It took Kiki several tries but finally Sammie figured out what she was trying to show her. She hoped that all the technology and people Vic had sicced on her wouldn’t catch on.
It took Sammie a while but she finally figured that Kiki’s note was embedded in a vase decoration. The vase looked normal enough, but it looked weird to Sammie because she knew that Kiki was not a fan of having flowers or green around. She thought it was a senseless waste of energy just to satisfy people’s faux “green Earth“ nostalgia. Even though she had spent her childhood on Surface, she didn’t miss it. She was extremely allergic to all kinds of vegetation and could roam around freely only during the deep of winter; most of the year she had to stay mostly indoors. There was no greenery inside her house on Surface and no greenery in our Minor quarters. And that’s why the vase didn’t look right to Sammie. She realized now that she had seen that vase before, but this was the first time she noticed it because it blocked a picture of Kiki, Muns, and her. Kiki must have kept moving it around until Sammie finally caught on.
The vase had what looked like an old bar code pattern in it; Sammie figured those were meant for the Worms. The strips of dark and light patterns were separated by dirty brownish colored bands and that’s what Sammie focused on. She could only glance at it now and then not to raise suspicion but she eventually figured that she was looking at the mirror images of handwritten notes. With the help of her own neuromorphics she read Kiki’s note on the vase.
Like an Orgy with Clothes On
Neuromorphics became part of various brain processes and were normally entrained with their waves. When, say, Sammie wondered about a particular issue, her neuromorphics would translate it as a request and post it on the Galanet. Once the response started to trickle back, the neuromorphics injected into the various brain processes as a recall and it was as if Sammie had known the answer all along and was just remembering it. That meant that neuromorphics had enough umph in them to send to and receive from the Galanet but when it was powered down, the neuromorphics kept posting questions. And then, because of the electronic silence, somebody else’s neuromorphics would pick up the posts. So the whispers she heard were transmissions from the neuromorphics of the people nearby her.
Imagine what would happen if somebody had an orgasm during electronic silence. That’s what Kiki had set out to investigate and her answer was that it would be like having a group orgy with your clothes on. The neuromorphics attached themselves to pre cognitive brain areas. That meant that they communicated mostly feelings that then nudged the cognitive areas this way and that. If somebody were to have a strong, powerful feeling like an orgasm it would spread quickly as an orgasmic wave to anybody nearby and from those to others nearby and so on.
Fear is a strong emotion, too, and it would have the same daisy chain effect. It would happen at the speed of thought but have a lasting impact. From all indications, Vic didn’t realize this was happening but now Sammie knew and could use this effect.
Orgasmic Waves
After the unleashing of Sammie’s Big Nothings she was let out of her quarters. She was happy, but suspicious at the sudden generosity. There really was no benefit to keeping her locked up, except she would not be sneaking around looking for Munjez but she figured that by now he was somewhere unreachable to Sammie.
The unexpected freedom allowed her to experiment with neuromorphic waves. She experimented with getting really close to people while talking and hugging and she tried evoking various kinds of feelings, from happiness to despair. At first it was not clear if the reactions she got were due to the neuromorphics or if they were just driven by social queues and microexpressions. Then a strange thing happened: the people sitting at a nearby table seemed to be picking up on the mood of Sammie’s table. She tried evoking different feelings in different settings and the effect was reproducible.
After many more tries she figured out that it also had to do with the shape of the space and the amount of people in it. Low ceilings and more crowded conditions were more conducive to spread the effect.
A Fan
I like your new top. That was Xin who was usually very quiet, a committed wall-flower type. What surprised Sammie is that she could not think of any new top… oh, you mean my teal pajama top? They had a good laugh and exchanged a few more words before parting ways soon thereafter.
It was odd that Xin had commented on it, really strange. They had never overlapped as she had come to the habitat way after Sammie had moved on and they really didn’t know each other. That out-of-the-blue comment left her thinking. And then it hit her: Sammie had put on her PJs when she started to get ready for bed—but that was after she had turned off external access to her Anchortron. So it seemed that Xin was letting her know that she was one of her watchers and could see inside her cabin without the Anchortron. But how could she possibly…
When she got to her cabin, she gave her Anchortron a look over and she saw it: one the support columns had been tampered with. It took her most of the next morning to do this surreptitiously, but she verified that the one suspicious column had a very different electronic emission profile than the column on the other side. She didn’t need to know exactly what was inside to know that they were now watching her throughout the day.
It also explained why they had so ”generously“ let her out of her cabin.
Where Is Vic?
For a couple of weeks Sammie had been interacting with as many people as she could. She played her first-of-Earth fame for all it had and for once she enjoyed it. They also loved her Surface stories and her descriptions of the open space and how exhilarating and dangerous they felt. Being this close to people gave her a chance to use the neuromorphic wave effect. She would start with one person, then another, and soon a small crowd. They really felt good hanging with Sammie and their joy led to their feeling more playful, more trusting, and ultimately more curious. And just then she mentioned the SimMod game she had developed, let me know if you’d like to try it. She would point out that her SimMod included fast-forwarding time from present conditions. They were enthralled by the SimMod, very much surprised by them, and shocked by the results.
