by Jerry
You see, Nathany wasn’t an ordinary little girl. There were no ordinary little girls on Cybland. Or little boys, either. I mean, ordinary like they are here. Of course in Cybland they all seemed normal to each other. They each had a syn to control their cybes; their cybes gave them special P-modes, each consisting of several percepts, and the percepts shared by the greatest number of individuals were called P-Zones. There were individual P-Zones and collective P-Zones. You learned about collective P-Zones, too, although this wasn’t something you really learned, if you know what I mean.
Nathany wore her syn around her neck, like all the inhabitants of Cybland. It was a wide, thick collar, very close fitting, made up of articulated segments. The real name for the syn was “Sensorial Control and Synthesis Unit,” but that was too long to say. It was like a mixer. Or a rheostat. Or both. It was also a sort of radio, both receiving and transmitting, but it wasn’t used for speaking. It was used to control the cybes.
The cybes are harder to describe. First, because you couldn’t see them. They were inside the body, transplanted into Cybland infants shortly after birth to replace the eyes and ears of babies—tiny little cybes (you could say “Cybernetic modules,” but that’s also too long) directly linked to the brain. It’s really the brain that sees and hears, isn’t it? Well, in Cybland, the first cybes were transplanted very early on, because a baby’s brain is a highly adaptable organ that learns lots of things very quickly, and it was a good idea to accustom the baby to the cybes right away.
Not only the eyes and ears were replaced, but all the other senses. Touch was fairly simple. A virus was developed that burned all the nerve endings in the skin, as well as those that transmitted taste and smell. Then a special substance was injected into the skin—liquid biocrystals, if you want to know. They reacted to pressure, cold and heat, and the syn sent this information to the brain, and the brain . . . well, it did what a brain is supposed to do, and said that things were hot, or cold, or that you’d cut yourself.
Taste and smell were a little bit more complicated. Things like filters were grafted into the body, and these gathered tastes and smells and sent them to the syn, which analyzed them and sent the information to the brain—which then did its usual work.
Actually, the only true cybes were those replacing eyes and ears, but people got into the habit of calling all the sensory replacements by the same name because it was simpler. What mattered was understanding how it worked: there was the syn, which acted like a small secondary brain, a supplementary relay between the outside and the real brain, and there were the cybes, which replaced the senses. Of course, all of them had to be changed as the children grew, like clothes or shoes. Except you only saw the syn. You might’ve seen the cybes when they were taken out in order to insert bigger ones, but you’d be asleep at that point. They were put in a box with your other cybes, and on the day of your last transplant, when you’d finished growing, you got the box as a present. Since Nathany hadn’t finished growing, she’d never seen her cybes. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was how you learned to use your syn and control your cybes, right from the beginning. Nathany learned fast, and she learned well. That’s why she was in SpecBlock D, although she was only six. Other children weren’t so precocious. Some never learned to use their cybes properly. There was something in their brain that made them incapable of doing it. They were refractory. Some couldn’t even tolerate transplants. As time went by, they would suddenly disappear from the Block and you never saw them again. Sad, but that’s the way it was.
Why did they replace all the senses in Cybland? First, I’ll have to finish explaining what they did with the cybes, what Nathany did so well that she was in SpecBlock D instead of EdBlock 6 with her childhood companions.
You see, the syn and the cybes were merely tools. Like eyes, ears, and the rest, after all. Except that they were a bit more difficult to use. To give you an example, our eyes see only certain colors, corresponding to very definite light wavelengths. Nathany’s cybe-eyes saw many more wavelengths, and her cybe-ears heard more vibrations, too, above and below the range we hear. But the human brain wasn’t really designed to receive these sensations—it could, but it had to learn, and that takes time.
And that’s not all. The syn didn’t only control the intensity of perceptions. It could also mix them, remember? In Cybland, you could taste colors, hear smells, touch sounds . . . although you couldn’t do this just any old how. That would have been really too upsetting for tiny children. It had to be learned bit by bit, too.
And there was more! The syn was like a two-way radio, but instead of using airwaves to transmit and receive, it used sensations. This is difficult to explain—in fact, it was difficult to do, and that was what took the most learning. Everyone has a particular way of perceiving things such as colors, smells, or favorite sounds, isn’t that right? It was the same in Cybland, even though all the cybes had exactly the same capabilities, which isn’t the case with organic eyes and ears. (The founders of Cybland were a little surprised at this unexpected development. They used to think that people’s perceptions differed simply because their sensory organs were different . . . but as they were diehard individualists, they managed to take this fact in stride.) Anyway, everyone had their particular way of perceiving things, called their perceptual mode, or P-mode for short.
A P-mode consisted of percepts—perceptions of your favorite senses in varying combinations and proportions to form the individual P-zone, that is, your own perceptual zone, the special way in which you perceived your environment.
So far, so good. What made it complicated is that people also have a special way of perceiving themselves. After all, our bodies, our faces, are also an environment, aren’t they? In Cybland, thanks to the syn, people could transmit the way they saw themselves, and similarly receive how others saw themselves. But you don’t necessarily want to see yourself exactly as you are. If your hair is brown and you’d rather be blond, for example . . . or ten centimeters taller . . . or ten kilos lighter . . . or have green hair, weigh thirty kilos more and stand three meters tall, you could do that. There was no limit to what the people in Cybland could transmit with their syn, you see. They could look like anything—blue with yellow polka dots, if they wanted!
