Reamde

The epiphany—if this wasn’t too fine a word for some crazy-ass shit that had popped up in Richard’s brain—had occurred in a brewpub at Sea-Tac. Richard had been marooned there for a couple of hours after his flight to Spokane had been delayed by a collision between a baggage truck and the plane: a strangely common occurrence at that airport, and one of those folksy touches that helped to preserve its small-town feel. Sitting there quaffing his pint and gazing at the shoeless and beltless travelers penguin-shuffling through the metal detectors, he had been struck by the sheer boringness of the work being performed by the screeners of the Transportation Security Administration: staring at those bags moving through the x-ray machines, trying to remain alert for that once-in-every-ten-years moment when someone would actually try to send a gun through.

Thus far, a commonplace observation. He had done a bit of research on it later and learned that the more sophisticated airports had hired psychologists to tackle the problem and devised some clever tricks. For example, they would digitally insert fake images of guns into the video feed from an x-ray machine, frequently enough that the screeners would see false-color silhouettes of revolvers and semiautomatics and IEDs glide across their visual fields several times a day, instead of once every ten years. That, according to the research, was enough to prevent their pattern-recognition neurons from being reclaimed and repurposed by brain processes that were more fruitful, or at least more entertaining.

The brain, as far as Richard could determine from haphazard skimming of whatever came up on Google, was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn’t being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord’s private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain. The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers.

So the airport luggage scanner epiphany was simultaneously dis- and encouraging. Dis- because some occupational psychologists had already beaten him to it and come up with a fix, but en- because people with Ph.D.s had vouched for the basic idea.

In order to make the case for MACUMAPPIS, Richard had to, (a) find some other desperately boring job to use as his experimentum crucis, and (b) figure out a way to map its basic processes onto Medieval Armed Combat. Between his years as a slavering World of Warcraft addict and his years as a founder/creator of T’Rain, he had ripped out probably half of the neurons in his brain and dragged them over and soldered them on to the cortical centers responsible for two-handed axe wielding, shield bashing, arrow shooting, and spell casting. In an evening of random questing around the imaginary world that D-squared and Skeletor had created, Richard could fire more neurons than Einstein had used while coming up with the idea of general relativity. Certainly way more neurons than the average supermarket checkout clerk or private security guard fired during an eight-hour shift. And the power of the Internet ought to make all that neural activity reswitchable; you should be able to patch it all together so that it would work.