The Great Game 🎲 Kollarum

Spectra & Sentience

The Blue Bubble, 2:55 PM

Under the Blue Bubble the lady with the white fangs didn’t feel a thing. She knew that the Aatari, who claimed to be such an enlightened race, and who claimed to believe in free will, were bombarding their guests with pulses of all wavelengths and colours. The Aatari beamed pulses from the light bulbs in their rooms, sprayed them from the exit signs in the halls, and showered them from the chandeliers in the conference rooms and stores. They even diffused them from the swirling circuits of the sky. It was for this reason that the lady with the white fangs believed that the guests knew not what they did.

Both Qayam and Dactalla, however, knew exactly what they were doing. Neither was affected by the purple pulses, the violet pulses, the bright yellow pulses, the aquamarine pulses, or by any of the other commercially-legal pulses that saturated the tourist resort. They could see however the effect that these pulses had on the other guests. They watched the conventioneers as they filed from the conference rooms and veered, consciously or unconsciously, toward the foyer to queue up for one of the attractions which had been offered to them in the pulses. Some were drawn to the lava melt, some to the ecstasy pools; others to the dinner specials in the Grand Atrium, or the cabarets of the Skyroom balls, those giant spherical madhouses of fun that jutted into the multicolour sky.

Many guests wouldn’t have bothered to stop on the street to look up at the stunning tectonics of the city — the purple spirals of the condominiums and hotels, which were crisscrossed by translucent overpasses made of ferridium and crystalfer. Yet these guests had been bombarded by pulses that contained sketches and blueprints, and found themselves walking, as if under a spell, to the booth which advertised architectural tours of the planet’s cityscape. The two dozen guests who wandered toward Qayam’s booth were by nature serious and reserved, yet they had irresistible urges to go to a bar to play a love game of some sort. They couldn’t have said why; it just appealed to them somehow.

Qayam and Dactalla knew that the guests were experiencing an entirely different range of perceptions and emotions than they were. They had to guess at what the guests were feeling, the only clues being facial expressions, gestures, and the words they spoke. This was because Qayam and Dactalla were both non-sentients, that is, beings whose physiology didn’t allow them to detect the waves that were constantly travelling into the emotional, intellectual, and ontological tensors of the other Kraslikans.

Of the 689 sextillion individuals in the Kraslika, 48 sextillion were unable to detect wavelengths beyond the visible spectrum. It’s for this reason that the majority of Kraslikans referred to the others as nonsentients or the ones who cannot feel.

The non-visible or pulse spectra didn’t stir their blood and didn’t massage their neurons. The waves didn’t work their way to the centre of their being, the starpoint, and hence couldn’t oscillate the marrow of their antennae, light up their brain circles, or alter the temperature of their ferromagnetic lattices. Nor did the pulse spectra create its usual havoc, constantly renegotiating the relation between their starpoints and the universe around them. Colour affected them, to be sure, yet their colour receptors didn’t perceive anything beyond the visible. While many Kraslikans would find it a relief not to be constantly bombarded by thousands of invisible waves, they couldn’t imagine what life would be like without them.

There were seven Kraslikan species that couldn’t feel pulse spectra whatsoever: the Colloidalids, Homosapiens, Baulians, Marsupaliens, Garandmaranians, Tinyruminoids, and Ostrikaliks. To these species — and to 3 percent of the other species — the nonsentient spectrum was a miserable inchworm, crawling from blue to green, from green to yellow, and from yellow to red, always only a tiny percent of what the others felt. To make matters worse, their internal colourspectrometers couldn’t synchronize or fluctuate with other spectral modes, which were governed by things like antigravity fumblers, timewarp signalpoints, blackhole grinders, and transylvan disrupters.

Referring to this group as nonsentients was, of course, an unforgivable prejudice. Yet nonsentience was a difference so basic that it couldn’t be ignored. Inevitably, it created a wide variety of responses in different parts of the Kraslika. In brutal tribalistic cultures, nonsentients were destroyed at birth or used as servants or slaves. In more enlightened species, everyone pretended that the difference didn’t exist. Like many well-meaning species, the Aatari usually ignored what could never be ignored.

Yet one thing remained a constant: at the top levels of all major galactic security agencies, the view was neither so brutal nor so liberal. Whether it was the Lok Patrol, the Fallar Guard or the Vicinowatch, the upper echelon understood that nonsentience could be a disadvantage or an advantage. Charged with transgalactic and transuniversal military strategy, those in the upper echelon knew that a weakness or deficiency this universal and this profound must be turned into a strength. First of all, nonsentients could be used in situations where it was imperative that the enemy couldn’t penetrate deep into their neural structures to extract information from their starpoints. Nonsentients could also be used as go-betweens and spies, since they were impenetrable, both in the sense that pulse spectra didn’t enter their brains and in the sense that their emotional and psychological reactions were exceptionally difficult to decipher. As a result, the military strategists prized their nonsentients. They selected certain nonsentients to be trained in the arts of dissimulation, so that they could pass as a sentient and yet remain unaffected by attempts to manipulate their tensors and starpoints. This wasn’t as complicated as it seemed: they merely used miniature spectrometers to see what everyone was experiencing, and then pretended to experience them as well, all the time operating free of the manipulative pulses that bombarded the air.

Not being able to feel the everyday barrage of pulses had its practical, everyday advantages as well. For instance, under the Blue Bubble Qayam and Dactalla weren’t affected by the blue pulse advertisements that everyone else had to learn to tolerate or take mind-control classes to ignore. These advertisements were literally everywhere: companies paid top dollar to run them, and to make sure that the ad consortium kept their ads free of distortion or decipherment. They didn’t want competitors to hack in and take advantage of their pulse streams, and they didn’t want those they manipulated to be fully cognizant of why they wanted one thing and not another.

Guests thought they were just looking at beautiful colours in the sky, yet they were being urged to take full advantage of the restaurants, shops, massage parlours, theatres, and other expensive amenities on offer in the Blue Bubble. They were urged to descend the underground caverns of Xanadu (which the ads called “A Miracle of Rare Device”) and ascend in the floating airships which were tethered to the Bubble with massive electro-black-magnet chains (these airships also imprinted the colourful skystreams with ads that flashed from above). Some guests, with chaos vectors deeply crisscrossing their reproductive instincts, had an inexplicable urge to get out of the Blue Bubble itself and have a riotous night on the town. The notion of drinking and having sex took over their minds and they were more than happy to follow the host, who promised more life in one night than they’d see in their lifetimes.

Qayam watched the 26 travel agents as they came down the grand spiral staircase and turned, as he knew they would, toward his bright sign. Their eyes were already falling toward the print growing finer, glowing in hot pink:

🎲

Next: Schemes: ⭐️ Fra Sole

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