pantelepathy

My heart was beating fast, and all the motions of my hands felt wrong... as if I hadn't ever learned to properly use them, and was limited to trial-and-error fumbling as I put on the black headset. I was nervous. This felt big... like, bigger than sex. I sat down after getting the helmet on properly. We had our chairs facing each other, so that we could look at each other's faces during the whole thing. She looked excited. I wondered if she was as nervous as I was. I'd soon find out.

I'd ordered the EMNSA when the first pre-orders were available, partly out of a desire to support the project. "EMNSA" stands for "Electro-magnetic neural sensor and actuator". The helmets were able to both detect and stimulate brain activity. This could be used for several things, depending on what software you run. For example, there were programs which would monitor your brain activity and correct it when it went outside of set parameters. This could be used for meditation or therapy. The helmet could also record dreams or waking ideas for replay later. Most people, however, were more interested in the two-helmet possibilities, like the experiment I was about to try out.

There are many different ways to hook one human brain up to another. The easiest is known as a "sync": you set a brain region to receive signals from the corresponding brain region in another person. For example, you might sync your visual lobes, auditory, touch, motor control, or all of the above. For safety reasons, the EMNSA helmet is incapable of providing very strong stimulation. This is mostly for the best anyway, since we don't usually want to totally override the existing signals in any particular brain region. For example, if I were to sync my visuals with someone else's, I would only see a weak shadow; almost like the easily dismissed visuals you can create in your imagination.

I had done that a few times, with friends and room mates. We always did two-way syncs: it felt unfair to read thoughts from another person without opening yourself up to be read. I had also synced taste, sound, and other senses. Not touch, yet, though.... that felt too personal to do lightly. I also hadn't tried motor control with anyone.

Today, though, I would cross all the boundaries: a full-brain sync. I really wasn't sure about this. I tried to quiet that part of my mind, though, knowing that she would shortly know everything I was thinking.

Chrissy was... a girl from class. I didn't know her that well, actually, which only made this weirder. I'd been talking about the EMNSA with another classmate, and she'd been very excited to try it. She said that she really wanted one, but hadn't put the money together yet. I was happy to oblige, because I was a little bit attracted to her, and... when you get right down to it, this was really crazy. I thought we'd just sync vision or something, taking turns closing our eyes and seeing out of the other person's. The whole-brain sync was her idea, and I should have turned it down immediately.

But I hadn't.

Right.

So, having donned my helmet, I selected the whole-brain sync alignment from a menu in the helmet software, and clicked "run".

###

I immediately felt a little difference in emotion, as my nervousness and her excitement mixed together. She reacted to my nervousness with concern, and I reacted to this with more concern, and we quickly looked at each other. After staring for a few seconds, there was a sudden feeling that everything was OK, and we both started to smile. I reached up to scratch an itch, and saw her (in a faint visual overlay) do the same thing, and saw her see me do the same thing, and saw her see the same thing, and we both stopped in surprise before our hand reached its destination. I laughed. She laughed. Then we both started to say, at the same time, "Was it your--?" and we both stopped, to let the other one talk, before realizing that both of us were asking whose itch it originally was. There was no need to talk, so I didn't know what to say next. At a loss, we decided to simply wave at each other. It was perfect, like a mirror... but the extra image in his eyes, the one coming from her, wasn't mirrored. So, I saw her waving at me, with a faint shadow of me waving back at her with the opposite arm.

We stopped waving and started doing more complex arm movements, but the spell was soon broken when she started doing dance moves. They were too complex for me to easily copy, even with the shadow of her motor cortex being projected onto mine. I could have tried harder to imitate her, but instead, I said "Dance skills need a more professional sync," and smiled.

Although there are broad similarities in the different brain regions, the fine-level structures are the result of what a person has learned over their lifetime, and so will be different even between genetically identical people. Because of this, a really good sync requires software that observes the two different brains for a longer period of time, identifying how different stimuli are represented as activation patterns, and building up a dictionary to translate from one brain to the other. The more abstract a concept, the more difficult this sort of translation becomes, until finally you get to the point where ideas cannot be transferred because one person hasn't learned about a subject or thinks about it in a dramatically different way. My machine wasn't even trying to do this sort of thing.

"We could make it work with a little practice," she said. Now that we were thinking complex thoughts based on personal background material, the connection felt much more alien. The ideas in her sentence connected with different ideas in my own head, since the map was bad. These disconnected ideas didn't form a sensible concept, though, so they slipped away like dream-memories. Her thoughts were a background of confusion, rolling around with an impossible logic of their own. I was observing this, pushing the chatter of her thoughts back by focusing on my own.

"I think mostly in images," I said, voicing some of those thoughts.

The feelings coming across the connection from her got a little more serious, and I saw her look into my eyes again (saw it from both directions). She started to say something, but then stopped. Her thoughts got more intense for a little while; still not enough to really cause me problems (they probably couldn't), but enough for me to feel briefly confused. I half-heard a sound:

<<I don't think in images. I don't know what I think in, normally. I can think in sound for you, though, if it helps.>>

This put a big grin on my face. This technology was cool. It let you experience things you just couldn't experience any other way.

It wasn't her voice. I had experienced this when syncing sound with a friend of mine: I could communicate by imagining talking, and he had told me that what he heard wasn't my voice. I could actually use any voice that I chose, as long as I could imagine it. He told me that he couldn't imagine sounds that easily, though. When he tried, I couldn't even tell he was doing anything. All I heard was what was coming in his ears. So, this was the first time that I got to hear someone's inner voice like that.

I glanced down at her breasts, and she looked at my chest. I snapped my eyes back up immediately, and so did she; I was determined to ignore the slip-up and go on as if it hadn't happened. It put me back into "this is crazy" mode, though, and I was confronted with the paradox of trying not to be too obvious about my attraction while hooked up to a machine that shared our every thought.

Heh.

[Continued here.]