Pirate Mapping

Too much in ‘survival’ mode from over-work to have much going on internal lately. Did do an aeon round recently. And woke up from this dream the other day.

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It was “almost” an accident, the press release said. The media told us about it from every screen. Scientists from several countries had been working for years on neural scanning, from ever-better imaging techniques to a cornucopia of ideas about “what it all meant.” Their enthusiasm for neural imaging as the crystal ball of ‘base-psychology’ was a little bit contagious, and the media began following the story like some soap opera of biochemistry, based on the tarot of the brain.  Science had never been so popular.

So it happened that when a small team discovered how to take the latest 3-D imaging “pattern” and replicate it or at least ‘the effects as if one had it’ in anybody — temporarily, of course — with a semi-synthetic biochemistry cocktail (or in English, with a needle and syringe into the arm or the ass), it took about 24 hours for the implications to sink in, and then the entire subject just exploded.

The scientists were rock stars after that. This one discovery generated so much combined public enthusiasm and outcry you’d think it had been the unveiling of some ancient god and modern aliens all in one night. From dire warnings from the pulpit to philosophical rantings in text, it seemed like the whole world for the first time agreed on one thing, at least: that this discovery was absolutely-damn-amazing.  Whether that was good or bad was up for debate, but the discovery itself was astounding.

I thought so too, as I listened to the news on my ride to work one morning. Some fervent dreamer I’d never heard of was waxing on about how, with a shot akin to a vitamin B boost, you could quite literally “see the point of view” of someone else. Surely this would revolutionize the evolution of our culture. You could now truly walk a mile in your enemy’s shoes, as the old saying went.

They tried to make it illegal in counties all over the country. It took about 6 minutes for half of Tennessee, Georgia and a slew of counties across the bible belt to decide it was drug-induced, and it wasn’t “you”, and it wasn’t in the bible, and hence it was bad. To the delight of the watching world, though, none except a few counties (which already outlawed drinking, dancing, and general happiness, as a religious imperative) were able to pull together any reason science could support for it being bad. After all, it had, at least so far, no measurable side effects, it was temporary, and far as anyone could see, it didn’t actually hurt anybody. Bill after bill to outlaw it failed to pass.

Later on, I was to think that maybe it would have had a 10 year wait to hit the public market, while various drug test trials were run, if the knowledge hadn’t hit the whole world including our enemies all at once — it wasn’t just ours, countries all over the world understood it promptly and began to implement it –  and if the government hadn’t been so gung-ho to map as many people as possible just to see what could be learned. Or more importantly to some funding sources, what our enemies, god forbid, might be learning. Several programs were set up which offered a trade: Go let them scan you, take some psychology tests, and you could choose from a whole neural-library of a pattern you wanted to experience for a few hours. Be a famous basketball player, a Hollywood beauty queen, a five year old little girl.

I had to try it, of course. Early on, in fact. I was one of the crazy people who waited all weekend in line outside one of the authorized clinics. I had fully intended to ‘take the map’, as slang put it, of this guy Jason, a movie star who’d been paid a fortune to give up his map to encourage the public to go make the trade. But at the last second I had some bizarre change of perspective, bit of a pun there considering the subject, and I chose the map of this 87 year old grandmother who was, it was said, in perfect health, and had 7 kids, 20 grandkids, and 37 great-grandkids. It was probably because my grandmother had died just two weeks before and I was still raw inside.  But whatever the case, I spent about five hours with a pretty radically different “perspective” than my own.

There were variants on the shots that could make it more powerful or last longer, but they weren’t what was approved for the trade. It didn’t matter to most people. This was novel enough to leave everybody begging for more. But of course, it took about ten minutes for black market ‘mapping’ to kick in as an entire industry. It was harder and longer and had a longer, more intense ‘confusion point’ when shaking it off, when that pattern ‘blended’ with your own, but that was actually the favorite part for many people, and many deliberately ‘raw’ variants that emphasized that part of the experience rose up.  Back-street commerce was instant and huge: be anybody in their library, and I nearly burst out laughing one day when I saw a man open his coat furtively and show a list of names to someone rather than an array of gold watches, and I knew many of the names were movie stars from the lab break-ins that had occurred around the world and distributed ‘patterns’ like music planet-wide. It was like Neuromancer meets Disney and they met in the middle over money.

