The Sea of Intuitive Reading, A Story

The Sea of Intuitive Reading by Adrian Perez

Alexander read at one thousand words a minute. It was impossible, so the program paused him every five minutes so he could remember to keep breathing. There the words were, floating in front of him in associative bubbles. All of it was non-linear.

This reading breakthrough had occurred during research on Dyslexia, that showed Dyslexics weren’t reading wrong, we were simply writing wrong.

The story the world shows us is composed of other monkeys coming out of bushes and trees to kill us. It’s green snakes curled up in green leaves and brown branches. So reading linearly is the worst possible way to process information. And importance is by definition, all that matters.

Try assigning neutrality to a word. Try it. I’m serious. I’ll pause. Don’t keep reading until you’ve found a neutral noun.

Unless you’re a freak, you can’t do it. We assign value everywhere. Word: Book. Sounds slightly good to me. Word: Freak. Pretty bad, but kind of good too. Neutral words? Indifference guarantees you will not remember them.

Alexander read at one thousand words a minute. Whole vastness swept through his mind with layered comprehension.

As the Internet grew, the human mind began to fall behind. Artificial Intelligence began to spring past us. And it took only a few years of Intelligence-Par Artificial Individuals to leap into cliche-battle with humans. So this is why it was so exciting for Alexander. He was reading to save the Human world.

He spun through time-lagged association, making realizations as he interlinked through the Thought Sea. He raced against an AI he could see in the distance. Forward to a quantum mechanical solution for one of the high-bid problems. He might get the solution first.

Capitalism was a war of relevance. And Alexander’s company was fighting to be relevant tooth and nail. The best thing that could have happened to humanity was to get a competitor that was temporarily better than it. Alexander was glad there had been two years of real non-relevance for humans. He was surprised and optimistic about how short a time it took humans to enter back into the world of meaningfulness.

In a sundry market Alexander floated in a sea of problems and solutions. The input matching the speed of the output. The only rhythm, the complexity of the universe.

The Wonderful Prophets of the Twenty First Century

Buckminster Fuller, Abraham Maslow, Russel Ackoff, and Douglas Engelbart all envision(ed) the future in the same vein. And I believe they make a circle of thinkers who are the most idealistic and holistic when it comes to their forecasts and methodologies.

In the chart below I have shown these thinkers in a larger landscape of thought. All of these individuals operate along the ideal, the alternative, and the systematic. What other thinkers occupy the same vein for the other branches of knowledge?

What other thinkers exist in the same vein as these?

Fuller constructed a world of Design Science where invention was consistently refined to create ephemeralization, where devices become more and more efficient. So a house needs less and less mass and resources than it used to. A car less and less fuel. He believed there were no crises of resources, only of intellect and will to engineer solutions.

Maslow constructed a world of individuals and organizations climbing a ladder of different needs, ultimately culminating at self-actualization, where a person is constantly approaching the limit where all of his or her skill and knack is resulting in a state of flow characterized by peak experience.

Ackoff constructs a world of synergistic institutions, where organizations operate for the betterment of their constituents and crisis are dissolved (not resolved) through lateral shifts in management thinking. All of this is characterized by a focus on effectiveness at solving the right problems, and not just doing the wrong things right.

Engelbart constructs a world where our tools can be used to improve those very tools, creating a loop of endless human augmentation. This manifested in work on human-computer interaction computer-computer interaction that demonstrated things like the mouse,  internet, and hyperlinking, in a united system. These very improvements serving to create even more improvements.

These are all people who have seen the world in what seems to be a third alternative. When others are casting situations as dichotomies, the solutions these thinkers propose seem to blow past the arguments at hand.

The Robe of Entrepreneurship, A Short Story

The Robe of Entrepreneurship by Adrian Perez

Clarke’s Robe was a t-shirt with one long sleeve that covered his left arm, the other sleeve being like a normal t-shirt. This asymmetrical black shirt represented the entrepreneurial class. It was his brother Raymond’s idea.

