[Endorphin]

Hello All! I've been writing this novel for some time now, it was originnaly written in Russian, my native lang, now I'm translating it into English because I feel that I have a better command of its written form. Crits welcome, etc. (Please note: I am mindful that the text needs corrections)


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The Fourth Reading.

Morning


He woke up at 6:57AM, as always just three minutes before the alarm clock would ring him up. "I've got things to do today", was his thought as he drifted half way back to sleep. New hardware that would allow placing phone calls without raising head is supposed to be delivered to Replicor on this day. As a matter of fact, necessity to raise a hand would be made redundant as well, just as it has been with many other novelty gadgets his office managed to acquire over the last two years while Clark has been listed on the roster of its employee staff.

The question of what to have for breakfast was beyond his scope of interest this morning. Clark set the kitchen to random, and 20 minutes after waking up he was sited behind a table with fresh-brewed coffee and hot sandwiches. His mind was preoccupied with the question of half-life period for the instinct to grab phone handles that his colleagues were sure to have after installation of the Alpha Sense In Voice (ASIV). That system was designed to interpret certain patterns of human brain's Alpha waves as a command to establish communication with a sought partner. "We should at least put out some baskets of chocolates for the transitional period. Otherwise the office guys might just not give a chance to get any work done at all."

Softening the turmoil brought on by integration of new systems from Parabellum, the intellectual property owner, has always been a hot topic for Clark. Every time he overheard a discussion of any one of their systems he would get a feeling of having one's heart and mind polished with fine sandpaper. For him there was no way to get the right kind of emotion on that subject.

Every client who received even one of their products would get his own, unique, notion of how the acquired novelty changed their life. Their chatter could usually be summed up as a confabulation of how pleasurable it had been to forget about the Sisyphean toil of the "days before", how quickly they needed an improvement, and how eagerly they were looking forward to completing a project they would not have dared to start without it. These three or four points were main criteria for evaluating success and effectiveness of any system's integration, albeit that that self-evaluation process itself has never bore even the slightest value on anyone's memory.

Even now, at this moment of digging up a deep philosophical thought, Clark couldn’t help but feel a certain irony in that he caught himself referring to his employers as clients again. This habit began with an event that took place some ten years ago. Reminiscences of what has happened then were not entirely unlike a fisherman’s tale, with the catch growing larger and heavier as years went by. This could have gone on forever were it not for need to put an end to making things up and take a moment to refresh the memory on what has really taken place.

And what took place, assuming it was not too late to instill trust in own memory, happened in a meeting room, or rather a huge, ostentatiously decorated hall, on the top floor of a fashionable high-rise American Calcium Inc. (AMCA) headquarters. Head of that joint, who could be differentiated from god only in that the god never thought that he was head of AMCA, decided to show the gathered public that he was in powers to commit a feat of telekinesis and force all present creditors to put their signatures on the loan extension deal typed up by his staff in advance.

Preparation for the trick took some half-hour of fiery talk bent around the high-flying topic of organic infrastructure growth during the post-depression renaissance. Clark, who was present there as a banking analyst’s assistant, to this day could have sworn with blood that the speech was like a voice-over for colorfully flashy cartoon rolling through everyone’s inner vision - almost like being in a hazy daydream with sound and video worth five thousand watt of existential mental power. Yea, that guy surely had something.

As soon as he was ready to snap his fingers following the pronouncement of “ladies and gentlemen, let’s pick up your pens”, the chair underneath his behind snapped in pieces ensuring the boss a hard landing flat on his back, eyes gazing into shimmering fluorescent light up on the high ceiling.

Clark would not have believed himself that the chair malfunction was of his doing were it not for a message he received later that evening. While busy sorting out paperwork related to the day’s events, chuckling on the memory of passionate performance about how all them goddamn office furniture manufacturers should be shot and hung twice, an announcement of “job well done” came through television broadcast. When Clark raised his eyes to the set, a lighthouse icon flashed on the screen: this was to be believed. While personal messages in broadcast television were not such a rarity in 2033, this particular one struck Clark’s mind like a ball lightning discharging into a barbed wire fence, sending his serotonin levels into high overdrive for days to come.

