Mod Superhero (Book 6 STUBBING on Oct 27th)

Chapter 6.57 - A Problem of Scale

Mod wasn't sure how the rest of the family meeting went after he walked out.

It felt like he had tunnel vision. Cyberspace fell away, and his perception closed off until there was nothing but his internal functions and his footfalls on the floor.

He wasn't even sure where he was going—

He just needed to leave.

Finally, he stopped in a demiplane. All the demiplanes were functionally the same—they were empty, except for an inert layer of training nanites. So Mod had to peek into cyberspace to get his orientation in the lab. This demiplane was the same one Mod used for training.

Somehow he'd walked there.

Mod could examine his own brain and his own thoughts in a way that even psychics couldn't replicate. Yet, so much of him still happened unconsciously.

He stood in the emptiness, with his eyes closed and perception cut off.

There were two ways that Mod could peer inside his own mind. The first was a world of representation—a world of software. The second was a world of hardware.

The first world encompassed Mod's memories and cyberspace. Even though those two things couldn't be further apart, Mod experienced them both the same way. His memories were stored as a representation of his physical body and thoughts inside a physical environment. Even though cyberspace was very different from the physical world, his brain represented cyberspace in a similar way to the real world.

This world of representation was the default way that Mod saw things, probably because he grew up human. In contrast, TINA saw the world hardware first—

Mod was only just learning to see things that way.

In college, Mod needed to take a philosophy class. Even though it was a basic course, some of the concepts stretched his mind to the limit. He was a physical being, and it just wasn't natural to see the world in abstract concepts. Peering inside his own mind and trying to see his own hardware was even more difficult. It just wasn't natural—not when Mod had spent his entire existence seeing the representation of the world. It felt like an even more convoluted version of Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

But even that didn't quite fit. The sensation was more visceral, like peeling back the skin of his leg to look at the muscle beneath. Except that Mod was going even deeper. He was peeling apart muscle fibers to watch chemicals trigger individual fibers to contract.

All that to say, the sensation felt itchy.

When Mod peered into his own brain, he saw its hardware. Even though he was all synthetic now, the structure was similar. Different regions controlled different things—audio-visual processing in one section, movement in another, and so on. TINA still had her own dedicated section.

And underneath it all were the neurons and the synapses between them. His brain was almost entirely electrical instead of chemical now, but the effect was the same—as synapses engaged, they flashed with light.

Seen altogether, his brain looked like a night sky full of twinkling stars, with regions clumped together like galaxies and nebulae. Except that the scale was wrong... If someone looked up at the night sky, they could only see ten thousand stars. There were over one hundred trillion connections in Mod's brain. As many stars as 250 galaxies.

Line up all ten billion people on the planet. Have them each take a picture of the night sky, then stitch all the photos together. There would be 100 hundred trillion stars in that photograph, and if you printed it, the photo would be big enough to cover New York City.