MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 5

The first week was rough, but a little coaching, coaxing and brow beating, and I thought they were getting the hang of it. I'd have to logon at least daily to keep Dimwit on track, but hopefully I could keep her employed. Blondie was now spending as much time reviewing her Cap logs, application functions, and work diagnostics as she was diagnostically analyzing her appearance from 360 degree angles, so maybe a promotion was possible in the next year or so. Dimples, I could leave on her own, but I was a bit weary to. She had no troubles at work, but I worried there might be at home. I worried one day she wouldn't come home.

I made sure to make time for myself. After all, thats what this whole thing was supposed to be about to begin with. To free myself from the slavery of workplace algorithm. Rules, subject to inputs and outputs, followed by more rules, requirements and feedback from constant monitoring, that turned human beings into nodes. I wanted my freedom. Not because I fancied a lifestyle of pagan indulgence but because I wanted my mind and imagination to be free. I wanted my relationships with people to be more than transactional interfaces within a mathematical formula. I wanted human connection.

Sure, I lived the hedonistic lifestyle intermittently. Drinking, drugs and sex had their part. After all, at our base level we are animals and life is short. But my greatest pleasure toy has always been books. Traditional books were illegal of course but the government rarely enforced the ban. There was hardly any need to. Very few people insisted on reading a book when KnowLoads could stream all the information they needed while sleeping.

Me on the other hand craved the hours of imagination books fed me. Their thick pages and boxy texture and the roughness of the dried ink on the dry paper. I navigated through them, staring at the thin cover, burying myself in the middle of the bound sheets, and emerging through the back cover, fully read, fulfilled and satisfied with story. VisoSummaries and direct uploads, KnowLoads, never did it for me. I needed to sip it. Browse it. Caress the words. Reading had always been about the foreplay. I wanted to savor it, contemplate it, and reflect on it later.

People who were limited to KnowLoads, that is ninety percent of the population, had infinite access to facts, figures and knowledge, but no understanding. They simply received whatever it was they were required to upload by school, work or government directive. They never made their own connections and rarely sought out knowledge for its own sake. They lacked curiosity.

Now that I was free I could read again. I could spend time with myself, inside my imagination, and outside with trees. I could use the tools of the ThinkingCap and the other marvels of engineering to create. They could still be my tools but I refused to be theirs.

My biggest challenge now was to decide how to spend my time. I had a giant blank slate in front of me and now I had to fill it with something. Up until this point someone had always filled it for me. I merely had to color in the boxes and even then they told me which boxes and which colors. My whole life had been inside ThinkingCaps and less technologically sophisticated mechanisms like school buildings, commuting routes, community clubs and offices. Not all Caps and not all square, but boxes all the same. Now, confronted with my own decisions, a blank slate, I realized I was also blank. I didn't know who I was. Not without someone to give me a name, a number or a purpose. That purpose, that self-definition, would have to my first task.

I know my father had been living this way for years. An OffGridder, he'd had to fend for himself. He'd refused to follow the rules so didn't even qualify for the BasicIncomeDignity Act stipends. The one's that force you to KnowLoad propaganda, adhere to almost prison-like daily schedules for sleeping and eating, and forbid you to consume any vice, including media material deemed "unhealthy". How he survived like this I had no idea. I was pretty sure he didn't have an army of clones working for him. Not that he wasn't smart enough. He just had more ethics than me. He wasn't the kind of guy to go behind someone's back when he disagreed. He had to put his finger in their eye when he told them. As for me, I had no problem concealing my hatred beneath a falsetto mask. It was a lot more fun. If I wanted to screw someone, or something in this case, then I preferred to do it in a self-serving way.

Maybe this was why my dad told me to stay put and not follow his path. He knew I didn't have the stomach to do it honestly. Why that matters so much to him I may never know. So there he sits, on the other side of the city, living in squalor, apparently able to find some kind of purpose because he's been doing it for twenty years, but separated from his only blood. Something told me I'd have to go and find him. Talking in Spheres wasn't enough. I had to touch him. Hug him. Look into his eyes to really know. To really know my purpose.

The doorbell chimed and I knew my Genies were home from the office. They'd been at it for twelve hours and must be exhausted. I'd give them another few weeks before I told them they're going to have to start second jobs. I already calculated that I could double my nest egg five years ahead of schedule if I doubled their shifts.

Dimwit walked in and plumped down on the couch. Shut her eyes and almost nodded off to sleep. Blondie went into the kitchen and poured herself a bourbon. I'd permitted them some small vices to release the pressure. I'd keep an eye on it, but if I wound them too tightly from the beginning, they might burst. If one of them went Postal I'd definitely get caught. That wouldn't be good at all.

Dimples sat at the dining room table and opened a book. A paperback. For a second I wondered if I should forbid it. I considered all the consequences. She already has access to the entire database of human knowledge and experience, along with a foundation of carefully designed memories through which to filter it. Certainly the government considered fiction books harmful when they outlawed them under the KnowUpload_Truth and Information_Anti ConspiracyNews Act of 2073, but how much damage could possibly be caused by reading a novel? She could have already uploaded hundreds of them by now. I hadn't been monitoring her thought streams that carefully. Unfortunately, looking into longterm memories wasn't something I had the technology for yet, but knowing her, she'd probably been uploading everything she could for the last week. Did I really have anything to worry about because she was now sitting quietly at a table reading a paperbound book, page by page, taking hours and days instead of minutes?

I didn't know the answer but it made me nervous anyway. She'd taken her ThinkingCap off so I had to inquire with the old fashioned method.

"What's that you're reading over there JennaBerry One?"

She looked up at me. Her pretty blue eyes blinked. Innocent. The eyes and expression of a seven year old. Not that of a twenty-five year old face that held those eyes or the rapidly expanding mind that sat behind them. She almost looked sweet and for a moment I looked upon her as if she were my daughter, or maybe just a little sister. I felt a tinge of guilt that I was exploiting her. Guilt that I was threatened by her instead of trying to support her.

"Just a book," she said.

I waited and held my gaze. Wanted to know if she thought she had anything to hide. Then it occurred to me that she might be wondering if I thought she had something to hide. She might be wondering if I was suspicious and if so why. Then she held the book up to show me the cover.

"Ninety-Eighty Four, by George Orwell," she said.  I looked at the sinister orange cover as she held the book up in her hands. The dark penetrating eyes of Big Brother stared back at me.