Raymond felt the middle class was in decline in their country. And it seemed like no amount of stimulus packages or tax restructuring was alleviating the issue. Clarke’s brother decided what was needed was eccentric symbolic warfare on the problem. He felt entrepreneurs were the source of a burgeoning middle class, so last month, Raymond convinced Clarke to wear a shirt that he had hastily put together.

Clarke had been a software engineer at a startup that made Facebook applications. That is until there was a major money implosion that got him laid off. Ever since then, Clarke was very depressed. He had invested so much of himself in the technology, and it was obvious the company was not going to be able to sell off the remaining tech.

To pull Clarke out of his post-job depression, Raymond sewed together the black shirt and explained to Clarke what had been kicking around in his head.

The shirt gave Clark immediate feedback. He walked into a Starbucks and it was only seconds before the shirt caused comment. The lady in front of him, casually glanced behind her and in a flurry of fashion fascism demanded an explanation for Clarke’s social deviance.

Clarke explained it meant he was an entrepreneur. And in a bout of social fear, he made up a fictional company to talk about it. The woman was greatly assuaged, and half an hour into their conversation he realized she was hitting on him.

Over the course of the next month, wherever Clarke went, the story started to spread. He realized that he better make his fictional company a reality. Much to his surprise, the symbol of his shirt aided him in this. Only a week later, while at another Starbucks, a bearded and portly fellow introduced himself to Clarke. Clarke wasn’t processing that the man was asking for a job. He was too stunned at seeing the man had on a black shirt with one long and one short sleeve.

-end-

A lot of people liked this story, so I decided to actually make the shirt described in the story (thanks to Margaret Glass for showing me how to sew).

Enough people have asked, so I am now making shirts for $22 (I am only shipping within the US)

Make sure to specify the size when you pay.

Here are some pics:

My Dad wearing the Robe of Entrepreneurship

My Dad and I wearing the shirt

The arm of entrepreneurship

The strength of Entrepreneurship

These Monkeys and Their… A Story

These Monkeys and Their… by Adrian Perez

It was getting to be Autumn. Vela’s organization had just overthrown the government in a movement that started a month ago. Growing disenfranchisement guaranteed it would happen fast. That no one was killed was amazing. It was something like the Orange Revolution, but with even more email, Twitter, and cellphones.

For a while, the internet had been developing along what seemed like trite lines. There were computer applications to shake breasts, and make farts, and less trivial ones like for showing your friends pictures or having conversations. All the while, the internet was having it’s main effect, the organization of data by all participants in a way that was networked together for all participants to enjoy.

Didn’t want to share your data? By hook or by crook it was going to get shared. Slowly, as the antiquarian facade of the last generation’s culture was understood and refurbished, people started to realize it was not about the data you controlled, but what you did with that data. At the beginning this meant counting farts and boob shakes.

Triviality was necessary to train yourself to experiment. Two months ago, Vela was reading Maslow on Management and programming one of those very boob-shaking applications. In the book, Maslow, a psychologist, was describing how the Black Foot Native Americans used functional leadership to elect the best member for the task. This meant that there were no general leaders, but if a need arose, a leader was elected who was best suited to the task.

Vela could tell her company was failing. Her boss had become reclusive and stopped sharing with the rest of the programmers. It was a death-sign that the company was running out of money. Since no one was using her stupid applications, she decided it was time to get back to doing something meaningful. So she started working on the ideas in Maslow’s infuriating/liberating book.

What bothered her about Maslow’s ideas is that they didn’t seem to scale. She agreed with the long-dead scholar that the power-seekers often seemed to be the least skilled at dispensing power wisely. How could you find the best person for a job? Vela went to her search engine and typed in, “The best person to be my boss.” She got a bunch of unsurprising garbage and advice on dealing with bosses.

Then Vela organized the first coupe of her life. She sent an email to each of her fellow employees in the tiny company, and asked them, “Baring the current boss from heading engineering, and assuming you can not elect yourself, who would you ask to be boss?” They actually responded without sarcasm! It was a programmer miracle. They must have all been feeling the morale sinking.

