coax the girl’s mind into remembering. He worked with kid gloves, stimulating the pontine reticular formation to release more acetylcholine. With the magnetic action of his nanotori modulators, Nathi guided ions of calcium into the snare proteins’ ionic traps and made them bind to astrocytes—the glial cells shaped like a star. He had to make her dream.
It was a simple matter of input redirection. In that, the posthuman dreams were not much different from human ones, except that posthuman dreams were typically called by choice. He paused. Who redirected the input streams, creating his nightmare?
Panicking, he cut all but one of his e-World links, securing it—and was struck by the sudden silence. Until then, he hadn’t realized how much e-World traffic he had carried. For a time, he simply listened to the girl’s internal music—the melodies he helped create.
But Nathi also felt a noise of almost random oscillations everywhere, like the murmur of a stream. Not strong enough to make a neuron fire but, when added to the equally weak input, it could occasionally lift the signal over the threshold, making the brain unpredictable.
But not chaotic—this was no white noise, equally intense at any frequency. This noise was rising at the lower end, falling down for the higher frequencies, almost like 1/f. The signature of something precious, something tenuous between order and chaos—complexity.
If this internal music of the brain was painted with the colors of the rainbow, combined they would have made not white but pink.
Pink noise.
Next time he dared to dream, he didn’t leave the only place he felt at home. He slept in.
3
“HEY, WHO IS HERE?”
The girl’s voice astonished Nathi. In this lucid dream, it came as if from Nathi’s own mind. Realization dawned—the “mummy” spoke.
“I am Nathi,” cautiously, he tried his voice. It broke. “What’s your name?”
“I… do not know,” the girl said.
He felt her puzzlement—they shared her brain.
“I cannot name myself,” she added. “Can you, please?”
To his surprise, Nathi discovered that he could not—he kept forgetting any name he now tried to give her. No cause for panic. He was certain that he could untangle himself from her once he woke up.
“You can’t?” The girl was disappointed. “But I thought you were my genie.”
Genie?
The girl’s personality traits, her emotional and intellectual capacities, remained intact, for they did not reside in either thalamus nor neocortex alone, but they manifested themselves only through the interaction of the two. Just like an ancient clock without its small arm could not tell time, while its longer arm that gave it “personality” remained intact.
“Nathi, why is it so dark?”
The girl remembered his name, at least.
“Your eyes are closed,” he replied, half-automatically.
“Can you open them? Genies can do anything.”
He could.
They stood atop a sparkling staircase made of dry ice. In front of them, the grandiose coils of the castle’s late magnetica architecture rose in their full uncloaked splendor—like a family of dragons curling around their nest, with the sparkling jewels of the observation bubbles held in their gaping maws. Within these curving walls streamed light itself, caught, bent to flow all around the castle, distorting the perspective, blurring contours. From the top, a many-pinnacled crown rose sharp into the darkness of the polar night.
“Wow.”
Balancing on one foot, the girl tentatively scratched above her ankle with her heel—and Nathi felt that. So, her body map and three-dimensional perspective were intact. The air