|Sci-Fi|: Eras of Cain Ch 8 |Sci-IRL|: Neurology and Cybernetics (Guest Post!)
Fic: Our teenaged cyborg heroes stand up for their memory/data rights + Science IRL: our Scifi Soothsayer neuroscientist explores possible neural/cybernetic plugins
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|Science Fiction|: Eras Of Cain Ch. 8
Previously…Cain murdered (unintentionally, maybe—brutally, definitely) her friend Trin’s VIP customer, Griff. Cain’s parents swooped in with their universe-traversing Worldship to scoop Trin and Cain out of the robotic grippers of law enforcement. Now, Cain’s parents are fighting over how to keep their daughter out of jail and avoid fueling a crooked politician’s campaign against synthetic intelligence rights. Meanwhile, Trin wonders how he can survive his (new) cash flow problem.
Adam and Eve Planck squared off across the galley table, their jaws clenching. The Worldship juddered underfoot and the autopilot’s voice crackled about a course correction over the comms. The ship decelerated, causing the silvery static of streaming starlines in the window to resolve back into a map of diamond-bright pinpricks.
Neither Planck cared to set aside their anger to respond to the autopilot. Even though Mr. Planck was taller, with muscles tensing his expensive suit jacket, Mrs. Planck’s whip-thin frame in her oversized pilot’s jacket managed to appear more lethal.
Cain leaned against Trin, her shoulder tensing against his bicep and he hoped it was because of the conflict between her parents, not a worrisome spacetime travel anomaly. Cain’s gaze was fixed on the furious adults, her mouth a thin line tensing her cheek against her black cybernetic faceplate. Adult angst then, not Worldship worries.
Trin was grateful he’d turned down his own cybernetic augmentations for the moment. If they could pick up the pheromones Cain’s body was surely pumping out, he’d be forced to empathize with her. Motivated by his sense of smell and some pesky programming to comfort her.
Spacetime travel jitters aside, and unfettered by Cain-chemistry, Trin’s thoughts turned to his own problems. Cain’s (wildly unexpected) murder of Trin’s best customer imposed an impossible cash flow problem for him. That is, if he ever got back home.
Trin sank into one of the chairs next to the galley’s counter. R0sie, the Plancks’ giant spider bot, shifted away from Trin so the industrious tornado of her many arms would neither fillet nor sauté him as she prepared dinner.
Even when Griff had been alive and paying Trin (resentfully) for their weekly alley appointment, Trin was barely affording Nutripacks and water after tuition bills. Attending the Planck School was a crippling price for a chance at a better future, and it looked like Trin might have to give up hope just to stay fed.
Mr. Planck spoke up, cutting into Trin’s dark spiral. “We chose this universe as our home to raise Cain because we’d be the smartest people in it, Eve. The three of us can outmaneuver any politician with our hands tied. We. Figure. It. Out.”
“That’s just your narcissism tal…” Mrs. Planck trailed off.
The pause gave Trin a moment to consider what Mr. Planck had said...choosing a universe where they were the smartest…The Plancks’ celebrity personas painted them as consummate Aximerran patriots. Though Trin had never heard their origin stories specifically, there was a pervasive belief that Adam and Eve were Axons, born and raised, working to serve their high-rise, techno-plex city as their civic duty and privilege.
Had Trin just learned a secret?
Mrs. Planck began to pace in a tight circle, brows furrowed, hands clasped behind her back. Her attention snapped suddenly to Trin.
“How strong is Oversight where you live…?”
“Again, his name is Trin,” Cain said.
Trin looked to Cain for some signal of how to handle this.
Cain’s cybernetic eye spun and dilated, zooming in on Trin’s face. Breaking their no eye contact pact. Cain must not know how to handle her mother either.
Trin stood and faced Mrs. Planck, suppressing an embarrassing urge to salute. Mrs. Planck suppressed an eye roll and tried to relax her shoulders under the lapels of her dark green pilot’s jacket.
“By ‘Oversight’, you mean camera surveillance and bot enforcement?” Trin hoped his feigned naïveté was convincing.
Mrs. Planck nodded sharply.
