If you are looking for headspace to rent, check with your friendly local cerebreal estate agent! Just have to watch when your memories decide to attack. The things we go through for our art… Dainjuh, dainjuh…
“The atrium overlooks the Sidi Ali El Mekki beach in Tunisia. The memory was laid down in September of 2045, so there’s plenty of sun, but the crowds aren’t too heavy.” I pointed out the window to the blue-green Mediterranean sea gleaming below. “Perfect for spending an afternoon lying on the sand and enjoying a good book.”
My prospective clients, a couple of seniors from Helsinki, looked dubious. “Looks hot,” Mr. Lasskso-Anttila said. He was short and paunchy, with a head of bushy grey hair and a face used to frowning. “I’m not fond of hot, Ms. Onyango.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. That’s why we have neural blockers.”
“But if the brainhost remembers being hot, won’t we be hot?” asked his wife. She was taller and wider than her husband, and clearly the more nervous of the two.
“Not at all. The same technology that walls off the brainhost’s private memories can be set to screen anything you don’t want to experience. And of course, you’ll have full autonomous motion; you’ll be able to move around inside the memory, just like we’re doing now.”
“And why is there fog coming from under the door?”
I turned to look, and that’s when the door slammed open and the monster leapt out.
It stood ten feet tall with skin the consistency of cracked lava, veins of glowing red pulsing between craggy black rock. Its long muzzle held the kind of spiky teeth normally only found in deep-sea fish, and its head bulged with dozens of eyes ranging from the serpentine to the insectile. Its roar was a deafening cacophony of chainsaws, thrash-metal chords, and babies screaming.
“What the hell is that?” Mr. Laasko-Anttila demanded.
“I don’t like it,” Mrs. Laasko-Anttilla added.
I stared at the monstrosity. It stared back, viscous green slime dripping from its jaws onto the tasteful parquet floor. It was better at staring than I was.
“Boo,” the creature said. “And other scary shit.”
I sighed. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to cut this short,” I told the couple. “I can show you the rest of the memory suite some other time—“
“Don’t bother,” Mr. Laasko-Anttila snapped. “Let’s go, Venla.” He turned and stalked through the blue-outlined arch that marked the exit, and after giving me an apologetic look, his wife followed him.
The headhaunter and I looked at each other.
“How much is this going to cost me?” I said.
It scratched its chin with a six-inch claw. “Five hundred.”
“Five . . .? You have to be kidding. I’m a small independent broker, I can’t afford that.”
“Cost of doing business. You don’t pay, you’ll never rent this headspace.”
“You’re not so terrible. I bet I can find a frat to rent to that would just consider you free entertainment—“
It opened its mouth and screamed at me again. This time, it went on longer, and featured undertones of blaring car horns, fingernails on blackboard, and automatic gunfire. At the same time, a tide of black spiders the size of housecats swarmed from the doorway, and body parts impaled on hooks descended from the ceiling at the end of rusty chains.
I watched spiders crawl over my feet and up my legs. I couldn’t feel them, of course—headhaunters are limited to sights and sounds—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t unpleasant.
I surrendered to the inevitable. “Two fifty?”
“Four hundred.”
“Three?”
It somehow managed to look insulted. “You think I’m some greenhead? I work hard at this, chica. Lotta time and effort, you know? Do better.”
“Three fifty. And you don’t come back.”
It shook its massive head, sending a spray of slime over everything; I had to admire his attention to detail. “I guess. Just don’t spread it around—I got a rep to maintain.”
“Whatever. Give me an account ID and I’ll wire it —“
Which was when everything went crazy. Quite literally.
The walls and roof ripped away and went spiraling through the air, like a dollhouse torn apart by a child having a tantrum. The ocean flipped upside-down so it hung above us, turned a violent shade of purple and began to boil. The beach twisted itself in knots. I could see a disturbance in the distance, flashing like a multi-colored strobe and getting closer.
In order to get their license, cerebreal estate agents have to pass a test; an entire section is on mental illness. You can’t rent out someone’s headspace if they’re psychotic.
I looked around wildly, but the exit arch was gone. The parquet floor now stretched to the horizon, which was rippling unpleasantly.
“Run!” I yelled, and took off in the opposite direction of whatever was drawing nearer.
