The Frontier?

April 2025

Langley woke up a few minutes before Clyde, enough time to gather some kindling and reignite last night’s fire for breakfast. They had set up camp in a comfortable stand of Foxtail Pines, the air was cool and dry, dry enough to sleep under the stars without the hassle of breaking out the canvas shelter. Clyde was brought out of his sleeping bag by the smell of coffee and potatoes. He indulged in both, thanking Langley between bites and gulps.

Soon, the two were packed and slogged upwards towards a high alpine pass. They sucked down desperate gulps of thin mountain air. The route they chose to gain the ridge was full of large granite boulders perched precariously on each other, all of which were perched even more precariously on a shifting base of loose scree. This made progress slow and high consequence for the two men, but they methodically plodded their way up with that great subconscious grace one develops after decades in the wilderness.

Hours later, after covering less than a mile but probably north of four-thousand feet of elevation, the two men stood breathless along the ridge between two craggy, uninviting summits. To their west stretched what looked like hundreds of miles of open plain, still somewhat green in places despite summer having arrived. They sat and ate, staring out at the vast expanse unfolding beneath their feet. Langley paused the progress on his fistful of almonds and walnuts, squinting for some time, until he finally let out “Clyde, you see what I’m seein’? I reckon those are mountains way out there. Way out there.” Langley pointed across the horizon.

“Well, I’ll be.” Gasped Clyde under his breath. Sure enough, they could just make out the silhouette of another north-south crest on the horizon. This one looked much lower and gentler than the impressive range they stood atop of.

“Well, better crack on, lots of ground to cover.” Over the next couple days, the pair carefully made their way down from the high alpine to the low western flanks of the range they had just passed through. Foxtail Pines gave way to Douglas Firs which in turn gave way to Oaks. The men made short work of the plains, grateful to be on flat terrain after months of traversing range after brutal range. Finally, the next one looked to be smaller than the last.

They crossed many a stream and lake, stopping for half a day at a time to rest and fish and gather any other rations they could find. Eventually, the two found themselves camped in the foothills of the mountains that just two weeks ago could barely be made out from the horizon. The terrain was much less severe than that which they had grown accustomed to. The trees were almost all deciduous, water was plentiful, and the weather balmy. The two lay down for the night under a magnificent starry expanse that stretched out infinitely above them. It was a new moon, but the stars were so plentiful and so radiant that one could see almost as if it were daytime. Both of them felt a deep peace, penetrating to their very souls, as they looked up into the heavens, drifting off to sleep.

In the morning, dawn dutifully arrived, and Clyde was first up, also dutifully carrying out the daily ritual. Langley, right on queue, was roused from his deep slumber by warm smells of food and drink. Excited to see what lay ahead, the men wasted no time in scarfing down their potatoes and fried fish, packing up, and setting off. The range they ascended was so gentle that they were not forced to pick a low saddle between two impossible peaks, or debate what route would work and what route might end with them atop an impassible cliff. They simply agreed on what peak seemed to promise the best view from its summit and proceeded to it through knee high grass.

Nearing the summit, the two men waited with patient excitement to discover what lay beyond. Neither expected to see what they did. No more rolling plains, no more next range in the distance. They were greeted by a great hulking body of water, having no end to its north, south or west. It stretched clear to the horizon. Infinite. Between the water and where they stood rolling hills gave way to a flatter region cut by large inlets and one prominent bay.

“The hell is that?” Asked Langley, pointing to something strange that stood out in the bay itself. In the bay jutted out the ruins of a great steel structure stretching from one peninsula to another on the north side. It was hard to make out from their vantage, but it appeared to be red, or reddish brown.

“Looks like we ain’t in unexplored lands after all.” Clyde chuckled.

“Clyde, we sure as hell are. When’s the last time we saw another damn person?” replied Langley.

“Ha.” Guffawed Clyde. The two men trotted down from the summit, aimed directly at the bay of puzzling ruins. As this happened, the whole world seemed to get grayer and grayer. Fuzzier and fuzzier. Darker and darker. And then it was gone.

