Minds Meet.

"A Science Fiction story wherein Mikey invents a machine that does for Brains what LapLink cables do for Computers."


The machine seemed to be ready to go. I called Matthew to see if he wanted to help try it out. He said "Yeah, I'll be there in 10 minutes." I knew this meant 20 minutes or more, so I fired up Netscape 3 and checked the online TV guides. Nothing of interest was on - 7 and 10 were showing Cricket, ABC had one of those silly opera things on, and SBS was showing a foreign movie with subtitles. Having never fully recovered from Thomas the Tank Engine overdubbed in Greek when I visited Cyprus, I elected to fire up WinGroove instead, and listen to some MIDI files through the HiFi.

A few tracks passed, and I began cleaning up the Hard Disk again - all those useless programs I had collected over the last few months. Most of them ended up in "Bit Heaven." I began to romanticise about the days when the 20 Meg Hard Disk was  big enough for everything. Now 1,800 Meg was not enough - even with ZipMagic.

My MIDI listening was interrupted by the crude "Mary Had a Little Lamb" playing from the $5 doorbell I bought many years ago. I got up and let Matthew in. He was a bit anxious about what I had in mind with this new gadget, and asked why I hadn't asked my other half to help instead. I thought that answer was blindingly obvious - she's an environmentalist, and quite religious. I love her lots, but she finds TV hard enough to watch, and doesn't play any computer games, save for Green Thumb Cards. The idea of linking two brains via a computer would be just too freaky for her. He reluctantly agreed, and settled in the chair next to myself.

Matthew knew I had been setting this machine up for a long time now - researching the possibilities. I knew there was almost no hope in hell that it  would do anything useful, but it was something new, and it didn't involve drugs. (I am a non-smoker, non-drinker (not even tea and coffee) and most definately not a drug user.) (I'm also a person who uses nested parentheses in general text.)

The machine was quite simple really -  it consisted of 2 identical halves, and a box into which they both connected. Each unit consisted of a rather crude oval-shaped head guide with a curved bar perpendicular, onto which a small cup was mounted which could run along the axis of said bar. This meant that all points of the head could be related to a 3 axis chart. The box contained some pateneted electronics and was connected to the SCSI II port on the Pentium 200 computer.

We both put on the headsets, and set them to about the same point on the 3 plane axis. Once they were on, I fired up the program I had written. This program, although rather crude, was intended to show if there was any traffic between the two headsets. It basically had 2 graphs, the code from which I had borrowed from a InstallShield application. These would, I had hoped, move in accordance to the amount of traffic travelling in each direction.

The application refused to run, saying it couldn't find the machine, so I knew what had to be done. I went through and bookmarked the pages I was still looking at on the web, and shut down Windows 95.

5 minutes later, windows 95 had returned to a state of stability, and I tried the application again. It appeared on the screen, but nothing was happening. Neither of us was sending out or recieving anything. It was a little disappointing, but I sort of knew it wouldn't work. After all, no one had ever been able to do it successfully. Why should I be able to do it on a clone computer that was chocked full of shareware and silly screensavers, when a Sun Netra counldn't do it.

I wasn't that happy, but had to face the reality that it didn't work, so we fired up Quake, and joined an internet game at quake1.aone.net.au. I died about 5 times in the first minute, so Matthew had a go. He ran around madly, shooting anything  that moved, but also got killed. He was a bit better at it than me tho - he killed 2 people in 5 minutes. He had the patience that it required to hang  around, and wait for the rocket launcher to appear. I got a bit bored after 10 minutes, and started looking around for other ideas, and picked up the TV remote. I flicked through. ABC was still playing its silly opera. Seven and 10 were still showing cricket, and SBS was still subtitling a foreign movie. I elected to stay with the foreign movie.

It was a little windy outside, so the reception wasn't the best at times, and at one point it was so bad that the TV decided there was no signal, and bought up a blue screen with "No Signal" flickering on it. At this same time, matthew had a real whinge. Windows95 had switched back to the monitoring program, and I heard him get killed. (Quake runs in DOS, so it is hidden when Windows comes up again.) I thought nothing of it, knowing Win95 did stupid things alot of the time. Probably he hit the Windows button on the keyboard.

I resumed watching SBS, even though I hadn't a clue what was going on in the movie. 2 minutes later, another wind blew the signal away again, bringing up the blue screen. At the same time, again, Matthew complained as Win95 put Quake back in the background and bought up the monitoring program. This seemed to be a bit too strange to be coincidental, and I joked to him that it was the blue screen of death on the TV that killed him in Quake. It was then I realised that there was something going on - there was something happening whenever I saw the blue screen. I asked Matt to watch the scale while I stared at the TV. Of course, the TV signal was fine then - as life goes. So I got up and unplugged the antenna from the set. Matt exclaimed excitedly, saying that whenever I looked at the screen, the scale moved up to about 10% - I was sending something that was linked in some way to the blue screen.

I turned back to the computer, and fired up Paint Shop Pro. I looked for the fill tool, but realised I couldn't find it easily,, so I quit that and bought up PhotoPaint instead. I did a flood fill of blue, like that on the TV. I also used HackIt to force the monitor program to stay on top. I eventually found which shade of blue worked the best., and began fiddling with the headset to maximise the signal. Eventually, I had a 35% of bandwidth signal being sent from me to nowhere. Matthew had used his initiative, and found a similar spot that responded to 28%. We sat and stared at the blue screen a little longer, and the scales began to rise. I fiddled with the gain controls on the connecting box, when suddenly something very strange happened. I became aware that I could see the blue screen, but from Matt's perspective. He said Holy **** as he apparently had the same expperience. We just sat and stared at the screen for the next 5 minutes, as we tried to comprehend what has happening - we could see our own vision, but we could also see each-others! I don't know how to explain it - because it is such an unusual experience. The closest I can think of is split screen TV, but there was no reduction in quality. We could still hear the sounds of death, as Quake was running in the background. Another 5 minutes passed - we were both achieving about 70% on the bandwidth. Suddenly everything went dark, as the screensaver fired up, and small animated bugs began to fly into and splatter on the screen. It was the first time Matthew had seen the Windshield screensaver, and had a fit of hysterics over it. But I could still see faintly the image from his eyes. I asked if he could still see what I was looking at, and he said "it's very faint, but it's there." He looked away and held three fingers up so I couldn't see them, and asked me how many he was holding up. "Root 9" I said. He chuckled, obviously taking it as a crude joke, and agreed.

He spun back and looked at me - I was looking at myself through someone else's eyes. What I found really strange was that I could still see him, and yet also see myself from him, in a separate view, but as naturally as if I had a second set of eyes. The image was slowly improving as time passed - I can only think that our brains were "learning" to obtain information from that particular point.

We took careful note of the coordinates we had used to achieve this result. They were somewhat different, but roughly in the same area on the head. Up and to the left of the left ear.

We weren't sure what to do next. We'd just experienced something mind-shattering for the first time, but couldn't figure out what to do with it. We settled on returning to Quake. But this time, He went to the other, older and slower machine, and we decided to play a networked game against eachother. It was acres of fun, because we could see where we were hiding, and read eachothers tactics. There were some games that would never be quite the same again. Scrabble for one!

While we kept playing, my excitement kept growing. Two reasons. One- This was a new invention that could change the world. Two - Maybe there were other senses that could be linked....

To Be Continued...


Copyright Michael Kean.

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