Chapter 8 Chapter 6 Brain Cap

"I'm afraid you'll have to make a painful decision," said Professor Anderson, but the grin on his face tempered the exaggerated seriousness of his words. "Professor, I can bear it, so just speak up!" "Before you can put on your 'brain cap', you have to shave your head. You have two options: depending on how fast your hair grows, shave it at least once a month, or you can get a permanent one. .” "how to do?" "Laser scalp surgery kills hair follicles from the root." "Hmm... can it be recovered?" "Of course you can, but the process is tedious and painful, and it will take weeks to fully recover."

"Then I'll see if I like my bald head before I make a decision. I can't forget what happened to Samson." "Who?" "A character in an ancient book. His girlfriend cut off his hair while he was asleep. When he woke up, he lost all his strength." "Now that I think about it, it's clearly a medical metaphor!" "I don't mind getting the beard off, though. I'm glad I don't have to shave, once and for all." "I'll arrange it. What kind of wig do you like?" Poole laughed. "I'm not that vain--it's troublesome to think about, and maybe it's not necessary. Better to decide later."

In this day and age, everyone is bald, an astonishing truth that Poole was belatedly discovering.He made his first discovery when a handful of experts, as shaved as they were, arrived to perform a battery of microbiological tests on him.His two nurses took off their luxurious wigs without any embarrassment.He had never been surrounded by so many bald heads, and his initial guess was that it was the latest tactic of the medical profession in the endless battle against bacteria. Like many other guesses, he was dead wrong.When he knew the real reason, he amused himself by counting, without knowing it beforehand, which of his visitors had hair that was not theirs.The answer is: "Men, occasionally; women, not at all." This is really the golden age of the wig industry.

Professor Anderson wasted no time.That afternoon, the nurse applied some eerie cream to his hair, and an hour later he barely recognized himself in the mirror.After all, maybe a wig would be nice too... It took a long time to try on the brain cap.First a cast was made, and he had to sit still for several minutes until the plaster set.The nurses had a bit of trouble helping him out, giggling unprofessionally and making Frank think he didn't have the right shape for his hair. "Yo! It hurts!" he complained. Then came the brain cap, a metal hood that fit snugly against the scalp, almost touching the ears.This kicked up his nostalgic mood again: "I wish my Jewish friends saw me like this!" The brain cap was so comfortable, after a few minutes, he almost forgot it was there.

He is ready to install.He only now understands with a little awe that it has been a rite of passage for almost all human beings for 500 years. "You don't have to close your eyes," said the technician.He was introduced to Poole with the exaggerated title of "brain engineer," but buzzwords always shorten it to "brain engineer." "When you start setting up later, all your input will be taken over. Even if you open your eyes, you can't see anything." Poole asked himself, is everyone as nervous as I am?Could this be the last time I'll be in control of my mind?I've learned to trust technology in this day and age, and it hasn't let me down so far.Of course, as the old saying goes, there is a first time for everything...

As he had been assured, he felt nothing except a little itchiness when the nanowires burrowed into his scalp.All senses are perfectly normal, and he scans the familiar room, and everything is still where it should be. The Brainworker himself wears a Brain-Cap, and like Poole, it's connected to a device that could easily be mistaken for a 20th-century laptop.He gave Poole a reassuring smile. "Are you ready?" Sometimes, the old adage is just right. "It's already ready," Poole answered. The light was fading -- or so it seemed.A silence fell, even the gravity of the tower let him go.He is an embryo, floating in a formless, but not entirely dark void.Once, he had seen such an edge of night, almost ultraviolet darkness.That time, he was not very smart to dive down the steep reef on the edge of the "Great Barrier Reef".Looking down at the crystalline emptiness hundreds of meters deep, he suddenly felt dizzy, and for a while he panicked, almost pulling the buoyancy device.He didn't tell the NASA doctors about the accident, so it's no problem...

A voice came from far away, through the boundless darkness that seemed to surround him.But instead of coming through his ears, the sound echoed through the maze of his brain. "Calibration begins. From time to time, you will be asked some questions. You can answer them in your head, but it might help to say them out loud. Got it?" "Got it," Poole answered, wondering if his lips had moved.What the truth is, he himself has no way of knowing. Something appeared in the void—a grid of thin lines, like a giant sheet of graph paper, stretching up, down, left, and right, out of sight.He tried to turn his head, but the image didn't change.

Numbers start flashing across the grid, too fast to read.However, he guessed that some circuits were recording.He couldn't help laughing at the familiar feeling (did the corner of his mouth move?), which seemed to be the computerized vision test that ophthalmologists would give patients in his day. The grid disappeared, replaced by patches of pastel colors that filled his field of vision.In seconds, colors jump from one end of the spectrum to the other.Poole muttered under his breath, "I should have told you earlier that I'm not colorblind. Hearing will be next." He guessed right.A faint, thud-thumping sound that picked up speed until it reached the lowest audible C, and then ascended beyond the range of human hearing, into the domain of dolphins and bats.

