Tristan lay still in bed, savouring the last remaining sensations that the dream had bestowed upon him – impalement, helplessness and the taste of death. Alas, all beautiful things must come to an end! He opened his eyes and looked at the clock. Its ruby glow showed 4:00 AM. He wanted to talk to someone about the dream. Myriam would be in the Hidden Worlds at this time, he thought. Wrapping himself in his sheets, he got out of bed and woke his computer.
The computer’s screen lit up its immediate surroundings, exposing the oddities that cluttered up his desk. A quill grasped in a robotic hand. Scribbled sheets of poetry mixed in with lecture notes on automation theory. A Bible, hidden beneath the mess, but not so obscured that it could not hold Tristan’s fascination as he loaded the interface to the world beyond his computer screen.
The camera fixed below the screen came on and he turned to look at it. It detected his face and began reading his expressions, which it would then send to animate the face of his avatar, Tridan, who was just awakening in his cavernous mansion in the Hidden Worlds.
Checking his console, he saw that Myriam was present in a neighbouring world. He sent her a quick message and set off to meet her at their usual rendezvous, the point where their two worlds met.
Tridan was tall, thin and pale with wild, black hair. Tristan had chosen him for his outstanding speed and agility. He loved to take pleasure in leaping and bounding through torch-lit caves and over dangerous fissures, down echoing chutes and up steep slopes, delighting in his perfect control over its being that its properties afforded him.
He had designed the mansion specifically to match his avatar, filling it with obstacles and traps that would make it uninhabitable to anyone else than an identical clone. Many areas had been tweaked to perfection so that even slight variations in the avatar’s parameters would make them impassable. Its décor was dark and brooding, with several high-ceilinged halls and chambers giving it a distinctly Gothic feel.
After running through the many hewn tunnels of his mansion, he arrived at last at the room that would connect him to the next world. It was a cavern in which a gigantic metal bell hung suspended by a heavy chain over an expanse of dark water. A gnome servant squatted by a control panel near the shore. There was a small rowing boat moored nearby.
Tridan barked an order at the gnome and they jumped into the boat, which the gnome then proceeded to row to the centre of the cavern, directly beneath the bell. With a leap, Tridan entered the diving bell through the small circular hole in its floor. Looking back down, he commanded the gnome to return to shore and lower him into the next world. The servant nodded dutifully and paddled away. A few moments later, there was a shuddering groan of hidden works going into action and the bell descended into the water, which rose to the level of the entry hole, but no further. Tridan peered into the depths as the bell continued to plunge, further and further down the rocky shaft that had been prepared for it. At last they came to the end of the chain, just over a metal grating, which slid open, completing the connection to Myriam’s world.
Looking through the greens and blues of the water, he saw a tiny speck swimming up towards him from below. As it grew closer, it swam in an upward spiral, allowing Tridan a moment in which to enjoy the sight of its lithe body. The mermaid avatar completed her ascent and surfaced in the entry pool, greeting him with a brilliant smile.
“Tridan!”
“Myriam!”
He returned the smile, realising that somewhere thousands of miles away a woman was happy to see him.
“So what brings you to my watery world at this time of day?” she said, her face playing with a range of quizzical expressions.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “A dream woke me.”
“A dream? What kind of dream?” Was it a fun dream?”
“That depends,” he said, “on your idea of fun. How does the idea of having your body penetrated multiple times sound?”
Her eyes widened and then she giggled.
“That could be lots of fun!”
“By ‘penetration’ I mean having your guts pierced by sharp metal blades.”
“Ew!” she said, her face twisting in disgust. “That sounds horrible. Tell me about your dream.”
“I can’t remember how it started, but it ended with a daemon attacking me. It was grey and corpse-like with metal blades instead of hands. I tried to fight back, but couldn’t because it wasn’t real. It stabbed me again and again and I wanted to run, but didn’t because I knew it was tireless. As my brain became overwhelmed by pain, helplessness and futility, I realised I was dreaming and awoke. Pity, really.”
“A pity?” she exclaimed.
“Yeah. It was a fun dream.”
“How can you say that? It sounded like the most awful kind of experience.”
“All dreams that allow us to experience things we couldn’t in real life are good dreams.”
“But do you enjoy things like that?” she asked.
“In the more general sense of the word, yes. Refusing to derive benefit from an experience that cannot harm me would be irrational.”
“That’s silly. Nobody likes feeling pain or being hurt,” she said.
“Pain is just our body letting us know that something bad is happening to it. Similarly, fear is just our mind warning us of impending danger. If we know that nothing bad is actually happening or that no danger threatens us, the emotions are irrational. By detaching ourselves from them, we can ignore or observe them without being subjected to their control.”
“I wouldn’t want to be emotionally detached from everything. It would be like being dead. How can you live if you don’t feel anything?”
“Good point,” he said and considered for a moment. “I think it’s only useful to experience the present. Ideally, one would treat the past and future as mere data, rather than emotional activators. There is no point in reliving the suffering of the past or allowing a hypothetical future to hurt us.”
