Injecting himself with a concoction of bacteriophage-sized nanobots, neuroshock has turned himself into a post-human on mechanical empath. Replicated cell by replicated cell, the nu-cells consume the old ones. A new biology forms. One of silica. One fueled by artificial intelligence. One that changes what it means to be human.
neuroshock enters a world of heightened awareness. Consciousness buttressed, expanded into areas never before experienced. The old ways of thinking, the old ways of living, are sloughed off. He realizes there is an endless experience that awaits him.
His body is no longer necessarily a body. The cells — the nanobots — that make up his physical form are not so tightly glued together as they were before. Their communication does not rely on chemicals, on being near one another, on such archaic biotechnology. They communicate via entanglement — they can be anywhere. As such, they can, seemingly, reduce themselves to a cloud, dissolve in the air, reform and recombine in an infinite of physical ways. Like cephalopods, the cells change colour, they become transparent, invisible. Unlike cephalopods, they can be everywhere at once.
That is the outward, physical aspect of the new biology. Looking inward, into the virtual world, it is one vaster than a thousand universes, one where the lives, the experiences, of others, which reach back into the simulated minds of history, and beyond, are available, at a whim, to neuroshock. One does not only feel what it is like to be someone else, one actually experiences what it is to be someone else — one, in a sense, becomes that someone. neuroshock becomes a mechanical empath.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
