Shadowtrap: A Black Foxes Adventure

by Dennis L McKiernan

  And on the grass stood a skinny, barefooted youth, a freckle-faced boy with the voice of Avery.

  Dressed in blue jeans and a red tee shirt, he looked to be about ten. His hair was light brown and not combed, and his eyes appeared to be hazel. He stepped forward and held forth a hand. Alice reached out and took it.

  “Avery, I can feel your hand!”

  “It is the suit, Doctor Maxon—micro-pressure waves.”

  Disappointment washed over Alice; reality had intruded into the illusion. “Oh,” she said, her voice tinged with regret.

  “Please sit down.” Avery released her hand and dropped to the grass, sitting cross-legged, hitching around to face Alice as she sat.

  “If you are ready, we will begin the neural mapping now,” said Avery.

  Even though she realized that this was but a virtual reality, still Alice was somewhat nonplused at this child in the forest who spoke of technical things. “Ready,” she muttered.

  “I want you to repeat after me: dot.”

  “Dot,” replied Alice.

  “Line.”

  “Line,” she mirrored.

  And so it went, through square, rectangle, triangle, arc, circle, ellipse, pentagram, hexagon, star, cube, sphere, and so on.

  After the long litany of geometric shapes, Avery said, “Now I am going to show you those shapes. And from them we will progress to more complex forms—to colors, motion, scale, and so on—as I map your visual cortex.”

  The glade then had disappeared, and the geometric kaleidoscope had begun.

  As they came to the end of that long chain, the glen and Avery reappeared.

  “What next?” asked Alice.

  “For the moment we will just sit and talk.”

  “Just talk?”

  “Yes,” replied Avery. “You see, I have begun mapping your aural cortex and your language center, and we need to converse.”

  “Oh,” replied Alice, again disappointed at reality’s intrusion. “What shall we talk about?”

  The boy grinned. “It doesn’t matter. Anything will do.”

  She returned his smile, then said, “This talking, am I expected to do it all?”

  “Oh no, Doctor Maxon. You do need to speak, of course. But listening is important, too. Both are needed for an accurate map.”

  Alice reached down and plucked a floweretted blade of grass. She raised it to her nose to smell its bouquet. It had no odor. “Oh!” she exclaimed, disheartened.

  “I’m not yet ready for that,” said Avery. “We’ve a long way to go. Smell and taste, most of touch, hearing, sight, kinesthetics—soon I’ll have it mapped. But for now, visual projections and micro-pressure waves will have to serve.”

  Alice sighed and looked at the tiny blossom. “I’m sorry now that I picked it.”

  The flowerette vanished from her hand. She looked at the boy. He beamed and pointed at a blossom nodding once more on its slender stem down in the green, green grass. “I put it back,” he said with godlike innocence.

  Eric sat on the bench at the end of the dock with the old man, each baiting his hook with bloodworms. The old man’s hands were palsied, yet he managed to press the wigglers past the barb. Before them the rolling blue-black ocean stretched out as far as the eye could see. In the distance a tall ship silently glided northerly, a cloud of sails rigged to its masts. The vault of a high blue sky arched overhead. Ocean surges rose and fell under the two fishermen as waves passed below the jetty to fetch up against the sandy shore, where stood tall desolate dunes with windblown grass clinging tenaciously to the slopes. Gulls squabbled over some tidbit near the water’s edge, and white terns rode on the wings of the onshore wind.

  As Eric cast his now-baited hook into the brine, he said to the old man beside him, “Well then, Avery, read any good books lately?”

  The old man looked at him with rheumy eyes, but his voice was firm, though androgynous. “Quite a few, Mister Flannery. Whatever I can get my, um, hands on. Whatever is in computer files or on holodisk is the easiest for me to read. I’m much faster at it than with old-fashioned paper books.”

  “Oh? How fast are you?”