Some people even changed the starting conditions to well-known historical situations and then helplessly watched it lead to war. Tweak. Fall to war. Tweak again and go to war again.
One of the features that people liked was running to the Bosses. This signaled the end of one phase and the start of the next. People could move ahead by fighting the Boss, just like the late 20th century games, but it would turn out to be a dead end. You could try figuring a way out by yourself and that would get you a bit further ahead. But the way out was for people to help each other and work together. And this included helping each other get past their fears, helping each other be vulnerable.
Sammie was surprised that Vic had not made an appearance in all that time. She figured that he’d catch up to what she was doing and try the SimMod himself and then he would figure a way to put a damper on the whole thing. Either that or he was probably discovering that being a boss and keeping control over people was a stressful job.
The SimMods
Kiki was aghast when she realized where she was and what she was looking at. Sammie this is more gross than the worstest fiction Mod. Jeez, this looks like some early century, megamachine kind of crap. Who came up with this? Even after Sammie explained it, Kiki was revolted by it.
They could hold conversations like this now and then because Xin was helping them do it ”under the radar.“ The feed was a deep fake using previous feeds and there were telltale signs of it, but Xin chose to ignore them then. Anybody could have watched the recording and detected the deep fake, but the fact was that nobody bothered to because Vic had not ordered it. Besides, most other watchers were busy deep in the bowels of the SimMod game.
OK, so… this is the worst that could happen if Vic’s thing goes on to its logical conclusion? Sammie had to explain, again, that this was the best case scenario, not the worst. Are you sure? I mean, Mods cannot predict the future! Sammie was ready for that one, she had run a simulation starting with the conditions in Germany, Austria, and the surrounding countries in the 1920s and 1930s, and no matter what, it would end up in World War II. Sometimes with Hitler, and other times without. Sometimes a few years earlier, sometimes later. Sometimes it would even start in Germany. But in the end, the Great War carnage happened. People were starting to take the SimMods, and what they implied, seriously.
As one of the smaller Major habitats found out, they were on a path that was going to turn ugly. This didn’t come out until much later, but a habitat that started under Vic’s influence had raced ahead. They experimented with a form of local governance that rejected Surface authority but it also rejected Vic’s. In fact, it rejected all forms of authority. Kind of like the US Libertarian movement.
They used SimMods expecting who knows what, but they didn’t like the results they got. No matter how much they tweaked, they would always end up in a brutish world where people literally had to fend for themselves, in constant violent battles with others. A world where any sign of help or coordination would be interpreted as a threat, or worse, a weakness to be exploited. Ironically, the habitat was one of the first to be alarmed enough to reach out to Earth’s authorities for help. Of course, Surface was not really an armed ”authority“ any more. Mostly, they acted as facilitators and served to have people get back in touch with what was important to them as a community.
This defection and the defections in his own habitat kept Vic very busy. He had been trying to come up with counters to Sammie’s SimMods, but to no avail. People were starting to come to him and, no matter what angle he tried, he ended up not having anything convincing to say. Fear really made things go awry, terribly so, and you’d end up with all the turn-of-the-century problems. Hidden, unexamined fear was surprisingly caustic for people and for teams, too.
The Results Are In
A lot of people at Vic’s habitat were immersed in the SimMods now, including the watchers and others under Vic’s influence. And they didn’t like what they saw. These folks had grown up RADICAL and knew how to use their voice and take responsibility for their actions.
Young Adah and her father knocked on Sammie’s door and told her what they had done to her Anchortron and they were there to undo it if she would let them in. They removed the sensors she knew about and others that they had placed throughout the cabin that she hadn’t discovered.
People kept dropping by and apologizing for her mistreatment, but she was most surprised when she opened the door to Dotty who was holding a finicky Munjez. Munjez had obviously bonded with Dotty and he was a bit reluctant to let go of her, but the sight of Sammie was the bigger pull. As Dotty came close to handoff Munjez, Sammie hugged them both. Then she ran to the Anhcortron and talked to Kiki and Dotty for a while. It’s amazing how much he had grown in less than five weeks, those were Kiki’s first words after seeing Munjez.
Later she even talked to the young man who had blocked her from her ship and who now didn’t know what to do with hands.
Finally, she went looking for Vic. She didn’t find him until the next morning, sitting by himself in the multihall. In fact, when she first approached him he made a go away gesture without looking. Sammie had to say, hey, Victor Boswell and then he turned around. He looked at Sammie and within a faction of a second she saw defeat in his eyes, followed by a flash of ”I’ll be back“ and finally a deep, blank stare.
Vic, come with me back to the Minor habitat. Munjez came to you, now it’s your turn.
After a while he looked up at Sammie and slowly shook his head from side to side in an apparent refusal. But then, he sprung up and said, I’ll go fold my socks. Meet you at the dock in 10. With that Sammie walked back to her cabin and got ready to go.