There was no need to feel a helpless clerk in the world full of large and hungry sea creatures anymore. From then on forwards, employers were clients, and clients, oftentimes, were guinea pigs. Moreover, this event heralded to Clark his initiation into Parabellum, that new-age cloak-and-dagger network of high-tech geeks entrusted with inventing goodies that make the new economy run. Enable betterment of people’s lives bearing no concerns for nuances of initial public offerings and meat grinders of patent registration.

For Clark to have retained this hybrid trick of a circus clown tamer in his head for so long and still remember well what he was up to doing on this Earth was in itself a kind of performer’s best-known number: loud music and out-of-place remarks – solo tour’s companions, friends and colleagues – the audience. When a question of “what time is it?” elicits “I’m not in your time zone to tell you that right now”, it is inevitable that the crowd develops certain reservations vis-à-vis its counterpart’s ability to deal in simple terms with simple issues. And that kind of eccentricity was the knee-jerk reaction Clark could not bring himself to rid off his personality.


When after a brief moment of reminiscence Clark returned his mind to the thoughts of the upcoming day’s work, his inner vision gave off a picture whereby the Parabellum’s processor of gesticulation and mimicry decoder was accelerated into the year 2067 – the upper limit of the timeframe within which the behavioral matrix of potential ASIV users remained visibly certain. That process, in the particular case of the system being integrated on this day, was necessary to calculate which, even barely perceptible, gestures and mimical movements preceded user’s placement of a telephone call. “Now all that’s left to do is pour in some sand [design a microchip] and order a production line in Taiwan someplace. Almost seems easy.”

What bothered Clark most at moments like this was the fact that Parabellum habitually accelerated its processors to the number of years divisible by five and the year now was 2043. It meant that that computation was done last year without his knowledge. Sometimes he was irritated by the idea that such scaled-up calc work was done without him being in-the-know of things. In a case like this all that was left of his responsibilities was to “bring the goodies to the masses”, as was a favorite saying of one his Parabellum’s protégé’s whom Clark has never met in his life.

But on this day Clark’s feelings were not at all like being irritated with powers that be. More like foretaste of initiation into adulthood of Chiribaya’s tribal offspring; the moment one gets to catch his first female prey in the jungles’ meadow after his thirteenth birthday. “Did they have to make them their wives in the afterwards? Did they equal their year to 365 days, like we do? Some causes to wonder.” At any rate, today Parabellum was supposed to affirm with financial involvement and public image its interest in the mathematical model of estimating variants of alteration of psychological characteristics in time.

That model implied creation of an algorithm for parsing the underlying psychosomatic functions responsible for gesticulation and mimicry with the purpose of being used in adaptive control electronic devices. Clark used graffiti paint for chalk to draw it on a corrugated steel fence after drinking tequila to half-suicidal state at a sweaty rave outside of San-Jose some five years ago. Ironically, the question that bothered him most about the event was whether or not he engaged in the act of body fluid exchange with that striking broad in woven silk shirt at that party or not. “Betcha beefy-t became woven silk in your head with the passage of time,” was how he reminded himself of human memory’s fallacy when it came to the gazillionth episode in the “wish it were so” series.

Clark flipped his cup upside down over the head and waited for three counted drops to fall into his open mouth. “What’s next?” His train of thoughts was gathering steam for the day ahead. “Could it be that that whole deal with the telephones is just another step in the test-and-delay stage before this model gets to be chosen as the underpinning of all ‘adaptive control’ semiconductors?” Thoughts like these were not entirely pleasant to entertain because of the flavor of overwhelming magnitude they gave off.

