Ariadne
Yes.
Nutscracker
But then that means the helmet of horror appears in the separator labyrinth, which is located inside the helmet itself?
Ariadne
Yes, it does.
Nutscracker
But the helmet has to be bigger than one of its parts. How can it be located inside one of its own components?
Ariadne
The dwarf said ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ only exist in the horns of plenty. The same thing applies to ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’. The horns contain absolutely everything you could possibly imagine and everything else as well.
Nutscracker
But in that case even the helmet only exists in these horns of plenty?
Ariadne
Yes, I think so.
Nutscracker
Whichever way you look at it, that means the helmet of horror arises inside one of its own component parts. But it exists inside a different one. Where’s the sense in that?
Ariadne
Where? In the horns of plenty, of course.
Nutscracker
Ariadne, are you serious?
Ariadne
Yes, probably. Or perhaps not. To be quite honest, I’m tired. If I meet the dwarf, I’ll make sure I ask him about everything. You think up some questions.
Monstradamus
Hang on a moment. How did the dream end?
Ariadne
After the lecture I went out into the corridor. There was no one there, just a big mirror in a semicircular frame on the wall. I went over and looked into it and woke up.
Monstradamus
What did you see in it?
Ariadne
Myself.
Monstradamus
And nothing unusual?
Ariadne
I was wearing a straw hat with a round crown and two little bunches of lilies-of-the-valley pinned to the brim at the back. The hat had a veil of thick lace with round holes, so I couldn’t see my face behind it at all. It all looked very beautiful, but something made me feel nervous. I couldn’t work out what was wrong until suddenly I recognised that bronze mask in my reflection and that frightened me, and then the dream suddenly ended. That’s all. I’m going.
Organizm(-:
I thought from the very beginning that goon must be wearing a virtual reality helmet. Honest I did.
Nutscracker
That’s not any kind of virtual reality helmet; it’s some kind of fancy pressure cooker. Games for children. I ought to know how a virtual reality helmet works when grown-ups put one together, and this is nothing like it.
Organizm(-:
And how does it work?
Nutscracker
Maybe I don’t understand too well which way the current flows and what it’s transformed into and all, but I do know perfectly well what someone in one of those helmets sees and thinks, because I’ve dealt with it as a professional, by studying the problem of choice in an interactive environment. We worked with those helmets all the time.
Organizm(-:
I’ve never heard of that problem. What is it?
Nutscracker
Well, imagine you decide for yourself who’s going to shoot who when you’re watching an action movie. If you decide the main hero gets killed in the first shootout, then what happens to the rest of the plot? If you had genuinely free choice, the results could be pretty miserable. But art is supposed to make us happy, not miserable.
Monstradamus
That’s for sure. And even when it does make us miserable, we should feel happy in our misery.
Nutscracker
That’s right! So there never is any genuine interactivity, only the appearance of it. Or rather, it is permitted, but only within a narrow range where no choice you make can change the fundamental situation. The main problem is to eliminate freedom of choice so that the subject is led unerringly to make the decision required, while at the same time maintaining his firm belief that his choice is free. In scientific terms it’s known as coercive orientation.
UGLI 666
What’s that?
Nutscracker
That’s a long story.
Organizm(-:
We don’t have much else to occupy ourselves with.
Monstradamus
That’s right. Tell us about it, Nutcracker. Let’s give our brains a break.
Nutscracker
I suppose there’s no need to explain what the Helmholtz sees?
Organizm(-:
Who?
Nutscracker
In professional jargon that’s what they call the guy in the helmet. A Helmholtz is someone who’s located in an artificial dimension that totally isolates him from the real world and moves around in it, or rather, thinks he moves around in it. Let’s assume this dimension takes the form of a flat area with three identical marble vases standing on it. And what we have to do to keep the action moving in the right direction is to lead the Helmholtz to the middle vase.
Organizm(-:
Three identical marble vases. Hardly makes it worth bothering to put the helmet on.
Nutscracker
Instead of vases they could be doors, turns at a road junction, any kind of choice at all in fact. It’s not important. Everything you see in the helmet is computed by a special program and the program can be set up so that, every time, the Helmholtz makes the same choice we made for him earlier.
Organizm(-:
Sure, you can fix the program, but not the experimental subject. He’s got his own programming.
Nutscracker
That’s the whole point. When the helmet and the Helmholtz fuse into a single whole, you can edit the reader as well as the book, if you get my meaning. That’s why we say editing technology can be external or internal. Although there’s no clear boundary between them, of course.
Organizm(-:
Come again?
Nutscracker
External technologies affect what we see, internal technologies affect what we think.
Organizm(-:
How about an example?
