Between the Lines

by D.B. Libby

 

In the burgeoning world of avid Streamers, Darnel stood out for two ordinal reasons. First, according to the General Metrics, he was the prime practitioner of the art, both in raw speed and in the sheer amount of printed material digested. Second, he had conceived of the system himself as a 15-year-old doctoral candidate, and was revered as its progenitor by the legions of enthusiastic advocates.

It had seemed to him at the time that Symbolic Streaming, or 2S as it had come to be known, was merely a logical progression of the newly-implemented optical-overlay capability, since the classical stream of text quickly began to approach the limit of cortical resolution, and using a simultaneous compressed stream simply allowed a greater rate of perception, while taking advantage of both hemispheres of the human brain to ingest information. At the point where the classical stream began to blur into a gray line, the briefer symbolics remained clearly discernible, and focus could be shifted instantly, with little practice, to the faster stream. Lateral speed of the streams was controllable by a simple hand gesture, universally known as the Pinch, forefinger to thumb in varying pressure. In the case of an unfamiliar symbol, if a rate reduction did not suffice to bring the classical stream back into perception, a secondary gesture, the Stop (middle finger to thumb) could be employed. However, the use of the Stop had become widely ridiculed as a shortcoming of the intellect, and was now frequently seen in use on the city passageways as an obscene gesture.

Darnel had established the basic lexicon of the symbolics in his thesis, which had run to several volumes, well beyond the requisite minimum. Categorization of word forms and their replacement with symbols grouped into pseudo-equations, as well as the abandonment of punctuation (replaced with variable spacing) had been fundamental. The lexicon was presently maintained by a consortium, and updated and improved on a daily basis, which, self-referentially, was streamed to millions of users. The sciences, of course, lent themselves most readily to streaming, as they were primarily mathematical—and thus already symbolic—in their present form anyway. One unforeseen result (of a dual nature) was that before streaming, the existing scientific literature was overwhelming in its proportions, and with constant additions was beyond the capacities of any individual; now anyone could digest the previous body of knowledge in multiple fields in a brief period, but unfortunately that engendered a driving hunger for ever more information. As input methods had not experienced a similar advancement in methodology, it forced the reintroduction of obscure texts to meet demand, which had naturally led to a general reexamination of the foundational bases of almost every scientific field. The most extreme example was the “Adjustment” in physics, when a bright young Streamer had a eureka moment regarding the underlying nature of the wave function, leading to the direct mathematical calculation of particle trajectories. There had been an immediate abandonment of the quasi-statistical approach, followed by an ugly general purge of the field’s leading Macrostring theorists, much to Darnel’s chagrin and a barely suppressed feeling of guilt.

After ten years, and despite holding a manifold doctorate, 2S was still Darnel’s primary field of investigation. He no longer needed to refer to the classical stream and began to consider it a waste of bandwidth, as he could slip into that perceptual state of comprehension of the symbolics almost immediately and at full flow. The palpable pleasure the transition afforded him was reminiscent of the feeling he had had as a toddler, when separate words had merged on a page to produce the novel thrill of reading. In his quest for advancement of the science, he had just begun to re-read his own thesis when he started to notice an unusual phenomenon—he perceived in the stream ideas which he did not recognize as having written. At first, he did not question the additional symbolic ideas, as streaming engendered a parallel flow of thoughts which at high speeds became virtually indistinguishable from the matter at hand, and he willingly let the current carry him into the realms he so desired. Several new propositions became apparent; that of multi-threading—the start of succeeding pseudo-equations in alternating hemispheres, the introduction of which could be controlled by a Pinch of the left hand; then the use of multi-line threads, which seemed to be optimized at eight per ocular input; and finally the use of chromatic shading for subtler nuance. As the stream faded into whiteness, he disengaged and quickly programmed the necessary adjustments. He then sought feverishly for further input, settling on a voluminous physics text produced, not surprisingly, by the young woman who had unwittingly touched off the Adjustment. He shook off a slight ache in his frontal lobes and pinched into the text.

As he relaxed into the stream, a smile ghosted across his lips. Apparently, most work since the Adjustment merely recreated previous recent advances in the field of physics, albeit with a more satisfying underlying rationale, but almost immediately hints of new directions came unbidden to his conscious mind. With the improvements he had programmed, he could not only comprehend the textual information at a exhilaratingly profuse volume, but also in all directions at once. With unnoticed tears of elation streaming down his cheeks, he looked outward to the universe, grasping it in its entirety, until he fully understood—the sum total of knowledge was not the holy grail it was assumed to be, but rather a revelation of the horror of the vast emptiness of existence. Too late, the last thing he thought was a single word. Stop.

When his body was discovered, a preliminary scan concluded that the damage to his cortex was bacterial in nature. No one seemed to notice the slight rictus of abhorrence on his face, and only the crematorial tech wondered that both his hands were clenched in common obscene gestures, middle fingers pressed to thumbs.