iNs0mNiA Sleepless in Tomorrowland

By Pascal Morgan

“Hey, honey?”

I’m calling her across the living room. She must be somewhere, I thought. At this time in the evening, she would be at her usual spot in the far corner where the gracious glass walls of our California woodside residence meet. That special corner overlooking Big Sur surrounded by redwood, sycamores, and a few distinct conifers. A view neatly tucked into the wooded slope and unveiling a small patch of serene blue ahead in the distance, a peek of Pacific Ocean, just big enough to spark this melancholic longing of a long lost home somewhere beyond the horizon.

Every time I let my gaze wander across our home, I would feel the snugness of our lives manifesting in the well-aged eclectic collection of Eames’ seating assortments, Danish designed tables from the 1970’s, and selected Giacometti sculptures. Was this my vision of my future fifty years ago when I just graduated from college as an aspiring, but totally naive computer engineer? I should’ve taken on the arts. How should I’ve known that my job would become obsolete a mere three decades later? But thankfully by then, I had a patent on a self-optimizing algorithmic procedure for self-contained artificial consciousness. Lucky strike. For every thinking robot, every AI bot instance running on the cloud, every algorithmic black box chewing away on our data, a fraction of a digital dollar-cent trickles into my account.

I belonged to the last generation of coders, overhyped whiz kids then in their mid-life crisis, who rang the bell for the demise of the engineering profession. Totally eradicated. Now, a good twenty years later, we all have ample time for the arts, I would quietly chuckle to myself. I know a lot of them weren’t that lucky. But I’m giving back now. Giving back big time. Though no matter how much I give back, my assets are still growing by the second.

“Hey, honey!” My eyes spotted her. Sitting there with a steaming cup of Japanese-import Sencha tea, a musing soul letting her focus float across the Californian landscape afar, she turned around to meet my gaze. She was mesmerizing with her 73 years, not aged a day beyond 30, and looking at me with a smile mocking my immaturity. “Yes, dear…?”

“You up for it?” I held up the latest Immersive Reality headset. What looked like a goldfish bowl that you were supposed to plop on your head like an astronaut’s helmet, was my latest fetish for escaping reality. A hyper-realistic fiber-glass sphere fitted with the latest visual projection and VR simulation tech. I knew she hated it. And I also knew she’d do it for me because she loved me.

I jumped on the lounge pillows in front of me. “Just a quick round together in the Verse? They’ve got this new experience online…” I grabbed the second fishbowl lying next to me and flung it towards her in a gallant spin. “… some kind of simulation of ourselves in an alternate reality.”

Sitting there with the warm teacup in both hands, she let the fishbowl bounce on the floor, roll past, and curl up in the corner behind her, coming to a twirling stop like a spinning coin losing its last momentum and finally succumbing to gravity. A moment of silence. “That sounds rather awful.” She smiled at me sadly.

I’m all jacked up and going for the thrill. “Yeah. They scan and reanalyze our data, create a spitting image of our personality and then project us into some parallel life.”

She still looks puzzled, even more concerned, like she’s feeling sorry for my game addiction. And slowly shakes her head.

“Well, suit yourself. See you on the other side!” I cry out defiantly. With a gasp of excitement, I pop my head into the fiber-glass bubble and a whizzing noise kicks me off into another world. My head is spinning. What’s this...? As if I had never fallen asleep, I still somehow slowly wake up again. Waking up into a strange new world. I can faintly hear an alarm ringing in a distance. Coming closer. Time to get up. And then...

[Display reads:]

“Transcript Diary Entry --- Begin Journey

Date: February 3, 2043

Time: 5:15 AM

Age: 75

Biological age: 38

Sex: Male

Gender: cis, sapiosexual

Account type: GOLD B+

Upgrade to A-: Yes / No; Upgrade to Platinum: Not available, insufficient funds]”

Waking up today again with a monstrous headache. Nosebleed running down my cheek.

Ugh. What a night.

