Greystone Part 2

 When I woke up, my thoughts were occupied by the strange dream that was fading away. Unlike the lab, the rooms here had a large window. It was night.

We were receiving countless streams of data from the cosmos, every second of every day. We had always received endless streams of data from the cosmos.

Even though it was 2 am, another unfamiliar member of the project was having breakfast.

There was a shelf in the kitchen with boxes, each marked with a sign. The one I went to said: "Breakfast bars. Supplements for Info-Nutrients."

I took two.

"You'll want a half bar for now," the team member said.

He was scrawny, fit but tired.

"I never expected my first day to be so eventful," I said.

"You jumped ahead of the other new candidates. You weren't highly sought after before, but now, you'll find that your intuitions are more effective. That's just the first run's after-effects."

"Why can't you guys bid higher on new candidates?" it seemed like the team had a secret super-power, they should be getting all the best people.

"High wash out rate. You already made it through the first 50% cut off. At this point, there's half a chance that you will end up as a useful member of the team, half chance you'll leave."

"Am I doing another run today? I asked.

"Hit the books today. grbeaver is out on mission, so go to whoever is on call."

The team member waved and left.

The half breakfast bar did not fill me up. I resisted and saved the remaining half until I knew what these bars had in them.

There were a few people about at that time, I shared an elevator with a young member of some other Systemics team. She went a different direction as I headed towards the Black Team lab.

 On call was yet another team member.

"Before you get to reading, I need to teach you one thing."

There was a tin, who knows what it contained. The on call person put the tin near me, and opened it.

 The small was devastating, but just for a moment. Then I knew what my nose was receiving but it didn't affect me.

"You are already capable of responding to attacks. Our ability to receive everything as information is our greatest strength. But you don't have to wait for the attack.  Focus on the horrible smell, after all, you did experience it for a second. Then picture the latter seconds of the exposure, when you contextualized smell as just information. Now visualize a connection where one substitutes for the other."

I didn't realize that the team member had opened the tin back up again. Or rather, a quiet part of me noted the presence of certain molecules but I couldn't yet associate such knowledge with the old sensation and reaction. My old reaction was gone.

"First try, that's good! There's a cleaning closet, go ahead and clean out Room 101. This technique I just gave you can be extended to things which are disturbing to any of our senses or automatic systems."

I had succeeded in completely turning the smell into information as I opened up the Room 101 pod. For a moment I reaction to just the appearance and the sound of my shoes as I walked in to the pod.

I had to spray down the pod, and then let the water and everytghing it collected go into a bucket. The bucket was dumped into the septic. There was a special tube which could be unsealed to dump the bucket into the same placce toilets went.

Logically I knew I had lost control of my body during my time in the pod, and what I was cleaning was my own grossness, when I had lost any moral or respectable concern for myself. I had not yet studied enough to understand the actual literal information my brain was provided.

After I had cleaned up the pod, and taken a shower to clean up myself, and put on a new uniform, I went back to the team member on duty.

Had I been working on this so long? It was another woman team member who was on duty now.

"Good. We didn't tell you but we consider the cleaning effort to be Run 1 1/2. But you can't clean very effectively right now, without your automatic responses. To stop the informational effect from taking hold, and return to natural human responsibility, adjusted by your acculturation to the system, think again on that link between the dry and inhuman informational truth, and the human and very illogical auto-reaction. Think about discarding or cutting off that truth, and convincing yourself that your eally do think bad smells are disgusting. Use that disgust sense."

Unlike detaching from human responses, re-acquiring them took me hours. The gradual return to human base functioning made me feel uneasy, but I couldn't identify it until once again the tin was opened.

"Go clean up  Room 101 again, and yourself. Turn your automatic human responses to sense data on and off. Practice returning to the digust priors, as you struggled with that."

I fought my desire to shut off smell as I truly cleaned the pod this time. I used the full set of cleaning products in the closet. Each time, I cleaned up a bit, and then shut down my senses and returned to the recognition of disgust. It took all day, but I could return to a sort of human baseline in a few minutes.

I suspected even this return to normality was not really true normality. I became less affected by my senses and the disgust response.

