Hatrack River Writers Workshop: Thought streams of you

This is topic Thought streams of you in forum Fragments and Feedback for Short Works at Hatrack River Writers Workshop.

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Posted by michelracineco (Member # 2485) on :

Hello there,

this is a short story, about 5000 words, near future SF.

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“I will kill you with a single shot to the head. Copying your tesses to the holocrystal will take just a few seconds, then you can die. Are you ready for this?” Killian asked.
Anita nodded.
Killian walked to Anita and gently moved her hair from the network adapter external connections. False hair, Killian noted. He had the same cybernetic implant in his skull. The device was commonly used to access the world network with mental commands, any content a thought away. However, Killian would use the adapter to copy Anita’s thought streams.
He inserted the holocrystal in her head and programmed the neural interface with a wireless datapad. Gigabytes of data flowed from her mind to the storage crystal. He could have copied the tesses directly from her adapter to an external server, but that was slower and error prone; he preferred to play it safe.
The copy completed with a beep. Killian slowly took the crystal out and put it into a protective casing, then in his shirt pocket.
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Lemme know.
Thanks
Michel.

Posted by autumnmuse (Member # 2136) on :

I'll read the whole thing if you want me to, just email it to me.

Posted by Jaina (Member # 2387) on :

I'll read it too.

Posted by Phanto (Member # 1619) on :

quote:
He had the same cybernetic implant in his skull.

This is a vague statement that takes too much thought to unravel. IMO, that is.

[This message has been edited by Phanto (edited April 13, 2005).]

Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :

I think this is the first time I've seen a line of dialogue as the opening hook that worked.

I was wondering...

quote:
False hair, Killian noted. He had the same cybernetic implant in his skull.

If he has the same cybernetic implant in his skull, is the false hair standard? If not, what does it tell Killian about Anita? If it is common, why would he notice it?

The geek in me wonders if terrabytes of data should flow rather than gigabytes. Measuring human memory in gigabytes just doesn't seem like enough space.

Posted by michelracineco (Member # 2485) on :

I will work that sentence you pointed out. It's weird. Probably half the sentences are weird... ;-)

The gb vs. tb is interesting. Anyone has any science behind the amount of data we have in our heads?

Thanks so much for the feedback.
Michel.

Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :

Forgot to mention that I'd be willing to read.

Posted by Survivor (Member # 213) on :

You've probably got about 100 billion neurons in a typical human brain, with an average of a thousand synapses leading to other neurons. Since we need to know the "address" of each synaptic link as well as its "weight" (how much it contributes to pushing the target neuron over threshhold), and the "threshhold" of the neuron itself, that means you need about five kilobytes per neuron assuming that you're being really quite efficient. I'd say closer to ten just to be safe. So that's about a terabyte to store the physical structure of a brain, just in terms of the number of connections. Say another terabyte to store all the "state" information.

But that's what you need to make it possible to rebuild the brain in essentially identical form, without any loss of identity. If you want to run a working model or "emulation" of the brain, you have to have all that information in registers in a processor large and fast enough to model the action of a hundred trillion synapses acting on a hundred billion neurons hundreds of times per second (obviously, you'd use the much greater raw speed of an advanced processor to take some of the load off from the much greater complexity of a brain, you're still talking about a big-o-hurtz machine there--exa-zettahertz speeds compared to today's machines, and all that raw info still has to be local to the processor, which is an enormous pain).

Human technology is not too far from recording all the information needed to rebuild a human brain (though it isn't certain that this could be used to recreate the "spirit"). But that's a long way from building a processor that could emulate a brain at a speed worth the effort.

But the text as stands leads me to believe that Anita isn't "uploading" in the traditional sense. Killian is storing her brain so that she can experience death, for whatever reasons, without the information in her head being lost. That strikes me as potentially being a very interesting premise.

But I'm not quite interested in reading this as is. The opening is just a little stilted for my taste, borderline info-dumpy (which could hurt you, since many people disagree about the specific numbers behind this idea).

Posted by michelracineco (Member # 2485) on :

Thanks Survivor, I appreciate the feedback. Jaina already pointed out areas in the text where too much infodump was done. Interesting you pointed that out without reading the whole text.

I need to get back to it, and fix that before it's worth submitting.

Thanks again.
Michel.