The headhaunter might not have had my training, but he recognized when a deal had gone bad. He loped along beside me, his claws on the parquet sounding like castanets.
“How’d you get in?” I asked as we ran. I was breathing hard, not from exertion but from fear.
“Can’t tell you. Trade secrets, yo.”
“Listen to me! If we don’t disengage, we’re going to wind up insane, catatonic, or both. Share a mental landscape with a schizophrenic long enough, and your mind will fracture—maybe permanently. My exit’s disappeared, but we might be able to use yours.”
“Uh—I kind of carry mine on me. It’s part of my skulpt’s code. Only it don’t seem to be working. . .”
“The whole interface must be borked. You must have seriously screwed up this guy’s brain by breaking in.”
“Hey! I’m a professional. I get in and out clean. Nobody’s gonna pay me if I wreck their property.”
“Sure. You don’t tear down the house, you just make it unlivable.”
“For a while, yeah. So what? Your roof leaks, you pay to fix it, right? I’m just a natural consequence of the environment.”
I saw something up ahead: a door, standing on its own. Doors are coded to be transition points, leading to other memories. Maybe we could duck into this one and get away from the present crazy by hiding in the brainhost’s past.
I tried the door and it opened. Both of us dove inside.
It was a hotel room located on the two-hundredth floor of a tower in Abu Dhabi. Outside the window, the blurred edge of a sandstorm was slowly eradicating the view of the cityscape like the onset of architectural amnesia.
The headhaunter looked around. “Don’t really fit with the atrium.”
“Oh, so you’re an interior designer, too?”
“I know a bit about design, yeah. But that’s not what I mean.” He tapped the wall with a blood-red claw. “I can see the memory feed. It’s not coded the same as the atrium was; looks like it’s from a different source.”
I guess all those eyes were good for more than shock value. “Goddamn it. He must be subletting. Buying access to individual memories from a bunch of different people, and patching the feeds together to form something he can rent for a higher price.”
The headhaunter picked up an ornate vase from a table and examined it critically. “Yeah, this whole room is a patchwork; even the carpet is from somewhere else. Your brainhost has a real talent for image splicing.”
I walked over to the window and stared out at the sandstorm. “Okay. The brainhost—Gunter Ablehauser—tested clean for schizophrenia. Which means he might be on drugs, or maybe having a psychotic break caused by trauma. If it’s the first, we just have to ride it out with him. If it’s the second, we’re in real trouble.”
The sandstorm had engulfed the base of the tower—and begun spiraling up it like a snake climbing a tree. The sandy brown had shifted to an eerie blue, and it was spitting crimson lightning in vivid, jagged flashes. “The psychestorm’s broken through the neural blockers. It’s going to flood the memory feeds and infect every brain that’s patched in. We have to stop it.”
I was already sprinting for the door. The mindscape on the other side was now a simple white corridor lined with doors, the default mode that provided easy access to whoever rented the headspace. Behind each door were remembrances of environments and events, ranging from the idyllic to the exhilarating. The dining room was well-stocked with memories of food and drink—a little too well stocked, now that I thought about it.
I reached the end of the corridor and a black door. “You broke in. Can you get us through this?”
“Whoa, chica. That’s a restricted zone.”
“I know. It’s where the bulk of his memory is stored. If we can access that, maybe we can figure out exactly what’s going on and how to stop it.”
The monster shook his head. “Breaking into private memories is serious, yo. What I do, the most I can get charged with is trespassing and being a public nuisance. This is breaking and entering, maybe even mental assault. Too heavy for me.”
“How about spending the rest of your life in a locked psych ward? That too heavy for you?”
He hesitated, then moved forward and pressed a clawed hand against the door. “We get busted, I’m telling them I did this under duress. Serious fucking duress.”
A moment passed, and then his claws seemed to sink into the door. It stuttered like a bad video feed and vanished.
“After you.” He didn’t sound happy.
On the other side was a room with two walls and a ceiling lost to distance. A white marble walkway ran down the center as far as the eye could see; the walls were lined with endless levels of catwalks, connected by staircases of gridded black metal that zigzagged to eternity. The walls themselves were bookshelves, filled with identical-looking leather-bound volumes with white lettering on the spines. It looked like a library designed by Escher and built by Moebius.
