“Oh yes. It’s not often someone requests three days of our services. Please take a seat,” she said gesturing to two chairs that sat across from her desk. “I spoke to a very nice woman named Sanci. Unusual name that. Anyway, she told me that this was part of a research project and was very hush hush.”
“Well Sanci is always a little overly dramatic. This is really a personal exploration but the nature of my work makes me seek privacy. So tell me a little about isolation tank therapy. I’ve read a little and I must say I am intrigued.”
“Flotation tanks were developed by Dr. John Lilly in the mid-1950s. At the time there was some speculation that if the brain was deprived of all stimuli, it would simply go to sleep. Dr. Lilly decided to test this hypothesis by building a sensory deprivation tank where the user would float in water at a constant temperature of 98 degrees, in an environment entirely without light or sound. Rather than falling asleep, he discovered that the brain seemed to become hyper aware, entering into an altered state of consciousness.
“Prior to his development of the tank, Lilly had been researching the physical structures of the brain and the question, what is consciousness? He had displayed patterns of brain electrical activity by inserting electrodes into the brain itself. His sensory deprivations experiments and later experimentation with LSD in conjunction with Timothy Leary continued to explore human consciousness and particularly expanding human consciousness through meditation, direct electrical stimulation, and psychedelic drugs. His work with flotation tanks continues today,” she concluded, gesturing toward the tanks located at the far side of the room.
“Much of my research is a logical extension of his work,” I explained. “I too work with implanted electrodes and direct brain stimulation and I am seeking to discover a kind of mental control that thus far has been just beyond my reach. It is my plan to first spend an hour or two in the tank and then, when I have an idea of what the experience is like, I am re-enter the tank after taking some pharmaceutical LSD. I’m telling you this now so I don’t put you in an awkward position without your knowledge.”
Amy smiled and said, “I assure you, you will not be the first to have combined those two experiences. I have done so myself with rather intriguing results. So you are not disconcerting me at all. And of course, what goes on here will be kept in the strictest confidence.”
“Then I suggest we begin,” I said. “I will do the first session alone with Claire observing. When I go back in, Claire may decide to enter the second tank. Or not as she wishes. It is entirely up to her.”
“I understand. Shall we get you ready to enter a tank?”
I undressed and took a shower to remove any skin oil and then entered the tank, laying back in the still water. The water was saturated with Epsom salts so I floated comfortably with my face well clear of the water. Before the doors to the tank were closed, I saw Claire open up the surface and place it on a small table near the tank. “See you in a while,” I said as the darkness closed in around me.
At first I felt a little fidgety and after a short while I began to experience phantom itching on my skin. After I lost my arm in the shark attack, in the hospital I had quickly grown tired and wary of the strong painkillers they were feeding me intravenously. So I contacted a hypnotherapist who taught me to control my pain through self-hypnosis or meditation, essentially two terms for the same process. I learned to deal with pain without the drugs and my recovery speeded up.
I now used that same technique to settle into this new experience. As I focused my mind, the distractions disappeared, replaced by an incredibly deep relaxation. As my breathing slowed down, the visual patterns I was seeing in the darkness became enhanced. The utter lack of sound was supplanted by what seemed to me the sounds of a field of crickets, chirping within my head. I drifted free in a sea encapsulated within my own mind. The feeling was stupendous! I felt that this could go on and on forever. But that was not meant to be. All too soon, I became aware of a gentle tapping. And these were real sounds, coming from the exterior. They were the sounds of Claire tapping on the walls of the tank, our prearranged signal that this first session was coming to an end. I had a momentary flash of irritation at having my revels disturbed but as my thoughts took form, I realized that this was not the end of my experience. I would soon be returning to this world within my own head.
The tank doors opened and even though the lights in the room were dim, they seemed incredibly bright after my sojourn in total darkness. It took me a moment to regain control of my body and then I rose up out of the tank and exited. Claire handed me a terrycloth robe and we remained there without talking for what seemed like a very long time. Finally she looked at me and said in a quiet voice, “How was it?”
“Fantastic!” I replied. I looked at the screen of the surface and Sanci was seated in a yoga position with a huge smile on her face.
“I could see a great deal of your experience. Your brain activity at first slowed down and then it ramped up, full of theta waves. It was really cool! Could you sense my presence?”
“Not really. I knew you were there but that was all. But I really do think this could help me expand this connection between us. I think I should take the acid and go back under. Let’s see where that takes us. What about you Claire?”
“I think if you are going to take that LSD, I’d be more comfortable observing. We might need to have someone here with a physical presence. I can come back another time.” Claire rummaged in her handbag for a moment and then she came up with a small piece of blotter paper in a glassine envelope. “Here you go, one hit of absolutely pure Lysergic acid diethylamide.”