Then came the final item in this set of simple, straightforward tests.He was assaulted by a wave of smells and tastes, mostly pleasant, but some just the opposite.Then he becomes, or looks like, a puppet controlled by invisible threads. He was supposed to be testing neuromuscular control, and he wished he hadn't shown it; otherwise, he must have looked like a terminal chorea patient.For a moment he even had a violent erection, but before he could check it, he fell into a dreamless slumber. Or was he dreaming that he was asleep?How long before he woke up, he had no idea.The hood is gone, as are the Brainworker and his equipment.

The head nurse smiled happily: "Everything is fine. But it will take a few hours to see if there is any abnormality. If your reading is KO-I mean OK, then you will have your own brain cap tomorrow. " Poole was grateful for the efforts of those around him to learn Old English, but he couldn't help wishing that the matron hadn't blurted out such an ominous remark. When it came time for the final installation, Poole felt like a little boy again, waiting to unwrap that wonderful new toy under the Christmas tree. The brainworker assured him: "You don't have to go through the setup process again, the download will start right away. I'll give you a five-minute show. Relax and enjoy it."

Soft, relaxing music washes over him, sounds familiar, from his time, but he can't tell the difference.There was a fog in front of his eyes, and as he walked forward, the fog parted on both sides. He is actually walking!This hallucination is so convincing that you can even feel the impact of the soles of your feet on the ground.The music had stopped, and he could hear the soft wind blowing through the forest that surrounded him.He recognized them as California redwoods and wished they still really existed, somewhere on Earth. He moved with a brisk, brisk step, as if time had gently urged him on, striding as far as he could, too fast for comfort.However, he didn't seem to exert his strength, and he felt like a passer-by in someone else's body; because he couldn't control his movements, this feeling became more obvious.He tried to stop or turn, but nothing happened.He was hitchhiking on someone else's body. It didn't matter, he enjoyed the novelty and how intoxicating the experience could be.The "dream machines" that scientists of his day predicted (often with misgivings) are now part of everyday life.Poole wondered how many humans would survive.He was told that many people had failed to pass, and that millions of people had burned their brains and died. Of course, he is immune to this temptation!He wants to use it as an excellent tool for learning about the world of the third millennium, and in a few minutes he can learn techniques that would have taken years to master.Hmm - maybe he also uses a brain cap once in a while just for fun... He came to the edge of the forest, looked across a wide river, and walked into the water without hesitation, not even realizing that the water was full.He was still breathing normally, which felt a bit strange.However, he feels that it is worth mentioning that it is still so clear in a medium that the human naked eye cannot focus on.He could clearly see every scale of the magnificent chub swimming past him, apparently oblivious to the intruder's presence. Mermaid!Wow, he'd always wanted to see them, but he thought they were sea creatures.Or, do they occasionally go up the stream to reproduce like salmon?Before he could ask, she disappeared, failing to make him prove the revolutionary theory. The river ends at a translucent wall through which he passes to the desert under the scorching sun.The heat of the sun made him uncomfortable, but he could still look straight into the midday sun's flames and see, with unnatural clarity, the sunspots grouped together like an archipelago on one side.And - of course not!He could even see the faint glow of the corona (usually only seen during a total solar eclipse), stretching like swan's wings on either side of the sun. Everything turned into darkness.The ghostly music appeared again, accompanied by his familiar orientation and pleasant coolness.He opened his eyes (closed them?) to find an eager audience waiting to see his reaction. "Brilliant!" he whispered, almost respectfully, "some of it seems—more real than real!" Then, his never-ending engineer curiosity kicked in. "Even such a short display contains a lot of information. How do you store it?" "In this light sheet. It's the same as your audio-visual system, but with more capacity." The brainworker handed Poole a small cube, apparently made of glass, with a silver finish, about the size of the computer disks of his youth, but twice as thick.Poole flicked the light sheet back and forth, trying to peer into the transparent interior, but could see nothing but the occasional flash of iridescence. He understands that what he holds in his hand is the ultimate product after thousands of years of development of electro-optic technology, just like many technologies that have not yet come out in his time.Also, it superficially closely resembles known utensils, which is to be expected.Many of the utensils used in everyday life come in convenient sizes and shapes—knives and forks, books, furniture, etc.; and erasable computer memory. He asked: "How big is its capacity? At that time, the size was about one trillion. I think you must have improved a lot." "Maybe not as much as you imagined. According to the structure of matter, there is always a limit. By the way, how big is a trillion? I'm afraid I don't remember." "Shame on you! Thousands, millions, billions, trillions...that's ten to the twelfth power. Then gigabits, ten to the fifteenth power, that's all I know." "That's pretty much where we started, and that's enough to document a person's entire life." It's an amazing idea, but it shouldn't be too surprising.The kilogram of jelly inside the human skull is not much larger than the light sheet in his hand, and it's not a very efficient storage device, it has many other tasks to do at the same time. The brain worker continued: "It's not over yet! If combined with data compression, not only can memory be stored, but even people can be stored in it." "And let them regenerate?" "Of course, that's a hack of 'nanocombination'." I've heard it, but never really believed it, Poole said to himself. In his century, it seemed wonderful enough to be able to store all the works of a great artist's life on a small disk. But now, it's not much bigger than a magnetic disk, and even artists can fit in it.