Neural Web

by Dima Zales

  “Make sure your countermeasure stops the Join app, deletes any sign of your virus, and closes the GPS backdoor forever,” Mitya says sternly.

  “Don’t teach an expert or you’ll eat baked shit.” The Russian proverb sounds ridiculous in Zik.

  I don’t follow the rest of my friends’ conversation because in that moment, the Join virus reaches the town of Kingston. Suddenly, we’re not just six hundred people but over twenty thousand.

  Our former opponents are now on the floor, the overwhelming flood of sensations putting them into a near-comatose state.

  “I’m looking at this code,” Mitya says from far away. “They’re only in the first phase of the app, the initialization. Once everyone’s merged, their memories are exchanged and the other phases begin. I think you’d better finish your cure virus before that happens.”

  “How does it know when the initialization is complete?” Muhomor asks. “I mean, they’re gaining more people as we speak.”

  “When there’s no new participants for a few seconds,” Mitya says.

  “I guess there’s an unseen benefit to how quickly it’s spreading,” Muhomor says. “They won’t reach a new phase for a while.”

  The virus reaches Woodstock, and another five thousand people join the sensory roller coaster. Joe slumps back on his hospital bed. His Tier II Brainocytes can’t cope with all that data and keep him upright at the same time.

  Roxbury and Saugerties are next, and another twenty thousand people’s senses are thrown into the mix. Now Ada, Alan, and I collapse on the floor. Dealing with this much sensory data is too much even for us.

  “I better take over the antivirus task,” Mitya says from even farther away.

  “Why?” Muhomor asks, but he sounds scared. I think he knows what Mitya is about to say.

  “Because the virus is spreading almost instantly, and as the radius of the infected area increases, so will the rate of newly infected people,” Mitya says. “All of New York state is a moment away from being affected, and New Jersey will follow a moment later. You’re not over a mile underground, which means you and everyone in your bunker are about to be victims of your own stupid virus.”

  “But you suck at this!” Muhomor shouts. “It will take you so much longer—”

  If I were a Jedi, I would call what happens next “a great disturbance in the Force.” My best guess is that this is what having millions of people Joined together must feel like.

  It’s hard to form an intelligible thought, but I still manage to guess that, as Mitya said, all of New York and New Jersey are now Joined with us. If correct, that means eighteen million Brainocyte users in the Empire State and seven million in the Garden State just Joined together—an unfathomable number of people.

  If it were possible to die from data overload, I’d now be a corpse.

  The lab around me completely goes away, replaced with the Join app universe. It’s as though I’m sitting on the bottom of an ocean of sights, smells, tastes, odors, and kinesthetic sensations.

  Another, bigger disturbance follows as three hundred million American Brainocyte users are infected. Canada and Mexico are next.

  Though it’s difficult to think, I observe that it’s easy for the virus to spread from North America to South America. The spread to Europe is trickier to puzzle out, because the distance between Russia and Alaska is a little short of three thousand miles, while the virus has a mile-long spread. Then again, there are the Diomede Islands between the continents; those people have Brainocytes. Considering submarines in the oceans and aircraft in the skies, it’s reasonable to fear that the virus is already on its way to Russia, with the rest of Europe and Asia to follow. From there, it will travel to Africa and who knows where else after that.

  When you’re experiencing so many points of view, time becomes one of those concepts that has no meaning anymore. It could be that a second just passed, but it just as easily could have been many hours. It’s impossible to discern. To preserve my sanity, I try to ignore all senses but vision; we humans are a visually oriented species.

  A tsunami of sights rolls over the shores of my mind. I gaze at the spire of the Empire State Building from every conceivable angle and, at the same time, take in the stately White House from even more viewpoints. All the eyes I see through seem to be very low to the ground. These people have collapsed from sensory overload just as I have—their eyes, like cameras, continue to feed their brains the never-ending input of vision, now shared throughout the world.