“Memory palace,” I said. “We need to locate the hippocampus interface—it indexes memories. From there, we should be able to narrow it down.”
We headed down the walkway. “I’m Aluna, by the way. What do I call you?”
“In the skulpt community, they call me Xochipilli.”
“Like the Aztec god?”
“Yeah, you know him? God of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man.”
“Don’t forget art. And flowers.”
“How you know so much about him?”
I could see something in the distance now, a multicolored glowing square. “Skullspace Inc. is just my day job—the rest of the time, I’m a dreamscaper. Did this piece with a lot of mythic themes, so I researched gods of art and creation: Arubani, Hathor, the Muses.”
“Yeah? You gonna be a big deal, like Oneiro or MindWarp? Have your stuff in one of those big Neuronet galleries?”
I could tell from his tone he wasn’t impressed. “Maybe someday. If I can ever figure out how to transition from plotter to pantser.” I threw the terms at him to show him I was serious, but they came out more like an entitled whine.
“What’s a plotter? Or a pantser?”
“Writers use them to describe their process. A plotter does an outline first, like an architect drawing up plans to follow. Pantser is from an old saying, ‘to fly by the seat of your pants’, or basically to make it up as you go along. Both ways have their strengths and weaknesses.”
“So you’re an architect that wants to learn how to fly, huh?”
“Kind of. Plotters are better at structure, while pantsers try to channel pure creativity. The structure part I can do, but . . .” I sighed. “I’m trying to push past it to something more spontaneous. Something deeper, something true.”
“I don’t know which one I am,” he said. “I mean, I do a lot of a research, play a lot of immersive horrorcore games to scope out ideas, but when it’s time to perform, I do whatever feels right. Like, I could have gone with skulls or snakes, but spiders and dismemberment seemed better for the setting, you know?”
“So you think of yourself as an artist?” I guess he didn’t like the way I said it, because he stopped dead and glared at me with all his eyes.
“Damn right. Maybe I use pirated game tech instead of a fancy dreamscape studio, but I do what any good artist does—I make people feel. Can you say the same?”
I didn’t how to answer that, so I said, “We’re here,” instead.
The interface hub was a square of light hovering in midair, a grid divided into various colors for different areas of the brain connected to the hippocampus. I stared at it in disbelief. “This is really bad.”
“Yeah? How so?”
I pointed at the grid. “The blue represents the prefrontal cortex, where episodic memories are stored. But these yellow lines, crisscrossing everywhere? Those are memory feeds from other minds. He’s got hundreds routed through his own hippocampus, which has got to be putting tremendous stress on the whole system. But that’s not all. This bright red area represents the amygdala, part of the limbic system that records emotional memories. It should be pink.”
“And if it’s red?”
“The amygdala is one of the oldest parts of the brain, responsible for primal reactions—especially fear. Right now, Ablehauser is experiencing terror. And look.” I pointed at the blue squares, about half of which were flickering from blue to red. “The terror is spreading through the memory feeds. That storm is like a nightmare hurricane.”
“So we shut it down from here, right?”
I was already yanking yellow wires loose; they dissolved into puffs of golden smoke in my hands. “I can pull the memory feeds—but that’s going to trap the storm in here, with us. If I can access the right memory, though, I might be able to figure out how this happened and how to fix it.”
“But if the storm can’t flood the feeds, won’t it back up into Ablehauser’s own memories?”
“Yeah. Just going to have to risk it.”
I didn’t have outside access, but I had a pocket AI slaved to my consciousness for scheduling and bookkeeping. I called it up now, and a chrome skull with human-looking teeth and eyes popped into existence at head-height. “Ahnold, I need you to execute a memory search.”
When he spoke, it was with heavy, deliberate tones and a thick Austrian accent. “What are de parametahs?”
“Headspace rentals for personal profit, recent changes to memory feeds, augmentation procedures, psychic trauma, illegal drug enhancement.”
Human memories are data-dense; it took Ahnold a few seconds to find and organize the information.
“Your AI’s a Terminator?”
“Useful monsters I like.”
“I haff collated a sequence of effents into a cohesiff narratiff. Ready to access.”