“So what you’re saying is ‘live in the present moment’?”
“Yes,” he said.
She laughed.
“I could have told you that without all this heady discussion!”
“Indeed. That’s why I come down here, for your pearls of wisdom,” he said with a wink.
She pouted and looked down at the string of pearls round her neck.
“They’re very nice pearls, I think” she said.
“Agreed. They bring out your anatomy, beautifully.”
With a splash, she hauled herself out of the entry pool and into the bell, spreading her half-fish, half-female form along the opposite side from Tridan.
“My anatomy, eh? You may want to watch your words, Mr. Spindly-legs, unless you want a slap of my tail!”
“Now that sounds like an experience we might both enjoy,” he said and smiled.
Half an hour later, he turned off his computer and went to bed.
* * *
The next day, Tristan sat at his computer, programming, teaching his robotic hand to write. He was developing an adaptive method that could overcome the irregularities in a writing tool , which was why he had chosen to use quills. Three cameras observed his own hand writing calligraphic script with a quill coloured red for easy visibility. The robotic hand copied his motions, its white quill writing in black what his wrote in red.
Imperfections in his program’s calculations caused it to tear the paper and he stopped. Turning up a setting, he increased the relevance of the sensors measuring the quill’s pressure on the paper and repeated the experiment. It didn’t tear the paper this time, but the letters were rather distorted.
For several hours he continued to play with the settings until at last he had cajoled it into copying his scrawl. If he were to transfer the hand to another computer, he could control its writing remotely. In time he could teach it to mimic all his gestures, allowing him to grasp objects in distant places or shake hands or stroke faces. Bit by bit, technology was allowing him to transfer his presence with greater accuracy and detail to locations he would never have an opportunity to visit in person.
He looked at the sheets of paper covered in some fifty lines and as many copies of the sentence, ‘All work and no play make Tristan a dull boy.’ and sighed. Picking up his phone, he dialled a recent number.
“Hey Jenny,” he said to the device in his hand, “are you free this afternoon?”
“Sure Tristan,” it answered, electronically imitating a young woman’s voice. “I was going to call you and ask the same.”
“Would you like to go out for a walk in the park?” he asked the phone. “I need a bit of fresh air.”
Half an hour later, he stood at the park gate, yawning in the Saturday afternoon sun. From behind him he heard the original of his phone call’s voice call his name and he turned to admire the owner’s approach. Jenny was slim and athletic with long, deliberately careless tresses of flame-coloured hair and a casual yet pretty dress. It was a delight to see her, no less for what was hidden and needed to be imagined as for what was exposed and tantalised the senses. Never in a hundred years could they create a virtual experience to match the reality of her body.
“Hey Jenny,” he said, “nice weather, eh?”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Especially for April.”
She came closer.
“You know, you look quite sleepy, Tristan!” she said.
“I’ve been working all day” he said, “and I was up late last night, chatting. How was your day?”
She began to talk about her morning workout at the gym and they entered the park, talking about trivialities. That was the problem, thought Tristan. Whenever he had tried to discuss anything more intellectual, she would agree with his opinions so readily he wondered if she even understood them. Talking about his work with her was out of the question and her taste in cinematography and music was so awful he went out of his way to avoid the subjects. He wondered if there were any depths to her at all, or just the pretty surface.
“Do you like my dress?” she asked suddenly.
“It makes you look like a woman,” he answered, evading the question.
She smiled.
“I look even more womanly without it,” she said.
He stopped himself from answering, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ and instead said “No doubt.”
They wandered on in silence, enjoying the sunlight and the pleasant breeze that was flirting with the trees and stirring ripples on the pond. A group of young women passed them, laughing and talking. Plenty of pretty faces there, thought Tristan. He might spend months getting to know each of them to the degree that he could state with certainty that they had nothing in common. On-line he would probably know in minutes, perhaps without even talking to them. The Internet unmasked souls while hiding their cases, turning human interactions inside out. Which was better, he wondered – to have a physical relationship with someone you couldn’t even talk to or a virtual one with a soul-mate you’d never be able to have any meaningful contact with?”
They reached the end of the park and declining an offer to visit her flat for coffee, Tristan said goodbye to Jenny and took a bus home. As he sat in it, contemplating an invisible skull in his hand, an idea for how to improve his control over the robotic copy at home occurred to him. He entered the block-of-flats where he lived, mulling the details over in his head.
“Good afternoon, Dr. Dante,” the cleaning lady greeted him, leaning on her mop.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Nesbit,” he murmured as he mounted the stairs.
What his robotic hand needed was dynamic feedback to inform it where it was going wrong. If he attached a camera to its forefinger, it would see everything it wrote. However, the hand’s movement would mean that continuous image registration would be necessary, which might be problematic. How would nature solve the problem? Of course! By keeping the visual input static!
He accelerated his pace and slipped on the newly washed stairs. Down below, Mrs. Nesbit heard a cry and a thud, followed by the awful noise of a body rolling down a flight of stairs.