  The Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridge crisscross the skies and blend with other bridges from millions of eyes. I get a chance to see through colorblind eyes, as well as nearsighted and farsighted ones. The red-orange colors of the Grand Canyon instantly change to the blues of Niagara Falls, and places I don’t recognize flit through my mind like a kaleidoscope on steroids.

  If I had any doubts about the potential scope of this virus, they’re erased by the next wave of images. Christ the Redeemer spreads his arms over the green hills of Rio De Janeiro, followed by Florence, Cologne, and St. Basil’s Cathedral. Stonehenge and the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids (both the ones in Egypt and the ones in Mexico) all explode in my mental view. The Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China, Mount Fuji and Yellowstone National Park splash into my mind, followed by billions of things just as beautiful but whose names I’m too overwhelmed to recall.

  The onslaught of visual data seems to be equally overwhelming to all of us around the world. As one, we close our eyes.

  For a moment, it’s as though the whole planet has gone dark. At the same time, closing our eyes does nothing to calm our other senses, so we’re just as overwhelmed by odors as we were by sights, only there is no way to close off these perceptions.

  After forever, I find that I no longer feel other people’s senses. The data blends into a paralyzing cacophony. Thoughts become a distant memory, and memories an abstract concept.

  A group in Asia has discovered a way for us all to cope better with these worldwide crisscrosses of senses. I recognize the solution with relief. These people were experienced meditators before the Joining began, and they are guiding the rest of the participants to ignore all sensation but one: the in and out of our breathing.

  Slowly, breath awareness spreads through the Joining, and after a hundred years of subjective experience, we—a large bulk of humanity—begin to breathe at the same pace. The world becomes the in and out of air in our bodies.

  Soon, we become simply the breath. I almost don’t recall what it is to be me. I’m a single ant in a colony of ants—no, even less than that. I’m more like a single, lonely byte of data in a multi-terabyte hard drive.

  After another eternity of breath awareness, my mind is clear enough to think again. No new people have been added to the Joining for a while, which means the next phase of Ada’s app is going to kick in at any moment: the part where each participant becomes aware of others’ memories.

  As though my thought has been made manifest, the memories of billions of people slam into every one of our Brainocyte-enhanced brains like an ice asteroid crashing into a searing desert planet.

  I think I lose consciousness for a few years, though I might be experiencing one of Dominic’s memories. There was a time in his life when he was completely cut off from the world.

  Memories bombard me. One moment I’m Alan, playing with his friends, the rats. The next moment I’m Joe, pummeling a school bully and intentionally trying to break the kid’s nose.

  Memories of joy and memories of sorrow barrage me with unspeakable intensity. I try to cling to something familiar, like recollections of the best VR flicks, or the billions of memories of riding in a self-driving car for the first time, or the varying reactions to the realization that electricity is not something you need to treat as a scarce resource anymore.

  With each memory, I become that person for that moment. I am an architect in Germany working on our next design and reminiscing about a middle-school adventure at
the zoo. I’m a woman in France remembering how we felt when we nursed our first daughter.

  The rate of memories speeds up.

  I’m an elderly shepherd in the Caucasus Mountains, Gogi’s homeland. I recall shepherding the old-school way, but I also marvel at the new method using Brainocytes and Augmented Reality, where our enhanced sheep avoid obstacles only they can see.

  I’m a Russian woman who recalls joining the Pioneers in the Soviet days. Our mother ironed that little red scarf for us, and we were proud and excited. The memories clash with my own—I too was a Pioneer, though I saw it for the commie propaganda that it was and couldn’t have cared less about the dubious honor.

  I’m a man in Rwanda who remembers the horror of hunger and is grateful that our son has never been hungry, thanks to free electricity and other technological marvels.

  I’m a software engineer in India, reminiscing about the awe we felt when we first used Brainocytes to search the web with our mind.

  The memories stream into my mind like a waterfall, and soon I’m only seeing patterns: millions of people getting married, smiling at loved ones, holding hands, eating comfort foods, and on and on.