A white trapezoid flared to life in front of me. A line of text unscrolled, telling me the initial memory was laid down two weeks ago. I put my hand out and touched it.
#
He stares at the screen, alphanumeric symbols informing him of the exact worth of his intellect, and curses. It’s not fair; he has an IQ of 153, but renting out his cognitive abilities while he sleeps is barely making him enough to pay the rent.
He checks the numbers for his memory sublets, but they aren’t much better. He gets them piecemeal from support staff in high-end tourism jobs: a maid enjoying the view from a luxury penthouse suite or a waiter sneaking a surplus gourmet meal aboard a superyacht, feeding on the experiences of those in the orbit of the hyperrich, editing them into a cohesive whole, then passing them along to his own customers, an economic ecosystem with him somewhere in the middle.
He’s smart, damn it. Why isn’t he rich?
The real money lies in renting out your imagination, giving a brainboost to the all the hungry creatives trying to get ahead in the cutthroat worlds of art: writing, painting, music, sculpture, movies, games, dreamscapes. He’s already renting out his intellect while he sleeps, but he can’t do the same for his imagination; you need access to both imagination and memories to be able to dream, and people who don’t dream lose their minds. If he’s going to rent out his creativity, it’ll have to be while he’s awake—only he’s just not creative enough to command any kind of money.
But he is smart.
Research into inducing a more creative state of mind leads him to Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson would sit in a chair comfortable enough to let him drowse, but not so comfortable he would fall into a deep sleep; he claimed to generate his best ideas in this half-waking condition.
In 1839—eleven years before Stevenson was born—a researcher named Heinrich Wilhelm Dove had discovered that when two different pure-tone sine waves were presented to a listener, one tone to each ear, the listener would experience the illusion of a third tone; this would have a pitch equal to the difference between the original two tones. Dove called this a binaural beat.
Long after both Stevenson and Dove were dead, electroencephalography would establish the existence of theta waves, produced by the brain under exactly the same conditions Stevenson was trying to capture. Theta wavelengths were between 4 and 8 Hz. Listening to a binaural beat in the same range—say, 6 Hz—would increase theta waves, which meant increased creativity.
Increased creativity meant more money. He downloads an audio file and bonefones a steady binaural beat directly into his skull.
It gets him better rates, but he isn’t satisfied. He needs to push his brainboosters to another level, get some high-level endorsements from successful clients.
Taking drugs is risky—not to mention illegal—but higher risk means higher reward, and there are always those willing to pay to get that little bit extra.
He settles on a drug called ayehuasca, used by Amazon rainforest shamans to induce powerful visions. It also increases theta waves, and he figures if he keeps the dose low, he can avoid some of the nastier side-effects—like intense, nightmarish hallucinations.
It makes for a disjointed, odd existence: his dreams are in black-and-white, flat and bland and devoid of significance; his waking hours are a haze, the drug mostly contained inside the walled-off confines of his imagination, but physical effects like dizziness and dry mouth are always present, the binaural feed a constant unsettling drone in his head. He’s getting flashes of other people’s memories too, leakage from the spliced feeds that are running twenty-four seven. He’s making serious bank, but he isn’t able to enjoy it.
And then something goes very wrong.
It starts with generalized anxiety, a known side-effect of both ayahuasca and binaural beats. He tries to ride it out, but it gets worse, a rising tide of panic he can’t suppress. He shuts down the beats, but it’s too late; he’s hot, so hot, there are screaming faces growing from the wall and suddenly, he’s in freefall, locked inside a pressure suit outside an orbital spa, just a techie doing routine maintenance and renting out his view, watching a continent-sized storm swirl across Asia, obliterating property and lives, but right now, it’s just a pretty backdrop for privileged space tourists, whirling orange and purple and blinding actinic flashes of lightning, he feels himself being sucked down into it and it’s hungry, so hungry, it’s going to eat the entire world—
#
The memory ends abruptly as Ahnold’s safety protocols kick in, pulling me out. I take a second to regain my bearings, willing the sense of panic to subside. “Ahnold, give me an analysis of the event I just experienced, and extrapolate possible causes.”
“Psychotic break induced by a combination of factahs: cascading memory overload, hallucinatory state triggahd by multiple chemical agents, and possible genetic predispostion to schizophrenia.”
