Artificial C2: Backstory for Oliver Wells

My story is simple. I've been studying the brain and cognitive psychology for what seems an age. My Doctorate was about the electrophysiology of the mind. It encompassed event-related brain potentials and cognition. It drew upon factors affecting the loading of a brain when involved in cognitive processing and increasingly the factors that would create out-of-condition responses affecting attention, mental chronometry, memory, and language. 

There are the inevitable warnings that the brain may break if it becomes overloaded. Most people check out when I tell them this. They hear words like science, brain, physiology and cognition and complete their own description of what I represent. Usually, it isn't flattering. 

 It's why Ranzino and Summers wanted to hire me. I've been involved with post-structuralism in my studies. The study of hyper-reality. Not some modern art school project with ultimate detailing oh no. Hyperreality is a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together. The experiences are such that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. 

There are no joins between what is imagined and what is real and I'll attempt to show this in my story. I've  followed the work of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who contributed to communication studies that speak directly to larger social concerns. 

I had to explain this to Ranzino, and I could see Summers taking notes. My explanation was that much of the thinking was established through the social turmoil of the 1960s, spurred by social movements that questioned preexisting conventions and social institutions. 

 Through a postmodern lens, reality is viewed as a fragmented, complimentary and multiple-meaning system with components that are produced by social and cultural activity. It's a perfect playground for Augmented Reality. 

Social realities that constitute consensus reality are constantly produced and reproduced, changing through the extended use of signs and symbols which hence contribute to the creation of a greater hyperreality.

There's a unit in Brant, here in Geneva, that is researching Human Brain to Computer Interfaces. It's called HCCI in the jargon. 'Human to Computer to Computer Interfaces. 

'Why the two Computers?' I hear you ask. It's simple really. The first is a small unit to decode the human thoughts and then the second is the main unit to receive them and to send back 'reprocessed' thoughts. 

 I know what you are thinking. It works well in PowerPoint, doesn't it? But in Real Life? I don't think so.

Well, that is exactly how they hooked me. Combining the sensuous properties of fragrant Jasmine Summers and the gung-ho bravura of film-star-tanned Bob Ranzino. They challenged me to 'make it work' and offered me around four times my current income to do so - and even threw in the free accommodation. 

Call me weak, but I fell for it.