On the other hand it was a sort of dread and sweetness rolled into one – some exotic taste. This year, just like in the recent past, to economically support semiconductor manufacturing in Southeast Asia, every “western” family would have to purchase at least half a dozen plastic toys for kids or other similar implements made in that same region. Sweetness of the thought laid in that if rather than acquiring masses of plastic they’d get one or two high tech electronic gadgets instead then those same responsible members of the society would help reduce environmental pollution with unbiodegradable waste materials by some eight to ten percent per year.

And that would have been a modest estimate on Clark’s mind. The dread of it was brought on by mental images of having to wake up in cold sweat from dreams of gun-wielding, starved-up-and-bankrupt toy factory people in Chinese Cultural Revolution-era peasant suits demanding to know “what have you done with my plastic’-n-rubber!”.

Television screen in Clark’s apartment showed live satellite images, floating from nightly Sinai Peninsula eastwards toward pre-dawn shores of Japan. Clark made a quick swinging motion with his head toward his right shoulder and shut the door behind his modest digs on the twenty-seventh floor. Load-bearing iron frame of his apartment building served as a Doppler radar for local airports to detect speed of objects approaching from over the Pacific Ocean.

The television interpreted this head movement as a command to save energy and, given that its infrared seeker showed that no one was present inside the apartment, disconnected provider’s data port and shut off main power. After cooling off for a few minutes it will switch its air filters from the internals to the room air outside and catch dust until the owner calls to play again.

Parabellum


Bus stops were set out along an alley with a line of lone-standing thin like twigs poles supporting overhead electronic displays - a picture that could be paralleled to a bed of palm trees with a harvest of voluminous coconuts. Third display along his way flashed Clark’s destination point with the time of departure in twelve minutes and another twenty before the arrival. Enough time to smoke one cigarette before it’s time to get going – just as the signal his watch sent out when he approached the station was preset to arrange.

Smoking before the morning bus had gotten to be more than a ritual - a kind of conditional reflex for Clark, daily routine to take a trip down the memory lane to the time when many years ago, when the whole of regional economy was bottom-dipping into recession, the wonderful system of intelligent public transport control came to see the light of day.

Clark was a kid back then, to be exact, but old enough to understand and remember the aspects of time when taking personal transport and vocational rights for granted was moving out of the present picture into collective reminisce of the things passed. Without being overly despondent, the good people of Pasadena, where Cark grew up, had very few things to keep themselves occupied in the year 2017 aside from feeding on canned food, mindlessly roaming around, and taking turns in keeping streets clean and plants watered.

Their mayor was an intellectually-active chap who wished to do more than sit and wait out the reigning depression. To try new things on the social side of life he signed a decree to fund and operate a fleet of city transport on a scheme nicknamed the “Free Hunting”.

“Free Hunting” meant that rolling around town all day without a specific route the bus driver collected the passengers at random and wheeled about until they disembarked at whichever other stop they felt like being out on the street again. After disembarking, many of them would then get on the next bus and continue onward their journey of the day without destination.

Not all took to liking the idea right away for reason that some still thought that they had places to go and be quick in getting there. If someone‘d shout up at the driver “let’s get to where I gotta go, now!”, spreading ripples of anxiety at all the good people present, then, well, yes, the bus would have followed there. Only the betaker of such a fresh idea, befallen onto the heads of all present, would then have had predisposed himself to questioning on how is it that his destination was more important, if not at all useless, than that of those who’d kept silent throughout his shouting storm.

Of course in cases of emergency, which oftentimes amounted to the likes of feeding one’s cat or visiting grandma; any such bets were quickly settled. However, many present at the “where to?” debates of that time were there simply because they had neither other places to go nor other things to do. Henceforth came about the idea of casting votes when deciding which route a bus should take on that particular day. As soon as fifteen or so bored souls pack in, everyone awaits in anticipation as the voting takes place to find out whether his day’s desired destination gets to be chosen as the one uniformly accepted by all.

