Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [22]
“With these, and just a little extra energy waveguided through your fingertips, you’ll open the way for me into any isolated network islands.”
Hacking was his job, and ghe was sure they’d face many obstacles when the security shuts all the doors. Two minds are better than one. While the girl was optimized for warrior-caste faps and superfast manipulation of photonic network channels, Nathi’s posthuman mind was very good at computation and analysis. They made an odd but perfect match—a man five centuries old and a child.
He didn’t want to think about the price.
“What of the pressure?” the girl asked. “The lungs—” That was the easy part. For both skin and eyes, Nathi controlled the tensile strength of metasilk, which could be formidable. And the lungs….
“No need to breathe. We’ll be her metically sealed.”
“IT’S TIME TO LEARN TO BREATHE,” HER NANNY TELLS HER.
She is in a dancing harness, hovering on her magnetic wings. Her Nanny is a big, warm presence at the blurry edges of her memory. In this one, she is maybe five years old.
“But I already know how!” she protests and starts to puff. “See?”
“No, not that way.” Her Nanny’s smile is like a fuzzy warmth outside her field of vision. “There is a special dancing breath, for flying. Try to breathe inside.”
“Inside?” She blinks.
“Imagine that you breathe the air—prana—into your legs and arms, into your stomach, down your spine, and everywhere you can think of.”
Everywhere? She nods. She closes her eyes. She tries. “It’s… tickling. Everywhere.”
“Shall I help?”
Nanny is fast. Before she knows it, the girl can only laugh.
“NOW FEEL YOUR BODY—ALL OF IT, WITHOUT THINKING,” Nathi tells her. “Find your inner self.”
But in this dream, she has no other self.
She breathes—or rather, she imagines breathing, trying to direct some prana through the brain’s internal model of herself—the brain’s predictive engine, constantly comparing the real world to the internal model and then readjusting the predictions, binding action and perception in reentrant loops.
Only, the real world is gone, her tiny body lying in a coma outside the dream. And her internal self is held together only through her genie’s will. She feels his presence, at the center of her consciousness.
She breathes. She feels it all.
Does he?
THE GIRL HA S PAR AHUMAN SKILL S FROM BIRTH, NEW action patterns mere humans only dream of. She must learn to activate them. How?
Nathi knows—faps, emotions, and consciousness are like “software optimizations” of the brain’s predictive engine that have evolved to handle the complexity of multi-limbed articulated movement. Though robots could be very good at specialized, pre-programmed tasks in a predictable environment, a brain would beat a robot any time in arbitrary, unexpected circumstances, since that’s what it has evolved for.
Nathi knows—with certain enhancements of the body and of nerve conductance speeds, one can do things the best of martial artists of the olden times could not conceive of being possible—if one performed the necessary movement patterns fast enough, without thinking—if they’d been ingrained as faps.
He knows—those martial artists had to spend long years of repetitious hard work in order to prepare their bodies physically. They had to go through demanding exercises, over and over, in order to entrain new action patterns. Still, no human had reactions faster than 8–12 hertz, the rate at which the brain sends signals to the motor neurons.
But a parahuman brain can be overclocked.
The posthuman mind is modeled after the human brain, while still retaining much of the machine’s raw computation power. This is what makes posthuman soldiers so valuable.
But they are still constrained by the digital nature of their minds. Without true pink noise, they do not cope well with unpredictability. And this is what makes parahuman warriors so feared.
The girl has got external skills for free. And Nathi has further improved her motor circuitry and muscle structure, primed from birth, and has installed nano-magsails