Rift

Rift

Chapter 1
He had never allowed himself to displace his consciousness into the rift. Perhaps he feared it would mean the eclipse and deconstruction of his soul, something that, as a man a little too tied to the past, he could not abide the idea of. This did not prevent him from carrying out his work with due prejudice and diligence; in fact, he proposed to himself that the very reason he was able to perform the research he so enjoyed was due to the fact he had been uncontaminated by the vast, soul-destroying expanse that would have been lain before him should he have chosen to don the technological vestments his subjects so often did in his presence.
One such subject, Fletch, was laid out on the table in front of him, a wafer visor encompassing his eyes, electrodes flat against his temples and within him the needed nervous taps connected to the device without any use of wires. The visor was a one-way mirror, through it he could see Fletch’s eyes, through Fletch’s eyes however, Fletch could see nothing but the rift. One was not unconscious upon entering the rift, the body operated in a business as usual fashion, to the point where the user can sense fatigue, hunger, need to relieve oneself and in such situations remove themselves from the real world and into the world of base needs.
It was not uncommon for users to ignore these minor signals, as you did become much less aware of your physical being when wired in, to the point where it was easy for some to forget they had a body at all; until after thirty or so hours they awaken, emaciated, soiled and exhausted beyond all belief. This is what Gira was afraid of – being consumed, taken under and taken for a ride, discovering infinity and knowing once he had tasted the boundless opportunity of the wired he would not want to be unwired, he would not want to limit his findings to the plane of existence so few people now chose to be a part of; if it could be called existing at all.
Fletch had only been under for six hours. He had made no effort to communicate any discomfort in this time. His longest run had been just shy of twenty, though during that run he had agreed upon the prerequisites to his being put in by the doc. He was slowly being fed a nutrient paste through a tube rather inconveniently hanging down the back of his throat, he was catheterised and he had rested for forty-eight hours beforehand, disallowed from jacking in. When he returned he was a disoriented phantom, blinking erratically and wandering, lost, through a valley of confusion.
He had spent so long under the watch that he was unsure whether he was truly outside of the grand simulation, refusing to trust the objects he could feel before him, they could be mapped into his neural sensory network. He had no real way of differentiating. Most of the paranoia stemmed from multiple dreams within cyberspace itself, in which he had relived this exact moment of escape, or ejection. In each of these dreams-that-weren’t-dreams, the good doctor had done exactly as he was doing now, sitting the man down, bringing a much needed glass of water (in which the doctor had also added vitamin C and glucose) and carefully de-catheterising him in an attempt to cause as little discomfort as possible, however Fletch never quite got used to the sensation of the slick rubber tube retracting from his urethra. It was always fire.
Eight hours, forty-three minutes and seventeen seconds, or as near to it as Gira could bring his thumb down on the watch. Fletch always wondered why he didn’t have a program simply monitor the length of the dive from the moment he was under until the moment he was up again. He brought his legs over one side of the table as if he were atop a camel and awaited the glass from the doctor.
“Cheers doc” The liquid was gone a moment later.
Fletch hopped down from the table. Gira looked as if her were about to ask a question, but Fletch turned his back to the man and walked across the room. The linoleum was cool beneath his bare feet, whereas the rest of the room was terribly humid. He pulled the curtain around him which hung from a rail on the ceiling, the rail was succumbing to rust at a steady pace, and in this humidity would likely need replacing within the year.
“How did you spend the past, say, nine hours? – Mr Fletcher” The doc enquired.
A constant noise of piss against pottery pervaded the room. It seemed to last for minutes. Fletch drew back the curtain, his eyes closed, concentrated, as if trying to fight some enemy within his own head. It was common for him to suffer headache after prolonged use of the visor.
“I don’t know Doc, I mean, I know what I did, but you know time in that place, you could spend five hours swimming in a virtual pool and it’s actually been ten minutes of real time, or you can have a ten minute conversation and it’s actually lasted two hours.”
“You know Mr Fletcher, thankfully, I have no idea what time is like in ‘that place’. I trust you to fill out the journal as best you can.”
“I’ve never asked you Doc, what exactly are you trying to find out from this little gig you got going here anyway?” He reached to his shoes and removed the bunched up socks from inside them.
“As long as I’m the one out here and you’re the one on the table exploring that damnable rift, I have no obligation to tell you why I’m doing this.” Doc straightened his glasses. He looked down at the pad in his hands and began writing. “The young woman I was observing before you became irritatingly quizzical, if you wish to continue receiving fifty dollars an hours for the time you spend here, I’d recommend you cease with the questions - Mr Fletcher.”  He nodded to Fletch.
“You know, Doc, you might have your little screen there, but watchin’ isn’t nothin’ compared to actually experiencing all of it. Maybe you might find ya like it if you’d just put on the visor and give it a whirl, it’s a hell of a place, infinite possibilities, and it feels real as if we were sittin’ here right now.” It was a sincere statement, most people took it for granted that nobody would want to be without it and what Fletch said was true, it just didn’t matter at all to Gira.