I can’t get my sleep cycles in sync. They said I could go down to 1.5 hours of sleep, squeeze it to the max, if I can get the fine-tuning right. I set my bloodstream nanobots to maximum CO2 extraction and intra-cellular ATP replenishment, with all the extras, you know, mitochondrial optimization and DNA micro-repairs, and blabla-yadda-yadda. All those gimmicky little extras that cost a fortune in total because they all add up on my subscription plan. I’ve got no idea if my VOmax has really gone up over the day. I do miss my dream cycles though. But with the latest implant they said that REM was overrated anyway. So, back to my sleep cycles. Hold on. Let me check the dashboard.

I’m pinching my fingers together and calling up my medical data hologram and navigating to my EVRNOX sleep plugin. Weird, the fingers feel a bit stiff today. Whatever.

The last update looks quite nice actually, smooth user interface, nice animations and stuff. They seriously had to improve after the last data breach. The sleep patterns of 250 million users were syphoned off by neuro-bandits, so they really beefed up the security, reworked the app and added some fireworks. They got so much bad press for being hacked, they really had to up their game. Listen, with 2 billion of us silverliners hooked on the system, this thing is too big to fail. You have to make it more attractive. Yes, I know I’m digressing here. But hold on. Do you know how much money these neuro-bandits can make?

Ever since our technocratic government introduced brainwave-scans as citizen IDs, these bandits are using the sleep patterns to reconstruct actual IDs and use them for fraud. Luckily, their success rate is still under 1%, but that’s already 2.5 million IDs they can forge right there. Massive security issue. And then you have to get the insurance police notified and all the paperwork. Well, for quite a premium I have that covered with my smart contracts. They’ll notify INSURAPOL immediately and trigger off all that needs to be done. But these insurance militia aren’t any better than the bandits themselves… uh, stop. Delete last sentence… Delete! Hey, what’s wrong here? This looks like a glitch, oh bother. Don’t really want this on record. I’ll correct it later.

God, ever since insurance companies are running the show, even the government in these rigged, so-called “liquid democracy” elections, they’ve even outsourced the police force. Insurance companies running the police. Go figure. Another fancy name for industry-run paramilitary. Just imagine your insurance policy being delivered in full combat gear. (chuckles) And they’re tough. Don’t want to be on their shit list. They will shut down a whole district and pull up a military-grade battalion to hunt down an 11-year-old who hacked into the school’s cafeteria. They just can’t take any humor.

Sorry, I’m digressing again. Damned. Gotta take my meds. Can’t focus, I’m all over the place.

This onset of dementia-ADHD has me really freaking out. Giving me the twitches. I actually don’t even know if this $3 million investment is going to pay off. I’ve subscribed for this full LIFE MAX package, a guaranteed 150-year life span, had all the gimmicks installed. And now, there’s this new phenomenon with “d-ADHD”!

Somehow out of nowhere we find out that our brains are overstimulated and the growth of synapses just starts going through the roof. Uncontrollably, just BAM, all these connections across the brain. They say, neuroplasticity is forcing this cerebral pimple between my shoulders to go apeshit because it’s trying to deal with my memory and processing implants.

I mean, come on. I only had the regular 2 Exabyte memenhancer module drilled into my cortex… just took the catalog standard at our local walk-in surgery pod. No big deal. Not even top-of-the-line. Just B+ hardware on a GOLDsubscription. They even threw in a bionic foot and left hand replacement coupon. But I’m not ready for that. I’m not shaking that badly yet.

It’s all just marketing anyway.

Two Exabyte module? You must be kidding. I bet this barely surpasses 5 Terabytes of data per second and probably starts dropping memory bits beyond 0.5 Exabytes. Data corruption is commonplace. I’ve been having these memory glitches lately, incoherent fragments, as if I’m remembering somebody else’s life at times. I explicitly declined the secondhand, refurbished stuff and opted for factory-new modules only. But I’m beginning to wonder… I can’t prove it though.

