Chapter 229: the Eyes Have It

Monday, May 23, 2005 (Continued)

We left the cellphone where it was to discuss this new idea.

#2: <How did 3B make fingertips provide tactile feedback?>

#6: <We didn't "make" them do it. We just assumed they were fingertips, and they obligingly came with a sense of touch.>

#2: <Yeah, same with us. It was a positive preconception, like the three-foot radius from our center was a limiting preconception.>

#8: <Agreed. The very first time we created a light blob we were visualizing a lightbulb, so that's what we got, even down to the same color.>

#1: <Same here. So what do we do? Do we create an ordinary blob and try to see with it, or try to create some sort of special blob, or what?>

#6: <My guess is that it's simple rather than complex. With NP it worked immediately. NP-points 'knew' how to receive the information, they 'knew' how to transmit it to us, and our brains know how to process touch information so there was nothing to learn the way there's been with some of the new skills we've discovered - like managing the accelerations of flying objects around. I figure remote sight will be simple too because it's involves preexisting functions. Whatever the transmission process is, there's no reason to believe it won't work with light. It's just information, same as for touch. Our brains know how to process sight. The only question is whether blobs can see light as well as send it, or whether that requires a special type of blob. I somehow don't think there are two types of NP, with or without tactile feedback. When we create NP-points we don't think about anything like that, so I guess we don't need to do it with light blobs either. We should be able to create one and have it work.>

#2: <What color and brightness? Size probably doesn't matter, because that doesn't affect NP's tactile ability, other than their obviously have less contact area if they're smaller, but that shouldn't affect blobs.>

#5: <Let's create one the same size as our own eyes, as that might help with our believing it's possible. The color question is interesting. It might be that blobs can only see the frequency they transmit, which would give some very weird results. If we used a red light blob, we might not notice a blue phone. We'd have to scout with red, green and blue light blobs to make sure we didn't miss anything important.>

#6: <I think there are problems with what you just said. First I don't believe the blob's sight will be restricted to the frequency they transmit. If it can send one frequency back to us, it should be able to send all of them, because the process is identical. That's just a guess, and probably a hopeful one, but if it doesn't work out that way we could put a very bright white blob in the doorway out of our room, so it fully illuminates the next room.> (My minds understand that "white blob" means three superimposed red, green and blue blobs.)

#1: <You've given this the most thought #6, do you want first honors?>

#6: <Okay. I'll create an ordinary, eye-sized, yellow light blob. Yellow just seems better because lightbulbs are yellow. I know that's probably not relevant, but it'll make the blob seem more natural to me, which might help me mentally. Then I'll close our eyes and then I'll try to see what the blob's seeing. If that doesn't work after a while, I'll open our eyes and try again. I think having our eyes closed might be easier, otherwise we have two different sights going on at once, which might look like a superimposition or maybe our eyes would somehow block the blob from working. I'm also worried about the 360 spherical effect. That's going to be super-freaky if that's how we see.>

#8: <I was thinking about that too. Seeing in a sphere would be very useful if we could process it, but it'd have to be very disorienting, and it could produce some massive distortions, like those wide-angle cameras do.>

#1: <I'll be happy if you have distortion or disorientation problems, because that'll mean you're receiving sight from the blob. If getting used to it takes practice, then we'll practice. If it's VERY upsetting, maybe we could have some NP-fingertips carry a cloth over top of the light blob, and have the blob float along at floor level, that way it'll get a narrower field of view, which is what we're much more used to processing.>

#6: <Good idea. I'll give it a try now.>

#6 created the light blob. Eye-sized, yellow and about as bright as the light bulb overhead, that way it could see whether it needed its own light source or needed another source. He closed our eyes, then...

Suddenly we were all seeing ourself. And an instant later, ourself with a new expression on our face. Not of happiness, as you might've expected, but horror at how bad our dehydration made us look. It was such a shock we lost center, and our horror and excitement meant it took us several seconds to calm down and get back on the job.

We braced ourselves for the sight of our face, and recreated the sight. Speaking about the physics of the process, it was very much the same as a normal view. It was full color rather than just yellow. There was more yellow than usual because of the yellow the blob was giving off, but our ordinary eyes would have seen more yellow too because of that. The perspective was ordinary, i.e., was not a spherical view, and there was no wide-angle lens distortion. It looked very ordinary, just like looking in a mirror.

Then the scene panned rapidly around to the doorway, stopped to look at it for a half second, then the view panned upward to look at the ceiling. Just for a brief moment of stability before it tilted down to look at Boss's body.