She sent the list of potential bosses to the CEO. Remarkably he did his job and in a week they had a new boss. Vela was shocked, she thought it would not go anywhere. And as a programmer she asked herself a question universal to her profession, “What if I can automate that? How can I make it scale.”

For instance, “Who do you have be the ambassador to India?” You could elect someone who is running for this position, but what if the best person is an academic or businessperson, who does not even think of offering his services for the position. What if the best man is a janitor for an apartment building? Or the best woman, a factory worker? You couldn’t just ask in a general way or everyone would elect a socially near person. And you would have a gargantuan pool of people to consider.

Vela’s company started to rejuvenate, and as they hired more people, she had more free time to work on this problem. She was going over her ideas over and over, running in circles. And then she realized she needed to add some meta. Why not put herself in the system to build the system? She asked herself, “Who do I need to talk to expand this idea?”

The answer came pretty quickly, as the intern walked into the lunch room to get even more tea. She knew what making tea seven times a day meant, he’s bored. He had elected himself by walking in. She started to talk the idea over with him. Before she accidentally got him looping along with her, he asked her why she wanted to do this.

Vela told him, “To make a scalable and benevolent democracy system to govern any set of actions.”

The intern said, “No you’re not. It’s so that you can right the sense of injustice you feel. So that you may have peace.”

And with that enlightening foundation, the application was a breeze to make.

Apoplexy, A Science Fiction Story

Apoplexy, by Adrian Perez

It is on the hands of giants the blood of followers falls deeply to the earth. Alex wrestled with that phrase his father told him when he was first going to the academy. It did not make any sense to him then, but for different reasons. One of them being the communal repartee that he had entered into with the Powerists.

He didn’t know what to expect when he first got to the campus. He flitted through the teleporter and arrived in a garden city that he had never before seen. In his dome in Northern Ohio, there was just the orange tint of sunlight. This place looked positively illuminated. And in a way, that his mind had not been able to imagine, if only for the poor sustenance it had received earlier.

The Powerists invited Alex to their dome out of the blue. He assumed that they were watching people’s behavior on the net. Scanning transaction and statements in the social tedium, looking for meaning. So something Alex did must have been relevant.

They were all wired to the brim with Sensory, so for all he knew he may have farted in just the right way to attract their interests.

What he knew of the Powerists is they are a cult, and that they believe that they can summon forth powers and control machines with simple training and minimal connectivity. The founder of the Powerists, Ian Smith, started tinkering in his garage before the Atmospheric Ripple, and he and other willing colleagues had entered into the first Advice Circle. This rudimentary Advice Circle was just a bunch of cellphones which were wired constantly together. They also had a function that would detect specific words in speech. So using these phones and a bracelet that would stimulate your arm in accordance with the person who was addressing you, you could enter into what would be called Rhapsodic Communication.

Ian initially imagined the device as a way to on-load strengths and off-load weaknesses. The pool of experimenters each took tests to see what each was good at. So that they would align in a complimentary fashion. They balanced around a list of virtues. Creativity, love of learning, wisdom, prudence, love, gratitude, teamwork, spirituality, forgiveness, modesty, self-control, curiosity, open-mindedness, appreciation of beauty, integrity, kindness, social intelligence, enthusiasm, bravery, hopefulness, persistence, and leadership.

The experiment was a success, but it had unintended consequences. Personal problems were solved tremendously quickly. If your anxiety increased for whatever reason, it would open your mic’ and people could hear and see your situation. Participants would talk about what was happening and the problems got solved with intense rapidity. Then, one month into the experiment, the participants started to speak with uncontrollable mumbling. And the objective, unconnected researchers who had been assigned to monitor them, went to pull the plug on the system.

This sent almost all of them into shock and the majority of them would have died, except if it wasn’t for the rapid action of Alex’s father who realized that they were going into shock because the system was off, and plugged them back together immediately.

