Hell of a time getting across campus just now. There’s cops and security everywhere.

There is a big protest happening because President Prescott’s 2nd inauguration is today or something.

All I know is we need to make sure they keep our coke machine stocked if this is gonna keep up.

Okay we aren’t actually basement dwellers. Most of us are on the 2nd floor, but we don’t have windows in the building so we might as well be on the basement.

Actually the basement is where the servers are, which was useful last winter the week we lost heat and Jack rerouted the fans to the duct work and our massive server farm became our heating source.

Grass

Walking back to the lab with lunch I suddenly stopped and realized Spring was already at its peak. All the leaves were out, dark green and full sized. It seemed like the trees were all still grey when Rasa, Kaitlin and I first “moved” into the lab.

I put down the bags and took off my shoes. I swear I heard my toes sigh as they dug into the grass. I needed a break, just a short break, and sat down on the hill in front of our building.

I heard my name and turned to see Sally.

I must say Sally made me happier than I’ve been in weeks when she let me know that Janice missed me. Sally said she missed me too and then she made me feel like dirt: I had missed her birthday earlier this week.

She accepted my lame excuse about work and stuff, and I think I finally got back on her good side by rolling down the hill with her over and over again.

I think there is a biological milestone just after puberty that makes getting dizzy something that induces nausea instead of giddiness.

Nothing like walking into a lab with cold food, grass in your hair, and mud on your pants to stop the conversation. If I didn’t know it was impossible I’d say that Adit lost his train of thought.

Outside the Green Zone

I know I’m not “in touch.” I’ve heard that accusation many times by the “activist” cool kids in the student center cafeteria, that’s one reason why I avoid eating there. That and the food is awful.

I admit I’m more into Alpha than what goes on outside Dulles’s halls. But stepping outside the green zone was a slap in the face.

First the smell. I don’t know how they prevent the smell from getting into the green zone, but they do. My stomach writhed and flipped in reaction to the smell. It wasn’t just the garbage it was as if the streets were sweating.

Second is the fact that the town was falling apart. When I first started going to Dulles as a student, downtown was full of, shall we say, cheap housing. But now it’s all gone to seed.

I wonder if the Roman Senate, as they heard news of lost territories, increased crime, and a diminishing treasury, ever put two and two together and realized that Rome was waning? Did they try to stop its slow death? Or did they close their eyes of it all and continued to bask in the glory that was Rome, all the while rubber stamping all of Julius Nepos’s decrees.

Heading out in the middle of the night seemed like to me the best way not to get noticed but the campus guard wanted to “escort” me for my own safety. It only took him 50 bucks to realize I’d be okay walking into town on my own. No bus or cabs, so there was a lot of walking. I discovered my campus ID was also my “pass” back into the green zone.

Alice had me meet her contact underneath the huge Prescott banner at the corner of Barbara Ave. and Houston St. I had assumed it was a left over “re-elect Prescott” poster from last year’s election. I was wrong. It was a banner, huge, 4 stories tall. It didn’t even have his name, just his picture and the words “Our Leader” at the bottom. They were all over town, covering the broken windows of all the abandoned buildings.

A few thousand dollars later I was heading back to the green zone. Another 50 and my bags weren’t searched, and exhausted I went to my room and collapsed on my bed. I closed my eyes and didn’t sleep. I waited 10 minutes, showered, changed, and headed back to check on Alpha.

Alpha doesn’t sleep, and neither do I.

Hitting the Fan

At six this morning Ned ran into my office absolutely livid. He was a mess. It looked like he came into the lab right out of bed. And basically he had. He got an early morning visit from a Greystle lawyer.

Ned ranted about how the project was not only going to stop but that I and the whole team was going to go to jail.

What the hell?!?

“Rule Number 1 Rob, Rule Number 1 – Don’t screw the money!” Ned said that every ten minutes for most of the morning.

Someone in the biology team was so excited about the medical possibilities of the VKV that they sent some of the info to some medical students. They went outside the team.

Greystle found out about it instantly. What idiot on our team would put project data on the grid? It doesn’t matter if it was encrypted, that is a fantasy now anyway with every key owned by the government. And now I guess we could say Greystle owns them too.

When Ned ran to meet with Greystle’s lawyers I called all the managers to the main floor. Adit, Janice, Kaitlin, etc. Every group manager was there and I let them have it. I asked them if their CVs were up to date because they were going to need them soon. I was shaking. I think I might have been crying.

I told them that Alpha would most likely die and that Ned was trying to save our asses.

And then it got worse.

Janice just stared at me coldly and said “you would kill them all. All the animals, all that life. You’d kill them all for Greystle?”

I always thought the phrase “the silence was deafening” was crap, but I swear my eardrums were bleeding while all of us just stood there. No one shuffled. No one cleared their throat. A lot of death to think about, and inside I screamed as I thought of what Janice must now think of me.

