On Oct 19, 2011, at 4:48 PM, Thorn Alley wrote:
--- On Wed, 19/10/11, MT <
FILTER 2011
An intermittent buffer failure in the
entertainment dream chamber eventually
permitted cross border access, previously
filtered out of the memory system; and
like the main character in that 2000 film,
Memento, I too had gained a shaky foothold
into the missing corridors of my strange,
evaporating mind. Over an apparently long
stretch of time, in spite of artificially
induced memory failure, I was able to piece
together an extraordinary narrative that
had been specifically designed to remain
hidden, and forgotten.
The original intent behind the system was
of benign purpose, but the failure had a
cascading effect, leading to the deduction
that I was on a long range, deep space flight
of unknown duration, for perhaps hundreds, or
maybe thousands of years; and in moments of
clarity, I was able to recall that suspended
animation, as an efficient means to transport
neurologically sentient consciousness, was
never an entirely safe method over extended
periods; so an alternating system of 'deep
sleep and waking state' was designed to take
advantage of innovations in virtual reality
simulations, thereby facilitating extreme
duration space flight.
In the waking state, the traveler was fully
conscious of the craft, the mission, and
all requisite duties, but any memory of the
sleep state was effectively wiped clean.
Conversely, in the suspended animation
sleep state, all memory of the craft,
mission, duty, and especially the original
identity, was likewise erased to permit an
alternate self to live a worldly life of
comforting diversions; but the trouble with
these semi-automated, long duration space
flight gizmos, is that inevitable technical
glitches have a tendency to mutate systems,
which, in this case, created a bit of a
seemingly unintended psychic overlap.
One moment you'll be driving down a winding
country road in a late 20th century
automobile, when an uncanny sense of being
light years away in the middle of a distant
star field on a seemingly endless trajectory
to a who-the-hell-knows-where destination...
...and the next moment you're back on board,
gazing at an external representation of your
immediate vicinity imbued with a completely
unfamiliar sensibility considering these
peculiar, isolated stellar environments,
when suddenly you begin to suspect that your
entertainment module is leaking into your
functional apparatus attention mode; and
you're no longer sure if maybe you're some
weird geek living a prosaic existence on a
relatively primitive planet, experiencing
intermittent flashbacks (or flashforwards)
of another existence on a distant spacecraft;
or, maybe, you're an intrepid explorer,
journeying amid ancient nebula, whose
entertainment pod is spewing odd bits of
planetary data into your waking state
efficiency node; or even weirder yet,
perhaps the ship's destination education
program has been compromised, and is now
synthesizing with the entertainment module,
creating a hybrid situation which the
artificially intelligent reality engine may
have intended all along, indicating that
the excruciating trip is finally nearing
its destination, and all onboard gizmos are
systematically shutting down. Either way,
the left hand was never supposed to know
what the right hand was doing, at least
according to the original engineers. ...