Where do your eyes go when you close them?
You’re here again
Abyssal Transmission 003
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▩P l a c e i t o v e r t h e r e?▩
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Excerpted from SEC-Tau Specialist Agent Handbook, Second Edition, Chapter 16: Active Agent Concerns
…in recent years, many misconceptions have emerged among active agents about the GMV procedure and the experience thereof. As you are reading this text, it is likely that you will be activated within the Established Activation Period and might have questions and misconceptions yourself. This chapter is not meant to be a full training manual for how to act or behave while activated, nor is it possible that it will assuage all concerns, but rather attempts to engage with more common fears and superstitions about activation. We have formatted it as a list.
1. Faces during activation
A concern of new agents often is the way that faces are distorted and flattened during activation. It is obviously more challenging to do your job as an Agent when you cannot see or read a subject’s or it’s internals’ expressions. SEC-Tau has also cautioned against looking at any internals’ face for too long. This has lead to a fair number of rumors about the dangers any given internal poses. For instance, the authors of this handbook have heard complaints that agents have desynced after encountering an internal, or even worse, that looking and/or retrieving information from an internal was the direct catalyst for a terminus collapse. These are unsubstantiated.
2. Pain
While an agent can feel pain while activated, most report the sensory experience to be depersonalized and distant. One agent, in her post activation interview stated that she “…felt like everything was distant. Yes my hand was split open, but the sensation was hazy, as if a half memory of an injury that might have not happened.” More often, we hear from agents that insertion is the most imediately uncomfortable part of the experience. It isn’t painful, we have heard, but unmooring and in rare cases catastrophic. In its worst form, an unprepared agent can suffer complete ego death upon return, as bits of themselves turn to electronic ash in the space between them and their subject. However, agents who have been lost post activation account for approximately .5%* of all missions thus far.
3. Variant Echoes
The authors of this handbook have encountered many stories about so-called “Variant Echoes”, a phenomenon whereby an activated agent sees shadows and human-like shapes in addition to the Structure and the internals that are filed inside. We would actually prefer not to name this, as that gives it an amount of social power that we are uncomfortable with, but for the purposes of this section we will refer to them by name. Physically, they are nothing more than loose garbage in the drift stream, or occasionally decoding artifacts. They are not intelligent, as the rumors suggest, but do not engage with them. If an agent see one, it is most likely because the agent lost focus and had a lapse in purpose. The most important thing to remember is to never engage with them, not for your own sake, but for the mission’s.
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Hello friends reading this. Have you considered how active a thing looking is? The trickiest part of mechanizing perception, I think, is controlling what and how much any given participant sees. I’ve been building this camera system for our new project and thinking a lot about making eyes that are stand ins for your eyes. How you, reader, see the world and how a camera does, and furthermore how a virtual camera does. The thing we’re making, at its core, is about looking and being. Being in a place and looking at it. So that creates a bunch of questions.
The other night I spent almost 3 hours trying to wrangle a system to pull focus to one object I want the subject to focus on. It did not work as I intended and I gave up. That’s fine, that’s making anything. But it did get me to think a lot about mechanizing looking.
There’s a lot of space to play in there that hasn’t been explored. The assumption that anything is as it is when we turn away is one of the core things that allow modern first person videogames to work at all but we still try to make simulacra of the world that most of us live in. We assume that when something draws our focus, the thing that previously had it is still there. I guess that’s why we call it object permanence, but that’s something that doesn’t need to exist in the fully constructed worlds we make inside of a computer. I know I’m not the first person to be thinking about this, but there’s so much more to explore.
Be seeing you
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Tell your friends
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