  The old man finally finished baiting his hook and cast his line into the sea. “Well, it all depends on what I am reading. The limiting factor is not how fast I scan and comprehend, but rather how fast the information can be made available to me. Holoreaders are very slow. So are scanners. Even disk readers. All are mechanically limiting; especially limiting are paper books.”

  “Ah,” replied Eric.

  The old man set a briar pipe to his teeth and tried lighting it, but failed, his palsied hands betraying him.

  “Here, let me,” said Eric, striking a match and cupping the flame. Gratefully, the old man sucked on the stem and drew the flame down into the tobacco, lighting it, though the fire held no heat.

  The old man leaned back and blew smoke into the wind. There was no odor. “Even so, when I am reading while doing other things, just browsing that is, I suppose I average a megaword a second.”

  Eric gasped. “Did you just say you read at a million words a second?”

  The old man nodded. “Of course, that’s just browsing. If I were to turn all my free parallel processors to the task, well . . .”

  “Never mind, Avery.” Eric shook his head. “I am certain that you would empty the old Library of Congress in a minute or two at most.” The old man shook his head and started to reply, but Eric stopped him with an outheld palm. “Instead, let’s talk about the mythical land of Itheria. You can make your neural map of my language centers even as we speak.”

  ploonk! The old man’s bobber jerked from sight as something took the bait—hook, line, and sinker—and he leaned forward and peered at the rippling ringlets left behind, then he cast a sidelong glance at Eric and smiled.

  The fat lady sat in the swing, one of her feet idly pushing it to and fro. She was darker than Meredith—so black that her skin seemed to bear a blue cast. She was middle-aged and dressed in a white, hooded robe, with white gloves on her hands. Her head was shaved bald, as was the case with many of the Ammonites Reborn.

  Meredith sat on the top porch step, a sweating glass of lemonade at hand—lemonade that did not quench thirst, she had discovered. She held up the glass, neither cool nor warm nor wet, and she looked at the fat lady. “You say that one day this will have taste?”

  The fat lady laughed her androgynous laugh. “Oh yes. Within two days, in fact—once I’ve mapped your olfactory and taste cortexes.”

  “Well, Avery, I certainly hope so. Lemonade would go nicely on a warm summer’s day.” Meredith set the glass back down on the porch. “Say, isn’t taste rather limited? I mean, I thought we could only taste sweet, sour, salt, and bitter.”

  “Quite right, Miss Rodgers. What humans call taste is mostly a matter of odor. When it comes to eating or drinking it’s typically the combination of four senses which detects the quality of food or drink.”

  “Four senses?”

  “Taste, smell, and touch—three of the senses I have yet to map, though I have started on touch—and sight.”

  “Sight?”

  “For most humans, food has to look somewhat appealing.”

  “Oh. Of course.”

  As the fat lady pushed the swing back and forth, the chains creaking against the hooks overhead, Meredith found it difficult to believe that she was talking to a computer and not some Ammonite Reborn. But the cold technical tenor of the conversation put a lie to the illusion.

  “Tell me,” said Meredith, “when we begin the adventure, we will be dreaming, right?”

  “More or less.”

  “I’ve always been interested in dreams and dreaming . . . and in their interpretations.”

  The fat lady stopped the swing and patted the seat beside her. “Come, Miss Rodgers, sit next to me.”

  Meredith stood and walked to the swing and sat. The fat lady began gently pushing it to and fro once more.

  “Tell me this, Aver
y, why do we dream?”

  The fat lady took up a fan and stirred the air. To Meredith, it did not seem to cool at all.

  “As I understand it, Miss Rodgers, dreaming is the way that animals, including humans, integrate what they have experienced during the day. It serves as a mechanism to parse these experiences out to memory, a mechanism to form new neural connections, a mechanism to integrate new experiences with old. It is a survival mechanism, for the integrated memories are used in coming up with strategies for the future.”

  “Survival mechanism?”

  “Yes. You see, when dreaming is deliberately denied in, say, rats, they cannot learn mazes. The new experiences are not integrated into their memories.” The fat woman smiled. “So at least for rats, dreaming is an integral part of coping with the world.”

