Chapter 6: Black Mirage
A black-hatted figure with a shaded face and long black coat-tails strides out of a series of slanting, pulsating neon frames punctuating a Stygian space nowhere in time. A dove with soft white feathers trails serenely behind, now and then playfully poking at his coal-black lapels and cooing merrily into his unresponsive ears. Out of the black, he swings a long black stick which silver tips glitter in the air and, fascinated, it swoops down in front to see a black shutter open in his chest. Light pours out of the shutter, revealing beyond the diaphragm an Escheresque, spiraling array of ornate stairways and corridors expanding and shrinking at a periodic beat. Softly reverberating along the passageways is a steady stream of breathing sounds. Before long, the dove has somehow drifted into the world of the maze. Just then, a clock hand somewhere strikes, a lift chime rings, a sound of a shutter closing occurs, and the surroundings of the dove melt into a cage in an oppressively grey room .....
"That's why they say that the quiet ones are the most dangerous!" She ... "You think you're helpfully opening them up when, in reality, they've been anticipating your every move with all the energy they surreptitiously reserve and drawing you in."
"Is that why you, the white dove, are playing computer games instead of wandering around town on a Saturday afternoon?" Her bob-haired roommate, Bernice, dabs tangerine orange polish onto her nails.
"Hey, I'm no escapist and this is no ordinary game! It's an online tournament where people from all walks of life compete to map the three-dimensional neural wiring in the mouse retina by tracing pathways through layers of cells in microscopic images," She protests while rotating and scrolling through a purple-and-cyan mesh of fibers on a pitch-black browser window, the mesh extending stretch by stretch with each color-accompanied click on oblong regions on a grainy, grey-scale micrograph corresponding to the selected cross-section of the model [1]. "Right now, a sly fox has laid out a gigantic yet invisible game of chess with unknown boundaries outside while accusing me of making game of his game. Oh boy, see how he's brainwashed me into playing riddle games I can't stop? I need to switch game for a while so that I can game on on his turf with a fresh mentality he's not foreseen. If you think about it, the millions of people over the globe thronging Steam and other digital game stores are probably all desperate for a breather from some kind of lunatic in their lives, whether this lunatic is human, insentient, or monolithic—that is, one humongous mass of insentient humans. Happily, these hundreds, maybe thousands, of millions of hours lost to virtual universes every day can now be channeled into work that betters our physical universe through games designed to not only entertain but also solve computation problems that still stump artificial intelligence."
"Ugh. I'd rather take a breather with the knowledge that I'm doing nothing other than taking a breather," Bernice paints green palm tree patterns onto the orange-coated nails. "Tell those game designers not to burden me with humanity's problems during my downtime, sweetheart."
"Uggghhhhh," She rolls her eyes. "Honey, nobody is compelling anyone to do anything! Call of Duty and Final Fantasy won't be genetically reengineered anytime soon. Besides, what's burden to someone may well be balm to another. We all have a deep-seated need to feel that we're of worth to the larger world, yet this emotional satisfaction is sadly not forthcoming in the daily grind, not even in therapeutic innovation research. Human computation games or Games With A Purpose, as they're sometimes called, give gamers a more visceral sense of identity as Very Important Players of the Earth community."
Bernice puts on tassel earrings in cascading cones of dark reds and browns and croons, "'Everybody wants to rule the world ... It's my own desire ... It's my own remorse ...' Be careful that emotional payoff doesn't earn them VIP status at game addiction clinics."
"Well, you never know! Someday, game engineers and neuroscientists might create this miraculous lovechild that hooks up new players without breaking a sweat and then gradually trains them to resist attentional biases and strengthen inhibitory control, all those skills robbed in addictions of all kinds. With one app, it'll rid the world of substance abuse, pathological gaming and gambling, cellular phone dependency and even shopping compulsion!"
"Alas, it'll be too late for my macaron addiction. Have fun saving the world while I fetch bacon from the other hemisphere!" Bernice picks up a floral laptop bag along with a sand-textured folder atop it and heads for the door.
"Departure time already? Nooooo....honey, stay with me a little longer! Just ten more minutes. Pretty, pretty please? This is one gamer who cannot do without physical company," she clings onto and nuzzles her head against Bernice's waist, nearly all of her torso leaning out of her light brown-pink swivel chair.
Easing herself from the ticklish clutch, Bernice chuckles, "Come on, sweetheart! The wall separating our room and Eleni and Ethel's room is not the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, or the proposed Trump Wall of America at the US-Mexico border. See you later alligator." The door closes after her. The label on the folder read, "e-Mathanaesthesia Academy - Calculus II".
[couch surfs in various friends' rooms within same flat]
[sends invitation to a literary GAWP(?) to him]
[he joins with a surprisingly identifiable handle]
[resonance - black painting]
Behind-the-Scenes Science:
Butterflies
References:
1. Kim, J.S., Greene, M.J., Zlateski, A., Lee, K., Richardson, M., Turaga, S.C., Purcaro, M., Balkam, M., Robinson, A., Behabadi, B.F. and Campos, M., 2014. Space–time wiring specificity supports direction selectivity in the retina. Nature, 509(7500), p.331. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13240
... .....xxx ..... ...
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.13632. Singer, E., 2009. The Army's Remote-Controlled Beetle, MIT Technology Review, viewed 3 February 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411814/the-armys-remote-controlled-beetle/
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6. Kobayashi, N., Yoshida, M., Matsumoto, N. and Uematsu, K., 2009. Artificial control of swimming in goldfish by brain stimulation: confirmation of the midbrain nuclei as the swimming center. Neuroscience letters, 452(1), pp.42-46. DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2009.01.0357. Lee, S., Kim, C.H., Kim, D.G., Kim, H.G., Lee, P.S. and Myung, H., 2013. Remote guidance of untrained turtles by controlling voluntary instinct behavior. PloS one, 8(4), p.e61798. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061798
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