Listening For Morpheus: Chapter 4

It was maddening.

Foster had been the youngest P.h.D. in psychology - outside the hothouse Tibetan who had opened his veins over being ditched by Miss North Carolina. Foster's thesis advisor had practically done the same when Foster went freelance, gabbling on embarrassingly about giving him his own department if he would stay. Foster was on retainer with no fewer than five of the Fortune 50. At security conventions he was crushed by the normally-jaded black hats and wide-eyed Solver wanna-bee's unable to contain their enthusiasm. He was even one of the very few of the niche field of Solving that ever saw the occasional mainstream media spotlight, as when during the ridiculous craze around the suicide Puzzle of the Abu Dhabi billionaire. Heh. That had been fun, even if a circus. He had been interviewed on BNN to mediocre ratings, but of course it had replayed on the Blog Network News affiliate Internet sites incessantly for months. Foster was every inch a success in his chosen field.

And yet! This was his second day with no progress. They had warned him of the difficulties, but he had just reflexively upped the fee and agreed. Maybe too quickly, Foster worried.

Foster sighed. He suppressed an urge to massage his temples, and turned the motion into a stretch and paced the room. He knew the unseen watchers were beginning to have inklings of doubt. Focus!

First Principles of Solving:
1. Obtain Puzzle.
2. Identify Matrix.
3. Identify Recipient.
4. Group Common Items From 2 & 3.
5. Solve.

These were Foster's own rules, carefully pruned and cautiously expanded like a veteran pilot's custom flight checklist. And just like the old airlines' milk runs through the NE corridor before they were nationalized in the late 'Oughts, Foster should be able to fly through this blindfolded with nothing but that checklist. That checklist and a fat cheque waiting in the pilot's lounge.

"Obtain Puzzle". Easy enough. It had arrived sand-boxed shortly after the inital briefing. It was safe under glass in a case fitted with variable cameras modified to simulate the frailties and spectrum of human vision. Foster had completed an initial survey but already there had been strange departures from the norm.

For instance, Foster had carefully measured the holopaper at almost three times the usual weight. That was so strange he had checked again to be sure. It must handle like light cardboard, he realized. Why would that be?

"Identify Matrix". Another aberration. The intensity of the matrix - it was inexplicably low.

A Puzzle's matrix - an old reference to some sort of simulation program - presented situations and stimuli to the subject. Measured in fictons - terminology borrowed from quantum mechanics to describe likelihoods - the matrix pressured the subject into visualizing unconscious references. It was like the old Pick-A-Path(TM) pre-computer adventure novels.

But instead of turning to page 44 to see what happened if you chose to fight the dragon, a fragment from your collective unconscious would drift up like a waking dream. And you would realize another piece of what the Puzzle was trying to tell you.

A well-crafted matrix tuned properly could invoke a near-mystical experience in the Recipient. The trick was amplifing only the right images with enough fictons that the Recipient chose them from amongst all the dummy images meant for peeping toms. That was where properly profiling the Recipient made all the difference.

Foster remembered a TA project during his Masters. Under his direction, he and his teammates had meticulously crafted an early Labyrinth for one of the rival Comp Sci profs that had condescended to cooperate. He was there to "see what this 'morphographic Jungian communication' was all about". He was not an ideal candidate. He was what lawyers describe a "hostile witness".

Which was why Foster had his team track him for two weeks before they hand-burned the Puzzle. Foster chuckled as he remembered.

When finally presented to him, the sitting professor had taken the over-sized, iridescent paper in hand and glared at the Labyrinth designed just for him. The Labyrinth's initial gentle spiral led his eye to a brief line drawing [hotel. surely not that hotel?]. Then a list of five numbers, one of them his bank account number [money. hotel. did they know?]. From the last digit a curve that might have been a buttock [the student. no!]. In his panic skipping over the placebo suggestions of a rainbow and opera, and his eyes boxed into quick diagrams; one jumping out at him [three parallel lines. capacitor. my patent!]. His eye jumped past dots that might have been a chessboard [no good at chess. failure. i want this over!]. Spying a calendar-like image [time. oh! patents expiring soon!]. The hint of a tuxedo [yes. upcoming convention]. Random icons, including the School of Psychology symbol [damn them. morphography mine. them at convention]. A plant that might be tobacco [smokers. pipe. psychology dean roake. bastard]. A mix of initials including MLK [king. cooperation?]. On it went.

The fat Computer Science professor took almost five minutes to compose himself. After giving high marks to the team, "For a good effort, but nothing very coherent", he marched straight to Dean Roake's office to discuss how he had changed his mind. As Roake wonderingly refilled his pipe, the man explained how he would agree to contribute his patents towards constructing an experimental Puzzle burner after all.

Mediocre grade notwithstanding (for not producing the tame results outlined by the lab test), Foster was hailed by student and staff alike as the Rasputin of a new age. But it wasn't hypnotism, and it wasn't blackmail. At least, it wasn't blackmail if you couldn't show the blackmail note to anyone who understood it.

And the new burner compliments of the School of Computer Science had made Puzzlemaking a breeze.

It was the Puzzle's matrix that could force imagery; linking ideas together that communicated. And even as the imagery faded, the knowledge it imparted remained. The newest Puzzles could make the Recipient smarter by about the size of a short novel.

But this matrix! Foster's prankster grin fell. The stimuli were so weak they were practically subliminal. Foster fumed, careful not to let his frustration show. He thought of Buridan's Ass, the mythic donkey who died of starvation because he was placed equidistant to two bales of hay and couldn't choose between them. How can you choose between such equally washed-out matrix stimuli?

Maybe it was designed for an autistic? Foster grimaced. Autistics were hypersensitive to stimulation - that was why they ignored as much going around them as possible - but one would hardly be the target of a Puzzle. No, it had to be something else. Enough for now.

Next on the failed checklist: "Identify Recipient". Well, at least he had something there.

She had been clearly identified. And Foster was looking forward to profiling her.

[That's All For Now - Thank You So Much For Reading]
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