To have practiced this exercise in democracy at a different period of economic cycle would have been an invitation for a large amount of daily troubles. But Clark felt safe in his assumption that for that period in history, the willingness, the human drive to practice the least amount of social interest in making a decision for the direction of the day’s bus route – quite possibly unbeknownst to those who had practiced it – were the necessary ingredients for fueling the new type of change. A kind of shift where deterioration in economic conditions spurred technological development capable of forever transforming ways of life for millions, not merely trumping things up with a new-button feature when “what else could you possibly want?” is the reigning metaphor of the era.

Parabellum, in the meantime, being a fledgling organization submersed to the darkness of a total lack of any prospective orders other than the prospective of sinking even deeper into the darkness, pitched an offer to the Pasadena City Council to run a pilot project for engineering an intelligent city transport control system. Running off its last remaining resources, Parabellum conducted diligent analysis of sociological phenomena whereby groups formulated the decision-making process as a function flowing in from variables of separate individuals’ wishes and expectations. Reducing probability of having misunderstandings, impacts, and errors among the passengers was taken as the highest criteria for the project’s success. And the latter was done for a reason - the reason being that the system was being engineered for the individuals using it - not the own checkbook in the pocket (as undoubtedly would have been the case if Microsoft were involved).

After correlational analysis, followed project proposal, then development, field tests, and finally, in the year 2019 – full scale integration of automatic, real-time control of city transport routing. The system was never assigned a cute acronym-like name, but its success, rooted in its never-before-seen efficiency, proved to be so staggering that within only several years, even as the economic crisis was bottoming-out, and some fuel for personal use began to trickle back into the consumer market - even those who could afford individual travel were giving up their car keys in favor of luxury buses and trains. The unthinkable had happened: driving started to become but unfashionable.

Industrialists cleverly seized up the moment: scores of automobile plants were refitted for public transport manufacture. Touching up on the car basics, refusal to drive individually was driven not only by having a more attractive alternative of a soft-seated gateway into the world of books and magazines wirelessly fed to your pocket cloth-like screen, but by rising costs and declining value of tastes as well.

There were, to be certain, exceptions, as many families and individuals with special needs were better off on their own when getting from A to B. For them there were functional, albeit bureaucratic, schemes for tax breaks, fuel reimbursements, and other forms of social aid. But most dramatic changes in transformation of the relationship between people and their transport had come to not so much the social as to the economic plane. In the era when “work-at-home” was as widespread a habit as smoking in the 1960’s and available intracity parking was a thing of the past, scores of needless roads and adjacent parking spaces were disappearing like trees in a wildfire, replaced by private gardens and low story housing.

Some bankrupt car plants have been converted to warehouses stocked up with non-perishable foods in anticipation of next such transformational turning point when, as had just been the case, sufficiency of provisional supplies was a really headachy worry.

In the aftermath, Parabellum, being the organization that played not the least significant role in the decline of automotive industry, had gotten itself enough charge of moral worth to afford being insistent in its aims to push through any one or another of its ideas, as it saw fit, as long as it was for the sake of eating right and living healthy; timeframes and deadlines open for discussion and seeking consensus.

It got its start some four years before the Pasadena’s project with an experimental neural network of closed circuit cameras – a system that was later assigned name “Acies”. Acies comprised a collection of surveillance cameras trained to sniff out objects using radio frequency identification technology or cellular phone signal detection. With the least amount of manual user input it sought out and visually displayed the location being searched by the user while at the same time giving the ability to survey the outlining areas and a step-by-step timeframe of the neural path leading up to object identification.

Since beyond their numerical identification majority of the objects were anonymous to the system, Acies allowed some of the most amazing television watching experience to date. Meditating in front of its screen at times invoked a simulative feeling of being able to see the physical location in space of one’s transcendental thoughts.

