Orexinal

Tear gas on the way home today

/ staticsky

I tried to sleep to the sounds of gun shots and the occasional explosion coming from the town and perhaps even from within the green zone itself. It was a failure. It seems fear keeps me awake better than Orexinal.

Erik banged on the door about an hour ago with the news. The President has ordered the arrest of the Speaker of the house and more than a few Senators and Reps have disappeared.

I guess tired of the months long cat and mouse game, the speaker sent out the Sargent in arms to arrest the President’s chief of staff for contempt of congress, but this time not symbolicly as it has been with all the other contempt charges for Prescott’s staff members. This time they were armed and they caught up to Mrs. Prince on her way home. A firefight broke out between the capital police and her private guards and Mrs. Prince was killed.

And now I am supposed to be packing. A Greystle guard is outside my door having just told Erik and I that we are to move into the lab until things settle down.

I don’t know where they are going to fit all of us. God I hope Janice and Sally are all right.

Insomnia

/ staticsky

You know insomnia frightens me now. Not only because it reminds me of my Orexinal days, but because it is the only time my mind is free to wander. No Alpha, no POV, no purchase orders. Just wander… without supervision really.

And it wanders to Janice. My mind knows to take it slow. Earn her trust. But I want so desperately to be close to her. Now.

And such thoughts make it even harder to sleep when sleep is what I need.

I need sleep because I need to explain the cost overruns we’re incurring on the new Tangent Alpha platform.

Tangent Alpha, I just came up with that term now. I guess insomnia has some uses.

One thing I’ll definitely make sure not to include in the report is that some of the costs have been spent on POV.

Catching up 2 – POV

/ staticsky

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.

Catching up

/ staticsky

Adit asked me today if I had been posting anything here, and I realized that since I woke up I hadn’t.

I guess with learning that Adit had discovered this blog took away a little of the fun for me. And now that it’s just on this old tablet it seems less like a blog and more just some text file.

But reading it over from the beginning earlier today made me realize I wanted to continue posting. I don’t want to forget these days working on Alpha.

So let me catch up: I’m awake now (sleep typing not being one of the side effects) and at night I go to sleep. Seems simple enough but just a few weeks ago that scenario terrified me.

The first “night” I slept for eighteen hours. When I woke up I was hungrier than I had ever been in my life. I rushed around eating every scrap of food I could find. When I sat down after eating I felt increasingly tired and worn. The idea of going back to sleep again and so soon was frightening. I began searching for some Orexinal. Instead all I found were notes from Adit listing all the things I now owed him.

“Sorry Rob, but I found them first. You owe me a coke – Adit”
And
“Nope – you owe me a weekend without you guys calling.”
Etc.

I basically am going to have to take Adit out to the nicest restaurant in the green zone

I quickly gave up searching and headed towards the bed. I barely made it.

Sixteen hours later I was awake again and starving.

Having no food left at my place I headed down to the campus cafeteria. As I walked to a table I passed some guys from Alpha’s geology team and they grew quiet as I walked by.

I was devastated. I think that was when I realized how much damage I had done to myself and to the project as a whole. I wanted to lead more than a team; I wanted the team to be a family. My family. Adit could be my brother. Janice could be my wife. Sally my daughter. But at that moment I realized that instead I was the drunk dad who almost ruined it for everyone.

I went straight back to my room. I was already having trouble walking and my head hurt. I was getting tired again, but I made sure to search everywhere to make sure every stash of Orexinal was found and flushed. I checked between the cushions and under the desk, I didn’t want one of those damn pills around.

As I start to drift off I left a semi coherent message for Adit asking him for yet one more favor. To search my office and make sure there weren’t any pills there for me to find.

And I told him I’d be in the office the next day ready to work a full day.

I was there the next day but a full day seemed beyond my abilities for nearly a week.

Hey Rob – It’s still me, Adit

/ staticsky

Okay, I was messing with some of your old equipment you have back here, seeing if there was anything Kaitlin can use, and I find another Orexinal stash.

Not cool. First thing when you get up we’re going to go through everything you’ve got – together. I won’t tell Janice – If you help me flush all your stuff.