Trin took a breath and adopted a look of strained recollection. Due to his illegal, underrage ‘escort’ job, he possessed a cohesive grasp on how the city of Aximerran’s Justice Department executed Security Oversight on its lower levels. He needed an alibi, lest Adam and Eve Planck—two national treasure celebrities—became suspicious.
“If you want to look at video footage, why don’t we check Cain’s aug feed?” Mr. Planck interjected softly.
Cain’s ‘all-organic’ eye went wide and glassy with sudden fear. She jammed shaking fists into her hoodie’s pockets.
Out of the proverbial frying pan and onto the stove.
The Plancks would straight-up see Trin in the act, on his knees, servicing Griff in that alleyway if they watched Cain’s footage. Trin’s gut clenched into a painful ball.
“I think Mom—Eve—wants to know what the authorities saw,” Cain said.
Eve flinched. Silence reigned in the Worldship.
“Eve?” R0sie finally prompted, breaking the strained silence. Her eight robotic arms ceased their cartwheeling across the galley. Half-cut vegetables and sizzling pans rained back to cutting boards and stovetops. The sensors on the R0sie’s face strobed, tracking red and blue lines across Eve’s tense expression. Trin wondered at the complexity and scope of the bot’s programming. R0sie—impressive mechanically—also seemed acutely attuned to Mrs. Planck’s needs.
If the Plancks were the smartest people in the Symparody system, perhaps R0sie was the most sophisticated robot? Maybe Trin’s own caretaking software had similarities to R0sie’s, given most cybernetic technology had Planck’s logo somewhere in its lineage.
“Chrissakes, Cain, I’m still your mother,” Mrs. Planck snapped. “In every way save nominal biological processes, anyway. Address me as Mom. And yes, Trin, what do the authorities know?”
Mr. Planck shifted his weight, his fancy leather shoes squeaking in protest. “Shouldn’t we know the truth? All the details, so we won’t get caught unawares if this goes to a trial?”
“Dad!” Cain looked stricken. “Demanding to review my aug’s feed is invasive! I have rights. You taught me that.”
To be continued…
|Sci-IRL Neuroscientist Guest Post!|: How Cybernetic Augmentations Could Work
Hi all,
, your resident Neuroscientist/fiction writer here! I am so honored that Rachel invited me to use my neuro know-how to take you on a journey of IRL scientific discovery through the Eras of Cain cybernetic augmentations! I won’t be covering everything about the systems I’m targeting as they are very complicated, but I’m going to do my best to make this interesting, digestible, and accurate! For this week, I want to focus on Trin’s augs.Trin has some really cool augs that enhance his olfaction (sense of smell) as well as gustation (flavor). These augs are not only able to enhance his senses to the point of being able to detect emotions through the smell of a person, but Trin can save scents and tastes, and recall them on demand. That’s all pretty cool to think about, but how does it work?
Let’s look at how Trin’s olfactory system might function!
For it to work, there’d have to be a biological-to-mechanical interface in which the augmentations would have some pretty high-level neural interface capabilities that could not only store information, but also be able to push the right buttons in the brain to make them occur again. Let’s assume that the brain is interfacing with an external system implanted somewhere - I recommended to Rachel that this system could exist in Trin’s piercings and she approved, so we’re going to roll with that! This system would have to be some sort of microcomputer-esque setup that interfaces seamlessly with the nervous system. Now, what is that system interfacing with and how could it work?
An external device would need to be capable of not only storing that precise information, but also reactivating those neurons again to give you the ability to recall sensations on demand. When we experience a memory, we already do this ourselves to an extent, so all the interface would need to do is detect when a memory was being re-experienced and increase intensity to assist in improved recall. In that way, what Trin’s augs do is something our brain does on its own, but not to the same degree or ability that Trin can.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how this olfactory aug might work and I came up with two ideas. Let’s take a look at those, as well as the anatomy of the olfactory system from the neurological side:
The Epithelial Interface ( dubs this “Portable Perfumery”)
Optogenetic Accessory Interface ( dubs this “Laser Lights Show”)
If we were to go with the Epithelial Interface concept, we would want Trin’s augs to interfere at the olfactory epithelium. Interesting fact, although the olfactory epithelium doesn’t quite look like it, some olfactory neuroscientists believe the olfactory epithelium is in fact part of the brain! Regardless of whichever you believe, this epithelial layer carries scent signals to our brain. With that in mind, we’d want the neurons there to be stimulated by molecules that would activate the right information that could then be communicated to the brain to let it know they are experiencing a scent. You’d need some sort of external device (a mechanism like Trin’s piercings) that could disperse scent molecules directly to the epithelium where that message would then be delivered directly to the olfactory bulb. That is all well and good, but I think you could get a more complex reaction if you were to zoom out, skip the bulb, and transmit directly to the parts of the brain that the olfactory bulb normally talks to.