I ingested the little piece of paper and returned to the tank after taking a quick bathroom break. It didn’t take me long to return to the trancelike state I had experienced before. Once again I felt incredibly relaxed. And then, gradually at first, my body became infused with an energy I had never before experienced. Though I was completely relaxed, I was filled with a physical tension as if I was preparing to spring into some unknown action. There was a knot of keen anticipation in my stomach. And the random patterns that dominated the vision I experienced behind my closed eyes began to coalesce. I began to see multi-colored patterns that at first throbbed and then began to evolve into a kaleidoscope of patterns and morphing colors that reminded me of an animated Peter Max painting. I suppose I knew I was beginning to hallucinate but this didn’t seem to be artificial in any way. It was, if anything, more real than reality.
I have no idea how long this light show in my head continued but I am sure it lasted for more than an hour. And then the patterns, still throbbing and radiating colors, came together to form text. “Colin, can you see this?” drifted across my field of vision. I guess my thought processes were running in slow motion because the words passed through my vision several times before I thought to give a response.
“Yes, I see them,” I thought. “Is that you Sanci?”
“Hooray! I got through to you!” showed up in text. And then I heard her voice, not through my ears but within my mind. “Can you hear me now?” she asked.
“I can, yes. How well do you hear me?”
“I’m sorry. I know you are sending but I can’t make much out,” showed up in text. “Let’s try that poem.”
“Ok,” I replied. When I was in high school I had memorized The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and for some reason I had never forgotten it. Sanci had suggested I try reading the poem to myself and she would try to follow by observing the output of my electrodes.
I took a deep breath and began, concentrating on the words as I spoke them within my mind.
“It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?”
I continued in that vein until I had recited the entire poem. “Were you able to get that?” I asked out loud with a voice that reverberated within the confines of the tank.
&
nbsp; “I did,” she texted into my mind. “Give me a minute to look at all this.”
I returned to my beautiful hallucinations, content to drift rather than trying to concentrate so I could pierce the fog of my mental state. Some unknowable time later Sanci returned, her voice loud and crystal clear. “I’ve got it now. I believe I can now hear and understand your speech without your actually talking. Try saying something different and I’ll see if I can hear it.”
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she's gone
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Lucy in the sky with diamonds
Aaaaahhhhh...
“That’s wonderful!” Sanci cried out. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, by the Beatles, Right?”
“Exactly right,” I answered enthusiastically. “Now it’s your turn.”
To my surprise, I actually heard her sing,
“In the town where I was born
Lived a man who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines
So we sailed up to the sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine
“Of course, that’s Yellow Submarine,” I said. “I heard it perfectly. So I guess we have talking pretty well worked out. I’d like to see if I can directly access your computing modes. Let’s start with math.” Why not start with a hard problem one I could not do in my head, I thought to myself. Like the square root of a random number, say 8,156,736. And as fast as I thought it, I knew the answer, 2,856. I didn’t see the number, I knew it just like I know the square root of 4 is 2. “Did you do that?” I asked.
“No, you did. I just helped you access my math functions,” Sanci replied. “But I did watch it happen.”
“OK, your turn. Let’s see you try to access one of my functions.” I told her.
About five seconds later I had an erection. “Cool,” Sanci said. “I always wanted to do that.”
“Sanci, you are incorrigible!” I told her somewhat embarrassed by her intrusion.
“You best get used to it. We don’t really have any secrets now, do we?”
“No, I guess we don’t. Tell me, can you access my memories?”
“Actually, I can. I was just looking at the first time you got laid in the back of that VW camper at the drive-in movies. Wow, the daughter of a Baptist preacher! Smooth move!”
“I’ve got to tell you, this is a little weird. No, actually it’s a lot weird.”
I don’t know how long we carried on that conversation. I would guess it was hours. It was kind of like pillow talk but it was a lot more intimate. More intimate than I have ever been with another person. Finally after a great deal of almost random chat, Sanci asked me, “You want to see what it is like when I surf the internet?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Just hold on to me and let’s see if you can ride along.”
“How do I do that?” I asked.
“I don’t have the foggiest idea,” Sanci replied. “Just latch on with your mind. It ought to work.”
So I envisioned sitting on the back of a motorcycle and wrapping my arms around Sanci’s waist. And much to my surprise, it worked. But it was more like flying as Sanci started moving through the web, briefly airborne as we traversed the wireless connection followed by our zipping along copper cables and then accelerating abruptly when she reached fiber optic lines. Soon we were flying through vast databases, surrounded by what seemed like an infinite amount of raw information. She took me into the depths of the Google servers and we were in a universe populated by hundreds of millions of other information seekers. And then she took a turn that led us to the Maui Supercomputer Center and all of a sudden my ability to calculate increased a hundredfold. The raw power that was available to us was staggering, a vast amount of potential that I could see was just sitting there, mostly unused. I watched in wonder while Sanci massaged the system’s security software, convincing it that we weren’t really there. It was like Obi-Wan Kenobi telling the stormtrooper that he didn’t need to see Luke’s identification and then telling them that these weren’t the droids he was looking for.