Weeks later the Atmospheric Ripple happened and Alex’s father was forced to leave the project to find safe haven for his family. Events asked of people that their lives change, and Alex’s father never returned to the group. So now twenty years later, Alex was the one returning by invitation of the first Advice Circle.

Medical Money Symbol (Alternate Rod of Asclepius)

I have been working on an application with a friend of mine to calculate the savings you would get if you could bargain down to the price Medi-Cal pays for services. This calculator tool will help you bargain down to more reasonable prices, which as anyone who has gone to the ER will know can be exorbitant (especially if you don’t have medical insurance).

I have been helping mainly with the layout and design of the app, where we have focused on creating a similar look to those of common hospital bills. In the process of doing this I created an icon that is meant to mock the common medical symbol, the Rod of Asclepius. My symbol is composed of two rods with a snake wrapped around them, creating a money symbol.

Anyone can use this symbol as long they credit me or throw a link my way.

The alternate Medical Symbol I designed for the Medical Savings Calculator

A smaller version of my medical savings logo

The Expatriation, A Story

The Expatriation, by Adrian Perez

Allen walked through the river bank. Hopping from rock to rock, he couldn’t see the ships flying overhead through the canopy, but he could definitely hear them. He started to run to the campsite. He would have to pack the fossils later.

In a little while, he stood a collective of Togs.

“What is the meaning of running off to this planet? You had responsibilities,” They implied with some level of force. The Tog were a collective group that long ago evolved from experiments with constant social awareness.

“The Federation really has no dominion over me,” Allen said, “I can come here if I want to.”

The Tog sullened, “But you made commitments. Experiments can’t go on without you.”

Allen always won progress through minimal effort. The Tog experiment had been failing recently and it was devolving into politics. He didn’t see how to change the situation, so he decided non-reciprocation was the best way to sober people.

One of the Togs, the one responsible for sexual relations drifted toward him. It was surprising this Tog collective was here in-person in the first place. They could have easily sent one member of the collective and stayed connected through distance tuning. What was more surprising is that he was now addressing the one he could identify as holding the sex role. It wasn’t like Allen could really respond, these jelly fish like creatures reproduced in a cloud of spores.

However, empathy oozed from this very non-bipedal representative. Allen’s mirror neurons forced feelings of kinship into Allen without him even realizing it. This Tog was good at its Position.

“Perhaps,” the Tog said, “You are in need of a vacation from the other world. One can be stifled by the impressions generated there. If I could perhaps attend with you on a Journey.”

Empathy or no empathy, Allen didn’t want to go on a “Journey” with anyone, he was tired of reaching compromise and unity. The research group was bogged to its neck in understanding exercises and peace seminars. It was an inescapable side activity with aliens.

He didn’t want to go, and that meant it was walking time. He left the tent the Tog was in and went back to the river and his fossils. A Tog who had not spoken went with him. This one looked larger than the others. Allen knew it wasn’t a queen or king. The Tog had none, they were a distributed network of individuals, created by a digital network that had become more pervasive than the one on Earth.

The Tog didn’t say a word. Until they got to the river. The Tog grumbled something as they approached the river bank.

“What was that?” Allen asked. He could have sworn the Tog said something in Earth, a language that the Allen didn’t think the Tog could speak.

The Tog repeated, “Idt.”

“Did you just call me an idiot?” Allen stood aghast.

Then the Tog shoved him with one of its tentacles.The shove was soft and barely pushed Allen back, but he knew what it meant.

Allen shoved back, and like two children in the weirdest play ground, they turned into a wrestling ball of jelly filled Helium sacks, flailing limbs, and gasping lungs. After fifteen minutes Allen got tired of kicking the Tog in what he hoped were reproductive organs, and the Tog got tired of trying to drown Allen in a cloud of spores.

