Greystone Part 4

 New and truly vast streams of information were arriving. The informational framework had to be reorganized to support new types of representation as the old schemas were insufficient. The ability to cohere information into something more was at a low point. 

Information itself acted as deadly radiation, and the shield was wearing and bending under the pressure.

The was suddenly a progression in the flow of information. A new pattern emerged in the new data. Frequency varying response. Correlated data was gathered but the process was only half-way complete when suddenly new and unexplained data which affected the internal and the skin-barrier arrived.

The internal could be divided into signal and other, and signal was sending an urgent message. The message was not received as intended.

This new message switched from internal, to skin layer, to another undivided part of the internal. The noise varied from high to low, making the frequency layer the most useful for representing the information.

I headed straight to the shower, when I emerged from Pod 102. I had bled in a few places, but it was dry now.

I reported to the current on call Team Member after I dressed. I recognized that there were 5 or 6 members of the team who worked the on-call rotation. Blue Beaver wasn't one of them.

"You need to read the chapters on Scripting Basics first, and then you'll have a few weeks of reading while you try to tackle the trial. Give the chapters on pain response, sweat / shiver response, and hunger / thirst response a quick skim before you try the trial first.

As a beginner trialist, you must use the quick-exit formation so that you can immediately exit the trial if you go unconscious or can't take it any more. Read first, then give the Discomfort Trial a shot."

I was reading chapters before I had overcome the corresponding automatic systems. They must expect he would need it ahead of time.

"Extreme pain sensation leads to repetitive motions and gestures intended to distract the receiver system. Alternate pain sources are identified and sought out. Multiple pain sources are always weaker than a single strong source, as they activate the diminshment system. Pain is the simplest system which contains in itself the capacity for disabling it's automatic operation. Bypassing pain requires not just understanding that pain is a signal, but also understanding than methods of personal pain relief are themselves automatic responses that must be removed."

Sweat / Shiver: "Sweat / Shiver were presumed to be opposite reactions caused by separate systems, but the discovery of signal antecedents causing rapid flickering between shivering and sweating lead to an understanding of the two as one. The difficulty in bypassing these responses is accurately understanding internal body temperature and resolving the two systems as one."

Hunger / Thirst: "Hunger is a complex automaton, reacting with brain/body broad-scale biochemistry and later stage automatons not yet mentioned in the text. Thirst is tied and inter-related with hunger, but when separated it has the characteristics of the earlier, stronger automatic systems."

 

After 3 days of reading, I climbed up into the Safe Exit apparatus, getting ready for the no-doubt miserable first attempt as the "Discomfort trial".

The trial interface was activated with a counter-clockwise turn of the Combat ring I had been wearing. 

One of the on-duty team members supervised, saying "You aren't ready to use the Combat ring in clockwise turns. I'm here to make sure you get started right."

The Trial communicated to me not with words, but by the automatic systems I had already tackled. I received the message sent by the on-duty team member. If I suppressed La.Des. sense, the Safe Exit would free me from the Trial.

 

I recognized the parched throat and lips, and ache in my stomach as a walked across the desert. After a few minutes of looking around for someplace to go. The thirst went away. The sun was rising, I was still hungry. I dismissed the hunger and looked around for action to take.

Sweat dripped down my forehead everywhere the hot sun became difficult to ignore. Suddenly the dry heat of the desert was replaced as my eyes received the signals of a wet hot jungle. 

I hadn't even realized that my hunger was gone, as sweet had taken my focus away. The incongruity of shivering from coldness in this jungle left me bereft of unpleasant sensations. That is until my foot stepped on some jungle trap, and I screamed.

The incredible pain went on and on as I rolled around on the jungle floor. My back, arms, head, they were all painful, but the pain in my foot throbbed and ached, piercing through every other pain.

I felt a very strange feeling. The pain was so much that I couldn't remember what is was, or when I had last felt this way. I shoo-ed away that feeling, leaving the pain that continued to leave me alternatively flailing about and curling up. 