Some of the media misunderstood. So some of the public misunderstood. The rumors about it were ridiculous. It did not turn you into someone else with history. It wasn’t like you knew the details and private life of that rock star. It wasn’t like you would know physics, or kung-fu, by taking the map of a person who did. It wasn’t any of those things. It was just a pattern, that the brain accepted, for a time; it was a perspective. You simply saw things in a different way for awhile. But not just some things. Everything. It wasn’t just a shift of opinion on a few topics, it was a fundamentally different state of mind. It was a genuine “escape from self” and “exploration of the-other”. The ultimate drug, in a way. It didn’t make you high, it didn’t make you low, it just made you different.

It was the backstreet market that found the dark side first, as least as far as I could see. Who would have thought, really, but it was basically some medium-size corporations who paid for the first venture into that potential. How would the CEO of the competing company think of this? If you thought about the problem, or product, or strategies, “from their point of view,” would you get an insight into their planning? It turns out — yeah. Not perfectly, but in general, you would. And what if that CEO had not been mapped? Well that is easily taken care of. He’d just disappear for a few hours into the shadow of a car with some tough looking men and when he returned, usually with memory wiped — another benefit of fairly recent science — suddenly his pattern would proliferate like a fractal available through every pirate mapman, as they came to be called, first in the city, then through the whole country and then the whole world. The enthusiasm the pirates had for sharing patterns was almost awe-inspiring. The government and military wished their communication systems worked half as well.

And then it got darker. How does your enemy think? The mafia wanted to know. The military wanted to know. Hell, the wife and the other-woman wanted to know. It had begun with people wanting to share the patterns of the people they admired, but it shifted into a much larger market of people sharing the patterns of those they hated. Ironically, and some people got a lot of humor out of this, the murder rate actually went down. It was now more profitable to kidnap someone for the scanners than to kill them for their wallet. Everybody wanted to sample everybody else. It was a phenomenon on a global scale.

And then it got darker. Could you map the pattern of someone limited to an experience? Sure, it would mostly be ‘just them’ like normal, but the rabid biochemical of an intense experience affected their map temporarily, which parts of the brain were ‘most active’ and so on — especially if some illegal setup had the ability to map it literally during that experience, and it could replicate to a lesser extent in someone else. Parachuting was the most popular map for about a week before sampling rape, from both sides and in both genders overtook that in the black market statistics.  As the overpaid and zealously enthusiastic black market scientists got better at isolating and creating patterns of an experience, rather than just a pattern of perspective, a number of crime statistics such as rape and prostitution went down as well. Why risk disease and arrest when you could have the same experience for money — made with the scanners or paid to the mapmen?

It got institutionalized, eventually; prisoners were allowed to request the maps of a variety of non-criminal sources, in the experimental idea that this might have some side-effect, even after it wore off, of the “new perspectives” giving their own brain some new neural connections and some different points of view. As much of the law abiding world became more criminal with illegal and even deadly experiences for sale, the criminals became more settled, often verging eventually into philosophy and brotherhood instead of the normal prison culture. It was a little bizarre, I thought to myself as I rode to work one morning.

Had it been only a few months since I’d been right here, on the way to work, and heard about the new discovery? It seemed impossible that so much change could have happened so fast. In my opinion, the world had just gone nuts.  The government, freaked out by the massive illegal mapping of people against their will, and by the weird ‘addictive’ quality of this allegedly non-addictive and temporary drug of sorts, had finally, after the fact, temporarily tried to make it illegal. Well, a few highly conservative people, one from a county where it was already illegal, did. The pirates fought back with more money than organized crime had ever had: within 3 days, all but 5 politicians — I mean literally the entire government – was revealed or proven to have engaged in this, and often to be deeply and repetitively engaged in this, which made the entire voting bloc just fall away in their embarrassment. They could either seem like a mortified criminal and step down — or band together to instead present it as safe and harmless and hence no issue at all.  There was no stopping it now.

