Ask A Genius 910: Rick’s Book is About a Celebrity
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/04/07
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, you should know that the main character is a celebrity and, to some extent, an industrialist who has used his celebrity to be the figurehead of a sizeable semi-insidious tech corporation, mainly in the 2030s; that is the period I am writing about. One of the things that he has access to is up-the-nose crawlers; these are little bug-like robots that are like a quarter inch across, little spidery things that go up your nose. One of the main technologies of this era, and this company is involved in pushing it, is Mesh which is like a less shitty version of Elon Musk’s Neuralink. You get a whole drilled in your head, not a big one like a quarter inch or less; they stick in this Mesh, and then they lay it out across the surface of your brain. It’s 10 millimetres by 30 millimetres, and you can receive input directly onto your brain via the Mesh. Your brain, after a while, learns to use the link. There are various versions of different degrees of invasiveness, and one is a cheap, blunt version you get in the military if you consent. It goes up your nose, into your sinuses, and the vicinity of your brain. It doesn’t transmit much discernable information because it’s not as precisely installed or as fancy as the full-on mesh, but it does help you in combat situations; you get a vibe off the rest of your combat group.
So, one of the things that this company might have is an up-the-nose crawler to deliver one of these kinds of blunt force crappy meshes up through your sinuses or, if not mesh, then just drugs. Suppose you’ve pissed off this company or pissed off this character. He might send a little crawler spider up your nose to mess with your brain. Another thing is piggyback consciousness. You probably never saw this Steve Martin-Lily Tomlin movie All of Me because it’s 30 years old.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: No, I haven’t.
Rosner: All right. So basically, a magic spell happens, and Lily Tomlin’s consciousness is moved… she’s a dying wealthy lady who does some hocus pocus to get her consciousness moved into Steve Martin’s brain, and they have to fight over his body and stuff. That’s like a step, something like that, piggyback consciousness. The intermediate step before replicated consciousness is available. A linked mesh: you’ve got two people with Mesh, and you generally link their meshes between a young person and an older relative, which links their consciousnesses. If they do this for a couple of years, the old’s consciousness pervades the youngsters’ consciousness, and it’s a way of persistence after death. This gets marketed to people at some point before full replication of consciousness is available.
Some of these are comments from the character himself.
“I don’t like going out, especially in a vehicle. Being on the road gets 7% more dangerous each year despite self-driving.”
“God forbid, if you endanger me with a vehicle, our systems will locate you and hit you with a ton of karma bombs, not actual bombs, just information-driven, not traceable to us.” He can access high-level AI net crawling surveillance and data mining in our systems.
Does talking about any of this stuff, is this worth anything?
Jacobsen: I think it is. It provides some context for your writing and is a suitable plug, too.
Rosner: Okay. All right, I already talked about this for military personnel. Low-bandwidth mesh implants inserted via sinuses are like quantum computing; even a little goes a long way.
Decoupling is a trend in which people don’t have to form heterosexual couples, which will lead to ideas around people not having to couple up for reasons of sexual attraction. It becomes increasingly weird and somewhat objectionable that people will structure their entire lives around somebody else just because the configuration of the other person’s genitals gives their partner sexual excitement that seems increasingly arbitrary to at least a segment of society.
Oozers and Goopers: people with drippy faces from whatever set of infections they have. Often mentally slow, sometimes twitchy, there are just a lot of people because of persistent rapidly changing viruses, a lot of which came from Covid and vax resistance and disease denial. There are just a bunch of people walking around in the future with apparent signs of disease and manifesting in different ways, and each one of the common ways that disease manifests leads to a different nickname. Some people even have catastrophic hemorrhages out of all the orifices of their faces. They just all of a sudden, like something, give up, and just blood shoots out of their eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, and they’re dead, and it’s horrifying. There are a ton of Tik Toks or whatever Tik Tok is in the future of people doing this, and then this becomes a popular way to kill yourself in an appalling fashion is to simulate that just by putting an M80 in your mouth, and it goes off, and your head semi explodes.
Congratulations to Taylor Swift, America’s first Secretary for gender affairs, in 2035. From her Senate confirmation testimony: “Man, woman, non-binary; we are all who we are, and that affects how we are and how other people see us. I promise to respect and support all Americans except mean people..” I’ll have to change that because her list of the different men, women, and non-binary is not nearly inclusive enough for 2035.
Also, have you seen the new LGBTQ+ flag?
Jacobsen: No. What’s it like?
Rosner: They added a circle in the middle and eight more stripes from the other side. Previously, the flag had a Chevron on the left side and horizontal stripes across the rest. Nowit’s, it has Chevrons coming in from each side and a circle in the middle. They probably added another half-dozen new ways of being to the flag; I am still determining what they are, but there you go.
Jacobsen: Very interesting.
Rosner: Yeah, I should look it up.
[Recording End]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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