But look at my neighbor. You should see what he just got implanted the other day! I mean, he went totally off-grid. Chinatown is not what it used to be. Where you had scummy basement workshops and a clan-run black market, is now replaced by top-notch medical labs with the best rogue tech bypassing sanction lists and import bans. But he is really fucked up. I would’ve never gone for this untested quantum crap. We are barely harnessing quantum computers and here are some black-market technicians soldering unlicensed chips into your brain? Totally rogue. Untested. Uncertified. Just like this submersible they sent down to the Titanic twenty years ago. Or the hibernation capsule to Mars that went bust last summer. A couple of lost souls again on some uncertified techno-trash. I mean, what are these people thinking?

But this d-ADHD does come with some quirks and perks. My hyper-focus is awesome. Just finished my last project under a week. Oncology assignment. Built the whole molecule from scratch. Active ingredient deadly for leukemia cells. Clinical trials starting next week. Actually, a well-paid gig. Just had to hook up my brain to the JOB-NET, and with all the tech I’ve installed I can download some of the best tasks that big pharma is delegating to the network. Distributed processing. Quite cool, I can earn something on the side to pay off all his junk in my head. Even works while I’m sleeping.

It’s just the restlessness and distraction that’s getting to me. They haven’t solved it yet. The tech support team is unresponsive, as always. I even tried to research it myself but it’s beyond my capacity. I can’t assign this d-ADHD as a task to my own brain enhancer. Whenever I try to define the project parameters something goes haywire. Why actually? It’s as if, whenever I try to analyze it, there is some barrier that comes up out of nowhere. Looks like my brain-interface just goes offline for a second and everything reboots. Coming to think of it, could this be on purpose perhaps?

Ouch, my fucking headache. Funny as it is, the pain is on the side of my head without the implants. Maybe I should just get everything replaced. Chuck out all the biomass and get some solid hardware in there. (laughing) But I still think the 1.5 hours of sleep could really be too short. Well, I maximized the regenerative deep sleep mode to 100%. Looks like I need to try a full three hours of sleep tonight. Or even go for four? Damned. Losing wake time again. That’s going to negatively impact my productivity stats. (sigh)

So, rise and shine. I need to get up, get out of bed now. Wipe the blood off my face. Unplug all of this stuff. Too many tubes hanging on me. (laughing) Let me check the endocrine cocktail I mixed up last night. Hm. Testosterone, growth hormones, anabolics overall. All norm. I could readjust the DMT and Ketamine micro-dosing during the day, though. Did I also add enough proteins for the overnight telomere repair? No jeans without genes. Haha. I’m getting old. And I’m not really that funny either.

Ok, let me zoom into this dashboard again. Mhm. Nanobot activity was also ok. A few billion ‘actives’ and only an average loss of 8%. My white blood cells have been slow, or they are getting used to their new friends and have stopped trying to gobble them up. Yeah guys, please work together, that’s the spirit. Ok, brainwaves normal too. I’ve been training my gamma waves to enhance my focus and productivity – hey, I’m just barely halfway through my life at 75!

AAAND… (tapping a drumroll)

It’s my birthday today! And a special one indeed. Had a morning run in the park planned with my neighbor. The dude with the quantum mess in his head. I’m going slip into my running gear and EMS suit, I think he’s already waiting for me in the XR simulator. As the special birthday treat, we booked this full-body AI trainer modeled after the first female Navy Seal in 2021. Real old school. I call her GI Jane, and she’s going to make us suffer.

Maybe I’ll go on vacation with my neighbor next year, if his brain isn’t fried yet and he can still think straight. (chuckles) There is this Ayahuasca-Amazonia special offer on sale. A fully immersive, multi-sensory Metaverse ride, this whole tribal jungle experience, you get jacked up with tubes, drug infusions, a total VR outfit. They even said, you can keep the special sensory suit on for three consecutive days and just remain in your bathtub, and what not. I still have some questions though…

Ok, diary. Enough for now. Talk to you tomorrow!

Roger out.

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“Transcript Diary Entry --- End Journey”