Page 6 - Effable Encounters

Jack-in-the-box

expected to stay late to perform needed experiments uninterrupted.
He cast about in his imagination for a subject: a child would be best,
or an adult of limited intellect; someone whose chains of inference
could easily be followed, link by link. Could he recruit a member of
the cleaning crew? A security guard? An administrator? Tempting
though the prospects were, he realized that using any other human
might get him in big trouble—as well generating premature publicity.
Certainly none of the people in his field could be trusted to keep his
secret, once revealed. In order to protect his precious discovery, he
left the crucial portion of his algorithm out of the program; it would
have to be entered by the user, and he was the only user who knew it.
That string of characters was locked up tight in his head; he
destroyed all other notes.
Around nine o’clock, Jack reluctantly conceded that he would have
to test his theory on himself. The laboratory was quiet; if anyone else
were around, Jack was not aware of it. His laboratory animals had
come through the loading procedure unscathed; it seemed to him the
risk was quite acceptably minimal. He allocated sufficient storage
space on the computer disk drives for a human mind and wired
himself into the telencephalocorder.
The device would render him unconscious while it scanned, coded,
and transferred the totality of his mind at that moment. A preset
hookup fed the data into the machine; upon completion, Jack’s new
program would activate, recreating all the implicit and explicit mental
connections it had found in his neural fibers.
He positioned himself and pushed the button.
They awoke within a microsecond of each other, ecstatic. Jack-in-
the-box realized who he was as soon as he found himself unable to
receive sensory stimuli or stimulate motor activity. Jack-in-the-body
had no concern other than to activate communications with the
computer. He did so and began the same series of physiological tests
he had used on the animal subjects.
“Ouch! Stop that!” squawked Jack-in-the-box through the voice
synthesizer.
Jack-in-the-body quickly discontinued the mild cortical shock and
enabled his own digital voice encoder. “You felt that? Where did you
feel that?” He fumbled for a clipboard.

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