Allen, lying on his back in the cool and shallow river bed, could see the rest of the Tog hiding behind the trees from a safe distance. He waved them over. From then on, Allen would head the new violence-based peace seminars at the research center.

 

Allen walked through the river bank. Hopping from rock to rock, he couldn’t see the ships flying overhead through the canopy, but he could definitely hear them. He started to run to the campsite. He would have to pack the fossils later.

In a little while, he stood a collective of Togs.

“What is the meaning of running off to this planet? You had responsibilities,” They implied with some level of force. The Tog were a collective group that long ago evolved from experiments with constant social awareness.

“The Federation really has no dominion over me,” Allen said, “I can come here if I want to.”

The Tog sullened, “But you made commitments. Experiments can’t go on without you.”

Allen always won progress through minimal effort. The Tog experiment had been failing recently and it was devolving into politics. He didn’t see how to change the situation, so he decided non-reciprocation was the best way to sober people.

One of the Togs, the one responsible for sexual relations drifted toward him. It was surprising this Tog collective was here in-person in the first place. They could have easily sent one member of the collective and stayed connected through distance tuning. What was more surprising is that he was now addressing the one he could identify as holding the sex role. It wasn’t like Allen could really respond, these jelly fish like creatures reproduced in a cloud of spores.

However, empathy oozed from this very non-bipedal represenative. Allen’s mirror neurons forced feelings of kinship into Allen without him even realizing it. This Tog was good at its Position.

“Perhaps,” the Tog said, “You are in need of a vacation from the other world. One can be stifled by the impressions generated there. If I could perhaps attend with you on a Journey.”

Empathy or no empathy, Allen didn’t want to go on a “Journey” with anyone, he was tired of reaching compromise and unity. The research group was bogged to its neck in understanding exercises and peace seminars. It was an inescapable side activity with aliens.

He didn’t want to go, and that meant it was walking time. He left the tent the Tog was in and went back to the river and his fossils. A Tog who had not spoken went with him. This one looked larger than the others. Allen knew it wasn’t a queen or king. The Tog had none, they were a distributed network of individuals, created by a digital network that had become more pervasive than the one on Earth.

The Tog didn’t say a word. Until they got to the river. The Tog grumbled something as they approached the river bank.

“What was that?” Allen asked. He could of sworn the Tog said something in Earth, a language that the Allen didn’t think the Tog could speak.

The Tog repeated, “Idt.”

“Did you just call me an idiot?” Allen stood aghast.

Then the Tog shoved him with one of its tentacles.The shove was soft and barely pushed Allen back, but he knew what it meant.

Allen shoved back, and like two children in the weirdest play ground, they turned into a wrestling ball of jelly filled Helium sacks, flailing limbs, and gasping lungs. After fifteen minutes Allen got tired of kicking the Tog in what he hoped were reproductive organs, and the Tog got tired of trying to drown Allen in a cloud of spores.

Allen, lying on his back in the cool and shallow river bed, could see the rest of the Tog hiding behind the trees from a safe distance. He waved them over. From then on, Allen would head the new violence-based peace seminars at the research center.

The Boogaboo, A Story

The Boogaboo, a story by Adrian Perez

You could hear the troops as they marched through the first floor. Bumps and thuds proliferated through the floorboards below Emily’s feet. Men and women, intent on more than preserving furniture, lunged forward on their mission up the stairs.

In history, there are many long transitions. And often enough, you can not percieve totally how things are changing. That’s why Emily felt it was best to be in the fray. If you’re making the fray, you get the satisfaction of seeing the state-change. Still she had no idea that it would be so scary.

As the world came together financially, conversationally, and and occassionally physically, Emily had known that the time for justice was now. In her country, the military was still tremendously large. It was a behometh sitting on the back of every citizen.

To quell her sense of injustice to the state of things, in her afternoons she studied Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. compulsively. It seemed their stories housed the weapon she wished to wield against the world. She was especially enamored by Gandhi’s Satyagraha (“holding firm to the truth that is love”). She also studied Klauswitz and Sun Tzu. The men of war mixed in with the men of peace.