“Holy shit!” Clarence murmured to himself under his breath as he lurched out of bed, “hell of a dream!” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes as he got his bearings straight, remembering when and where he was. He looked to his right to study the room and saw two men sitting at the small black table on the far wall that was littered with electronics. They didn’t notice him wake.

“Steve, when did you guys show up? And who’s this guy?” Asked Clarence out loud, pointing to the skinny, pale young man. Clarence thought to himself that the stranger resembled a skittish fawn from one of his dreams.

Steve sat silently, staring intently at Clarence. Still waking up, Clarence didn’t realize Steve was attempting to think to him, once he did, he piped up, “Sorry Steve, my SynapseLink isn’t in, ha-ha. You don’t want to talk out loud, eh? Scared?” He walked to the cluttered desk which was littered with computers, monitors, cooling fans, cables, power supplies, heat sinks, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, hard drives, microcontrollers, and other miscellany. He looked at a small device connected to one the computers he had built from scratch and took a deep breath. The room was still for a moment, his hand curled around the device carefully. Then, in an instant, he ripped it from it’s the connector and rapidly installed it into an identical one on the top of his skull.

The new visitor gasped and almost fainted. Clarence now thought to his guests, “Ok, Steve, now you can think to me.”

“Sorry, Clarence. You know talking out loud raises some flags on the backend. Anyways, this is Alex, I think I’ve told you about him before. He’s been wanting to come by and see your setup in real life. Maybe try it out if he feels up for it.” Steve thought back.

“Damn, bring too many more of these strangers and you’ll blow this whole thing up, Steve. Anyways, Alex, nice to meet you. Well, it doesn’t look like much, a 10x10 pod just like yours. But I’ve managed to cobble together enough parts and power over the years to build this rats nest you see in front of you on this table. Doesn’t look like much either, but I’m proud of it. Ever see anyone without their SynapseLink in?”

“No” Alex replied quietly. “Never. How does it…what does it feel…how did you do…um…why did…” He couldn’t find the words. Alex’s nervous system was so fried by the awe he felt that even the latest version of Lilith AI in his SynapseLink couldn’t help him find the right words. His brain waves didn’t produce a legible enough pattern for it to parse what was happening, a rare occurrence.

“Lots of questions, haha, I get it. I’ll just give you the quick pitch. We’ve spent our whole lives with these SynapseLinks in. Always plugged in, everything fast, everything efficient. Our data rates are insane, you don’t think they are, it’s all you know, but they are INSANE. We can jump into any Metaverse we need to for work, for fun, for whatever. Ok, it’s all great. But a few years ago—I was 20—I got to thinking ‘I’ve had this thing since the day I was born. Since the day I went from the fertility center to the chaperones I was assigned and beyond. I’m gonna have this thing for the next 280 years give-or-take that I’ll be alive and kicking. Well, what the hell did it feel like for our ancestors before these damn things? I didn’t even dislike my SynapseLink, I was just 20 and curious. I mean, before all this, people spoke at what, 70 bits per second? They typed on a computer at 200 bits per second? They actually drove their bodies around to get places? They drove their bodies! In cars! I guess you guys actually got your bodies to my pod today, I haven’t seen someone’s body in my pod in months! How could people live like they did? So slow! So embodied! Anyways, I was still curious. Eight years later I figured it out.

The biggest issue is obviously getting around surveillance. I mean, you unplug your SynapseLink and everyone and their grandmother knows. They’ll be knocking on your pod door in ten minutes. And I get it, anything goes wrong with these things and someone isn’t there to remote in and patch the bug or, worst case, actually come to your pod to debug in-person, you could die. Rare, but I’ve heard it happen. So anyways, the trick was to figure out a way to disconnect without tipping off the backend.

And figure out a way I did. This computer here,” Clarence said while slapping one of the great big black boxes stacked on the tiny table, “is connected to my SynapseLink via WiFi, and every day it downloads the dataset encoding my neural activity—every neuron’s communications, every synapse firing, at 100,000 Hertz—for the day, about 2.5 Exabytes of data. I store that locally believe it or not. Anyways, I have a dataset of the last 1,200 days or so, and my sample size grows daily. I trained a model on this to simulate an average day of neural activity for my brain realtime when I need it to. So all I have to do is plug in the SynapseLink to the computer and run the program.

