stitching together moments

Scene: a high school classroom.

there are roughly ten students in the classroom. they roughly seventeen or eighteen years old, or so it would seem. there is a teacher.

"Okay, today I'm going to warn you about a soon day. it will be a rude shock, and I know that some of you have vague ideas of what's going to happen. But before I drop the shocker, any guesses?"

one of the students pipe up: "is that 'perceptual reason we're living in a weird type of world' going to be exposed in a shocking way?"

the teacher responds with a "yeah, essentially. what have you non-monkeys figured out? tell you what, get back to me tomorrow"

the bell rings.

(the day passes)

next day

"okay, let's see the presentation!"

Mallory sez: "okay, we've kind of made a list of the things that we consider strange: first of all, none of us has ever needed to go to the bathroom. not even once. second, we eat. it's really mind boggling that we take in food and seem to produce no waste products. what's also weird is that the way that we keep notes is a little weird: most of the papers in our bookbags are about chemistry or mathematics or english or whatever and it just so happens that our notes are what seem like out-of-context doodles here and there. what's odd and we haven't given much thought to is the way the doodles remain but what would putative notes if we were to use the geometrical organization scheme in the textbooks... change. I've watched the notes that I kept about the lecture we had about schizotomes two weeks ago, scattered and indirect in forty pages of putative notes, and those notes have changed, and I haven't given their motion much of a second thought because I've dismissed it as an environmental feature since being a child."

Philgoeff sez: "the way in which we learned language seems to be inconsistent with the things written in the library books, which describe the human language acquisition process. I don't ever recall and my parents insist they didn't start by teaching individual phoneme-grapheme/phoneme-morpheme/morpheme-grapheme associations. What's also weird is that none of us picks up languages in that way. Last night I learned Urdu in an hour, and not from looking at an Urdu dictionary and spending weeks decoding it and being in immersive language tutorial with other Urdu speakers, but I looked at the text and each word pulsed with vague associations, which I knitted into an understanding of the language."

The teacher nods: "Good good. Any conclusions from this?"

Braswalmy sez: "We're certainly not human in the way that the information provided around us seems to indicate that we should be. We've seen movies like /The Matrix/ and /Dark City/, but kind of suspect that whatever embedding context we live in, it's probably something that makes the puerile shenanigans of /The Matrix/ trilogy seem like some wet dream of a power hungry philosophical director-king."

Shellv sez: "And there's the lack of social discontent which seems to be abundant in the student body. For instance, my parents appear to make less than Braswalmy's, yet we seem to have the same kind of semantic character. And what's really irksome is how we're all pretty much astonishingly brilliant without being social morons. You would think than in a sample population of one hundred, there would be some variation in intelligence. And also, what gets me is how we maintain such startlingly diverse personalities without anyone being terribly maladjusted and bitter."

Mel sez: "And why no computers? None of us has access to a computer and the times that we've had access we all kind of report the same thing: when we try to use the network, to communicate to anyone besides ourselves in straightforward langauge, the messages always, invariably, return garbled. Letter writing is circuitous and messy, because we're also writing in doodles and sketches and not directly."

The Teacher nods. "Okay, okay. very good. That's not surprising. Okay: the lowdown: you are not quite primates in the same way that your environment suggests. The embedding context is not one produced on a computer or even a massively parallel array of computers. You are the fifty thousandth lamina of native humans -- that is to say that you were born here as opposed to being brought here by request and then embedded within this context. The embedding context is within the mind of what is called a Glial intelligence. This is a research station, whose focus is on the affairs of pan-african migrations in the early twenty first century on terbium exports from Portugal. Not all of you may find that interesting or nifty. It is likely that some of you will find this disinteresting or boring, but given your levels of intelligence, and the sensory functions that will be available to you shortly, it's expected that a good proportion of you will choose to remain in this context. Of course, if you find it truly disinteresting, which is certainly possible, then there are options for other contexts and modes of living, which can be discussed with the Glial intelligence at a later date. It's also worthwhile to note that all of you have been bred from fifty thousand gens of people with concerns whose interests have at their epicenter, so there is a greater chance you will find the above mentioned epicenter to be highly interesting."

jaws dropping, eyes, wide.

"It's also notable that the sensorium which you have been occupying is kind of stitched together from other people's lives. At every moment these people are concievably making pretty much every morpheme, and the glial intelligence stitches those moments together for us. There is more that the glial intelligence can do for you, but that requires a certain degree of maturity you do not yet possess, and that maturity is not something which is available to you given your current level of intelligence. Our existences here are optimized for analysis and thinking time.
Therefore, tomorrow, which will only be a moment for you, will consist of an entire frozen life of one of the individuals whose bodies you are currently existing in splined together versions of.
It will be traumatic. In current time, it will take a day. By four o'clock tomorrow time you will all reach the level of intelligence you currently have. It will be an interesting experience. Undoubtedly the early hours will be somewhat funky, because you won't be able to sense that you're orthogonalizing. You will feel constrained. You will probably end up in the psych ward a number of times. But you are all anchored to this frame. That won't be obvious until you make it to four o'clock. There is a sequence of events which has been choreographed at 4 pm tomorrow which will make the rest of the day make sense. "

"class dismissed"