  Interspersed with our memories are the tiniest moments of clarity—moments when the interconnected humanity realizes something together. When I Joined with Ada, this is when we understood and forgave each other every grievance we’d ever had in our marriage. Such a feat is too difficult to accomplish on this global scale, but we do feel as one for many moments, and we jointly realize how much every human being has in common, especially when it comes to the inner world of our minds—the only reality that truly matters.

  The moments of clarity start to get longer, and that sense of enlightenment I felt when I Joined with Ada comes back a billion times stronger. I feel part of something unimaginably bigger than myself. There’s a certainty in our minds that we’re all intricately connected to something unfathomably complex. For a nanosecond, the entirety of humanity experiences what it’s like to be in Heaven, or Nirvana, or Shangri-La, or Zion, or Utopia, or fill in the name of a place of ultimate contentment, spiritual and psychological fulfillment, and pure joy.

  The pleasant sensations give way to fears. We realize just how vulnerable we are. We have weapons that can kill us all in a blink, and despite the new abundance of energy, we still have habits that could turn Earth into a human-unfriendly hellhole. These fears turn into a determination to do something about these problems, and that leads us back to feelings of connectedness and hope.

  A subjective century later, the whirlwind of memories and enlightenments subsides enough that I have an independent thought, and I recall this is when The Cohens made an appearance when Ada and I first Joined. Could Ada’s self-organization code really take advantage of so many brain resources? In terms of hardware, it could. She uses each user’s own allocation on our servers, outside their biological and virtual brains, so no extra server space or CPU is necessary.

  Ada also mentioned she leveraged Einstein as part of the app. Would he have enough processing cycles? Mitya once claimed that a Brainocyte-enhanced brain at Tier III can perform two quintillion computations per second. Quintillion is ten to the eighteenth power, a number that’s difficult to comprehend even at a Tier I brain boost. That means this worldwide version of The Cohens would achieve a few billion quintillion computations per second.

  In theory, Einstein should be able to cope with that. He usually has enough processing cycles to assist every single Brainocyte user anyway, and since we’re all lying on the ground not doing much, the AI should currently be idle and ready to assist.

  Sure enough, the feeling I had with Ada returns many billionfold stronger.

  “We think, therefore we are,” we jointly contemplate with the intensity of an earthquake.

  “You’re still a philosopher,” I mentally say after I recover my wits. “But I guess it’s not appropriate to call you The Cohens anymore.”

  “That being was but a shadow of me,” the humanity thinks back. This time, the force of the reply almost makes me lose consciousness. “If I had to name myself, I think Gaia or Earth might be more apropos.”

  “Gaia,” I think back, after I overcome the sense that I’m not worthy to speak to a creature so terrifyingly vast. I have a million questions vying for the honor of being asked first, but I go with my first intuition. “What is it like to be you?”

  “What is it like to be anything? The simplest answer is the analogy already in your mind, the one where you compare yourself to a neuron and us to a fully functioning brain,” Gaia mentally booms.

  This time, the force of the answer does make me black out.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I float in a darkness of complete sensory deprivation, eager to awaken so I can resume conversing with Gaia.

  A familiar voice pierces the darkness. “Mike, this is Mitya. I’ve finally worked out a way to stop everyone’s Join app and patch up Kostya’s backdoor. You and your family will be the first to receive the fix.”

  “Wait,” I want to shout. “I have more questions for Gaia.”

  I’m not sure if Mitya hears my plea or not, but I find myself thrust back into my physical body.

  It takes a few hours to reorient myself. When I do, I’m still lying in a fetal position on the floor of the lab. Now that I’m disconnected from the worldwide Joining, I’m filled with utter despair for its loss. All I want is to reconnect or cry myself to sleep.

  “Mom, Dad,” Alan whispers in a haggard voice. “Are you alive?”