When I finally spoke again I took a more conciliatory tone. I said that if Alpha was going to continue we’ve got to work better with Greystle. If the VKV is going to be used in medicines and save lives in the REAL world we’d need to work with Greystle or else what we learned here could never be used to help anyone.

I then ordered Pizza. That seemed to help a bit. But there was almost no small talk as we ate. Janice wouldn’t look at me.

During lunch Ned came in with somewhat good news. Alpha would live.

Ned convinced Greystle that the mistake would not be repeated and that Alpha was a proven money maker that could not exist nor be maintained without the present project team.

So now as it stands nothing has changed except that if any of us leaves the green zone we are instantly off the project and possibly even instantly put it jail.

We also lost our write access to the grid.

Okay, this is embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t know it was possible to that. I’m sure Adit will figure out a work around, otherwise half the team will lose their entire social life.

So we’re now prisoners of the campus and the green zone. Just as well I guess, none of us ever left… really. I mean at least now our campus pharmacy is fully stocked of Orexinal. Of course even if I didn’t take some tonight I doubt I’d be able to sleep.

I’m pretty sure we’ll have to push back our “beg for more money” presentation to Greystle yet again.

Hitting the fan II – this time it’s personal

I look like crap, I feel like crap.

And tonight I go to sleep. I really have no choice. I’m locked into my room, and I’m not allowed out until after I wake up. And sleep I will, they took away my Orexinal.

They have Kaitlin in the other room acting as my guard. I wonder if they’ll slide me food under the door.

How could it have come to this? Pathetic sad little boy afraid to go to asleep. I am crap.

Earlier today I went to get some Mountain Dew and Twizzlers. I came back from the snack machine to find Alice, Adit, Kaitlin, and Janice in my office. Janice’s eyes were red and she wouldn’t look at me.

Alice noted that the whole group knew not only of my Orexinal habit but what I myself had read about it on the old web. It seems I’m not as good as I thought with the old browsers and I had left a cache of all the sites I visited on Alice’s cube.

Adit and Kaitlin apologized for not recognizing I had a problem because they had thought I had stop using when we had finished the “Rasa” project.
I tried to explain that it hadn’t affected me, and that was met with a strong rebuke. Examples of my failures were too easily given from handling Greystle and the VKV to my inability in getting additional funding.

Janice’s rebuttal hit home the most. “Really Rob? No effect?”

In an effort to relieve my pain Adit decided to increase my embarrassment with a question I couldn’t really answer. When was the last time I took a shower? I’m sure it was just a few days ago.

I tried to explain it was hard to get into a routine without really having a “morning routine” anymore.

When I started to get angry and a little aggressive Adit grabbed my arm, which made me scream out in pain. I hadn’t realized I had begun cutting myself. Late at night I guess. Perhaps I was trying to keep my body awake.

I tried to explain it to them even though I didn’t understand it myself. Janice left the room without talking to me.
I guess that is what an intervention is.

They let me across campus to my room. You’d think a person basically being dragged would grab attention, but the lawns now seem to be just a staging area for near riots between Prescott supporters and activists. No one noticed us.

God I am tired. I’m frightened, what if I don’t wake up? Will this be how Janice remembers me? How will she explain this to Sally?
My head hurts.

Catching up 2 – POV

When I got back to the office I thought the first thing I’d hear about was the status of Alpha, but instead it was about the subject I dread: Politics

There is some kind of court case against President Prescott going on and that seems to be the new excuse for an increase in crime in town and even in the green zone. The thing Adit and Kaitlin wanted me to know was that there was a curfew now in the green zone. They figured I wasn’t aware of that and I wasn’t.

The campus security is also especially twitchy now.

More importantly though Adit and Kaitlin let me in on their little secret: Using the tech that keeps Adit… umm… Adit (and not Rasa), they are able to share experiences.

They started working on this right after Adit got his upgrade.

If you want any proof that Orexinal was affecting my performance I think you need go no further than the fact that my two main technical resources had basically been working part time on the alpha project and full time on their own experiment, and I had no idea.

Much like how Kaitlin and Adit upgraded Adit so that all electrical activity is recorded and “played back” to trigger his memory, they now can record the specific frequencies of each brain reaction to stimuli and compare that to how another brain reacts to the same stimuli. They can then create a mapping table between the two.

The program would learn how I see blue, and it would learn how Adit sees blue. Then I could look at blue, and record my brain looking at blue and then upload that recording to Adit. He’d then see the blue. It isn’t a recording of the blue or even my brain’s reaction to the blue. It is my brain’s reaction to the blue mapped to Adit’s brain’s reaction to blue. It would be what I saw as if he saw it.

Adit and Kaitlin mapped different sensory experiences. Their reactions to colors, shapes, smells, sounds, lights, all were mapped. Then touch. And as they are intimate now… all touch. They can really “share the experience.”