Nutscracker
The simplest external editing program is ‘Sticky Eye’. That’s when, as you turn your head, one of the vases gets stuck in the field of vision and lingers there longer than it should.
Monstradamus
But what about the two other vases? They’re standing next to it. According to the laws of perspective …
Nutscracker
How perspective operates inside the helmet is decided by us and our client. Another method is called ‘The Weight’. When the Helmholtz tries to move away from our vase, the program slows down his movement. And when he approaches, it speeds his movement up. As though we’ve tied a mathematical weight to his foot and it keeps disappearing and reappearing again. That makes it easier to move towards the chosen vase than in any other direction, and disorganised series of random displacements will bring the Helmholtz to it pretty quickly.
Organizm(-:
A mathematical weight. That’s beautiful.
Nutscracker
The next technology up is ‘Pavlov’s Bitch’. That’s an intermediate conditioned reflex editor.
Organizm(-:
So it’s named after that Russian scientist who noticed his stomach juices started flowing when the phone rang?
UGLI 666
No he didn’t, he just studied conditioned reflexes in dogs.
Nutscracker
I didn’t invent the name. When you look at the vases that we want to exclude from your list, your vision starts blurring and rippling and you get a horrible buzzing in your ears, or even an electric shock. So you won’t look at them again.
UGLI 666
But you’d notice that straightaway.
Nutscracker
We want you to notice it straightaway, draw the right conclusion and look in the right direction in future. It’s a cheap technology for third-world countries. But if the budget’s big enough, then fo
r instance we can use infrasonics. The Helmholtz won’t notice anything, but he’ll experience a dark, mysterious horror when he turns towards any vase except the one we want. The obverse method is stimulation of the pleasure centre when the correct choice is made. They used to insert an electrode, but now it’s done by pharmacological means or by entraining the brain to delta rhythms.
Organizm(-:
You don’t say. Are you telling me they’ll be doing all that stuff to us if we watch interactive movies?
Nutscracker
I don’t think so. These techniques weren’t developed for the movies, not even for virtual spaces. They were just modelled there. The topic is not in the public domain. But since you and I aren’t in the public domain either, I suppose it’s okay for me to tell you about it.
Organizm(-:
So what are the internal editing programs like?
Nutscracker
Well, for instance, take ‘Sunny Kiss’. The vase we have to choose is endowed with positive emotional coloration by employing universally accepted aesthetic codes, given a positive inner content, if you like.
UGLI 666
Inner content. Would that be inside the vase or inside the viewer?
Nutscracker
That’s a difficult question. You could say it’s inside the helmet. But all that’s just words. It’s easier for me to explain how it’s done. Say a ray of sunlight falls on our vase, or you hear a soulful melody in the air when it enters your field of view. The reverse technique is ‘Doom and Gloom’. For instance, when you look at a vase we don’t like, the sun is covered by dark clouds, a grey fog comes down and you hear unpleasant noises.
Organizm(-:
Fair enough. What else?
Nutscracker
There’s another technology called ‘The Seventh Seal’. The vase that has to be chosen is marked out using secret signs that attract interest or stimulate the imagination. It can be absolutely anything – a hand print on its surface, arrows pointing to it on the ground, a dove sitting on its edge, mysterious graffiti, and so on and so forth. The obverse method is ‘The Le Pen Club’. That’s when the vases we wish to exclude are covered in the crudest obscenities you can imagine, preferably not even in paint, but xxx. Virtual, of course.
Organizm(-:
And you mean the Helmholtz won’t notice anything?
Nutscracker
Used on its own, any one of the techniques used is easy enough to spot. But if the methods are combined together in a subtle fashion and always applied in rotation at a level of intensity just on the border line of perception, you get practically a hundred per cent precise manipulation combined with total imperceptibility.
Organizm(-:
I get it. It’s like what you see at the railway stations in Asia. When a passenger thinks it’s the tumbler-gambler who’s going to cheat him but actually everyone playing the game is in on the swindle even though they’re arguing with each other all the time, maybe even fighting.
Nutscracker
Exactly. Only in our case absolutely everybody in the station is in on it, including the stone Atlantes by the main entrance.
Ariadne
How clever you are, Nutcracker. After I listened to you I wrote a poem. It’s dedicated to you, Romeo and Isolde. Shall I read it?
Nutscracker
Go on.
Ariadne
Beyond the window-pane on Doom and Gloom
Old Pavlov’s Bitch’s Sticky Glance is glued.
My Minotaur! Creep silently into my room
Beckon me with a glance, brazenly nude.
Nutscracker
Powerful as ever. And he’s already partly fulfilled your wish by removing his helmet, even though he has no head underneath it. I’d say it’s impossible to expose yourself any more brazenly than that.