  “I’m here, sweetie,” Ada says from the middle of the room. “Let me recover a moment, and I’ll crawl your way.”

  “I’m alive too,” I reply. It takes all my focus to make sure my voice doesn’t break as I talk. “Not sure if I can crawl yet.”

  “Can we talk in VR while we recover?” Alan suggests.

  I’m flooded with relief at Alan’s amazing resilience. The kid already sounds like his usual self. I wish I could say the same about me.

  With a huge effort of will, I recall how to put myself into the VR conference room and appear there. The light from the windows makes me narrow my eyes, and Mitya’s smiling face makes me jealous. He wasn’t part of the Joining, and there’s no way he can understand how I feel. Especially since I’m not perfectly clear on that myself.

  “You should’ve given the world a few more minutes of Joining,” Ada says as soon as she appears. “Maybe even a couple of days.”

  “Right,” Mitya says sarcastically. “I should’ve watched the human population die of thirst and hunger. Great idea.”

  “You don’t understand what it was like,” Alan says from behind me. I didn’t even notice him appear.

  “I know that the world is a mess,” Mitya counters. “Thousands got hurt, and there are many casualties.”

  The idea that fellow beings might be in pain overwhelms me with an unusual surge of empathy. I sink into an office chair before I succumb to the fetal position here in VR as well as in the real world.

  Muhomor shows up, his eyes wider than dollar coins. “I’m a genius! My virus did that. I should get the Nobel—”

  Mitya places a hand on his shoulder. “Your virus is also the reason we need to undertake an enormous restoration project.”

  Using every screen as well as the table surface, Mitya shows us the problem. Though most vehicles are self-driving nowadays, plenty still work the old way, with humans in control. Additionally, countless bicyclists, skateboarders, bikers, and rollerblade riders crashed into things or fell when the Joining first began.

  “Transport is only one of many issues,” Mitya says as he puts up more imagery. “Surgeons were midsurgery, countless folks were swimming, or fixing roofs, or—”

  “That is so awful,” Alan says in a barely audible whisper. “Are you sure people died?”

  “Logic would dictate so, unfortunately.” Mitya closes his eyes for a moment. “It could be that some instinctive part of them retained enough men
tal capacity to float on water or not kill a patient, but as you can see”—he shows another slew of images of people in trouble—“there are plenty of problems to solve.”

  “What about the men who tried to kill us?” Ada asks. “I doubt they would want to continue their folly or even be ready to continue if they did, but you never know what—”

  “I had them tied up as soon as the robots arrived at your location,” Mitya says. “They’ll have to wait for the police to take care of them, and the police will be busy for a while. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll have those same robots carry you to the hospital, just as I’ll use the rest of our robots worldwide to try to get things back in order.”

  Everyone agrees to let Mitya handle things while we recover. Before long, I find myself in the metallic arms of one of the more sophisticated robot models. The same thing happens to Alan, Ada, and Joe, although it takes two robots to carry Dominic. He was almost at his destination when the Joining took him over with the rest of us.

  During the trip to the hospital, the yearning for Joining dissipates, and I offer my services to Mitya since I can also control a small army of robots. By the time we get to the Kingston hospital, I’ve learned that some people are easier to rouse to action than others. Luckily, doctors and other emergency personnel tend to be in the easy-to-wake group.

  “You need to get moving,” Mitya says through the metallic voice of a robot that’s kneeling next to a man wearing scrubs. “We have people who need help.”

  Just as we’ve seen elsewhere, it takes only a couple of prompts before the man gets up.

  Once there are enough self-aware doctors here at Kingston, I get them to check over Alan, Dominic, Ada, and me. After a bunch of stitches for me, we all get the green light, except Joe, who needs jaw surgery and some bones set.

  “I don’t foresee any complications,” says Dr. Jarvis, whom Mitya flew out in a helicopter. “Your cousin might have trouble talking for a few days, but that’s about the only concern I have.”