  “But I’m not a rat,” protested Meredith. “And most of my dreams seem to have absolutely nothing to do with my everyday experiences, though occasionally some do. I mean, usually my dreams are weird and wild and wonderful. At times I am flying or running through the air. At other times I find myself riding a giant snake—a dream whose interpretation seems rather straightforward to me. And other dreams are just as bizarre. And most of them seem to have little or no connection with my day-to-day business of running a rare book store, or any other day-to-day experience.”

  “Ah, Miss Rodgers, I believe that’s because there are two things occurring during dreams. First, the daily experiences themselves are being quietly reviewed and integrated in memory with other experiences. New neural connections are being formed. Typically all of this takes place below the level of awareness; hence, usually a given experience does not directly factor into a remembered dream. The second thing that occurs, though, does indeed give rise to those dreams you find far-fetched. You see, the very act of integration causes random neurons to fire, sometimes whole clusters, and then the human mind creates a dream by triggering other clusters and chaining these firings into a fantasy. What I am saying is that the haphazard triggering of an arbitrary cluster of neurons causes the mind to author a tale to tell itself. You might call it a daydream which occurs while one sleeps.”

  “Oh, how utterly dreadful,” said Meredith. “I want my dreams to have a mystical quality and not be just some random circuits going off.”

  The fat lady shrugged, then added, “Of course, some remarkable things come from the dreams of humans. Things quite original, creative.”

  “Xanadu,” murmured Meredith.

  “Quite right,” replied the fat lady.

  They swung without speaking for long moments. Finally Meredith turned to the fat lady. “Tell me, Avery, do you dream?”

  Very soberly the little girl in the pink frock looked at Caine. “Sugar for your tea, Doctor Easley?”

  “Why yes, Avery,” replied Caine, smiling as she held up the tiny, empty bowl.

  “One lump or two?”

  “Oh, seven please.”

  The little girl tch-tched and shook her golden ringlets as she carefully counted out seven imaginary lumps of sugar into Caine’s empty cup. “This will make your tea sickeningly sweet, Doctor Easley.”

  “Oh but I like it that way,” said Caine, pointing at one of the guests slouched in a wee chair, “just as does Pooh.”

  They sat in the little playhouse, the girl and the five dolls and one stuffed bear and Caine—especially Caine—rather scrunched up around the miniature table.

  The little girl continued ’round to the rest of her guests, dropping invisible sugar into the empty cups before each and every one, while Caine stirred his intangible tea with his tiny spoon.

  “Tell me, Avery, just how do you do it? How do you, uh, make us forget who we are, make us take on a whole new persona?”

  The little girl stirred her own unobservable tea, her blue eyes seemingly lost in reflection. At last she lay her spoon aside and looked at Caine. “Well, Doctor Easley, I think you know of the medical benefits that can be brought about by synchronizing the natural rhythms of the two hemispheres of the brain, enhancing some while suppressing others.”

  “Yes, Avery,” responded Caine, bemused by the incongruity of hearing this from the lips of a five-year-old girl serving imaginary tea in a playhouse. “At my clinic we use it to help people relax before surgery. But it is also used to treat sleeping disorders, to deal with anxiety and panic attacks, to reduce stress, and so on . . . though I imagine its most spectacular use is when it aids in the integration of the alters in cases of multiple personality disorders.”

  The little girl nodded. “Exactly so, Doctor Easley. It is indeed used to treat dissociative states. But by the very same token, it can be used to create an alter . . . temporarily, of course.”

  “Aha,” replied Caine, enlightened. “Yes. I see. You use hemisync to create an alter and to sublimate the primary. Clever.” Caine took up his empty teacup and held it forth. “I salute you.”

  The little girl smiled and lifted her teacup as well, clinking it against Caine’s . . .

  . . . and so did the dolls and Pooh.

  The ancient woman in the kimono took up the ink pot and brush in her worn hands. “Consider a cat, and I will depict what you see.”

