#when gravity fails

"I left Yasmin a note telling her to lock the door on her way out. Yasmin was one of the few people I trusted alone in my apartment. We always had a good time together, and I think we really cared about each other in some unspoken, fragile way. We were both afraid to push it, to test it, but we both knew it was there. I think it’s because Yasmin hadn’t been born a girl. Maybe spending half of your life one sex and half of your life the other does something to your perceptions. Of course, I knew lots of other sex-changes I couldn’t get along with at all. Well, you just can’t get away with generalizations.

Not even to be kind. Yasmin was fully modified, inside and out, body and mind. She had one of those perfect bodies, one of the ones you order out of a catalog. You sit down with the guy in the clinic and he shows you the book. You say, “How about these tits?” and he tells you how much, and you say, “This waist?” and he gives you an estimate for breaking your pelvic bones and resetting them, and you have your Adam’s apple shaved down and you pick out your facial features and your ass and your legs. Sometimes you could even go for new eye color. They can help you with your hair, and the beard is a matter of drugs and one magical clinical procedure. You end up with a customized self, just like restoring an old gasoline automobile.

From R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk When Gravity Fails Sourcebook

“It’s simply known as The City. It lies on the fringes of what once was the Arab Federate. Almost 2,500,000 people live in it, making it one of the largest cities in the region. For a city this size, it’s got a surprisingly good feel to it; clean and alive, not like many of the European or American cities. Even the air is clean, step outside and you can smell dry, desert winds scented with spices, flowers and date palms. The streets are crowded with scooters, taxies, and horse carts, all of which make so much of a racket that the Muslim faithful need a city-wide network of speakers to properly hear the muezzin call them to prayer. There are very few private hover cars, as most of the city’s residents can’t afford them and there isn’t much room to park them anyway.

The ability to send thoughts directly to another person’s brain is the stuff of science fiction. At least, it used to be.

In recent years, physicists and neuroscientists have developed an armory of tools that can sense certain kinds of thoughts and transmit information about them into other brains. That has made brain-to-brain communication a reality.

These tools include electroencephalograms (EEGs) that record electrical activity in the brain and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can transmit information into the brain.

In 2015, Andrea Stocco and his colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle used this gear to connect two people via a brain-to-brain interface. The people then played a 20 questions–type game.

An obvious next step is to allow several people to join such a conversation, and today Stocco and his colleagues announced they have achieved this using a world-first brain-to-brain network. The network, which they call BrainNet, allows a small group to play a collaborative Tetris-like game. “Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem-solving by humans using a ‘social network’ of connected brains,” they say.

The technology behind the network is relatively straightforward. EEGs measure the electrical activity of the brain. They consist of a number of electrodes placed on the skull that can pick up electrical activity in the brain.

A key idea is that people can change the signals their brain produces relatively easily. For example, brain signals can easily become entrained with external ones. So watching a light flashing at 15 hertz causes the brain to emit a strong electrical signal at the same frequency. Switching attention to a light flashing at 17 Hz changes the frequency of the brain signal in a way an EEG can spot relatively easily.

TMS manipulates brain activity by inducing electrical activity in specific brain areas. For example, a magnetic pulse focused onto the occipital cortex triggers the sensation of seeing a flash of light, known as a phosphene.

Together, these devices make it possible to send and receive signals directly to and from the brain. But nobody has created a network that allows group communication. Until now.

Stocco and his colleagues have created a network that allows three individuals to send and receive information directly to their brains. They say the network is easily scalable and limited only by the availability of EEG and TMS devices.

The proof-of-principle network connects three people: two senders and one person able to receive and transmit, all in separate rooms and unable to communicate conventionally. The group together has to solve a Tetris-like game in which a falling block has to be rotated so that it fits into a space at the bottom of the screen.

The two senders, wearing EEGs, can both see the full screen. The game is designed so the shape of the descending block fits in the bottom row either if it is rotated by 180 degrees or if it is not rotated. The senders have to decide which and broadcast the information to the third member of the group.

