Maybe I have too much time on my hands, but I worry about how much TV my children watch. My wife and I try to restrict it, but on the occasions when we are both too tired and too busy to fight with them, they have amazed me with their voracious appetite for video input. They could watch from 7 am to 9 at night, every day, without complaint. Sometimes I wonder if they would forgo food for another round of “Thomas the Tank Engine” videos.
In the morning before I go to work, I will observe them sprawled out on the sofa, the steady stream of cool light entering their eyes and massaging the tips of their neurons, stimulating novel neuropathways never heard of when I was a toddler and our one black and white TV was only on a few hours a day. They sit there, almost motionless, and I wonder how that plasma screen is reshaping their little brains . . . .
My mind goes ahead forty years. My daughter is alone in a dark room. Over her eyes is a helmet with a visor that projects video images directly onto her retinas. She has a pair of the latest Virtugloves on her hands, the latest in virtual sensory perception with propriceptive enhancers. In those gloves she manipulates a $3 million pistol-grip joystick (inflation has been a problem in the last 40 years) molded precisely for her hand and no other.
She sees a black field of space. She is in a space ship flying though an endless cyber-cosmos. A small star appears ahead of her, and rapidly grows to become a huge green blob. She eases up on the joystick, searching the surface of a strange planet. Finally she spots what she is hunting for – a narrow crevasse in the surface. She pushes on the stick and glides in.
The inside of this planet is very different from the placid outside. There are electrical currents, like bolts of lightning, traveling everywhere. In a few places she sees these currents tangled up in vast storms. She is careful to avoid them – a single glancing contract and her mission may be over.
She accelerates, knowing she does not have much time, twenty minutes at the most. It took her ten minutes to get this far, so she will have to hurry. She accelerates her ship, rapidly and deftly dodging the currents of electricity that seem to be everywhere. She has never been inside this planet before, but she seems to have a familiarity with every one of those currents, every pathway.
She dives deeper. In the distance she sees what she was looking for, a volcano deep under the crust of this strange world. This volcano is very angry, spewing hot red magma for what seems like hundreds of miles. When the magma meets the electron streams, it throws their controlled flow into chaos, creating more electrical storms.
To get to the volcano, she must fly directly through one of the magma flows. There are only 2 minutes left, no time to hunt for an alternate approach. She thinks she knows enough about the electron streams to dodge them by memory. Through a hot mess of pulsating magma she flies, first darting up then down. She can see nothing; now she is flying on pure muscle memory. The magma clears, and she is right on top of the volcano. Her index finger moves to the trigger, and she delivers a volley of laser bullets into the gullet of the volcano. She waits. Too much ammo could cause surface damage, opening up the volcano rather than closing it.
The magma slows down to a trickle. Three more bullets, no more, no less, she decides. She is exactly right, and the flow stops completely.
Now she reverses her ship, rapidly weaving her way back out to the surface, almost exactly retracing her every move. This is the easy part. The computer has tracked her path exactly, so mostly she just follows its prompts, but on occasion she will make corrections because the virtual terrascape often shifts ever so slightly.
A moment later, she is again hovering over the surface of the green planet. The flight timer reads 18:54, not bad for an emergency procedure.
An overhead fluorescent light comes on. My daughter stands up, and flips her visor up. She blinks at the temporary harshness of the artificial light. The room she is in is empty, except for her chair and equipment. She strips off her gloves. Through a window facing her chair she can see a man lying anesthetized on a surgical table. One side of his skull has been removed, exposing his brain, and a huge robotic arm with a tiny probe on the end is moving away. A second arm supports the cut-away section of skull, and loads up a staple gun to fasten it back into place.
The door opens, and a young woman dressed in white scrubs steps through. “That was brilliant work, doctor,” she said. “You were able to cauterize that intracranial bleed without having to cut through a single major neuro tract.”
“Oh, don’t thank me, Deborah. Thank my dad,” she replies. “He is the one who let me watch all that TV when I was a baby.”