Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.10 Walkaway

Heather perked up: “Sure! What’ve you got?”

They spent a few minutes setting things up. Tomsk, it turned out, couldn’t participate because he was using a tiara from work that didn’t allow the user to alter the software running on it. Nadine sat down carefully, and concentrated on looking at the images her arlife overlay fed her from Heather’s feed, while Heather wandered around looking for sage plants. She could hear a regular *thunk* sound from Tomsk, as he used the time to familiarise himself with his new throwing knives and Ketah’s body.

An image of a butterfly caught her attention. She knew that species liked the nectar from sage flowers, and she focused on it and the emotion of wanting to follow it. Heather’s mouth dropped open in wonder, like the butterfly had become fascinating, and stepped towards it. The butterfly flew on.

A minute later, Heather let out a yell of triumph. “Sage! I’ve found it.”

They trooped over and, sure enough, Heather was standing by a clump of the purple spears, watching several butterflies flit about them, feeding.

Tomsk: “I wonder if this would work in combat? Not to teach the moves, but for a Sensei to teach how to spot openings? If we started a project on The Burrow to investigate the possibilities, I think there’s a lot of people in the martial arts world who’d be willing to experiment. This could be the greatest training tool ever.”

Heather: “The upgraded tiara technology sensitive enough to allow this has only recently become publicly available. I don’t think anyone’s producing hardware robust enough for that sort of usage. The sensors have to stay very precisely positioned against the skin so we can use the interference effects to inverse Fourier the Cayley manifold.”

She spotted the identical blank looks on Tomsk and Nadine’s faces.

Heather: “Tell you what, I’ll add it to my todo list. I’ve already received a request to come up with cheap limited-functionality variants to use on the move, that don’t immobilise the body.”

They carried on gathering plants and carrying out experiments as they walked. Nadine found that, by walking next to Heather, she didn’t need to use the distracting image feed and could still let Heather access Nadine’s knowledge of where not to step - but only if Nadine was thinking about it in the front of her mind. If she concentrated on song lyrics, it no longer worked.

The final, inadvertent discovery happened when Nadine glanced at Tomsk and thought about his normal muscular body. Heather blushed and hastily cancelled the program.

Heather: “Filters. This thing definitely needs filters. Maybe merge it with an expert system, or use it as input from an expert system, rather than making it a direct feed?”

Nadine: “What happened?”

Heather: “Abs. You like the look of light and shadow playing over taut abdominal muscles.”

Tomsk chortled.

Nadine groaned. “Sorry Heather. Yes, you’re right, filters are a must!”

Tomsk: “Make them optional. Some people might like receiving a bit of unfakeable appreciation.”

Heather: “It would only be unfakeable if you trust the other person’s hardware, or you yourself have an expert system you trust to analyse their input as being unmodified.”

Nadine was eager to change the subject. “There’s a rabbit warren just over that next rise.”

Tomsk: “Let’s try you both against an easier target, before attempting a rabbit. Use that moss-covered fallen tree trunk. We don’t want to leave a creature in pain.”

Heather: “That’s what Beagle and Puppy are for. Puppy fetches dropped knives, and Beagle is designed for tracking and stunning. Mind you, that’s not how the ǃKung do it.”

Nadine missed a throw. “Was that an alveolar click?”

Heather *thunk*. “You linguist! Is that all you think about?”

Nadine missed again. “Unashamedly so. But go on, tell me about the !Kung.”

Tomsk: “Nadine, your elbow is sticking sideways. Try keeping them in line like this.” He demonstrated.

Heather *thunk*. “They dip their arrows in poison made from ground up beetle larvae. Very slow acting. The hunter comes back from a hunt without anything to show for it, and everyone remarks upon their failure, which he accepts with humility. Then the next day they track it down, and pretend that the kill was mainly thanks to the one who supplied the arrows, who gets the job of dividing out the meat among the people, according to the traditional rules.”

Tomsk: “Don’t flick your wrist. You can learn to put more power behind it later, but for now you’re going for consistency. The knife should slide along the forefinger when released.”

Nadine: *bounce*. “How did you meet them?”

Heather: *thunk*. “Many of them moved to the Serengeti when drone hunters wiped out the Eland antelope in the Kalahari. ASGuard don’t allow drones, electronics or even mechanical equipment like motors in the area, so the !Kung made a deal with Ascension, the company Yerkes set up to operate the Kilimanjaro facility, to be allowed to stay in return for keeping an eye out for saboteurs.”

Nadine: *bounce*. “Well I’m now being consistent. I’m consistently hitting the tree with the hilt each time.”

Tomsk: “Good. Don’t change what you’re doing. Instead change where you’re standing. Move back until the spin brings the point forwards at the same time as it arrives at the target. Keep the same balanced stance I showed you, and don’t speed up. Try to make each throw identical to the previous one.”

Nadine adjusted her distance, but not quite enough. *bounce* “Why insult the hunter when everyone knows the poison takes time?”

Heather: *thunk*. “Tradition. Their culture is more than 200,000 years old. One of the last groups of hunter-gatherers who don’t use herds of domesticated animals, so they keep only what they can carry on their own backs. Non-accumulative. There’s downsides, like high child mortality in times of drought, but they’ve learned to eat or use practically everything in their environment, even the insects. To a !Kung gatherer, this wood would seem full of never-ending bounty.”

Nadine: *thunk*. Yay, her knife hit the target and actually stuck there! Now to try to repeat it.

Nadine: “Udovica Dika, Vedad’s grandmother, is like that. She’s housebound now, but she used to be an old-style folk healer. I’d walk through the woods with her hobbling along, and she’d know five of six uses for everything she saw.”

