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Rated: E · Other · Sci-fi · #1208068
Pt 1 'Bandwidth' flashfic collection, work in progress, casual cyberpunk, high bitrate
Note: wherever a word appears with a '2' at the end, this means it is theoretically squared, as in math terminology.

Try telling that to microsoft word;)

Any suggestions on how to adapt msw to include this as it should be would be gratefully received.

Enjoy.




Looped Out With the Dentist and Pals



I've always hated 'porting to the dentist, have done for as long as I remember2.

Apparently, folks always have and used to even die from lettin' 'em rot; before the dangers of tooth decay campaigns became race memory and my grandfather died so early.

He conceived my mother safe in the knowledge that he would be dead and that my gran's more caring fancy man, my adoptive grandfather, would raise my mother to the age of ripeness.

My gramps freaked at modern dentistry in its infancy but how the hell would he even comprehend the modern luxuries we have now?

Heck, they even still had labour unions back in his day…I guess we don't have it nearly so bad now with instant appointment transmission and all; I guess I just still fell at odds with the bugs that reassemble me so many times a day, let alone my teeth.

In the old days they would rip teeth out with cold, hard, clinical brawn, rather than the simplicity of as good as 'porting them away, doing the hypereal math and porting them back afresh for want of a better metaphor…it's the same technology anyhow.

If only they could do that with people, repair them during a 'port session – they probably would were it not for the legislation they say keeps us all from going full on looped out2 'til the state we've been in so long becomes commonplace, race memory.

Still, a hundred years may be a long time in nanopsychology but it took a good couple of grand just to stabilize the whole 'thou shalt not kill' ethic and all, so I'm told in those big ass gothic museums the occasional insurgents find so important.

I guess if I'm still freaking at the prospect of 'porting to the dentist for all the harm it does in the waking world, my grandkids2 probably got a while to wait before the commercial potential really hits.


It took the music business a good couple of centuries to really implode but if it wasn't for the bugs that make and do everything for us now, we'd never have gotten to the stage where fractal drives allowed a life time's supply of music in a literal nutshell, outsized for simplicity of access.


Now, we're all damn near telepathic philosophical musicians and artists doing our own thing, working 'cause we want to – all in the name of human2 development and killing time.



But I digress2. It's my job as historian.


          So my dentist casually sits me in the comfortable fetish chair and asks if I want him to talk me through it – estate policy.

I respond with a negative. I know what those damn bugs get up to and, although not thinking about something leads the creative right side of the brain into top gear, I'm at the stage now where the nightmares my ignorance allows for are lucid and even fun sometimes, in their grandiose 4d technicolour imagery-

-I'd just rather get it over with. Another victim of the modern age, haw haw.

          The dentist straps the funky faux-rubber nanoreceptor to my face and I clamp down hard on it while it cools and adjusts to the contours of my fiz.

"Initializing nan'smition," he says, an old oral hygienist's joke.

I can't see or hear the nanoprobes as they get to work-

-I can just about feel them though, crawling and scanning like little Ai bulldozers around the gumshield.

I always choose late evening 'portings for this kinda thing, my lucid lysergic dream catcher.

The job's over in moments and I'm already back at the pad within full ten.

          I crawl into bed feeling sluggish and confused before swiftly 'porting to that strange land where scale is all topsy, I'm an impotent giant in my vaguely amazonic dystopian landscapes; having cups of mormon coffee with the also giant empathic spiders, leg hairs miles wide but still so tiny to me.



They're inside my sanctum, my mind's home, but I don't mind 'cause they're great coffee makers and even better conversationalists.



As they begin to traverse my synapses, iterating into strange new shapes to suit the mood of the conversation, I know I'll be here for a while…but I might just learn something.






~*    *~

                                                                Counting to Zero

                                                          19th & 20th Jan 2007


                                                                            Hull
[Part two of 'Bandwidth' coming soon]

         Currently listening :
Taiga
By OOIOO
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