“Thank you for your time Joseph, it has been a pleasure as always.” Doc tapped a few times on the translucent screen covering six inches of his forearm, “Four hundred and thirty five dollars and ninety-eight cents has been credited to your account and I look forward to seeing you again in ten days’ time.” He held out Mr Fletcher’s jacket and allowing him to slip, arm after arm, into the thing before releasing it.
“The pleasure’s all mine Doc, I ain’t gonna quiz you no more either. I’d be a sucker to pass up the easiest job I ever did have. There isn’t no fucker’d get me working in QC on dehydes again. Not even if they offered me fifty an hour.” Fletch smiled at Doc and subsequently left the room, back out into the sprawling city, which ten minutes prior, simply didn’t exist.
With Fletch out of the building, Doc could continue his work.
“Lock doors. Brain scan, subject Fletch, fifth run. Brain scan, subject Merrill, first run.”
The two previously inactive lights set in the walnut desk fired into life, blue-tinged light projected into three dimensions, a section of sky brought down from above to rest in the air atop the desk. As suddenly as the light appeared came the models of the subjects’ brains, in what some would consider far too much detail, hovering, slowly rotating. The seat of human consciousness of these two separate individuals standing before the doctor as if presenting him with permission to stare into their souls.
“Show neuron activity density distinguished by lobe. At ten times speed, if you will.”
The left brain slowly became an intriguing lightshow of intricately balanced neural activity, red light dashing amongst the blue, wires of human thought and action, creating a shifting bluish-pinkish glow as the stimuli experienced in the rift probed varying responses from varying areas of the brain. The density of the neural network activity seemed to be largely focused in the sensory cortex and occipital lobe, whilst the other areas of the brain were operating on reduced levels to those going about day-to-day life.
Doc found the right brain far more interesting, it showed similar levels of activity in the sensory cortex and occipital lobe, as well as similar levels of usage in both the motor cortex and cerebellum. However, unlike the first model, this model showed extremely high usage of the areas of the brain controlling logical thought, memory and arithmetic. Higher levels than would ordinarily be observed in a human being during any worldly activity. They were blood and awe, great red swellings on the projected model which lay before him, with only the slightest of a purple tinge created by the antiquated projector’s overuse of blue light.
“Visor relays for respective runs onscreen. Sync to progress of neural usage pattern.”
Two thirty-inch sections of the wall flipped themselves inch by inch. Now behind the desk were two screens, detailing exactly what the subjects were experiencing during their respective runs.
“Reduce to three times speed.”
He could now make out the content of the dreamlike worlds which lay before him. Merrill was engaged in some sort of heist scenario. Catching a glimpse of her image as she passed the glass wall of a city bank, he noticed the program’s use of a black ski-mask in order to conceal her features, uncommon, as most career-criminals had long since found more interesting ways of avoiding recognition during their crimes.
The monitor above the right-hand brain was a less dynamic sequence, showing Fletch cruising slowly through faceless buildings, shards of obsidian risen from a marsh of snaking vehicles and light pollution, each window parallel to the next, emitting some strange light like a portal through which a whole other world were visible. He simply kept cruising.
Confusion was all that could be said to describe the look on Doc’s face. Here were two separate projections, with almost identical cityscapes, one with an action sequence containing multiple constructed characters, intricate police roadblocks and traps and moving at considerable pace. The other, a man on a motorcycle, and a plain one at that, slowly cruising through some half-abandoned east-coast-city. What is causing the disparity in higher-level brain activity? Had the amount of mental work needed to generate a virtual construct changed significantly over the past eighteen months?
	“Surface.”
	A screen suspended on a mechanical arm, chromed to the point where to witness it was to blind oneself, protruded from the back of the desk and as commanded swung to rest adjacent the doctor. In crossing the desk it interrupted the brains still revolving in perpetual motion causing a flutter of colour and the retraction of shards of blue-pink light in an explosive manner, though without causing a sound.
Doc was now sat with a surface browser open. This was all he knew of the net. Reasons for excessive brain usage during rift simulations. Go. Ones and zeros streamed in packets of light along the optic cabling, less than a millisecond later they were multiplexing themselves in twine with vast herds of data fulfilling vastly different purposes, all excited and brimming with energy on a quest to metamorphosis themselves from data to information, and back in the nature of cyclical transformation before bestowing their final form upon those which they had initially been property of.
At the return of his request, some six milliseconds later, he began to hunt through the vast amount of information presented to him. None of it relevant. Product placement in rift simulations. Are the government monitoring our thoughts and fantasies? A ‘how to’ guide on using rift constructed AI to help you spy on those you’re rifting with. As far as Gira could tell, nobody either had the time, money or patience to monitor people’s brain activity when under; this didn’t surprise him, but it left him dejected, and without any helpful or even contrary data on the subject to investigate.