To do this, they vary the signal their brains produce. If the EEG picks up a 15 Hz signal from their brains, it moves a cursor toward the right-hand side of the screen. When the cursor reaches the right-hand side, the device sends a signal to the receiver to rotate the block.

The senders can control their brain signals by staring at LEDs on either side of the screen—one flashing at 15 Hz and the other at 17 Hz.

The receiver, attached to an EEG and a TMS, has a different task. The receiver can see only the top half of the Tetris screen, and so can see the block but not how it should be rotated. However, the receiver receives signals via the TMS from each sender, saying either “rotate” or “do not rotate.”

The signals consist of a single phosphene to indicate the block must be rotated or no flash of light to indicate that it should not be rotated. So the data rate is low—just one bit per interaction.

Having received data from both senders, the receiver performs the action. But crucially, the game allows for another round of interaction.

The senders can see the block falling and so can determine whether the receiver has made the right call and transmit the next course of action—either rotate or not—in another round of communication.

This allows the researchers to have some fun. In some of the trials they deliberately change the information from one sender to see if the receiver can determine whether to ignore it. That introduces an element of error often reflected in real social situations.

But the question they investigate is whether humans can work out what to do when the data rates are so low. It turns out humans, being social animals, can distinguish between the correct and false information using the brain-to-brain protocol alone.

That’s interesting work that paves the way for more complex networks. The team says the information travels across a bespoke network set up between three rooms in their labs. However, there is no reason why the network cannot be extended to the Internet, allowing participants around the world to collaborate.

Author: G. A. Effinger

Genre: sci-fi, cyberpunk

Year: 1987

Notes: First novel of the Budayeen trilogy, followed by A Fire in the Sun and The Exile Kiss. I have read the Italian translation by Maria Cristina Pietri published by Nord in 1989. Nominated for the Nebula and the Hugo Award. Read this review in Italian here.

Marîd Audran lives in the fictional Budayeen district of an unspecified Middle East town. He is a private detective, and is perfectly confortable in that place full of night clubs, drugs, prostitutes and cybernetic enhancements – even if he doesn't want any of the latter for himself.

He's meeting a client in a night club when a man who dresses and behaves exactly like James Bond shoots his client and vanishes. And that's just the start of Audran's troubles, as more and more of the people he knows start getting killed, some in very brutal ways. He's sure that the killer – if there's just one – is using a "moddy", aka a personality modifier like the one the "James Bond" killer was obviously using. And what's worse is that Audran's state as a freelancer with no brain cyberware may end very soon, as Friedlander Bey, the real ruler of the Budayeen asks him to complete a task he isn't even sure he can do. But no one can say no to Friedlander Bey, and Audran desperately wants to live – and to prevent other deaths as cruel as the ones the myserious killer(s?) is/are inflicting upon more and more Budayeen citizens, all of which are very close to Audran. Audran is forced to change if he wants to survive and catch the killer(s?), but the price may be too high even for him...

If Neuromancer and other cyberpunk novels borrowed elements from hard-boiled fiction, this novel is a straight-up detective story, and Audran starts as the typical noir detective. And yet the ending is far from what you'd expect. There's plenty of cyber, represented by the "daddy" – modules that give knowledge of a certain subject or can be used to repress hunger and so on, and the "moddy", which are a very popular way for people to live their fantasies, sexual or not. With the right moddy you can feel powerful, sexy or even become more skilled in your job... And there's plenty of punk too, because those who live in the Budayeen are those who live the most unconventional lives, and are not the kind of people who would be accepted in a traditional society. Sex workers, dancers, assassins, all are part of the weird big family of the Budayeen, closely watched and "protected" by Friedlander Bey, generous and ruthless like an old god.. There's a lot of LGBT people, and sex changes are extremely common and popular (Yasmin, Audran's girlfriend, was born in a man's body).