“Ahnold, you said multiple chemical agents. What, other than ayehuasca?”
“Eighty-seffen pahcent likelihood of a hypnotic.”
I frowned. “Any hypnotics that can produce schizophrenic symptoms?’
“Scopolamine, also known as hyoscine, is a tropane alkaloid used to treat postoperatiff nausea and vomiting. Scopolamine crosses da blood/brain barriah readily, and has been shown to cause psychosis in large doses.”
“Devil’s Breath,” Xochi said. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor with his claws in his lap, a monstrous fanged Buddha. “They make it from a flower called Angel’s Trumpet. Women slip it into the drinks of rich corporate types, use it to rob them. Stuff can make you seriously trip out if you take too much, though—even kill you.”
“Ahnold, hypothesize the consequence of a person dosed with Devil’s Breath accessing a headspace altered by ayehuasca.”
“Seffenty-six pahcent chance of synahgistic effects.”
“Enough to break down the neural blocks separating two minds in a headspace, one inhabiting the intellect and the other the imagination?” I could envision how it happened: two waves of madness smashing into each other like hot and cold fronts, swirling into a psychlone of insanity and wrecking anything in its path.
“Ahffirmatiff. Intahfacing with such a mind carries a significant risk of crossovah psychosis and pahmanent mental disahbility.”
“Yo, we gotta get outta here,” Xochi said. “I got enough crazy in my life.” He blinked at me with a dozen eyes, none of them at the same time.
“Ahnold, give me a diagnostic on the external headspace interface.”
“Unable to comply. System is not responding to quahries. Please contact a qualified serfiss representatiff.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Okay, this isn’t all bad. Drugs wear off. Maybe we just sit tight and wait it out.”
“That ain’t gonna work, chica. I may not know brains the way you do, but I know what it takes to hack through a neural block. Sneaking into a display space ain’t that hard, but the walls between different parts of the brain? Megatough. If this schizostorm can take those down, we ain’t safe. Especially since you shut down those memory sublets—that thing don’t got anywhere to go but here.”
He was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. “Then we find a way to separate the two components of the storm. That might interrupt the cycle, get them both to calm down—“
“Dainjuh. Dainjuh,” Ahnold’s flat voice intoned. “Incoming psychotic effent. Exit the headspace immediately. Imminent risk of sefere mental trauma. Dainjuh. Dain—“
And then it was upon us.
Reality itself ripped away like cheap wallpaper. A howling, razored wind tumbled me off my feet and into madness. Random memories and delusions battered me like a capsized boat caught in whitewater rapids, the current bashing me against outcroppings of rock while trying to drag me under, every impact a psychic jolt of imagery and emotion.
Daggers wreathed in blue flames raining from the sky. Warm skin as he shook my hand and told me I had the job, but his gaze was cold and distant and devoid of any mercy. Fluorescent green scorpions swarming over my body, plunging stingers into my eyes and ears. The feeling the first time I brainboosted my imagination, rush of inspiration overpowering the reservations I had about the long-term effects on my brain. Running in slow motion pursued by a black serpent the size of a bullet train, static-filled screens where its eyes should be, fangs like curving scimitars dripping with foaming yellow venom. The sick realization that she’d slipped something into my drink.
I tried to hang on to myself, but the outpouring of fear and horror was relentless, along with the utter conviction it was never going to end. I was dead and in hell and I deserved to be there . . .
But I could taste the difference between recollection and hallucination, and the memories weren’t as bad as the visions. The next time a memory slammed against me, I focused on it, willed myself into it, a shipwreck survivor desperately grabbing a piece of wreckage to stay afloat.
It was a mistake. The memory was an older one, a depressive episode of Ablehauser’s client that ended in a failed suicide attempt, his last thoughts before he fell unconscious and the paramedics arrived: I never would have made it. The corporate structure is like an endless succession of ladders and all the rungs are greased. The only ones that get ahead are the ones that boost their brains with other people’s talent. That’s what I should have done.
