Synthetics Read Online Free PDF Page B

slow down. I felt calm. She was right. She must be right.
     
    ***
     
    “Hey Stuart, how’s it going?”
    I sat myself down at his side. Three days had passed since the meeting and some of my initial horror had worn off to be replaced by comparatively mild unease. I hadn’t phoned home in days. This was beginning to become my world.
    Both of us wore lab coats. Stuart was staring at a screen with his chin in his hands.
    “Staggers man,” he said without taking his eyes off the screen, “I’m alright aye. How about you?”
    “I’m as good as I can be,” I replied, “Still feeling a bit unsure about this whole thing. What have you got there? Is this your assignment?”
    Each of us three interns had been assigned to a different lab to become acquainted with CANA practices. We were to rotate every month and hopefully, by the end of the internship, have a broad understanding of the different projects that were on the go. I was assigned to a lab that was experimenting with new coolant systems, but Stuart appeared to have lucked out and gotten attached to a cybernetics department.
    “Yeah man,” replied Stuart. He pointed to the monitor, which showed a three-dimensional rendering of two mice on a tropical island. “This is Archie,” he said pointing to a brown mouse, then to a white mouse, “and this is Ingrid.” He looked away from the screen to me. “And they are in love.”
    I nodded slowly. He had bags under his eyes from lack of sleep.
    “It looks like they are both males though,” I pointed out.
    Stuart squinted at me, eyes full of suspicion, and then started peering at the monitor again.
    “It does not matter,” he said after further scrutiny, “Their love is transcendent.”
    I laughed. “That’s the best kind,” I motioned around the room, “So what is this?”
    Stuart stretched and yawned. “Well,” he said, “I don’t really have a clue. My job is just to watch the mice and note down any peculiar behaviors and map their routines. But…” He pointed to a box like machine in the corner. “I do know that Archie and Ingrid are actually real mice.”
    My eyes widened.
    “Nice crazy eyes bro,” said Stuart before continuing, “Inside that machine is two mice who have been stripped down to only a nervous system and a brain.”
    “Sounds twisted,” I said.
    “Hell yeah, but pretty normal considering this is CANA.” He laughed. “Okay, so those mice are then hooked up to monitors and lots of different doohickeys, which allow them to interact in a virtual reality and also, for that virtual reality to interact with them.”
    “So they couldn’t do that with an unmutilated mouse?”
    “Nah, this ain’t the matrix. You got to be able to access every sensory receptor. All the muscle and crap just gets in the way.”
    “Oh,” I replied, “That’s disgusting.”
    “The idea takes some getting used to I know. I used to feel bad for the mouse, but after watching them…” He looked back to the monitor. “After watching them I realized that they seem to be enjoying themselves. It’s real for them. Watch this.”
    He pressed a button and a giant block of holey cheese appeared. The two mice sniffed the air, watched the cheese and then dashed inside one of the holes.
    “Now they have a house made of cheese,” said Stuart, “Must be heaven for them. Took me nearly two days to code that thing.”
    “The cheese? Two days to make a piece of cheese?”
    “Yup,” replied Stuart, “Two whole days, with my supervisor’s help. You have to code for the shape, colour, texture, taste, the smell; every little thing that will make the mice think it’s real. It’s all about signals interacting with the appropriate receptors in their nervous system. It’s pretty similar to regular computer programming to be honest.”
    I watched as a mouse emerged from the cheese. It waddled now.
    “So you hook them into a body and they would be just like the guy we saw.”
    “Synthetics,” nodded