* * *
A month later, Tristan opened his eyes on a silent world. Lying motionless in a hospital bed, he watched doctors and nurses flutter around him like angels about a martyr, tending to a body he could no longer feel and trying to communicate with him. He blinked at them and they broke into smiles. By writing on a card, a doctor instructed him what he should do. By winking his left eye he would answer ‘yes’ while with his right he would answer ‘no’.
Many tests were made during the next few weeks and the expressions of the doctors grew sombre once more. His body had been completely paralysed except for the eyes, which were now his only link to the dream world about him. There was no known cure for his condition and it was unlikely that he would ever gain control of his body again.
A doctor with a serious face held up a card that asked ‘Do you want to live?’ Tristan closed his left eye as tightly as he could and the man smiled.
Almost a week later, they brought a large screen and positioned it over his bed. There were four cameras attached to it, pointed at his face. After an hour or more of preparations, adjusting settings and running tests, the doctors and technicians finally ran the application he had been waiting for.
The screen lit up with the words, ‘Calibration: please look at the blue dot.’ Then it went blank and a blue dot appeared in one corner of the screen. He looked at it and it disappeared, reappearing in the opposite corner. For about five minutes he chased it about the screen until the words ‘Calibration complete.’ appeared.
Next they ran a test program, which created a mouse cursor at the point where he was looking. Winking an eye caused the cursor to left- or right-click appropriately. It was programmed to ignore both eyes clicking at once, so as to filter out blinking. He spent several minutes getting the hang of it, clicking on objects, dragging them about the screen and performing similar basic tasks. It was a strange feeling, having the cursor as if permanently stuck to his eye. However, he could free himself of the irritation by looking off-screen, if necessary.
Finally, they ran the most important program – a virtual keyboard. By looking at and wink-clicking on the desired keys, he could type any text message he wanted. After a few moments consideration, he wrote the following: H-E-L-L-O W-O-R-L-D.
Over the next few months, he worked hard to develop his newfound mode of communication and began to get his life back in control. Thanks to his university contacts, he became the test-subject for all kinds of software for disabled people. His unique position as patient and scientist allowed him to write invaluable first-person reviews and analyses, which along with the numerous interviews that the media paid him for, provided him an income sufficient to cover his cost of living and to pay for the expensive equipment that allowed him to be a member of society.
It soon became apparent to him, though, that the virtual world was more accepting of his defects than the real one. Jenny had come to visit him and after spending an uncomfortable half hour trying to talk to his screen, her voice being filtered through a speech-to-text utility, while looking at his bandaged, immobile body, had said goodbye and left.
“His eyes creep me out,” she whispered to the nurse as she slipped out of the room.
Tristan was not surprised that she did not choose to visit him again.
Myriam, on the other hand, was much more sympathetic. She was patient with his slow typing and awkward movements and did her best to make him cheerful while they were together. However, even she admitted that she felt sad that he ‘never smiled at her anymore’.
This prompted him to apply to supervise a bachelor’s thesis at his home university. With the help of an enthusiastic student, he was able to reconstruct a number of his former facial expressions, utilizing the calibration data from the expression grabbing application on his personal computer. Now, even though his real face was an immovable mask, he could still smile at the one person he really cared for.
She squealed in delight as the face of his avatar reanimated in the manner that she remembered it.
“That’s wonderful, Tridan!” she said. “You look your old self again!”
They were seated in a cavern, deep within her world – his own had become uninhabitable to him – he on a cosy couch she’d prepared for him, she in a pool decorated with little clams. A blue glow coming from luminous fungi on the walls and ceiling lit up the scene.
“This is just the beginning, Myriam,” he said, his writing accelerated by text-prediction software. “Do you remember how I told you I was experimenting with remote control of robotic hands? Well, I’ve summarised my previous results and managed to get them accepted for publication.”
“Congratulations! I think it’s wonderful that you’re managing so well!”
“Thanks. It’s also put me in a great position for further experimentation.”
Myriam raised an eyebrow, quizzically.
“You see, Myriam, I’m applying for a grant to experiment with direct brain control of robotic limbs. If it’s successful, I’ll have a brand new pair of hands that I’ll be able to control remotely, wherever they are in the world!”
“Sounds handy,” she said with a wink. “What is ‘direct brain control’?”
It means I’ll have electronic chips surgically implanted into my brain, reading control signals that would normally move my hands and arms. Instead, the signals will be interpreted and used to control the robotic ones, via the chips. They’ll be bi-directional, so the robotic hands’ pressure sensors will send inputs to my brain, giving me a unique sense of touch.”
“Brain surgery? Won’t that be dangerous?”
“A little. I’ll be under a general anaesthetic during the operation, which will be one of the first of its kind. Usually they wouldn’t allow such experimentation on humans for ethical reasons, but as I’m the one applying for the grant, there’s no reason to object.”
Myriam’s brow furrowed as she considered the operation and the risks it represented.
“It does sound dangerous,” she said. “I mean, what if you never wake up?”
Tridan looked about him and smiled.
“Is anyone ever really awake?”
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