Radio frequency identification tags used in training of the cameras were not entirely dissimilar to those used for tracking groceries in a supermarket, or letters in mail. However composition of complex numerical codes applied to the tags was in itself a science of its own. By ways of calculating a combination of numerological and quantum algorithms, Acies selected the camera feed most suitable for the viewer’s topical agenda from amongst a massive current flow of data within the comprised network.

For a number of reasons, not least of which relating to system complexity and concerns for privacy in open-access environment, Acies’ practical use was limited to aiding in traffic control and crime-fighting technologies. A presentation to demonstrate its effectiveness was cast whereby with the help of a pocket computer located on island in South Pacific, which at that time was not yet in imminent danger of disappearing under rising sea levels, control of traffic lights in Minneapolis was run for a two week period.

Irrefutable results in improved traffic flow and reduced congestion were supported by concrete figures as well as a whole legion of happy-faced drivers. Sensational character of Acies trial was, however, eclipsed by the news of biodegradable plastic hitting the market. Compared to traffic jams in Minnesota this was indeed a revolutionary event. But the main role played by Acies came later, during development of biosensory communications technologies – means of communication where human organism’s biometrical parameters are factored in during establishment of electronic communication parameters.

The way in which Parabellum avoided becoming a household name still remains a big mystery. The company, if such term is to be applied, is registered in San-Francisco as an organization offering consulting services in local area network layout and vacuum cleaner repair. There is actually an office with address and telephone number. It is jam-packed full of defunct computer equipment and broken vacuum cleaners in a difficult to find warehouse that was renovated and converted to offices by USF arts majors as a retribution to the city for squatting it during the depression. Should anyone manage to reach it by phone, a receptionist with digitally-alerted voice would explain that none of the presented offers or services are available at the moment; but getting through would have been the real challenge.

When mentioning Parabellum it makes more sense to make emphasis on the people rather than the umbrella organization that unites them. Office in Cisco is, as a matter of fact, someone’s idea of fun to make it look like the company is busy doing real work. The almost two thousand people that comprise Parabellum are, just like all other self-sufficient members of modern society, busy spending their workdays getting on with the jobs, solving interpersonal problems, self-advancement, and giving adequate input to the economy. They live in different cities and countries, solve unsimilar tasks, do not drink from the same coffee pot and share no such common attributes of corporatism as meeting rooms and electronic email domain.

All these superficial shortcomings, however, could not in any way diminish their sense of belonging. For each and single one, being part of Parabellum means moving along the tried-out progress curve of the same phase – the process to which several banal comparisons may be applied: wine that gets better with age, and repetition that is mother of all learning to name a couple. Thoughts that unite, flowing into proposed ideas, down to joint efforts in development and implementation – Parabellum more and more resembled a man-made equivalent of the hydrologic cycle.

When abstract idea is nurtured to condition and it is time to roll up the sleeves and splash it out into the light of day – assembly lines, garages, and workshops are broken out – Parabellum becomes much the same with a wound-up mechanism; a train locomotive, a computing center, and a blast furnace – all rolled into one.

Culmination was in materializing the technology on a niche chosen by Parabellum to be most suitable for the purpose – usually an organization treated not a lot unlike a guinea pig. Were it ever openly stated so - the latter would have been a point of contention for many high-flying birds at the top of the guinea pig organizational hierarchy. But there was little choice to have: “implementational operations”, as they were called, were always done with the utmost nobody-knows-anything secrecy mode, hashed. Under certain flow of events it was not unusual for the organizations themselves to get in the position of believing that the materialized innovation was of their own doing – same as if a lab mouse declared itself inventor of the injected serum.

To Parabellum members responsible for running field tests - the picture could not have looked any more different. Exactly with that mission in mind Clark was heading to the Replicor’s office on this day. They used to be a huge marketing material manufacturer and after the crisis were quick enough to adapt to making designer electrical fixtures: sockets, lamps, plugs, wires. Under the curtain of existential confusion Clark had to try, test, and report about initial field run of the intra-office telephone system that promised to render dial-pads and headsets obsolete.


Thanks for reading!
Endorphin.