UGLI 666
Nutcracker, there’s one thing about what you say I can’t understand. How can you change what’s in front of a person’s eyes without him noticing? If he’s looking at the same place but sees something different, how can he fail to notice?
Nutscracker
I couldn’t understand that at first either. But for the Helmholtz the word ‘change’ has no meaning. In real life what you see depends on where you look. But when you’re wearing a helmet, it’s the other way round – where you’re looking depends on what you see. Is that clear?
UGLI 666
Not entirely.
Nutscracker
In the real world you see what’s in front of your eyes. No matter which way you point your rump. But in this world you see what’s in front of your eyes, no matter which way you point your head. As we used to say in the xxx, it’s chalk and cheese, even though it sounds pretty much the same. You don’t have any independent system of coordinates, and we decide everything you see. So you can’t even suspect anything. For you even the world isn’t what it really is, but what’s shown to you. You feel like you’re looking around in a natural manner, but in fact all the time your eyes keep stumbling over our candidate – sorry, I mean our vase – and it gives you this light and happy feeling. But you never think to ask why, the same way no one ever asks why it’s a sunny day.
Organizm(-:
An interesting slip of the tongue.
Nutscracker
And if the mark turns his head too rapidly, so that ‘Sticky Eye’ and ‘Sunny Kiss’ stop working, then ‘Doom and Gloom’ and ‘The Weight’ kick in immediately.
Organizm(-:
Well, Nutcracker, so now I understand what you do for a living. Tell me, as a professional, do you reckon they could be influencing us in some similar kind of way in here?
Nutscracker
I’d have to think about that.
UGLI 666
I noticed a long time ago that conspiracy theory has taken the place of religion for atheists. They always think there’s someone manipulating them, hypnotising them, zombifying them, bugging them, trailing them. But that someone is simply the devil, and that’s all. The fact is, it’s only a short step from atheism to schizophrenia, and in most cases it’s already been taken. What about you, Organism? Do you feel like someone’s manipulating you?
Organizm(-:
To be honest, I do.
UGLI 666
What kind of manipulation is it?
Organizm(-:
Being locked in here, for instance. Or being fed pancakes for the second day running.
UGLI 666
Ah, in that sense. But that’s not manipulation, that’s God’s punishment.
Organizm(-:
Ugly, let me explain to you how we’re manipulated in here. Let’s assume that headgear on Asterisk’s head is a virtual reality helmet after all.
UGLI 666
And then what?
Organizm(-:
Perhaps everything we see here is something like that flat area Nutcracker was talking about – with the three identical vases, except one of them is more identical than the others.
Nutscracker
For us to be manipulated like that, we’d have to be wearing helmets.
Organizm(-:
Maybe we are.
Nutscracker
Touch your face with your hands. Can you feel any helmet?
Organism(-:
No, but …
Monstradamus
I know what he’s going to ask now. He’s going to ask whether you can use a helmet to simulate what you feel with your hands.
Organizm(-:
Well that’s right. It seems a natural enough question to me.
Nutscracker
If everything is simulated by the helmet, then it’s not a helmet or a simulation any more. It’s life.
Organizm(-:
Nutcracker, there’s one thing you didn’t explain. Who switches on all these ‘Sticky Eyes’ and ‘Sunny Kisses’? Surely someone has to control it all?
Nutscracker
Certainly. There’s an operator with a special monitor. He sees the Helmholtz as a d
ot on a radar screen. And the vases would be, say, red rhomboids. There’s a manipulation menu on the same screen. The rest is all just like in Windows – click and drag.
Monstradamus
Click and drag. A great slogan for a double-edged axe.
Organizm(-:
And how can you do it the other way round?
Nutscracker
How do you mean?
Organizm(-:
So the virtual reality helmet is on the operator who controls the manipulation. And this operator somehow makes the others see what he sees.
Nutscracker
How could he make them do that?
Organizm(-:
Hypnosis.
UGLI 666
There you are. I was just waiting for that word.
Nutscracker
I don’t know much about hypnosis. But if a hypnotist was powerful enough to make others see what he sees, why would he need a helmet?
Organizm(-:
In order to know what the others have to see.
Monstradamus
You could take it even further. Not just seeing, but actually being there. Asterisk wears a helmet in which he sees a labyrinth. And we’re all inside this labyrinth. And he manipulates us.
Nutscracker
You mean we’re all inside the Minotaur’s head?
Monstradamus
You could say we’re in the space that he sees.
Nutscracker
Then where’s the Minotaur?
Monstradamus
We have to assume he’s in the space that Ariadne sees in her dreams.
Organizm(-:
End of the line. Remember, Nutcracker, at the very beginning you asked me ‘Where is here exactly?’ I didn’t understand your question at first. In the helmet of horror, that’s where.
Helmet of Horror Page 5