So let’s step away from the olfactory epithelium and focus on the brain for our second concept: the Optogenetic Accessory Interface.
When you have certain experiences, your brain ‘lights up.’ What this amounts to is chemical and electrical signals being projected to areas that communicate with that region to assist you in deciphering what it is you’re experiencing. There are three primary regions in the brain that the olfactory bulb projects to: The piriform cortex (the primary olfactory cortex), the amygdala (emotional processing), and the entorhinal cortex (memory formation). If you really wanted to alter a sensory system like olfaction, you could easily leave the actual organ - the nose, the olfactory nerve, and the olfactory bulb - alone and focus on the areas that they communicate with. How might such an augmentation work? Thankfully for us, optogenetics exists!
Using optogenetics - a method that allows you to activate/deactivate regions of the brain through genetic intervention and light - you could cause an organism to have phantom sensations by tricking that part of the brain into thinking something’s happening. I’d like to think in the far flung future, Trin might have access to far more advanced optogenetics. Maybe he could activate them through higher cognitive function that interfaces with his augs. He can then activate the lights on the cellular level to push the right buttons and cause the exact sensation he wants. Of course, to get precise scent experiences, we’re talking about an unreal amount of pinpoint accuracy, but this is sci-fi isn’t it? For those more interested in the concept of optogenetics, check out this video that offers more information than I can here:
Let’s review:
Epithelial Interface ( interjects, “Portable Perfumery”)
Pros
Direct interface with the olfactory system
Less invasive than placing light switches in your brain
Auto dispersion and storage of scents through scent molecules
Cons
Having molecules to disperse would require refilling the mechanism regularly
This might be cheap at first, but regular refills would get costly, which wouldn’t be great for Trin
Optogenetic Accessory Interface ( interjects, “Laser Lights Show”)
Pros
Direct interface with the brain would give you better access to memory enhancing from scents
If you can push the right buttons in the brain, you wouldn’t need any real molecules
It might be expensive initially, but after the install, you wouldn’t need to get constant refills
Cons
Installing this would be very invasive and possibly unsafe
The precision of this instrument is both a strength and a weakness. If the optogenetic light gets moved, you could push the wrong buttons and incite the wrong behavior. In this case, smelling the wrong thing. (or remembering the wrong thing, smirks evilly, with no plot spoilers, of course)
Alright, that’s everything from me! As a fellow reader of Eras of Cain, I am so excited to have done this collab with Rachel, and I look forward to another one in the near future! I can’t make any guarantees just yet, but I think next time we’ll be talking about the neuroscience behind some of Cain’s augs. Catch you then!
Author’s Note—Scifi Soothsayers Inaugural Collabo
Super mega thanks to
for this Inaugural Soothsayer science article!Join
and I in this Soothsayer collab! We had a blast working together and we’d love to expand our network of IRL nerds! I learned a lot from this and the realism helped me flesh out plot points where cybernetic malfunctions can pose some believable problems for our heroes.If you’re already a Soothsayer, drop us a line and let us know how we’re doing!
, lookin’ at you ;)If you want to join our nerd squad, leave us a comment or drop us a DM to explore other sci-fi/science collabs!
We’d love to hear from you!
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Love the IRL collaboration element! And I'm definitely open to that, if something closer to my field comes up! Maybe something on the multiverse-hopping ship? Though to be honest theoretical cosmology isn't especially my area of expertise either 😆
Excited to see what's next for Cain and Trin! It's been a wild ride so far!