It was lots of fun. But it was also very distracting. How are you going to recognize people if they look different every day? Or suppose someone decides to look like a horrible monster and walked about scaring everybody? And then it could be dangerous if the people in charge of atmospheric machines decided not to hear or see on the same wavelength as the alarm systems . . . Or if someone in the street decided to see only green colors, he’d never stop for red lights; there’d be accidents all the time. Of course, in the city of Cybland there weren’t any cars and therefore no traffic lights. Everything was organized so that individual capabilities wouldn’t endanger the person or those nearby. But you can see what might happen.
Well, there were obvious limits—not to what you were capable of, but to what you were allowed to do. When you were by yourself in your individual P-zone, you could do what you liked. But when others were around, you had to stay within the limits of the collective P-zones.
This meant that you had to learn about these P-zones, about the perceptions that, by common consent, governed behavior in a social context. Although there was general agreement on a certain number of things, there were also individual opinions about a great many others, depending on your profession, for example, or your sex. Well, to make a long story short, it meant a lot of learning for little Cyb-landers, on top of what they had to learn in school like you and me.
Nathany, at six years old, was in SpecBlock D because she had learned especially fast and well to use her syn, control her cybes, and handle individual and collective P-zones. Naturally she hadn’t finished learning—you kept on until the last transplant, and even after. Because, after the last transplant, you were an adult and had the right to experiment with your cybes and syn without a te
acher’s supervision. In fact, nobody had the right to prevent you from doing exactly what you wanted in private. (As I mentioned, Cybland society was founded by rugged individualists. A society of individualists is rather a contradiction in terms; they had to tailor their theories somehow so as to create a viable society. But these kinds of complexities are the spice of life, after all.)
Anyway, Nathany waited impatiently for the time when she could do exactly what she liked with no one to tell her not to. You see, Nathany was an inquisitive little girl, which is perfectly normal, even in Cybland, except that she wasn’t necessarily inquisitive about the same things that we are. The teachers thought her curiosity a good thing—as long as she didn’t exceed the limits set by them—which is also perfectly normal, as it is here. What’s more, from the moment Nathany was considered precocious they tended to give her more leeway than other little girls. Even so, and without quite knowing why, there were moments when she overstepped the teachers’ limits and got herself into hot water. (Of course, it’s hard to know exactly where teachers’ limits are. They have a way of shifting about, don’t they?)
For example, when Nathany was still in EdBlock 4—she was four, and hadn’t yet been considered precocious—she had reconfigured her classmates’ cybes to her own format—a particularly amusing combination of colors, sounds, and smells that she’d discovered and wanted to show to them. The teacher noticed it—Marlin, who wasn’t very smart, but then teachers are trained to know that when kids go into a giggling huddle they’re up to something, whether it’s in Cybland or here. Well, Marlin got really mad. He did something to all their syns and told them they weren’t to do any more amusing mixes. They weren’t supposed to do amusing mixes right now. (Although Nathany didn’t know it, this was the moment when her teachers first began to consider her precocious.) Marlin gave her a sound scolding in front of the class, and as extra punishment set her syn to a really boring P-mode (no visual/auditory crossover; imagine!), and told her that it was simply not done, to mess about with other people’s cybes, making them perceive whatever you wanted. It was bad. It was forbidden.
Like most Bad-and-Forbidden things, there was no logic in it. “What about the P-zone?” sniffled Nathany rebelliously. (“And what you’ve just done to me?” she added to herself.) They were learning Level 2 Collective P-zone that month, and the teachers were explaining what it consisted of and configuring their cybes accordingly.
“That’s different,” replied Marlin. Collective P-zone-2 (which regulated interactions with a number of simple machines) was like learning to count. Those who were better at it taught the others. This was necessary, useful to all concerned, and good. What Nathany had done was something else again. Maybe her combination of percepts was fun, but the others didn’t need it; and what was more important, perhaps they didn’t want to perceive things her way. She had no right to force them.
“But I didn’t really force them,” protested Nathany. “They wanted to.” (The other children discreetly said nothing. The fact was, she’d configured their cybes herself because they were so slow and clumsy.)
But that was no reason. If they hadn’t wanted to, what would she have done?
Nathany hung her head and was obliged to confess by her silence that she might have tried to coerce them. She generally got her way, being tall and strong for her age.
“Well, you’re not to do it, understand?” said Marlin by way of closing the discussion. Nathany translated this to mean, “You’re not to do it unless you’re an adult.” Marlin paused for a moment, then added, “Later, you’ll learn how to share your percepts with others. There are ways of doing it that are permitted. But it’s too soon right now. After all, you have to be able to walk before you can run, don’t you? When you can walk, you’ll be able to run.”