So besides transsexuals it looks like if Hera and Zeus ever get into an argument about sex again they can ask Adit or Kaitlin rather than just relying on the answer Tiresias gave. And no, I did not ask either Kaitlin or Adit which sex enjoys sex the most. And given the difference in anatomy and thus the difference in neuron wiring to respond to feedback from said anatomy the shared experience can really only ever be an approximation.

Actually all sensations through this tech will just be approximations, but according to Adit even just watching TV from the point of view of the person sitting next to you blows away any sense of “self.” And coming from a man whose every memory is triggered by a computer program that is saying something.

Over some beers we discussed what to call this and though I personally thought Perceptitron was cool and retro, in the end we decided to call the tech POV (Point of View) and we decided not to tell Greystle… or anyone else.

Erik just burst in and woke me up. The campus is in lock down. We can’t even get into the Green Zone now. Where the hell is this going?

A researcher with nowhere to go

Well now I can’t get back to sleep.

Erik Dasner lives across the hall – he’s the guy who just gave me the news.

Erik is especially nervous because his project at the medical school is getting its funding stripped. As soon as they close the books on the project Erik gets kicked off campus. Now with what is going on will the green zone be abandoned? If so what the hell happens to him? How does a researcher get a job in town?

Erik’s research project ended with a result so boring it doesn’t really shine on his CV, which considering the amount of work that went into the study is a real shame.

After the two biggest murder sprees in 2018 were discovered to have been committed by men who had brain shockers funding poured in for a study about the long term side effects of this treatment. This was the first year that brain shockers were approved for mood disorders and no longer were limited to epileptics and schizophrenics. It was an incredible life improving technology that required only an hour long procedure to implant and optimize. And the idea that this technology could lead to such violent behaviors was quite the story, the media milked it for all its worth and a lot of people who could have been treated with the brain shockers were instead given the same old mildly effective drugs they’d been given for the past few decades. The game changing technology was given a black eye.

So Erik became the lead researcher in the study and after 10 years they discovered that a small percentage of the group did indeed exhibit abnormal behaviors from violent sexual fetishes to self mutilation and anger management issues. In an even larger percentage they noticed cheating, lying, and general anti-social behavior. Basically what they discovered was that the long term effect of brain shockers was that they were just typical humans. The percentage of aberrant behavior in the study group was basically the same as it was in the general population.

By then the technology was off patent, the lawyers had moved on, and the media had long since lost interest. No one publicized the findings. Since it was off patent there was no real money to be made clearing the treatment’s good name. Hopefully at least a few doctors read about the results and then recommend the treatment to their patients.

At least that is what Erik hopes. Otherwise 10 years of his life really was for nothing. And nothing is looming in his future right now either.

And the present just makes him more terrified about what nothing will be like.

Escorts and Agriculture and Religion – oh my

This morning I was awoken by my “escort,” and she wasn’t wearing a cocktail dress, she had a gun. I have an armed escort to work now. That got some looks around campus.

Today it was like a morgue in the lab. Everyone seemed to be there. Everyone seemed to be working. But no one made a sound. The real world was on everyone’s thoughts today.

The staff meeting today was the most… efficient, I guess, that we’ve ever had. No sidebars. We never went off topic. We never got sidetracked. I didn’t like it. This wasn’t my project. My team. This group of people was scared.

We can’t imagine how to create and maintain our Alpha and its tangent if we are afraid to let our minds wander. If we are afraid to get off the path.

The path seems the only safe place.

But what is occurring on Alpha allows us to stay on task while still enjoying wonder. And it is wonderful and weird.

Some branches of the primate Alphans have already begun to develop agriculture. And because of it have become much more dependent on things out of their control. They are developing a spoken culture to explain their fear. Perhaps we are witnessing the beginnings of religion?

Also the primate Alphans seem to have many divergent branches. It will be interesting to see which, if any survive. Many of the branches are more or less sexually compatible, and we have seen that there have been cases of two dramatically different branches getting together. The heart wants what the heart wants after all.

The unfortunate offspring that happen often suffer from either gigantism or dwarfism like lygers and tigons (oh my). These children are shunned as you’d expect and don’t live long without support. And of course it seems that they are sterile. But it is interesting how closely these different species will live together, often with just a river or a hillside separating them. In Alpha’s future will we eventually have two or more completely divergent species fighting over resources?

The reptile guys don’t have agriculture or seem to have any traditions beyond their silent democracy. Were their elections of Alpha males (or females) a weird evolutionary oddity? Though Janice didn’t like to hear it that is what a lot of us thought. Until we noticed something about their seasonal migrations. They were building. Basic root cellars and shelters really. Very odd, but as a new extended family moved into an area they soon began to use and expand the facilities left by the previous area occupants. They’ve built the beginnings of a town for others, without out ever meeting. If only the “friends” you make in the grid were as a real part of your community.

Things are happening fast. We have decided to slow Alpha down… way down. We are missing some important developmental moments at the speed it’s been running at. Greystle is fine with that as they’ve almost completely lost interest in Alpha and are more interested in the coming Tangent Alpha.