Emily had to have empathy for each side in the fight she intended to win, for she was intending nothing less than the abolition of the military. The majority of her friends discounted her and it proved too devestating at the beginning, so she took herself towards other forms of social justice, practicing as a lawyer, while maintaining her ethical commitment. Most of her job was guiding people into mediated arbitration and away from courts and her office.

Her reputation blossomed as a fair person, and Emily discovered how valuable fairness was. By operating on her strengths in communion over the pursuit of the good and beautiful, she began to defy her weakness. She still lacked bravery, and yet she spoke for truth and fairness. She lacked leadership, and yet she had a growing organization. Weakness was processed by the habit of greatness into unimagined assetts.

So from her personal development came the experiments that led to revolution. Slowly but surely, in a conversation, in a tweet, in a blog post, she changed people’s minds by documenting the strategic acts of suffering that she designed to demonstrate her point about injustice. She lifted not a hand against anyone, and yet, she demanded a just world unswervingly.

People listened as her bones cracked in civil disobediences designed to wake our love. And on the day of a national strike that had been inconceivable ten years earlier, people listened as she was ripped off a podium by a group of coordinated men with the intent of cutting the head from the beast known as peace, but that they called horror.

These pro-military forces were not even composed of the military. As the military grew into a bureacracy of non-fighters, it realized it had to change towards being a force of civilization building as well as destroying. So it was the 800 pound gorilla in the room with so many opinions it had no opinion.

The success of the national strike had so terrorized this abduction group, that they did not kill Emily as planned. They brought her to a house nearby. But in moments the house was stormed.

Emily, blind-folded on the floor heard two helicopters land. A blast as the door was rammed down. Then men and women in body armor burst through the door. Emily kicked her bound feet into the nearest guard. The abductors fired their guns into the oncoming troops. But the troops did not fight back, they simply kept coming. Some were knocked to the floor and some were killed. The mobbing troops crashed into Emily’s room. The first went down, shot in the face. But when her abductors saw that the oncoming troops were merely disarming them as they crashed forward, they set down their guns without knowing why.

Fool’s Errand, a Story

Fool’s Errand, by Adrian Perez

It was not to be. Alfred stood on the veranda of his estate, small lap dogs skipping about his feet. There there was nothing that could be done. He simply had to trust himself to do it.

Inside of himself, a deep welling of fatalism poured through his heart. He had never killed so many children before, but on this planet, there was a parasite that rendered half the children into something else.

He looked at one of the children playing out in the garden around the veranda. It’s legs, in reverse to the normal mode of things. The knee caps on the wrong side, for an inverted walking motion. It’s head larger than usual.

This batch of children had been found in a church. The people in that province were utter fundamentalists, with an emphasis on the sacredness of life that stemmed from their roots in Jainism. In fact, they were called Jainist Catholics. It was because of this that the Sterilization Board had commissioned Alfred and his team to clean up the mess they had discovered.

Most of the contaminated children were destroyed immediately on site. They had been hiding in the basement of the church, but Intuitives had been sent out ahead of time to find their location.

He felt like a traitor. The children had not learned the sin of denying the possibility of gifts in the world. Alfred had, however. he had been killing children for years now. He had been in two wars to preserve the freedom of his planet. The last, resulted in the Isolation Field, and it finally left the planet in peace. Cut off from its amibtious neighbors.

Peace and prosperity came with the bizarre curse of the contaminated children. After the Field was erected-and most suspected it was the Field-about half the embryos were born with flawed DNA that resulted in the physical and mental abnormalities. The flawed embryos were thrown out in the majority of the planet, but the planet, as a den of independence from The Authority was filled with a large minority of naturalism who-ha’s. So in the year after the war, Alfred’s job became the killing of abomination, the murder of monsters the religious refused to kill.