I wondered, on the way to work, if we had accidentally created The Akashic Record. Was this the whole point of life? To bring our experience back to the collective? What was wrong with having it before you keeled over?  The philosophers had never addressed that possibility.

I turned my attention to the likely events of the rest of my day. The aspect of me that reminded me of the boxer I’d sampled thought my boss was an asshole who was always looking at my boobs instead of my face. The aspect of me more like the grandmother I’d sampled understood he was very young, and saw his insecurities and his potential. The Zen master I’d sampled, I felt as if he were still “the shadow of a memory of a perspective” inside me too, and he had no worry about it either way: it was a beautiful day this morning, right here, right now. Of course, the assassin that some backstreet miscreant mapper had given me instead of the nun I requested, calmly considered that I could simply arrange a terrible accident for my boss if it all went badly, or coax him into a compromise that would let me ruin his marriage and sue his company for sexual harrassment if necessary.  I scolded most of them. It’s just a job already.

Grandmother thought we should be focusing on more positive things, and reminded me that I’d been willing to plant some iris and tulips this year and it was about time to arrange for that. The poet was composing something abstract and philosophical in the back of my head, and the philosopher just the other day had reminded me of this old Twilight Zone episode — or was it The Outer Limits? – that had a variation on this, as if prophetic, where people could “sell memories.” And I remembered a Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. book I’d read when young, where these alien whales could “buy your dreams.”  This technology wasn’t really any of that, but it kind of verged on it if you were buying the experience-map option.

I thought again about the flowers. Digging deep enough holes for the flower bulbs would be a lot of work. There was always Derek, my potential boyfriend. He might help. Of course he’d take that as interest from me. But maybe it was. Is not, part of me said. Is too! another part responded. The plumber shadow from that map had an opinion about Derek’s family; he wasn’t even catholic for godssakes! I giggled. Neither was I. A whole fight broke out between the shadows, the aspects, and I pushed it all to the back of my mind and ignored them. Nobody had ever told us about this side effect. Some people went stark raving mad from it. Some seemed to get a lot wiser. Everyone seemed to get a lot less predictable. And most peoples’ reality got a little more interesting.

I shrugged, and let the Zen Master come forward. The late Autumn sun was on my left shoulder, and I felt content. I closed my eyes, as the rocking of my car on the monorail, the 6:19am to metro, nearly put me into a trance. The world was below. I was here, a seemingly normal person, a responsible, respectable young woman, as long as you didn’t talk to my bad-maps. Who were arguing in the background I realized. Make friends now, I demanded of them. Or else. Still they balked. The Zen Master had given me the idea and it was a great one. I would imagine myself back in both of those maps and then imagine energy and love rushing through my body and “blending” them with each other and then with me. And damn if it didn’t work pretty well to deal with aspects in conflict, although on occasion the result of the three was a little… bizarre. I mean sometimes it was hard to track how it even related. A merge could work but all the sudden I loved this shirt with yellow flowers I’d have found hideous the day before, and kept craving black olives. God only knows why.

The side-effects were unpredictable. Some psychologists were probably making fortunes just to teach people this as if it were some arcane science, and not something you could do on the 6:19. The Or Else started to sink in apparently, as the little bit of Me-ness in each of the arguing shadow patterns realized their threat of obliteration and scuffled into the background.

I sighed in satisfaction. Another 8 minutes to enjoy the sun on my shoulder and the rocking of the rail.

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It’s hard not to notice the sync of this ‘technology’ in that dream world and my ‘spiritual life’ in this one. – P