#neural interfaces

"Hey Vela, do you have a minute?" A message popped up on the Project Stillpoint team chat. "Can you stop by the Cygnus meeting room? The Cold Sleep team wants to see you."

"What for?" asked Vela.

"We are talking about something that might be up your alley."

The Cold Sleep department was not, strictly speaking, up Vela's alley. She was designing and engineering neural interfaces for the astronauts' interactions with the ship's machinery.

The two departments, however, had a lot of interaction when it came to integrating all the systems for the interstellar flight. No one could fully predict how the astronauts' brains will be affected when they come out of the cold sleep near Stillpoint Star. The neural interfaces will have to recalibrate. Several teams worked jointly on these problems.

Vela opened the meeting room door. The Cold Sleep team, gathered around the rectangular table, looked rather short on sleep of any kind. The dozen scientists, engineers, doctors and project managers appeared to have had a very long day, judging by the slumping and yawning that went on. But it was still morning.

"Oh, hi, Vela," the team lead, Omyer, said from behind an army of plain white coffee cups arrayed in front of him at the table. The residue in them varied from thickening sludge to dried stains. The team might have been here all night. "We've been having a problem and wanted to pick your brain. You probably know that yesterday was the first test of the Cold Sleep capsules."

"Yes," said Vela. The test started about a year ago. Yesterday was when the first batch of test subjects woke up.

"It went pretty good, but there was a surprise. All the astronauts woke up as expected, except one. You know that coming out of a cold sleep involves intense dreams, right?"

"Right."

"Well, one astronaut could not wake up from that dream."

"Or rather, did not want to," said Senior Engineer Nalveso. Vela looked at her. "She was having… too much fun. She did not believe it was a dream. We repeatedly tried to tell her that she was dreaming. You know, they can hear the outside world in that phase of awakening. They can even respond. She heard my voice, but thought it was inside her dreamworld. I kept saying 'you are dreaming', but she just replied that I was messing with her. She was convinced she was awake."

"Oh," said Vela. "How is she now?"

"Luckily, her crewmate thought of a trick that woke her up. She once told him that as a child she had an imaginary friend, a five-legged puppy. She had even sent him a drawing of it. So we injected that image into her dream, where it ran around on five legs, you know? It ran up to her, and it kind of… gave her a pause. Literally. She recognized it could not exist in any conceivable world. It undermined the integrity of the dream enough that she woke up."

"Interesting," said Vela, still trying to predict what this team wanted from her.

"We have to come up with a universal Impossible Object to wake up any astronaut who gets stuck inside their own head. The kind you see and know you must be dreaming," said Omyer. "Because not everyone had imaginary friends."

A young, round-faced engineer spoke up. "I propose to use a geometrically impossible object. One that can't exist in our reality. Like a Klein bottle."

"A Klein bottle might work!" said Omyer. "But that's your department, Vela. You tell us if it's possible."

Now Vela could see why they came to her. She and her team designed three-dimensional virtual interfaces to ship's systems that would be projected directly into the astronauts' cortexes. There were going to be times during the trip when the astronauts won't be able to physically press any keys or interact with any tools. They will be in anti-G pods. For protection against multiple Gs they will be enveloped in compressive gel so tight that they won't be able to move so much as a finger. The only way to control the ship machinery will be through the neural interface.

And she had to disappoint her colleagues.

"I'm afraid a Klein bottle would not really work. It is not embeddable in 3D space. Yes, it is a paradoxical figure, but you can only perceive it correctly in four-dimensional space."

"But this will be in a dream," said Nalveso. "Surely your department can design a 4-D virtual space to be injected into a dream?"

"Unfortunately, no. We can design only what a human mind is capable of visualizing. And 4-D space is impossible to visualize," said Vela.

"Ah." Omyer took off his glasses and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. In an outburst of sympathy Vela added: "But there are other paradoxical figures that can be embedded in 3-D space. For example, Escher's trident. Also known as impossible trident, devil's tuning fork and other names."

Omyer typed on his handheld. "Oh!" he said and raised the handheld with the image on its screen. "This could work! How much effort is it to design, Vela? Tomorrow the next test batch is waking up. Can you do it before then?"

"In a day?" said Vela. "To modify a neural interface to accommodate impossible geometry? Hmm. We are quite swamped with work."

"Then maybe it's not necessary," said Nalveso. She sounded desperate to reach any decision and move on. "We can go the imaginary friend route. We could just have someone call up the families of the astronauts and ask them about their childhood imaginary friends, monsters they were afraid of, and such."

"No!" Vela shouted. The notion twisted her stomach. To imagine a colleague calling her family and asking such questions while she was asleep and helpless - why, this was a fate worse than being trapped in your own head. She could not do that to the astronauts. "It won't be needed! We'll make it happen!" # # #

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Here are links to the geometric figures mentioned in the story:

Klein bottle