Transimony
A short short story I wrote in 2018
I was widely assumed that somewhere, people were going through the training while using Smart Drugs. But I didn't know how to connect with that alternate reality, and likely would have been too frugal to pay the premium.
I was both eager for and worried about the training. People said such disparate things, some saying subtle and some saying profound. Some said it was both. The word weird came up a lot, too. Maybe that's what made me a bit concerned.
I wasn't sure whether to take the training standing or sitting. I aspired to standing or even walking – but they suggested sitting to make the training “smoother”. Would that be smoother for me, or for my training partner? I guess we are one, ultimately.
The chair was super comfortable. It took a few minutes for the chair to map itself to my sitting preferences. I suppose I could have uploaded my experience stream, but I wasn't sure I had as many datapoints as the AI could use.
After I was comfortable, I picked up the data mittens. They were light, like empty pinatas, but the powercomm cable added a slight heft. I pulled them on and fiddled with them until they felt comfortable and cozy where they wrapped my forearms.
It seemed like the mittens, or maybe the chair, sensed when I was ready to start. The only way I could describe how they felt was odd. Personally, I wasn't ready to apply the weird yet.
Apparently what I had assumed was powercomm also had some tubing that inflated the mittens until I had soft, quilted balloons on my arms. Although it felt like there was only air inside the mittens, somehow the air had a texture or squeekiness to it. Depending on how I moved my hands, I felt surfaces from sandpaper to pudding to warm oily ball bearing.
Odd little vibratory patterns played a counterpoint to the tactile smorgasbord.
The sound level picked up, but it felt like soft aural confetti, a ticker tape of sound bits. Maybe they fell out of the pinatas.
There was a lot going on, but much of it was happening – or felt like it was happening – inside the mittens. I gave up trying to figure out how all these textures were flowing and colliding seemingly at the same time. I was still pretty sure it was illusion, the mittens had no more mass than they had before.
A voice that seemed to come from all around me calmly asked me to confirm that I would like to use the default speech, then display, for my task input. I concurred, and then gave myself over to a stream of letters and then words, to which I moved my hands – mostly my fingers – in what seemed to be random patterns.
There was a lot of repetition of letters at first. As time went on, new characters were introduced. Eventually it seemed that we had had had enough. The display in front of me started showing words. At first, and for a long time, words repeated, although some patterns were evident.
I entered a fugue state in which I was responding to the words and phrases before me, but without conscious thought or volition. Eventually, a cheesey “Tah-Dah” snippet sounded, like from an ancient version of Windows. I rose from my chair and went off to sleep, fixating those subconscious muscle memories in my body.
The next day my keyfabric was delivered. It came rolled up in a slender tube, with instructions that led me to unroll it and slap it to make it rigid. It had a slight texture, like seersucker, and was the same generic pale dirt color that I remember seeing on the keycaps of my father's aged ergonomic keyboard.
I sat down, laid my fingers on the surface, and started typing this story.