Heather: *clink*.

Nadine looked at Heather’s close grouping of knife marks, and realised she’d managed to hit one of her pair of knives with the other. She returned to her own pair, determined.

Heather: “Part of the reason they’ve lasted so long is lack of aggression. If someone steals their land, they just move into an even more deserted and barren area that nobody wants. They have so few possessions, it isn’t worth anyone attacking them to steal from them. And, inside a group, there’s little to squabble over. If someone doesn’t get on with the others, they’ve no shared resources they’ll miss out on if they just walk away to join a different group.”

Tomsk: “What about status? Brides? Access to richer hunting areas?”

Nadine: *thunk*

Heather: *thunk* “They don’t have chiefs. Issues get decided by everyone discussing it around the fire until an agreement is reached, and someone who gets listened to on one topic may be accorded less respect on a different topic they know less about. Marriages are not financial, and while several women might decide to sleep with someone who is a good hunter, they can also freely choose not to if he annoys them. As for hunting areas, they normally spend less time doing chores and food gathering than workers in Europe, America or China - they’re content with a simple lifestyle.”

Nadine: *thunk* “Sounds good in parts, but I like my food.”

Heather: *thunk* “It’s an acquired taste. I only spent a couple of weeks with them, but it was very low stress. Lots of time telling jokes and making music. I was looking for inspiration and wanted to try some of their low-tech crafting techniques.”

Tomsk: “Talking of food, shall we go look at those rabbits?

Heather: {Let’s switch to group chat. Quieter.}

They edged over the rise as quietly as they could manage, crouching low to the ground. With her overlay set to magnify, Nadine could make out a single bunny nibbling a blackberry at the edge of a mound covered in brambles. It had brown-grey fur, with alert pinkish ears stuck straight upwards. One liquid black eye kept them in its sight at all times.

Tomsk: {I think it’s watching us.}

Heather: {It isn’t frightened at all, the blighter.}

Nadine felt smug. She’d been pretty sure the enterprise was doomed right from the start, when she’d bet Heather she couldn’t do it.

Nadine: {Do you give up now, or are you going to try to creep into knife range?}

Heather started creeping slowly forwards. The rabbit took another bite of the fruit, twitched its tiny whiskers then disappeared into the brambles so fast that only the afterimage of its white striped tail was left behind.

Tomsk suppressed a grin. Heather swore, then shrugged. “Oh well. At least I got to see something cute; even if it was laughing at me.”

The quiet stalker drone bobbed up and down once. Nadine could swear that, in the orglife overlay image of it, the Beagle sniffed dismissively at Heather and looked down its nose at her.

Nadine: “Can’t win ‘em all. There is a consolation prize, however. I just happen to have on me a pair of bowls, sugar, and whipped cream left over from making cornicelli. Fancy a bit of fruit picking?”

They filled both bowls and a tub she’d brought along, then sat down to feast. There was just something about eating food you’d procured yourself. Heather sounded profoundly satisfied.

Heather: “Ah, this is the life. The secret to true happiness.”

Nadine: “Oh, that reminds me. Tomsk, you said to ask about Aminat’s solution to the problem of humans getting used to good situations then not remaining happy, because instead of continuing to rate it as fantastic, their expectations adjust and it becomes their new normal.”

Tomsk: “Aminat deliberately tried to live a simple, slow-paced life. She spent time meditating upon which objects and activities were essential to her.”

Tomsk: “If an activity was essential, then she did it like it were special, paying full attention to the doing of it.”

Tomsk: “If something wasn't essential, she tried to let it go, or stop doing it; tried to stop being attached to it.”

Nadine: "That sounds very similar to Columbina's theory of cooking!"

Heather: "I'm not sure that would work for me. I like to keep busy."

Tomsk: "She said that, for her, the hardest thing to stop being attached to was ego. She said the secret to letting go of her attachment to unreasonable expectations was being honest with herself about them having been unreasonable - that she had wanted more than her fair share of wealth and status, which came at the expense of those around her.”

Tomsk: “Once she pierced that illusion and became humble, accepting that she would inevitably fade and die, just as everyone else does, she became open to happiness, accepting the fragile beauty of life's impermanence, experiencing every moment of it that she could, by living in the now rather than paying attention to hopes for the future or regrets about the past."

Nadine: "You realise that's the exact opposite of what you said yesterday about the importance of having a clearly defined achievable vision and working towards it?"

Tomsk shrugged: "Zen tends to be like that; full of apparent contradictions. It's like a hamster wheel for the mind. It worked for her, though."

Heather: "It would explain why the !Kung retain that tradition of putting in their place those who look like they're in danger of getting too big for their boots - it doesn't just keep things level, it also keeps 'em happy."

Nadine grinned: "Did they insult you much?"

Heather sighed: "All the damn time. The experience did teach me to pack lightly, however. After 3 days of trying to lug around an enormous backpack, I discarded everything I couldn’t fit into my pockets and felt better for it. The things I did keep, I cherished - I looked after them and tried to make them not just as useful as possible, but also as beautiful as possible."

Tomsk: “Perhaps the ideal is to strip down to one transcendentally beautiful object, but have that object be able to do anything...”

He posed while indicating himself, forgetting for a moment that he was inhabiting a doll.

Tomsk: “...the human body.”

Heather threw her bowl at him. Luckily for Ketah’s body, he dodged, swaying just the minimum amount needed to let it fly past rather than smear her hair in blackberry juice. The bowl ended up lost in the brambles, and not even Heather’s puppy drone could retrieve it.