Nathany didn’t quite see the connection since she knew how to walk and run, and would have liked to know how you shared percepts when it was allowed. She sensed it was probably advisable not to press the point. At least Marlin hadn’t said it was Bad-and-Forbidden to experiment on yourself. From now on, when she wanted to share her experiments with others, she’d take care no to be caught doing it, that’s all.
Things changed somewhat after Nathany was transferred to SpecBlock D. She could ask more questions, she realized, and the teachers took longer to reach their set limits. As soon as she arrived, her syn was unblocked. Apparently she now had the right to try out interesting percept mixes, and if some were inadvisable the teacher took the trouble to explain when they were dangerous for your physical and mental balance. If she wanted to try them anyway, she should ask for supervision by a teacher.
To tell the truth, at first Nathany didn’t see how SpecBlock was any better. The drawbacks were more obvious. Do you remember the first time you went to school? Well, it was the same for Nathany. She didn’t know anyone. All the teachers and children were new to her. The fact that the other children didn’t know each other, either, because they were all precocious and had been withdrawn from their respective EdBlocks, didn’t help cushion the shock of relocation. You children were able to go home after your first day of school. But not Nathany or the others. SpecBlock D was now their home.
Nevertheless, children in SpecBlocks did go back to their former EdBlocks at regular intervals. It was felt they shouldn’t be separated too abruptly from what, after all, had been their family. Nathany went back to EdBlock 6 to visit her old companions and teachers—Marlin, Treza, Bobb, Cort, and her favorites, Yvanie and Marelle. But after a few months something strange happened: it wasn’t so pleasant going back to the EdBlock. There were too many things to tell about, and the others didn’t always understand very well. It annoyed them not to understand, and they didn’t look at Nathany in the same way any more. They’d changed.
Of course, it wasn’t the other children who’d changed; it was Nathany. In a SpecBlock you learned a lot very fast, leaving the EdBlocks far behind. Finally, at the end of the first year, Nathany asked not to go back to EdBlock 6, ever. This was predictable and quite normal. Almost all the other SpecBlock children had done the same. SpecBlock D was now their real home.
This didn’t mean that Nathany found life as pleasant as she had in her old block, when she was precocious. She had to more or less begin all over again in learning to know the new children and teachers, but because there were so many interesting things to do, she didn’t often have time to mope. After all, she wasn’t precocious for nothing. In Cybland, precocious children were generally sturdy, well-balanced individuals.
Except that . . . at the end of Nathany’s first year in SpecBlock D, her father died.
You may wonder at this point in the story where Nathany’s parents were and what they did. And to begin with, did Nathany have parents in the way we think of them here? Not really. The founders of Cybland had left Earth to live in their own, different way. The biggest difference, as you probably realize, had something to do with the cybes. But there was another, important difference, and that concerned the way people produced children and brought them up. Each child had a father and mother, but—as sometimes happens here—the mother didn’t usually carry the child in her womb. And children weren’t brought up by their parents, but by the Block teachers. The parents knew their children and could see them every day for two hours if they wanted, as well as spending a whole day with them every ten days. Parents in Cybland were in fact merely adults much like others. Not really special, you see. Some simply gave their children to Cybland and never visited them. The children didn’t miss the parents, however, since there were six teachers—three men and three women—for each group of twenty-four, who remained with the children from infancy as they all moved from one Block to another. There was the occasional exception, but in general the teachers and children formed a family that wasn’t so different from ours—don’t you think?
Nathany didn’t know her parents well. They were very busy with the Cybland government and rarely came to see her. She didn’t care. She didn’t parti
cularly like them. She didn’t detest them, either, mind you. The fact that she saw little of them simply didn’t matter much.
This being the case, you may wonder why I’m telling you about her father’s death. Even taking into account her transfer to SpecBlock D, it shouldn’t have affected her unduly. That was normal for Cybland. But it was after her father’s death that things changed for Nathany. Before, she had been inquisitive, but her inquisitiveness had stayed within reasonable bounds. After . . . But you see, I think it wasn’t so much the death of her father, after all. It was the death of her father. The way he died.
Nathany knew about death. She had vague, childish memories of children in the EdBlocks being around, and then not being around. Of course she asked questions, and finally someone told her that they were dead, which meant they’d gone away and wouldn’t ever come back. No one seemed overly upset. She got the impression it was quite normal, and even sensed that those children were better off dead. They were refractory. I told you about the refractory children who couldn’t tolerate transplants and disappeared from the EdBlocks, didn’t I? Nathany felt a certain anxiety about this, but her teachers assured her it only happened to very young children, or to those who couldn’t learn to use their cybes. Nothing like that would happen to her! She was nearly seven now, a big girl, and she knew very well how to use her cybes.
What she didn’t know, and what the death of her father suddenly taught her, was that becoming an adult was no guarantee against ever being refractory. As I told you, Cybland was a city where, because of the cybes, everything had been organized to avoid accidents as much as possible. It was a closed, almost totally controlled environment, much like a greenhouse. But even in a controlled environment accidents sometimes happen. Accidents did happen, and disease as well. People died, or suddenly someone who had been perfectly normal couldn’t use his or her cybes properly or even use them at all. This had happened to Nathany’s father. After an illness he’d become refractory to his cybes. Finally he died.