Becoming a different organism. Blessed near a different species.
Here’s the thing: joining the Vigil rewired your brain.
Years ago, I’d wondered how Zillif could link to the datasphere when she was paralyzed. How did she work the keys on her access implant? Answer: there were no keys. The implant was a link-seed, embedded directly inside her head.
And now I had one too.
Over the two-week retreat of mushor, the seed would sprout faux-neural tendrils, nano-thin vines threading through my cerebellum like parietal ivy. The creepers were electrotropic, drawn by EM sparks; they’d infiltrate the regions of my gray matter where neurons fired most profusely. The LGN and visual cortex. Broca’s and Wernicke’s language centers. A smattering of sites in the so-called reptile brain, controlling my heart, lungs and digestion. Once those major roots were established, the link-seed would take its time spreading into areas of lesser activity.
My memory.
My muscular coordination.
My dreams.
Two weeks to a brand-new me. And the moment the surgeons closed my skull, a ruthless black clock started ticking. Tick took, tick lock, adapt or die.
They laid me in a room with cool blue walls. An electronic nurse clamped itself to my wrists and ankles — if something went wrong, mere human reflexes wouldn’t be fast enough to save me.
Three times out of a hundred, electronic reflexes weren’t fast enough either.
There’s one brutal reason why few people on Demoth or elsewhere have direct brain-links to the datasphere. The technology is centuries-old, simple, inexpensive… but it takes granite-hard discipline to use without blowing out your frontal lobes.
Each year, for example, a handful of ambitious business execs bribe some less-than-scrupulous surgeon to plant link-seeds in their brains. The witless saps dream of getting an edge on the competition; they salivate at the thought of instant data access, with no risk of being overheard whispering to a wrist-implant. "And discipline?" they say. "I’ve got discipline. I didn’t bludgeon my way to CEO of Vulture Incorporated without having discipline."
Believing a link-seed is just a faster, hookup-free method of direct braingrab.
Two days later, all blissful confidence, they try their first unfiltered download. A market quotation on some stock they think is important. Which drags along quotations on related stocks. Then the whole financial sector. Then the entire planetary market, and markets on other planets, and every corporation prospectus registered with the InHand Exchange, and quarterly economic statistics on every planet in the Technocracy, not to mention major trading partners and up-League envoys…
Like trying to sip from a firehose. Only in this case, the firehose sprays info-acid all over your hippocampus.
The condition is called "data tumor." A possibility I faced myself, lying in that cool blue room.
If I was lucky, the electronic nurse would raise a baffle field before it was too late. Block the incoming flood by broadcasting static — jam me into radio isolation from the datasphere till the surgeons could remove enough of the link-seed that it stopped working. If the nurse was a microsecond slow in detecting a tumor bloom, I would sit there stat-shocked while the link-fibers in my brain got toasty warm from the electrical activity of downloading reams of bumpf.
What do you think happens when a network of molecule-thin wire heats a few hundred degrees inside your brain? Cauterization. Blood brought to the boil. High-pressure juices squirting out the edges of your eye sockets.
The College Vigilant had made me watch a doc-chip of patients collapsing in data tumor. Don’t ask me which was worse: the sights I saw before the camera lens got blotted red, or the sounds I heard after. But neither the sights nor the sounds were pleasant things to remember while lying in a cool blue room.
There was precious little time to feel my way forward — the link-seed spread its tendrils unstoppably, connecting to new neuron clusters every second. Sixty seconds every minute, favoring me with a tinnitus of hiss in my left ear, then a spasm of muscles in my lower back, then a flash enhancement of color sense in my right eye. (Cool blue chilling left, electric blue stabbing right.)
Lying in an empty room, clamped down by a nurse machine that loomed over me like a spider… rippled by sensations that were all in my brain… no clear line between waking hallucinations and dreams when I fell asleep… nightmares of being raped by some metal monster that pinioned my body, impaled my mind…
I want to tell you how it changed me. I do. But like making love or throwing punches in a fistfight, some experiences can’t be broken down into words. There’s no way to tell everything, everything all at once. You have to pretend there’s a throughline, a sequence… when the whole point is it’s happening simultaneously, all your brain cells firing together. Sensations in your body, in your eyes, in your ears, bristling along your skin, rasping in your throat, pressing sharp on your stomach, squeezing around your temples, burning in your chest. And those are just the chance physical offshoots of becoming a link-trellis, transient side effects of the tendrils snaking through your mind. There’s also the gasping moment when a vine tip pierces a pleasure center. Or a pain center. Or, by ugly coincidence of timing, both at once.
Emotions float up. You find yourself crushed with soul-ripper grief, weeping in heartbreak for ten bleary seconds till suddenly everything switches to funny, which infuriates you, which depresses you, which bores you, which makes you feel wise as an angel, then wicked as an imp.
All you can hold on to is your Vigil-trained discipline: keep breathing, one breath at a time, take in what’s tearing you up without trying to fight it. Observe it without trying to process it. Get out of your head, because your head is damn-fool busy. Let everything come, let it pass, let the changes happen.
The seconds pass, sixty seconds to a minute. What you are is just what you are, not what you have to be.
There’s no linear unfolding. With a link-seed, input comes to your brain in gestalt, an instantaneous neural activation matrix: not this-then-that, but a billion neuron clusters simultaneously receiving their piece of the whole, a single gush of comprehension. Everything all at once.
On the third day of mushor, third day of delirium, I nearly lost my grip. Battered weary by emotions, delusions, physical jiggery-pokery (itches, stabbing pains, dead numbness), wanting to shout, "Stop, leave me be, let me rest!"… my mind suddenly filled with the image of a peacock’s tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a hundred eyes wide-open, watching me with all the calm in the universe. Colors fanned over every grain of my vision; I couldn’t feel my body, no artificial prod to laugh or cry, nothing in me but the sight of that tail, reaching high as the stars and low as the planet’s core, filling my thoughts, my world.
And the sound of it: feathers rattling, demanding attention. Look at me. Look at me.
Placid. Even affectionate.
I don’t know how long the moment lasted. Long enough. The peacock eventually fractured into another donkeydump of sensations, smells that whistled, bright kicks to the stomach (each one a different color)… but I could handle the new barrage. I was surfacing now, swimming toward the light; I’d passed through the center of mushor and was coming out the other side.
At the time, it puzzled me why the eye of my personal hurricane was a peacock’s tail. I didn’t have long to ponder the question — too many distracting fireworks going on inside my head. Later, looking back, I shrugged off the vision as random mental floss, some piece of neural flotsam my brain happened to seize on as a life preserver.
I was flagrantly, hubrisly, witlessly wrong.
At the end of mushor, my brain was still in one piece. Not boiled in its own juices. And cleaned-purged-regenerated, the way you feel after a pummeling-hard work out.
But different. Transformed.