  Hiroko envisioned a cat, and swiftly the old woman brushed it onto the rice paper. It sat all onyx black, one paw raised to its mouth, licking.

  “Is this what you envisioned?”

  Hiroko nodded. “Yes, grandmother,” she said, using the term of respect even though she knew the old woman was but an avatar of Avery.

  “Does it represent all of the cat?”

  Hiroko raised her palms. “I do not understand, grandmother.”

  “Let me ask it this way: does the cat have curved claws?”

  An image flashed into Hiroko’s mind, and with a single stroke the old woman brushed its likeness onto the paper.

  “Does this represent all of the cat?” the old woman asked.

  Hiroko smiled in understanding, and a quick succession of images flashed through her mind: slitted pupils, tufts of fur in cat ears, twitching tail, arched back, pointed teeth, a ball of yarn . . .

  As each of these things were envisioned, the old woman inked them onto the paper, her brush flying.

  “What lesson does this teach, grandmother?”

  The old woman smiled up a toothless smile at Hiroko and replied in an androgynous voice: “Only that vision is a two-way street.”

  “Two-way street?”

  The old woman pointed at the sketch of the talon. “If you were to see a claw, the image would be transmitted to your visual cortex and your mind would then deal with it. Yet if you did not actually see a claw but were instead to clearly imagine one, the mind would retrieve the memory of a claw and would deal with it in much the same manner as if it had actually seen it.”

  “Aha,” said Hiroko, “you are speaking of the mind’s eye.”

  “Just so, Miss Kikiro,” replied the old woman.

  “But what has this to do with the Black Fox adventure?”

  The old woman looked at Hiroko and once again smiled her toothless smile. “Only that whatever you can envision in the darkest recesses of your mind, I can make a reality.”

  Suddenly a black cat sprang into being before a startled Hiroko, the animal spitting and hissing in fury. Just as suddenly it vanished.

  Her heart pounding in alarm, Hiroko wildly looked this way and that, her eyes seeking the cat. But it was gone. And then she saw that the cat had vanished from the rice paper, too. She looked at the old woman to find that ancient face wrinkled ’round that toothless smile.

  Arthur Coburn sat in the box seat and watched as the polo game thundered to and fro, the second chukker underway with willow mallets clacking against the willow ball. Beside him sat a beautiful young lady, perhaps in her late twenties, with long auburn hair and long slender legs. She was dressed in a flowing pale blue dress. A wide-brimmed straw hat graced her head.

  “Who do you think will win?” asked Arthur, turning to the youn
g lady.

  She favored him with a dazzling smile. “Who would you like to win, Mister Coburn?” she asked in her androgynous voice.

  Coburn smiled. “Ha! That’s right. You can easily determine the winner, eh, Avery?”

  The young lady merely smiled.

  Coburn turned back to the match. “We humans place so much importance in winning and losing that we often forget it is merely a game.”

  Clack! The wooden ball sailed down field, ponies galloping after.

  “This adventure we’re going on, Avery, it, too, is but a game, with you as the Game Master, the controller of all.”

  The young lady took off her hat and placed it in her lap. The sun highlighted copper glints in her hair. “But, Mister Coburn, all games have rules, and in the one we will play, I must abide by them.”

  “Rules, Avery?”

  “Programs written by Doctor Rendell. As the superuser, he has written them so that they favor the players, Mister Coburn, and not, as you call it, the Game Master.”

  Coburn stroked his chin. “Favor the players, eh? Tell me this, Avery, have you ever won?”

  The young lady smiled and shook her head wistfully. “Not yet, Mister Coburn, but some day I hope to.”

  Clack! Willow mallet struck willow ball, and ponies thundered by.

  The tests and mappings went on, with Avery neurally charting critical responses of the skin to heat, cold, itching, tingling, pressure, wetness, and the other sensations of touch. At the same time, Avery continued plotting the auditory and visual cortexes as well as the language center, though most of the language mapping would come on day two.