He’d had a vision then, one so clear and strong it felt more like the memory of something real than something imagined. A future in which people were so dependent on brainboosters that they’d lost the ability to imagine, to think, even to remember for themselves. A global elite did all that for them and raked in the rewards, while the general populace spent half their time living other people’s lives and the other half shambling around like dead-eyed zombies, devoid of creativity or independent thought.
He’d survived his suicide attempt—and in the end, he’d decided he’d rather belong to the elite than the zombies. He’d chosen what sort of monster to become.
No, I thought. That’s not going to happen to me.
I was a dreamscaper. An artist. And no matter how tempting it was, I’d resisted the urge to borrow from others to enhance my talent. I wasn’t going to depend on anything but myself—I had skills, and the only way I was going to survive this was by using them.
As a dreamscaper, I used lucid dreaming techniques to manipulate input from my prefrontal cortex—the center of cognitive thought and memory—to my hippocampus and amygdala. I knew how to manipulate my own dreams; now I was going to try to manipulate someone else’s.
The hippocampus interface was still nearby—I could sense it through the raging chaos around me, a calm cybernetic eye in the center of a hurricane. I reached out, willing my arm to lengthen like the tentacle of an octopus toward an unmoving technologic anchor.
Contact. Manipulating the mental processes of another person without their express permission was highly illegal, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I linked the cognitive feeds to my own, and suddenly, I wasn’t feeling the effects of the storm; I was above it, around it.
Two minds locked in a feedback loop of terror and pain. I recognized Ablehauser’s immediately; the other was the one who’d had the vision of a bleak, empty future. His name was Quon Chen, and he worked for a streaming service based in Singapore—that was all I could glean from the scattered fragments of his mind.
I tried to separate the two streams of consciousness, imposing images of concrete dams and gigantic, iron-bound doors between them, and failed utterly. The storm crashed through my barriers like they were paper. The two minds were too intermingled, the currents driving them too powerful.
Stop thinking like an architect. Think like a pilot.
A pilot that didn’t fight the wind but rode it. Let it take her where she wanted to go, even if she didn’t know her destination.
I let go, and let the storm take me.
It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. I was moving a thousand miles an hour and could slam into a brick wall at any second. I didn’t care.
And I saw the solution, so simple and pure, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. I didn’t need to separate the two forces, I needed to merge them.
Their minds had one thing in common: they were consumed by fear. I needed something simple, powerful, and unifying. I didn’t overthink it, just conjured up the first thing that came to mind: Ablehauser’s memory palace, the one that looked like an infinite library. I took that image, wrapped it around the screaming winds and channeled them down that long corridor. I had a runaway train now instead of a cyclone, but that was an improvement. Time to put on the brakes.
Libraries were calm, introspective, linked to memories that went back to childhood. Ablehauser was smart, Chen worked in entertainment; I was gambling that both of them had spent happy times surrounded by books.
I added a thick, soft carpet on the floor, with intricate, mythic themes woven into the fabric: heroes, not monsters, magical castles without dungeons, gardens filled with tropical flowers. I put a skylight overhead, a bright sun in a blue sky shining down and banishing the shadows. Some soft, meditative jazz for a final touch of ambience.
The torrent of panic slowed. Their minds desperately wanted a safe place, I could feel it. The rows of impersonal leather-bound volumes became books of different sizes and colors, each one a treasured storehouse of fictional experience, a blend of intelligence and imagination.
It was a single shared memory that finally broke the storm, a science fiction book they both adored. Each had their own versions of the book’s characters in their heads, but they didn’t clash; they amalgamated instead, hybridizing into composites. All of them materialized on the carpet, looking around bemusedly, and Ablehauser and Chen stood among them, looking dazed but rational.
Xochipilli made his way through the crowd. “You did it!” he said. “Man, that was a rough ride.”
“You okay? I lost track of you in all the crazy.”
He gave me a spiky grin. “I just ran like hell. Broke into a repressed memory and stayed out of the way. Those things never get accessed.”
“So the big scary monster took off and hid?”
“Yeah, yeah. How’d you pull this off, anyway?”
I pointed at a door-sized book hanging in the air. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It’s a fictional e-book that appears in a real book by the same name. Supposedly the most popular book in the universe, largely because every copy has those two words on the cover.”
The two words? DON’T PANIC.
“Good advice,” I said. “Don’t you think?”
END