So it was totally normal, that as his gas mask-wearing Stormers dropped into the dark basement, smashing wine and monsters in their wake, they separated out the uncontaminated from their other brethren. Prejudice and a fundamentalism of his own should have kept him unfeeling, but the creature he was about to knock out with his rifle was younger than the rest of the contaminated, and playing with the doll he had just bought his daughter for her Birthday. And so he tagged her as clean, and sent her to be processed back into society.

She went unnoticed in the vans of the bureaucrats, her youth and the symbolic spray paint on her shoulder that Alfred had made, rendered her invisible to prejudice. It was unperceived that her eyes had a slightly triangular dimension. Her innocence and the power of Alfred’s clean symbol on her shoulder saved her life.

His automatic reactions had caused him to do this. The first days he had her at his estate, he watched her play from the veranda, holding his rifle. Occasionally, he pointed it at her. On the third day, he set it down, and on the seventh day, he sat and held her in his arms.

Alfred’s wife did not ask him questions. His daughter did not come up to play dolls with this new interloper. The grand piano he had smashed through the terrace doors accumulated cruft from the nature blowing around the house.

The child ran up the steps to play with the dogs at Alfred’s feet. He approached her and crouched next to her. She turned to him with Alien eyes, the ridges on her shoulders more apparent in the dress she had found in his daughter’s room. She wrapped her arms around him. Alfred sat and mourned his family as he held abomination in his arms

Peace War, A Story

Peace Way, by Adrian Perez

Alexandra stood in the naive of the dome fortress. She waltzed over to the window and found the valley in ruins. Still in ruins, she thought.

It was a long time before the Geodesics would arrive at the planet. If not waiting, then wanting something from them all.

She unfurled her computer and sat to prepare for autistic mode. She needed to practice if she was going to oppose their takeover of the Gantry. She was the only one left here, everyone had died of Pox.

Wrapping her hands into the computer’s chording surface she felt for the appropriate keys. Rubbing in the final configurations to begin the process. Light from the screen dimmed and she increased her ocular capacity, causing the color in her eyes to exchange away as her pupils widened.

The screen flickered a set of colors in a very specific order. Analyzing her brain for the proper feedback, slowly convincing it that she was who she claimed she was and that she should learn what she was asking to.

Alexandra’s chord grips grew tighter around her. She relaxed and fell into induced autism. She relaxed to get a sense of her body. She sensed the breeze from outside and the lights in the corridors. All of the sensory information of life was pouring in as she maximized her sensitivity. She started to pick up small muscular tremors. Little ripples of blood and tension that an untrained person would never sense. She saw how the movements of her body related to her thoughts.

Most people felt that Aut-class individuals were mainly controlled by the programs they used to train. But it was quite the opposite. Most of the ability was derived from within. Alexandra had trained all of her few years so that she could effectively and rapidly remove all distraction from the subject of study. And with devices that could output as fast as she was inputting, she could process countless thousands of the facets of life that history held, in the blink of an eye.

Next she dropped her discrimination levels. Humans have an immense capacity for judgement. Babies learn in a heavily encoded way by virtue of their lack of judgement. This results in a lot of trial and error which eventually creates heavier and more elaborate forms of judgement. This would be inhibiting to learning for Alexandra.

An autistic person can gain just as much interest from the dirt on the wall behind you as he does from looking at your face. Normal people eventually judge away the extraneous data in their environment. So much so that they can’t even tell you there was a spot on the wall they could have noticed.

Judgement is good for things like deciding which threat to run away from. But it’s not good for learning. If you have a bunch of negative feelings surrounding your teacher’s eyebrows, this will inhibit you. If you didn’t get a math formula the first time and you have guilt over it, this will inhibit you. The elimination of judgement was the most important part of autistic mode.

Judgmentlessness was only created from immense trust and self-confidence. Alexandra meditated on this every day.

Finally, the computer determined she was ready. It began to act like an externalized judgement machine, stopping Alexandra from looping back on data too frequently. And so, over the next half hour, as the Geodesic ships came closer and closer to the planet. Alexandra prepared for War.