When Gravity Fails: A Review of George Alec Effinger’s Novel

Gwendolyn Bellinger

George Alec Effinger’s cyberpunk novel, When Gravity Fails, allows his readers to explore an innovative and intriguing futuristic world, one dominated by brain modifications, sex changes, and a string of gruesome murders. Our novel’s hero, Marîd Audran, is one of few working in the Budayeen who has managed to maintain his independence. This zone, infamous for crime, is packed with prostitution, drugs, alcohol, and cheap entertainment. When Audran stumbles into a series of seemingly-related murders, he is offered an opportunity to work with the Budayeen’s most notorious criminal mastermind, Friedlander Bey. Audran must strategically maneuver between the demands of Friedlander Bey and his own values and independence while staying alive and stopping the depraved killer.

I found Effinger’s imagining of the future quite telling of the political landscape during which he wrote. Written in 1986, the novel takes place in the 22nd century Middle East after a splintering of the Soviet Union and the United States, leaving much of the Western World fragmented into small states. In this vacuum of power, the Middle East has returned as the prosperous center of tourism and development. Although taking place in a fictionalized city, Effinger hints that the area is somewhere in the Levant, possibly in modern-day Lebanon or Israel. His visualization of the Cold War taking down not just one super power, both both, and leaving much of the Western World divided seems an apt prediction for his time.

Audran lives in a world of modifications; nearly everyone in the Budayeen has some sort of physical or mental enhancement. The physical ones are not so different from what we see today: breast enhancements, facial reconstruction, fat reduction. Whatever plastic surgery a person wants can be done at a price. Audran seems bored by the dozens of perfectly sculpted bodies dancing day-in and day-out at the bars.

Sex changes are commonplace. From what we can gather from Audran’s narration, gender appears quite fluid. Most of the dancers in the bars and the prostitutes were born male, including his girlfriend Yasmin. While some have completed the shift from one sex to the other, others are somewhere between male and female, preferring a more ambiguous gender. While Marid Aubran states he usually can tell to which sex a person was born, he is mistaken multiple times throughout the novel. Effinger’s commentary on sexual fluidity very much seems ahead of his time, making the novel still relevant in terms of the current social dialogue regarding sex and gender.

Just as common as plastic surgery and sex changes are brain modifications or “moddys.” Surgeons are able to rewire one’s brain in such a way that the person can install software that can change their entire personality. By popping in a “moddy,” you can become anyone: living or dead, fictional character or superhero. Their pre-programmed knowledge, personality, language, and thoughts become yours. There are less overwhelming additions, “daddies,” that can be installed as well. Instead of an entirely new personality, these allow the wearer to gain new knowledge or abilities, such as the ability to speak a new language, analyze data, or override hunger. Almost everyone gets wired as soon as they can afford it. One character says he was wired at the age of 13. The only ones who shy away from such modifications are the devoutly religious. And Marid Audran. Audran prefers his brain as it is.

One of the highlights of the book is the way Effinger truthfully incorporates aspects of Middle Eastern culture into his writing. He manages to portray the city as one of diversity, not as a flat, uniform culture often depicted in films. Aubran, for example, is from Northern Africa, the son of a Maghrebi prostitute and a French father. While he considers himself Muslim, he is not devout. He hints at the mixed roots of other Arab characters, and has been acquainted with a number of foreigners of American, Russian, European, Africa, and East Asian backgrounds. Ethnic diversity is prevalent. Likewise, he emphasizes the religious diversity of the city. While some are extremely devout Muslims, others are non-practicing Muslims, Christian, or simply non-religious. The city is divided into rich and poor areas, religious and non-religious, areas dominated by crime and upscale spaces. This diversity paints a much more accurate and believable picture of the Middle East than I originally anticipated it would.

Likewise, the author frequently laces his novel with Arabic expressions, greetings, and customs. Part of the novel takes place during the holy moth of Ramadan, Audran often quotes from the Qur’an, and characters haggle over prices in much of the same style as I’ve experienced across the region. Effinger even presents the moral and religious ambiguity surrounding the prevalent culture of mental and physical modifications, the religious community shunning the “moddies” altogether.