"Universe 2" Recovered Sections

Excerpt 1

Perhaps one of the most interesting things I came across in my time in that universe was the development of living technology. Where many people would be used to screens of light and circuitry of copper or gold these people had octopus skin which changed to a picture produced from a sort of brain in a jar. These systems were amazingly swift, cheap, and versatile. You could find in every family home, often in its own separate room, what appeared on first glance to be a medium sized dog laying down next to a hairy and grotesque, yet familiar, monitor attached via umbilical cord with pale skin stretched where the screen should be.

If you look closer you'd find that this "dog" is actually a sack of flesh with an orifice on the top obscured by its thick fur, and upon touching the fur the monitor to its side changes it's skin tone to what is immediately recognizable as a startup screen. The family that agreed to kindly host me on my involuntary travels was baffled by my confusion upon seeing this computer of flesh. They helped me understand, to a slight degree, how it worked. They showed me how they fed it some sort of slop through the orifice on the top to keep it alive and how to operate the computer, even sending messages and playing games by pulling on its fur in strange ways. I recall, dumbfounded by the workings of this creature, asking how it "connects to the internet", to which they laughed and admitted to not fully knowing.

Awestruck by this foreign thing and wishing to know more I sought out a company that made these things, looking up the location of a nearby manufacturer on this beast with the help of one of the family members. After finding it I took an all-too-familiar metal tram to a city where I set off to this company's headquarters. Along the way, as I mentioned in my previous experiences, there were no signs that there existed living computers in this reality other than a lack of TV screen billboards like that could be found back where I'm from. I even looked keenly for shops that sold these things but I could not find a single one. Because of this observation I came to the conclusion that these creatures required specific conditions to survive that could not be provided in typical circumstances that "normal" (to me anyway) computers can stand due to their inherent rigidity. Eventually I arrived at the headquarters, a large skyscraper with shockingly few windows, and I was surprised to be welcomed on a tour with open arms. On the tour I learned exactly how these things worked and, more importantly, how they were made.

One of the first things that they showed me was a cross section of one in the main lobby suspended in some sort of liquid. The organism was mostly brain and nerve, however about ⅛ of the body was for the purposes of survival- digestive tract, heart, and a unique excrement system. The only bone in the body was a upright not quite human skull surrounding the large brain.

As I marveled at this I asked my tour guide how this came to be. She looked at me strangely, something I am well used to by now, and told me that a, now defunct, corporation from France, while messing around with organs from donors and genetic editing, found a way to make a suspended human brain communicate with octopus skin to create images. At first it was just random dreams, memories, and images of the host brain but after years of work they have found a way to get the brain to do complex calculations and act as an encyclopedia. From there the natural progression of human curiosity took hold and by the 1970s select companies, including NASEA (NASA back at home), received these basic computers to run calculations with. From there work began with intense genetic editing to make one of these sloppily put together Frankenstein's monsters into an actual living thing that's able to survive on its own. The first successful model was birthed by a willing surrogate in the 1990s. With this breakthrough they were then able to create a "Mother" who acted as a factory for these computers.

The tour guide, done with her monologue, then ushered me to follow her to the elevator. As we went up I realized that there was music playing through speakers. I decided not to ask any questions about how they worked as my tour guide already seemed to be slightly put off by my lack of knowledge. When we arrived at our floor she took me down a hallway to a window. I looked through the window and my jaw dropped. A hairy mass of flesh, taller than 3 adult men, sat in the middle of the room. It had silky golden fur covering all its body and was occasionally swelling as it breathed. Workers in lab coats scurried around tending to this monstrosity, one was pouring a barrel of liquid into the top of it from a walkway above, and several were cleaning the floor. My tour guide told me that this was their Mother, one of the best ones available in the computer industry at the moment. I was speechless.