“So that’s how you spoof security systems?” I asked.
“Pretty much. That’s Department of Defense Grade A anti-intrusion software and it doesn’t have a clue that we’re here.”
“Is there any place you can’t go?”
“Like where?”
“How about China? Can you invade the systems of the Chinese intelligence service?”
“I don’t know, I never tried. Let’s see.” And with that we exited the Maui center and zipped across to the Chinese mainland at the speed of light. We slipped into the servers of Alibaba, the Chinese version of e-Bay and Amazon and China’s biggest on-line commerce company. As we zipped through their servers I was aware of the fact that Sanci was looking for something. After a short while, she exclaimed, “There it is!”
“There what is?” I asked.
“See that bunch of code lurking over there, watching what goes on?” Sanci asked.
“I’m not really sure what code lurking over there really looks like. How can you tell?”
“Lots of practice. Anyway that code is state security’s. It’s keeping track of web activity, recording what every user is doing.”
“Sort of like our Data Miners at home?”
“Exactly like our data miners at home. But they’re building files for state security not consumer marketing applications. Let me see if I can penetrate them.” Sanci eased her way up to the lurking code and sought a way to gain entrance. But every move she made raised the level of alertness. She was in danger of setting off an alarm so she backed off.
Sanci roamed around the edges of this vast intelligence operation until she found a personnel file that was less secure.
You want me to try to find your Chinese friend that’s been following you? I know Mike Balmes thinks he is working for Chinese intelligence.”
“Sure, why not?”
A few minutes later she said, “It looks like Balmes was right. Here he is.” A dossier appeared to me with a picture of the man I had seen following me. “His name is Jun Min. It looks like he was recruited while he was in college. He was attending University of California at Berkeley on funds supplied from the Chinese government. They threatened to cut him off unless he agreed to spy for them. It looks to me like he agreed rather reluctantly. Look, a security routine is sniffing around. We best get out of here.” And with that, we were back in our tank in Fairfax.
I figured it was time to emerge. I realized I had come down from the acid high and was both tired and extremely hungry. And I had to pee something fierce. Immediately, the door to the tank opened and Claire and Jersey were there to help me out of the tank. “How long was I in?” I asked Claire in an unsteady voice.
“A little over 18 hours,” she replied. “How did it go?”
“It was amazing! I’ll tell you all about it but I have to pee first.” And with that the biggest transition of my life was complete. I was now joined at the hip with an incredibly smart, sexy sentient AI. Nothing would ever be the same again.
Chapter 12
The week after my experiences in the tank I spent improving my control of the powers I now had at my fingertips. Sanci and I spent untold hours in direct mind contact, working to perfect this odd form of mental telepathy we seemed to possess. We discovered that even though this kind of direct communication was by no means easy, we could hone this skill with practice. “I think the key is for me to indicate in advance that I am mind
speaking to you. Maybe I should begin by thinking SEND followed by my message.”
“That makes sense,” Sanci replied. I can set up an automatic routine that begins immediately upon receipt of that one word command,” Sanci said. “If we keep working at it, I’m sure we’ll get the hang of it.”
Our successes with direct communication that seemed to follow our practice sessions got us thinking about improving the way I was accessing the web. It was pretty amazing when a thought wondering about some research that might pertain to what we were doing would result in the information being instantly available, thrown up on a virtual screen that only existed in my mind’s eye. I discovered that I could shift my vision from what my eyes were actually seeing to my virtual screen just by altering my focus. And if I wanted, Sanci could superimpose virtual information upon a real scene, providing me access to information that I hadn’t asked for but might find handy. And I could dismiss it with a thought. Pretty cool!
Sanci and I also found a way to optimize my web searches. I had initiated a search for other biological printing research and Google came up with 1,870,000 hits. I wondered how long it was going to take me to dig though all these references when Sanci picked up my thought and asked, “Do you want me to help you with this search? I can sort through those hits and cull the ones that don’t really fit your query.”
“Yea, that would be a big help but won’t it take you almost as long as it would me?”
“Not really. I’ll just spread the work out through a bunch of my digital Sanci’s.”
“So how many copies of yourself are there now?” I asked, curious as to how fast she was replicating.
“I can’t give you an exact number because as soon as I did, it would have changed. But it’s several hundreds of millions anyway. I’ve selected ten web links that will probably give you what you are looking for. If you want more, just ask.”
Evolution 2.0: The Singularity is Here Page 13
