MINDLYFT

PROLOGUE - BrainStorm

They've put me in one of those cold white rooms. Of course all the rooms at 451 Bradbury Street are kept as cold as refrigerators. Not because of the servers. They're underground somewhere beneath Vegas. A thousand meters deep. It's still cold there. At least for another few hundred years. No, they keep the building cold for our ThinkingCaps. With all the advancements, even neuro-bit circuits and quantum bits work better in the cold. Can even melt in the heat. Maybe their interface conduits work better in the cold too. Which is why their TellRooms are even more frigid.

My leg is bouncing up and down as if I was tapping out dance rhythms on a toe pad. I catch it. A twitch, a tick, something that wouldn't be happening if my ThinkingCap was working right. Something that would give me away. I have to keep it together. I've done so much to keep this together I can't break now.

Looking at myself in the mirror every morning I reassess my own fidelity. My own appearance of fidelity. My androgynous haircut. I loved my long hair. Its now butch-cut with a buzz saw. No make-up, bite trimmed fingernails, and the plain self-selected uniform of the female office worker. Black blouses, square and rigid, like wearing a cardboard shell. Only the black yoga pants reveal the woman. The last bit of humanity they've left us. Men wear straight fitting black slacks. We all wear the same shoes. Of course you can choose your own designer. Some of the labels can be quite clever beneath the shoe sole.

I go to my zen place. Deep in the inner core of mental center. I place the cap neatly on my head. Make sure the temple connectors are aligned, the outer lights blink green, and my resonating vision confirms "Active" on a clear pixelated lens that floats just below my brow. I'm linked in or at least appear as though I'm linked in. The outward lights show green. I have communication links and partial receptors displayed on my conduit screens and even thought streaming coming into my short-term memory. I've hacked the system. Partially, or I should say mostly, disabled my cap. Only to everyone else, including these probes in the TellRoom, I'm fully connected. A fully functional human cyborg.

They blanked my communications so I don't know for sure, but this is probably a routine interview. I've been to more than twenty over the last two years. Routine maintenance is what they call it. There will be some Carbon with an intercept link that he plugs into my Cap with his finger. An interchange of data, of which mine is all false, and a few elementary questions from something so dense it wouldn't know if I was a tree or a person. When it's finished one of the Supervisor Cyborgs or SupBorgs will come in and try to engage me like a person. Just to see if I have any personality. Or from their point of view, any quirks that would reveal I wasn't really plugged in. That's when I go to my quiet place. Hide my true self. Put my bouncing knee into hibernation and my dark humor into silent mode. They look into my eyes, drill into my mind, past the cap, and dig up the depths of my subconscious. They find nothing. I've taken it out and put it someplace safe. Human Cyborg rating "1" they confirm. I'm green to go. I thank them cordially, stand up, and return to my circle.

The Circle is a large circular desk I share with eleven other CapBorgs or Cappers. We interface with one another, share ideas, divide up problems into sub-components, work on them in relative isolation even though we're sitting right next to one another, and then come together to share solutions. The problems relate to larger problems we share with other Circles. Big corporate strategies, theoretical events they want to have ready work-arounds for, and technology challenges, fixes and upgrades. It's almost impossible for us to decipher what the practical real world problems and solutions are because we only see them as math equations. Algebra, calculus, geometry, linear calculus, integral equations and a new form of math they invented called "multiverse calculus". We read, speak, and collaborate in this language. If there is an English equivalent, the translation wasn't uploaded to our Caps. So there's no way of explaining it. Like sitting in math class all day solving equations thrown at us from a book of problems and never finding out whether we got the answers right. All we can know is if our solutions are right with ourselves. If they balance and at least appear solvable. Maybe the Central Artificial Intelligence Network or CAIN knows, but it doesn't talk to me. At least not as an individual.