84

Introductory Text

84th Post

Posted 13 June 2016 at 16:09:34 UTC

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> A full scale interface portal below a highly populated urban center.
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> In the early days of flesh interface technology, this would have been considered utter madness. The uncontrolled incident zone would have resulted in mass segmentation and total chaos. And looking back on the experiment, madness was in fact the result. But for a brief time, it seemed like an idea worth exploring. It all started one day when a mid-level analyst was navigating a 3D map of the Honduras Contained Interface II and felt the urge to go to the bathroom. Just as she was getting up from her desk, she was struck by an overwhelming realization.
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> But before we get to that, you must understand some background information. First, building an interface below a populated city was now possible because we had learned how to control the size of incident zones. We could create interfaces with incident zones that only existed within the interface tunnels, instead of there being a large uncontrolled zone around the interface. This was achieved through a breakthrough involving signal cables.
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> For years, we thought that the interfaces had little appetite for anything but flesh. Machines and other objects were ignored. They were not incorporated into the interface superstructure and did not seem to undergo significant travel. But the Chinese figured out that the interfaces were willing to incorporate electromagnetic signal cables.
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> If a live, transmitting cable was sent into a phagus corridor, the cable was taken up by the cilia limbs and connected directly to the interface's nervous conduits. At this point, we could send and receive signals from the interface. You can imagine our excitement. We had a working example of seamless techno-organic integration. It would naturally become the basis for direct-sense feed technology.
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> In those early days, we had no idea what the interface did with the signals we sent to it, nor could we make much sense of the signals it sent to us. All we knew is that it loved signals, the more the better. The more cables we hooked up and the more information we sent and received, the smaller the segmentation zone would become. As computing and signal technology advanced, we were able to reduce the segmentation zone to area within the interface tunnels. Finally, we had a relatively safe and stable flesh interface.
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> Still, we had no reason to consider building an interface below a city until our mid-level analyst made her startling discovery. Before this discovery, we knew that the size of a flesh interface depended chiefly on one factor: how much flesh it was provided. But at a certain point, the interface would cease to grow, even if it was provided with ample "building material." We wanted to know why. Why had the Novaya Zemlya and Artigas portals grown so large, when other portals were offered more flesh but failed to grow? In addition, we wanted to know what factors shaped the configuration of the interface tunnels, the so-called ant farms.
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> At that point, we knew only a few basic facts: the tunnels would form either underground or underwater, but not in the atmosphere. The underwater tunnels were much larger than the underground tunnels, generating more segmentation and requiring more signal transfer to quell the segmentation. While the interface tunnels avoided the surface, they had little regard for the composition of the rock, sand or soil that they were tunneling through. They tunneled through everything at rate chiefly determined by how quickly we fed them flesh. It wasn't possible to observe the tunneling process, but it must have happened via segmentation because the dirt and rock which was removed simply disappeared. The tunnels were self supporting and would remain in place even if the surrounding earth shifted, unless they were wholly exposed to the open air, in which case they would putrefy.
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> But why did the tunnels take one configuration or another? What our mid-level analyst discovered as she traveled through the 3D digital recreation was that the route she was taking was strangely similar to the trip she took to the bathroom every day. It was an odd little route through a poorly designed research facility, which included a short flight of stairs and a switchback at the end of the hall. All of this was reflected in the ant tunnel.
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> Forgetting for a moment about her desire to use the bathroom, she took an emergency escape map off the wall and compared it to the ant tunnel she was studying. The layout of the Honduras research facility, which was just a few hundred meters from the interface entrance, was quite different from the layout of the interface tunnels, but there were certain similarities which went beyond coincidence.
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> The analyst's discovery spread quickly through the facility, and the analyst herself was given minor promotion along with a new office. It was discovered that the interface tunnels did not copy the architecture of the research building but rather the most frequently used paths and most frequently occupied rooms in the building. That is, it copied the layout of human activity within the building. But even this it did in a distorted, oblique way, repeatedly copying and multiplying certain sections of the layout, as if the building map was being viewed through a multi-faceted lens.
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> For the people working in facility, the discovery was nothing less than eerie. Shortly after the newly promoted analyst moved into her new office, a new section of tunnel was created within the interface to reflect this. No longer were the analysts detached observers. It was clear that on some level, they were being observed and copied for some inscrutable purpose.
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> A quick comparison of interfaces and nearby human-occupied research facilities revealed unmistakable parallels. Huge facilities such as Zemlya Novaya tended to produce huge interfaces. This even held true for undersea interfaces such as Artigas, where the nearest facility might be many kilometers away.
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> The correlation was stupefyingly obvious once we looked for it, and it set off a wave of crazed speculation. People started theorizing that the interfaces were affected by all sorts of things: the mood of the office, how much coffee we drank, the health of our potted plants. This period of wild speculation came to known as The Correlation Game, as almost anything was proposed as a possible correlation. Most of this speculation came to nothing. But there was one idea that gained traction: what if we built an interface in a highly populated area and gave it unlimited flesh material?
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> How big would it get?
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