#6: <Yippee!>

#1: <BIG YIPPEE! This is fantastic! I'm surprised the vision is so ordinary though. I didn't expect that.>

#6: <Me neither. I was sure that if we saw anything it'd be spherical, and that we'd probably try to throw up... >

^

[[Human visual processing in the brain is very much a "divide and conquer" process, to a truly bizarre degree. Whatever you are looking at is sort of projected onto a movie screen, except that the movie screen is actually a whole stack of screens. Each screen only shows a particular aspect of the image. One screen shows ONLY horizontal lines, another screen shows only vertical lines, another diagonal lines, another only circles (not ovals), etc. The brain ends up with a stack of transparent sheets, each containing no, or a single very rudimentary, component. For example, looking straight on at a friend, the sheet that records straight vertical lines might have a small line segment for the line of the center of his nose, and that's all.

All of those sheets have to be individually processed, analyzed and compared to achieve anything, e.g., to recognize someone, the person's expression, state of health, etc. (It is my STRONG belief that there is an extra screen that captures the shape of breasts, and that this screen has a prehistoric genetic mutation, carried by the Y-chromosome, that causes it to output too much amperage, making anything it registers very attention getting.)

#6 said he was expecting a spherical perspective, but he was also looking at our face, expecting to see that. He was totally familiar with what our face looked like with normal vision, but he had only a very rough idea of how it would look if distorted by a wide-angle view. With two different expectations, the stronger one dominated. The image of our face was sent to our visual processing screens, and naturally an "ordinary looking" image resulted, as it was using the ordinary process. By the way, we all saw the resultant image (not just #6) because we all have accesses to our senses, same as we all feel what NP-fingertips touch, we all smell with our nose, etc. Sensory input is sent to our brain where it's processed, and is available for every mind to access.]]

^

#6: < ... The good news is that this is immediately usable. So far I haven't tried to move the blob. All I've done is think about looking in different directions. I haven't tried using it with our eyes open either. I'll try that first because it's an easy test.>

#All: <Whoa!> (or words to the effect). We'd gotten a superimposed image, for the second or so #6 let it last, which included a single particularly confusing sideways pan with the light blob's 'eye'.

#1: <That's going to be hard to work with.>

#5: <I'll say. Can you imagine trying to walk down a flight of stairs at the same time as the blob was moving sideways in a different room, or was going up a different flight of stairs at a different speed. Yeech! I think we use our eyes OR a blob, but not both. It's too hard.>

#8: <We can easily allocate two minds to listen to two different conversations at the same time. Both conversations are coming in the same ears at the same time, so it's very much the same as for eyes. Maybe we can do the same divide and conquer approach with sight?>

#4: <Here's a scary thought; we can have 64 light blobs going at once. Can you imagine 65 different superimposed images!>

#8: <That might end up as nothing but a total whiteout from all the superimposition.>

#6: <Quite likely, I think. I suspect multiple sight sources will just cause confusion. Hearing two conversations at once never disoriented us the way two sights at once just did, so I don't think the two senses are analogous that way. We don't need that skill for now as it's not as if our body is going ANYWHERE! I'll keep our eyes shut for now, and see if I can move the blob into the other room. I'll try to see the cellphone bundle, but I'll take it slow.>

[[As is fairly obvious, our sense of balance uses visual cues, so superimposed images can create a giddy, disorienting sensation - especially if they're tilting differently because we're very sensitive to tilts. It's very different from listening to two conversations.]]

A second later, after a couple of lurches of movement, #6: <I'm having trouble getting the blob to move.>

#2: <I bet you're concentrating almost entirely on your sight. Try almost ignoring what you're seeing and thinking about moving the blob instead. Let it see whatever it sees, just like when we walk around in our body, we see whatever we see.>

#6: <Good idea. We know our body is chained to a chair, so the blob can go wherever it wants without any care at all. I can be totally passive about what I see. Here we go.>

The blob flew straight to the doorway, too fast for human movement, especially my movement at the moment.

There it paused to give us a chance to look at the room. Across it was the stairs going up the opposite wall, with the door at the top closed. It was quite a dark room, and one of my other minds (#5) reacted by helpfully creating a bright yellow light blob in the doorway. That helped for a second, until #5 realized that he might be able to see with it, which created a superimposition of two simultaneous sight sources. Almost immediately #5 canceled the light blob.

#5: <Sorry. I'll try again and just keep it as a light source this time, without thinking about seeing with it.>

A second later that was achieved, and #6 could carry on with his exploring.

We'd already seen that the cellphone/gag bundle was sitting at the base of the stairs. Now #6 moved our vision quickly across the room to the cellphone, then turned to look up the stairs.

#1: <Go up and have a closer look at the door. Is it locked?>

The blob zoomed up the stairs. A little bit disorienting, but only a little. Years of watching special effects on TV might have acclimatized me to movements like that. There was no lock on the inside, just a push-down-then-pull door handle.

