I’m a cyborg! The Tarens use nanite technology and my head has been exploding the last few days while a computer built itself in my brain. And I’m not hallucinating the dot in the middle of the room or the floating words. That’s just the default display of the computer in my head. Before I get sent off with Sa Lents I have to pass basic interfacing-with-virtual-environments training. And currently I have no access rights to anything, so all I can see is a dot.
I just reread all this big long entry and it sounds nothing like the explanation they gave me, which involved showing me pictures obviously meant for children and saying in their language: "Muina. Home. Planet. Home. Lantar. People." And me sitting there looking puzzled, as my injected language tool triggered concept recognition, not words. I’m not sure how much of what I’ve written down matches what they were trying to tell me. The pictures were more helpful than what they were saying.
It was only when I was taken back to my room and had had a shower that I started crying. Because being rescued and going home are worlds apart. And, weird as this sounds, because I’m not a surprise to them.
Friday, December 21
Say Ah
Another medical exam to start my day – if it is the start. Since it never gets dark outside and the lights don’t go out in my room, I’m having a lot of trouble keeping track of time. My meals are all very similar – something fruity, vegetable sticks, either bread or processed fishy stuff – so all I have to go on is when they choose to talk to me, and a watch which tells time for a totally different planet.
Being able to ask questions, no matter how slowly, really makes a difference to the poking and prodding sessions. The doctor is a pretty nice lady. She even apologised for not giving me painkillers, but apparently it can cause problems with the way the interface builds itself.
We had a long, if infantile, chat about the interface, which has left me feeling very dubious. I kept picturing my brain being shredded by little wires, until it dribbles out my nose, but from the helpful illustrations Ista Tremmar showed me, the nanites are so small they build a mesh which coats the insides of veins. Computerised cholesterol? Ista Tremmar said that almost all strays have a naturally strong affinity for the Ena, and for some reason this effects the amount of body real estate the interface grows to cover, which confused me again because I don’t understand what the Ena is or its connection with nanites.
Having a large interface may or may not be a good thing, but it sounds like knowing how to use it is what matters. These people spend all their time permanently wired into a really complex virtual world, and they start living there just after they figure out the whole walking thing.
Kuna seems to translate to virtual space, maybe. I desperately need a real dictionary, rather than these vague feelings that what they’re saying matches something I know about. I still can’t quite decide what they mean by the Ena. It could be some kind of other dimension? Or an evil spirit world? The fact that it’s involved in travelling really quickly from one planet to another makes me think of hyperspace, but hyperspace is really just a magic science word people made up, isn’t it?
Saturday, December 22
Meh
I can’t sleep. I’m not even sure I’m supposed to be sleeping right now.
Today was my first session with Sa Lents. I told him I don’t think the people of Earth are descended from Muinans, and he said that other Muinan-settled worlds had forgotten their origins too, and that I was definitely Muinan-descended according to my genes. I refrained from pointing out that that could mean that Muinans are Earth-descended.
The rest of the time was spent on geography. I drew a really bad map of Earth with my finger on the tablecloth screen and wrote down the countries I could remember.
I’m supposed to start on interface learning tomorrow, once they’re sure there’s been no strange issues caused by my language injection, which I reacted to poorly. I am very bored. I wish I’d brought my pippin statue along for company.
Sunday, December 23
Digital mind
No more complaining about being bored. Interface training is giving me some idea just what having a computer in your head means.
The training is aimed at little kids and is as much teaching them to read as it is how to use their interfaces. Just read. They don’t teach kids to write. So obvious, but yet so strange. If you can select a letter from the alphabet quicker than writing one out, why bother with writing? I’m being trained by a complex teaching program which looks like a cuddly lady in her thirties. Sana Dura. It took me way too long to realise she wasn’t an actual real-time person, but eventually I realised that whenever I interrupted her and asked my scrambled questions, she would answer, but then go back to exactly what she’d been saying, in exactly the same tone.
I did exercises for ages – I want out of this room – and the more the basics settle in, the less straightforward the training becomes. At first it was just me and Sana Dura standing in a colourful room, with her telling me to push buttons which I can see before me. I can’t really describe how I push them. I see them floating in front of me and they activate if I want them to. Then I graduated to alphabet and it was a very interactive touch the letter game which put 3D movies to shame. It was as if I was in my room, and also this colourful world of floating letters and flowers and cutesy animals, the two worlds overlaid on each other. I find it very disorienting unless I close my eyes to block out reality.
There are twenty-eight letters in their alphabet.
Monday, December 24
86400
I can turn out the lights! It feels like such an achievement, but so far as I can tell it means that this tutorial program thinks I’m about five now. I can also open the internal doors without having to go poke the locks, and I can make the window go dark like extremely tinted glass. All of it’s extremely simple – it’s just that having run through all these training exercises I’ve had an upgrade to my status so that I can use some of the minor room functions. My injected language has also settled in more – I’m not going to be able to speak it properly any time soon, but it helps my memory during all the infant lessons I’ve been having. Accelerated learning, I’d guess you’d call it, and I’m taking big leaps forward – enough to start asking more complex questions.
During yesterday’s session with Sa Lents we used my watch to work out how long an Earth year is compared to a Tare one. Fortunately, while they use different squiggles for each digit, their number system is apparently the same as ours. I don’t know how I would have managed if they used binary or base three or something. I’m good at maths, but not that good.