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Okay, this is as far as I can turn the chip on given what I am capable of as far as I know it. But know that if I could turn the chip on a little higher, I would, and I would hope you would be listening. I can't even turn the chip on without letting you know what the hell I mean, though, and I hope the word hell won't make you shut down and stop reading, write me off just for a word I dropped and didn't even mean or need to use. The chip-- I was working one afternoon at Midas China and Silver, when an older lady came into the store, perhaps later 50's or early 60's and her throat was oddly scarred, but somehow none of that made her any different to me until she spoke. Her mouth didn't move. I mean, it twitched occasionally, but in no relation to the sounds that came from the little radio-sort of box that was attached to her shoulder-lapel. I was shocked, and she could tell. My whole sense of what I felt was real slipped for a second, and I questioned in my mind for a moment whether or not I was asleep or awake. I think she could feel my confusion at least, though perhaps not just how much it confused me. She told me that the radio box transmitted the signals that her brain was trying to send to her mouth, and translated them into speech for her. In effect the radio-box had really become her mouth. I could not help but to look at the radio-box and try to see how such a thing might work, for if I could not see how it worked then she either must be hypnotizing me, for this had truly transcended any ability of any ventriloquist, or I was dreaming, and in either case, if I could not see how it might work, then what was happening to me was not real. A cord trailed up her neck and into the thin gray-black hair that sort of covered the upper portions of it. She saw my gaze and pulled the cord free from her hair and head. The end was a little flat disk, and looked like some sort of round refrigerator magnet or something. She told me that it attached, not by piercing the skin, but by magnetic attraction to another similar plate under the skin in her head. Of course she had to reattach the cord to her head to tell me this, so I could not look at the end of it while she continued to tell me this, and indeed I never got to actually dig through her hair to look for scars or anything, that was not a place a person who was convinced that he might or might not be dreaming would civilly dream of being. She explained that she only could possibly have even heard about such an experimental medical technique because she was wealthy, and knew people through her years of trying to be able to speak. She said that doctors in the Medical College of Virginia had opened up the back of her skull and wired a computer chip that let the signals from her speech center translate into electrical signals that could be made into sound. I worked at Midas China and Silver over three years ago. If we could put a chip into a lady who could wander into a china shop and tell a nobody like me about her experiences with being able to speak through a little chip put in her brain, how can I not think that there isn't already a chip out there somewhere in the same laboratory that has managed to go the next step, to make it so that every single thought that passed through the brain could be transmitted as it occurred. I want that chip. I want to put it into my head and turn it on and give you the receiver. I want the right to do that. But what if somebody has already done it to me and I don't know it. I want to tell that person you were wrong. I would have let you listen anyway. |