Look, it’s really important you do right by yourself and your whole team when you wake up.

With what has happened with Greystle we aren’t just a project team anymore we’re comrades in arms, and we need you fearless leader. Ned isn’t one of us, you are.

So stop this crap! If you don’t this is all going to fall apart.

Hey Rob, Adit here.

/ staticsky

A blog? I haven’t seen one of these since the Grid came up. Did you know one of my doctors had a Rasa blog going on when I was a kid? When I was tracking your web usage on Alice’s backup I looked it up and read it; it was like meeting an old elementary school friend. Well you know, I assume it would be like that, if I had any elementary school friends. Or if I went to elementary school.

So about your blog Rob, I was able to hack into it via the Grid. It looks like no one else has yet but just in case when you wake up I’m going to give you an old tablet pc that has all wireless connectivity removed from it. I figure that way no one can stumble on to it. That way you can keep updating this knowing Greystle can’t read it.

How ya doin’ Rob? Actually right now you’re snoring, I am five feet away from you. Since you were sleeping I figured this was as good a time as any to set up a bogus Grid account so you can get full write access again. I’ve already done all the other team managers. Tomorrow I’ll do the full alpha crew.

You and Janice huh? Well since I know your secrets I’m going to tell you a secret. Kaitlin and I have been an item since my upgrade.

And Rob. I think it is only a secret to you. You have been seriously missing things guy.

Anyway, about Kaitlin and I, when you wake up I do have something very cool to tell you.

Take care Rob, we’ve all been really worried.

Hitting the fan II – this time it’s personal

/ staticsky

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.

Hitting the Fan

/ staticsky

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.

The old net and old opinions

/ staticsky

I’ve been feeling a bit down lately. At first I thought it might be a bit of “post-partum” depression in finally having consummated my relationship with Janice. After so much tension and expectation the body is bound to feel a little “let down” at having finally gotten what you so long desired. But I couldn’t be happier about it, and I get more giddy about she and I every day.

I thought maybe the die off on alpha was getting me down, but really that is part of what the project is about: life and the cycles of life. The die off is part of the living artificial world we have created, and besides the life count summaries are leveling off and the extinction rate is back to where it was before the die off.

Alice keeps prodding me about Orexinal and says I should get off of it. But I can’t find anything on the Grid that had anything but praise about Orexinal, so Alice had me look at her old internet snap shot backup that she grabbed from Archive.org before the government shut them down with the passing of the Freedom of Commerce act. Millions of machines once served up all the data that she’s got stashed in a few cubes on her desk.

It seems there is a big black market for backups of the old net Definitely useful to have an anti-authoritarian goth chick on the project team.

And as you’d expect from the medium that was outlawed because of the volume of anti consumption commentary (don’t want to denigrated products you know, you might hurt their feelings); there is certainly more of anti-Orexinal buzz on the old online slow road.

It seems Orexinal’s definition of “no side effects” is “nothing you can see.” Kinda like the definition of the legal torture allowed by police (man, one trip outta the green zone and I’m starting to sound like an “activist”). Depression and paranoia seems to be the side effects most people were complaining about. The paranoia is pretty targeted though, you become paranoid about sleep: what sleep does to you, where do you go, what is your mind doing without your control. The dream/sleep state is the enemy (I can get behind that).

Orexinal, among other things, generates many of the chemicals your brain generates while you dream. Keeping the brain healthy. The fruitier of the commentary I read posits that the “spiritual” aspects of dreaming are left unfulfilled and that the Psyche naturally gets depressed having been removed from its natural state. The truly paranoid articles suggest that the paranoia against sleep acts as an addictive hook to get the user to continue to use the drug, and that this “side effect” was a planned property of the drug.

Hard to judge the veracity of any of these claims. Actually impossible. Well that’s one advantage of the Grid’s vetting of public content (though Janice’s position paper on the beginning of life has still not been green lighted), you know the experts agree on it.

So should I get off Orexinal? I’d say “I’d sleep on it,” but I won’t.

I erase the history log of the sites I went to before giving the cubes back to Alice.

Outside the Green Zone

/ staticsky

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.