short story: understand

"Understand" by Ted Chiang (1991)

This is one of my favorite short stories. Excerpts below:

Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven't filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It's become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge.

All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision.

What can I do with this knowledge? Much of what is conventionally described as "personality" is at my discretion; the higher-level aspects of my psyche define who I am now. I can send my mind into a variety of mental or emotional states, yet remain ever aware of the state and able to restore my original condition. Now that I understand the mechanisms that were operating when I attended to two tasks at once, I can divide my consciousness, simultaneously devoting almost full concentration and gestalt recognition abilities to two or more separate problems, meta-aware of all of them. What can't I do?

---

His name is Reynolds. He's originally from Phoenix, and his early progress closely parallels mine. He received his third injection six months and four days ago, giving him a head start over me of fifteen days. He didn't erase any of the obvious records. He waits for me to find him. I estimate that he's been supercritical for twelve days, twice as long as I've been.

I now see his hand in the investment patterns, but the task of locating Reynolds is Herculean. I examine usage logs across the datanet to identify the accounts he's penetrated. I have twelve lines open on my terminal. I'm using two single-hand keyboards and a throat-mike, so I can work on three queries simultaneously. Most of my body is immobile; to prevent fatigue, I'm insuring proper blood flow, regular muscle contraction and relaxation, and removal of lactic acid. While I absorb all the data I see, studying the melody within the notes, looking for the epicenter of a tremor in the web.

Hours pass. We both scan gigabytes of data, circling each other.

---

I'm riding in a mud-splattered taxi to Reynolds' apartment.

Judging by the databases and agencies Reynolds has queried over the past months, his private research involves bio-engineered microorganisms for toxic waste disposal, inertial containment for practical fusion, and subliminal dissemination of information through societies of various structures. He plans to save the world, to protect it from itself. And his opinion of me is therefore unfavorable.

I've shown no interest in the affairs of the external world, and made no investigations for aiding the normals. Neither of us will be able to convert the other. I view the world as incidental to my aims, while he cannot allow someone with enhanced intelligence to work purely in self-interest. My plans for mind-computer links will have enormous repercussions for the world, provoking government or popular reactions that would interfere with his plans. As I am proverbially not part of the solution, I am part of the problem.

If we were members of a society of enhanced minds, the nature of human interaction would be of a different order. But in this society, we have unavoidably become juggernauts, by whose measure the actions of normals are inconsequential. Even if we were twelve thousand miles apart we couldn't ignore each other. A resolution is necessary.

---

In other news, this blog will soon go into hibernation. For a long time I've been wanting to stop using the last few forms of social media I'm still on... and I think I've finally reached the pointy end of my ever-waning tolerance for it. I don't particularly want to be online at all anymore, beyond using it as a reference tool. I could probably list about 20-30 reasons why this is so (about the blogging specifically). I'd rather not be so thorough, though--at least not outside my own head. It's enough to say that all my reasons converge somewhere in the vicinity of "writing here and now, in this particular way, doesn't make me happy and doesn't bring me closer to any of my goals, plus in some ways it actively works against my best interests, so... let's stop."

I might (or might not) post some quotes over the next few days and tie up a series or two, with minimal commentary. Then I'm switching stuff up and moving on.