#2: <Here's a good question. Can we create an NP-point by the door handle and open it? I'll try.>

Pause, then, #2: <Damn, I can't. What about you, #6?>

#6: <No, I can't either. That's a pity. That could have been useful for all sorts of things, especially getting cookies out of Vanessa's kitchen.>

#1: <Good example, especially if you fetched a big glass of milk at the same time. I'll create an NP-point next to our body and fly it up to the door. That should work now, then we can open the door and have a VERY interesting search of the house. I'm starting to enjoy myself now!>

#2: <It's a good feeling.>

#1: <#6, can you look back at the doorway so the NP can go faster please. I don't know the room well enough yet.>

#6: <Sure.>

We ALL saw it - just to the right of the doorway into our room there were three nails sticking out of the wall. Dangling from one of the nails was a ring of keys! With a pistol on one of the others and their belts and knife sheaths on the floor below the nails, but who gives a fuck about those!

[[Dom was a careful guy. He'd put the nails there himself, to hang the keys and the two guns on before entering our room. With those items kept out of our reach, there was no way we could get away. The next worse item we could grab would be a knife. With our hands held the way they were, it was almost impossible for us to thrust with a knife. One slice of a thigh was all we could have achieved before our target stepped away, or was dragged away by his partner.]]

#1: <I've changed my mind. I think I'll use my NP to pick up that interesting looking key ring.>

#6 moved the light blob closer, by heading straight for the keys. Just as well he wasn't walking in our real body, because he walked right off the side of the stairs, as safety rails don't stop light blobs.

#1 reshaped his NP so it was slightly concave at the top and quite wide, slid it under the top of the ring and lifted it off the nail and brought it to our body.

#8: <Did you notice that your NP didn't cancel. We've got our real eyes shut, and that NP was active in the 'other' room for far longer than two seconds. It feels weird to call it the "other room" - it is the "other" from the point of view of our body, but not from the point of view of our point of view.>

#1: <Good point! I never thought about it canceling. The vision from the blob is so normal that I wasn't thinking about things like that at all.>

#8: <We should be able to create NP-points under the vision of a light blob too. I'm betting we couldn't do it at the top of the stairs because we weren't familiar enough with the where it was in relation to our body. Our minds create the points, and our minds are in our body, so I think that's important. We can easily test that later. I want to get the keys first.>

[We did the suggested test only a few minutes later, once the more urgent matters were dealt with. We sent a blob around to where the hooks are, let it have a very good look around in all directions, then successfully created an NP-point at the hooks. Considering all the recent developments, it's starting to look like the cookies in Vanessa's kitchen are in more danger than Prof and me.]

A couple of seconds later I canceled the light blob, opening my real eyes to look at a very beautiful key ring floating in front of my face. It contained six keys, two noticeably larger than the other small ones.

A few more seconds after that and I had the first of my hands' padlocks undone. After four days being locked motionless and with every finger broken, I couldn't use that hand, so I used NP to continue to unlock padlocks, doing my other hand next. It was a bit awkward, but I was pretty highly motivated.

#5: <Prof is still asleep. He's going to get a nice surprise soon.>

#1: <Let's check we can undo the main padlock, and then plan what we should do. We'll have some choices then.>

We couldn't bend over to look at the padlock because our waist was still chained. So we closed our eyes and used a light blob to look at the padlock while we unlocked it. Useful things, light blobs!

The key went in. It was hard to turn, but with 110 pounds of force available, a few more fingertips putting force on either side of the key and others to hold the padlock stationary, we got the job done.

When the lock opened, we didn't even start removing the chain. We just sat there thinking.

#5: <Fuck! We could've gotten the keys before the merge. We could've easily made holes in the panels by ramming the 2-by-4 through them, enough to see the ring so we could NP it here. IF ONLY we'd known it was there!>

#7: <We never heard the keys rattle there, just the thump of a gun being hung on a hook and I thought that was the 2-by-4 being knocked against it. And unlocking the padlock took quite a lot of force in total. It might've been difficult with only fourteen pounds... >

#5: <We would have found a way around that. There's stuff we can use for a lever, and there are shoe laces to use for strings to tie it firmly to the ring bolt.>

#2: <I don't want to be a wet blanket, but we need to concentrate on the present.>

#7: <I wish you were a wet blanket, but I take your point.>

We thought about it for a few minutes. We weren't in a condition to go anywhere if we could possibly avoid it, so I was going to call 9-1-1 on the house phone, presuming it had one. That'd bring the cops to us. The cellphones had to be destroyed and lost because I couldn't guarantee there wouldn't be some trace of our having used them. It had taken us probably thousands of operations to get the cellphone to the base of the stairs, but fetching it back was almost mindlessly easy. It was a pity, but I went through all the messages we'd stored on both phones and deleted them all, making sure I didn't read any of Prof's. I deleted every phone number, the call registries, and everything else that I could find to delete. I wiped them very, very thoroughly, then wrapped them in one of the gags to take upstairs for disposal.

There was some tidying up to do in the room, like putting the crap back in each baddies' pockets and simple stuff like that. With the force I had now, that didn't take long. What to do with the gun was a bit of a question mark, but I came up with a reasonable plan for that, I hoped.