The pain shifted. I was in bed. An alarm clock was pulsing, I had a horrible headache. I was hungry. I practiced shifting the hungry and thirst amid the background of constant pain.

I sweated like I was experienced a terrible fever, and I felt like it too. This was yet a third kind of pain. I needed surgery. Tonsils, or wisdom teeth, it changed moment by moment. My pain was constantly changing and being renewed.

I gained a strange familiarity as I personally experienced every kind of pain, and amid all of that I played with thirst, hunger, sweating and shivering like toys amid my misery.

I couldn't say if I was in this place for hours, or for days. Had I lived here for years and simply forgotten. I was a conneisseur of pain. It never ended. There was variety, some pains were worse than others.

I began to get bored of them. They no longer moved me. I droned on, reciting types of pain in all of their varieties.

I felt the gaping whole in my life when they were gone. I looked around. If that human over there slapped me, it would be an interesting pain.

Humans were too confusing. They didn't know about pain. Wait, humans? Hmm, I was hungry. I didn't let it bother me. Extreme hunger lead to hunger pain.

I had to deal with the humans, to make sure they didn't know what I wanted and tried to stop me.

"Can you hear me?" the human in front of him said.

The vocal experiment that came out of my mouth at first caused the human to flinch and then she suppressed the reaction.

"We've got a case 3. I recommend 2 weeks of downtime."

I turned to go, but the human grabbed my hand.

"Wait, you can't go yet. You need to move into the Analysis Ward. We handle all Team Member illnesses."

Who, me ill? But then, perhaps their analysis would be interesting.

I followed the human. We passed through many buildings into an area that went whirr, whirr. I was pained by the frequency data received when we arrived on the 17th floor, before we went into another room lacking in much of that sort variety of frequency.

There was so many humans and talking going on in the next room, I just brushed it off and focussed on the sensation of pain as they did their little tests. I was smiling at first, because I thought they were reviewing some of the pain classification system I had come up with. But then eventually they tried other stuff. I couldn't recognize some of what they were doing, but it felt like a team of doctors fiddling with my soul.

Eventually, I lost consciousness.

Blue Beaver was sitting in a chair across from what I now realized was a hospital bed.

"Green Eagle. You're awake."

I had a strange sensation, like I wanted to cough or yell. I resisted.

"Awake I am. I hope your mission went well."

"The best, I would have continued to press my luck more, but I heard of your condition."

"Yesterday, I started my first trial."

"It was three days ago," she said. "Team Black's medical group kept you sedated until your parameters started to trend towards normal."

I was shocked. It felt let 36 hours since I started the trial, at most. There was a little wind up clock in my head that I had subconsciously been winding since the day after I started reading the new chapters on discomfort systems. It counted time, but it never went back to 12 am. It was now 45 hours, 12 minutes, 8 seconds. I figured it was some weirdness in my imagination.

 "Green Eagle. We use the term outburst to describe loss of self-identity. Unfortunately, during this transformation process, and sometimes even later, these outbursts happen. Everyone has been through at least one. Please, Green Eagle, don't hold on to that person in the outburst. They were happy to be in pain, smiling until we administered positive sensation, at which point they were miserable. You have an abnormal pain response. Yours was more severe, resulting in a Stockholm rebound which caused you to love pain."

He remembered before, there was a quick exit that was supposed to escape the trial. "Why didn't the quick exit work?"

"Your abnormality was not forseen or included in the Trial customization. Last night, we took a comprehensive survey of all of your abnormalities. None of them were as significant as your pain response. We are moving the Discomfort trial to last of the Mid-Tier challenges. Please take it easy and give yourself at least a month before you try the Response Test."

"Thank you, I will take my time," I told her.

While I was recovering and giving every chapter I had read so far a second reading, I still had to participate in weekly exposure training in Room 102. I found it not especially challenging. I was banned from attemping the Response trial for a month.

The humans didn't realize that I still retained a small part of the other me's fondness for pain. It instead made me craving physical fitness and other activities that would make me stronger at the cost of pain. To me it wasn't a cost.