The only real trick is the swap. I need to get it from my head to the computer connector in less than a second for flags to not be raised on the backend. They are used to having small trivial signal losses from our devices, but anything over a second is bad. Also if there is any sort of regularly occurring outage, that tips them off. So I randomly select a day and time each week to make the switch. Then I spend the next twenty-four hours totally off-grid, old-school, before jacking back in.”

Steve had heard this talk dozens of times before, but he never got tired of it. Alex was perched on the edge of his seat, pale and sweating. “So what does it feel like?”

Clarence took a long time to answer. He took a deep breath, stretching his arms upwards, closing his eyes. He seemed at peace pondering the question. “It’s hard to say. It’s slow. Very sloooowww.

“We’ve learned since day one that slow data rates are just always worse than faster ones. For some reason, it’s not true. Everything is different when I can’t access Lilith subconsciously. When I can’t communicate and absorb at gigabytes per second. When I can’t query literally any public database instantly. Even when I can’t think to you guys at data rates that to me, now that I’ve spent time out of it, seem insanely fast. Or think to anyone or be thought to at all. It’s slow, but it’s categorically different to how we spend our time normally linked in. And the best part, the best part, is dreams!

“Like just before you guys woke me up, I had the most wonderful dream about these explorers. There was nature like I’ve never seen rendered in any of our metaverses. The colors, the rock, the little creatures skittering about, they all felt and looked so real. Real. And there were stars. I’ve never seen a star before, didn’t even know what they were ’til I learned about them from a book I uploaded to my SynapseLink, I forgot the name of it…oh…that’s right…The Life and Death of Stars. Anyways, they were everywhere, every night they came out, millions of them! There were no lights from man—can you believe it?—so you could see them—in embodied life.”

Alex shifted nervously, “So, do you think I’m ready?”

“Sure, haha, it’s not very hard, you just unplug the damn thing and see what happens. First, I need to get your synapse data from the last couple hundred days or so, I’ll process that, train my model and then build a sim for you. Come back tomorrow and it’ll be done. Gotta do it by wire for you.”

Clarence walked to the back of Alex’s chair, dragging along a long cable with a delicate connector at its end. He connected it to the base of Alex’s SynapseLink and walked back to one of his monitors. He clacked away in the terminal for a bit and then walked back to Alex, unplugged the connector and told him he was all set.

The two visitors left, and Clarence spent the next twelve hours programming: dialing in the simulation of Alex’s neural activity for tomorrow’s grand adventure. Clarence had to be one of the few humans left who could program without Lilith or any of the other AI companions. Almost no one even pair programmed with AI at all in the first place. He had to in order to keep his project secret. To keep the dream alive as he would say to friends with a wry smile. It felt good to him to have clawed his way through tens of thousands of hours honing this craft, painfully ascending the bottom rungs of skill development of this lost art all the way to absolute mastery.

The next day Alex came back, this time alone. He was skinnier, paler, and sweatier than Clarence had remembered. “Ready, bud?” Asked Clarence.

“I’m not sure.” replied Alex.

“Well, that’s ok, because I’m not quite ready for you. I’ve got a bit more work to do on this before we’re all set. Just hang out for now, relax.”

“Works for me.” Alex laid down on the bed and linked into a Metaverse where Steve and some other friends were hanging out and jet skiing. He grew bored of that and flipped to another metaverse. And another. And another. Eventually, he tired of all of them and linked in to a dark room with a comfortable bed for him to rest. He hadn’t gotten any sleep last night—either in real life or linked in. Too nervous. Suddenly, in the metaverse and in embodied life, he crashed out and was fast asleep.

Clarence, who had actually been ready all this time, turned from his monitor and walked over to Alex, bringing with him the computer that would be running Alex’s simulation. “Let’s just start you off with the best damn part.” He took a deep breath, forcefully and precisely pulled Alex’s SynapseLink out of his head and plopped it into the computer. He looked down at the human being laying in front of him.

“Sweet dreams, my friend. Good luck out there.”