Eventually, after I could detect no unpleasantness in the pod, I returned to myself, and thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned every part of me.

I had just started reading the first of many books on the secured e-reader that the on-call team member provided me.

My cell phone had been unsecured, so it was one of the things we were all told not to bring. I couldn't contact anyone on this e-reader anyway.

The book was called: Human Automaton, and it was about how the human had automatic responses that controlled more of the behavior around us than we realized. Just like my personal journey on Black Team had started with controlling disgust, the book started with that. His assignment was to read and understand that section. Once his training covered the other responses he would go back to reading about them.

Initially tasked with controlling poison and dangerous foods and substances, disgust had been brought into a fundamentally social place. We had an automatic social response, which was often denied in so-called polite society.

Blue Beaver returned from her mission after I got half way through the section on disgust.

"I didn't expect to be reading this kind of thing," I told her.

"You've experienced the first taste of what this team is about. We become informational beings, but without training in how our body responds, we become horrible people. You think you've got disgust under control but there's still many more steps to go. 

Our body's automatic system is always acting. There are many things we have to learn to establish, as we replace that system."

It was a weird systemics, but I guess it was systemics after all. "Don't you become an empty husk after you've pulled away the human?" I asked.

"You'll find a new desire to define yourself in a way that isn't contingent on biological circumstance. Not about what neighborhood you were born in, or what you look like. It's about who you really are when no automatic system is pulling you along. Let's get dinner, you haven't eaten since breakfast."

They actually left the Systemics building. I thought the team members never left, but they must have for missions.

"I assume I'm not ready to know about what missions you all go on?" I said.

As Blue Beaver lead me around the monastery, she replied in part. "Everyone tacitly assumes that all physical action is decomposable from all computing action. A simple weather station proves them wrong, but the inter-connection between Systemics and the physical work of the Monastery is profound."

She actually lead us off the monastery property itself, and to a restaurant in the neighboring town which depended so much on Monastery customers for it's existence.

"It's like this town. Your assumption is that the Monastery's influence ends at the property line. The truth is that this town is deeply intertwined with the Monastery in the web. Nothing is a complete graph Green Eagle. Nothing is unconnected either."

I got it. "I was worried about paying for dinner."

"How mortal of you," she said. "But you aren't worried now."

"I was guilty, but I realized that I was assuming this business was separate and independent, therefore it needed this financial API." 

"The missions," she said, "we don't have to take them, from an outside point of view, and yet we do."

It was a very homey meal, I didn't order or chose my meal, and we walked outside after we were done.

"Is there something you noticed about that meal?" she said.

"It seemed really bland," I admitted. There wasn't a lot of flavor too it.

"But outside standards, that was a very flavorful meal, but you've begun to retrain your automatic response to smell and taste. Every time you flipped from recognizing your senses to recognizing information, you weakened those paths. In the end, meal bars are all you will want. Just preserve function, and provide brain specific supplementation."

 After we walked about for a bit, she lead me back to the systemics building. 

"You've gone just a half step into the room, Green Eagle. Most often, that's where the initiate thinks they've achieved enlightenment. After a day of reading tomorrow, your second run will challenge that thinking. Prepare yourself to be stretched in unexpected ways."

 

I was really thirsty, when I woke up. That dinner must have been salty. Breakfast bar (just a half), and water. I sat and read the rest of the Disgust part of Human Automaton.  There was another book called Independence and Dependence: Clearing the Cobwebs, which seemed to go to the things which Blue Beaver had talked about.

Only the first chapter was unlocked for that book as well. I read a dozen books that day, and always just the first chapter or two. These books seemed to be oddly structured. They talked outside view, big-picture stuff, and they talked about the things I had already experienced myself. They didn't take one step into the unknown which I faced tommorrow.

I had half of the bars marked "dinner" for dinner, and went to sleep. Reading all day had somehow taken a lot out of me.

o o o 

"It's quite clear, you have to be the one to do it."

"Uh, really?! I wasn't even naturally that way to begin with."

"But you chose to return that way."

"It was economically wise. Fine. But one of you is handling final stage."