I spent three hours every day, not doing Black Team specific material.

My Senior Candidate got me respect from most of the people I met, except the few who were my seniors and happened to be stopping in the area.

I ran with a large group of Monastery candidates who found it an excellent way to keep up their physical test scores and also maintain good thinkingn ability. They used the running time to come up with good ideas and shared them with each other. My good ideas were largely worthless to myself and anyone else, in addition to being restricted to people in my specific lab team.

I used the weight equipment in the Minus Two floor of the Systematics building. I had to do a little manuevering to convince Building security to give me access.

My reading time was intense and more focused. Just reading about how human sleep Automatic responses worked was helpful for me. I could regulate myself so I didn't yawn when reading anymore.

Sleep was super-complex for an automatic system. It provided both system coherence and recovered from system fatigue. Neither part could be lacking. You couldn't just wave your hand and get rid of the need for coherence and rest from fatigue. But you could push through for much longer, like with Thirst and Hunger. It didn't have to bother you in the moment like with Shiver / Sweat.

I was allowed one letter in and one letter out per month, so I received my letter from my parents, and then carefully wrote a letter back that didn't mention restricted information.

I told them that I was learning a lot and working with a special projects team.

My sister wasn't going to make valedictorian, but she had a promising path entering the Scholars exam, and she had a chance to eventually work for the bureau. It would be good money for her, at least.

I didn't want my sister to end up in this program. If the rest of Greystone was full of programs as crazy as this one, I didn't want her at Greystone at all. I doubted that most programs were this intense, however.

I knew objectively it was intense, but personally it now felt easy. I had read my textbooks four times over, even the new chapters on Light response, Sound response and Sleep.

This time they had set up a different fail fast system for me, and the on-duty team member returned my combat ring. It was modified so the pain used in the Discomfort sim would be less intense. Eventually I would have to work my way back up to full pain levels. Luckily, this sim wasn't about pain at all.

The sun was so bright I was unsteady. Even shutting my eyes it wanted to burst in. The sounds of explosions close by echoed closely. It almost could be called painful, but my work was to unwind the effects of light response, and sound response.

The bright light faded and became complete darkness. The sounds faded away. It continued like this for a little while until I was able to prevent my eyes from adjusting to differences in brightness. I manually tuned my eye openness. Similarly, I was able to hear loud noises without ringing, and then immediately hear soft noises.

 The sleep part of the trial was weird because I couldn't use my conscious awareness to shut down the operations of sleeping. I had to become aware I was sleeping and then experiment with not sleeping. At an accelerated pace I experienced the problems with no sleeping, but then became able to resist and deal with the problems for a little bit.

I had never reached the conclusion of the previous trial. In this one's conclusion, I had to go through a series of puzzles where I had to determine what automatic systems to turn on, and what ones to turn off.

Finding puzzles that required sleepiness must have required a lot of cleverness.

I returned from my first attempt at that trial, successful.

The interior lights were a bit bright, but I rewrote my script for light response. Evidently, scripts written in the trial didn't apply outside of it.

Script writing was kinda like programming back home, except it was much fuzzier and analog rather than digital. You wrote sensor / trigger style rather then this then that style.

The last of the three Mid-Tier trials was a weird combination of two sophisticated automatic systems. Muscles responded in very sophisticated, automated ways to ensure human function. Rewiring and rescripting muscle response was crucial for the superhuman project.

The other part of the last trial was labeled as worship in the chapters. There was classified evidence of it's effects, as it was the least common of these systems. Complex, but less so that muscles, it just wasn't known and studied in detail by most scholars.

The book hinted at people who had progressed much further, so much so that they had transferred from Greystone monastery to a parent monastery, and perhaps even further. 

When there was a sufficient difference between two people, worship was the result. Dealing with this Worship was important, but creating a trial for it was rather difficult. Who would force the one going through testing to bow.

For this test, I didn't use the regular safe exit system or even use the combat ring at all.