Author: Elliott Fielding

“I need to think about it.”

“But can’t you just pick now? You’re the tiebreaker and we’ve got to decide.” Jene was worried. Making a group decision was stressful; prices changed fast.

“Dude, I told you, I need to think about it,” Kol huffed.

“Fine. When can you let me know?”

“In an hour or so.”

“Okay, but can I hang out here? I won’t bother your… thinking process. And I’m curious.”
“Sure. I need to do a little maintenance first, you can watch.”

Kol turned on a loud filter that blew clean air over an enclosed workspace then opened an incubator with blue-gloved hands to unplug and slide out one of the large trays inside. The surface of the tray was covered with a convoluted pattern of curving ridges. It almost looked like the wrinkles of a brain, Jene thought with a shiver, especially since it was bathed in red liquid.

“Is that blood? Is that your blood?”

“No, jeez, it’s synthetic growth medium, with vitamins and sugars and antioxidants. Brain food, haha.” Kol set the covered tray into the clean workspace. As Kol worked, Jene listened to the drone of the filter fan and the click and whirr of valves and heaters cycling on and off. It all seemed so complicated.

“Is all this worth it?” she asked.

“Yeah! It’s great to offload some thinking while I do other things. Distributed Intelligence is the future.”

“And you think it thinks like you?”

“Definitely! You’ll see. Well, usually. Sometimes things get a bit weird.”

Kol stopped talking to focus on removing and replacing the red liquid. After sliding the tray back into the incubator and reconnecting the leads, he turned to Jene. “That was the dorsolateral tray” —he tapped his forehead— “part of the prefrontal cortex.” He pulled out the next tray. “And this is the amygdala. See that part, that hub at the center of the biocircuit? That’s the basolateral nucleus, great for weighing risk versus reward.”

The names were meaningless to Jene, but it sounded smart. “Where’d you learn all this stuff?”

“Grad school, what a waste of time. But the DI system salesperson was really impressed when I knew all the lingo.”

Once all the trays were complete, Kol pulled off his gloves with a snap and tossed them into a red biohazard trash bag already half full of sterile single-use pipettes and bottles.

“Okay, it’s good to go.” Kol rolled his chair to an adjoining computer workstation. “I don’t even need to input all the parameters; AI can do that.” Kol typed into the search bar, took the stats from the AI overview and dragged them into the DI window, typed one more question, then hit the enter button with a decisive smack. “All this info is being translated into electrical impulses: action potentials that trigger neurotransmitter release, that’s how brains work. It should only take a few minutes— oh, that was fast, here we go.” They both watched as words appeared in the answer box on the screen.

>>> Yo dude, go to Cabo obviously. It’s going to be an epic vacation!

“See?” Kol crowed.

“It does sound like you! Wild. But who still says ‘epic’?”

“Not me. Like I said, it’s a bit weird sometimes.”

“So, Cabo it is.”

“Cabo it is.”

“I’ll let everyone know.”

“Epic!”