Mama, We Are Zhena, Your Son

'''Crosshill, Tom. "Mama, We Are Zhena, Your Son."' Lightspeed: Year One''. An on-line anthology available here. "Zhena" available here. Print version: Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2011, conveniently accessed through Goodreads. Abridged audiobook version (which Erlich has consulted), edited by John Joseph Adams (Skyboat Audio, 2012) available directly from Audible.com and iTunes.

Summarized by Dione Basseri on GoodReads site, "Zhenya is part of an experiment, trying to create a 'quantum brain' by placing a young child in a digital quantum environment. And the experiment succeeds. Unfortunately."The idea is that " A young mind can learn to think qantumikally in a simulated qantumikal environment," as Zhenya writes to Mama. In the experiment, the environment is like a video game of the dungeons and gnomes variety, and the boy is "there" — in what appears to be a castle — with his dog, Sulyik. Both are "there," in the game/experiment via what Zhena sees as a helmet, the material part of a series of GUI's, where, Zhenya is told, GUI plus a number "means gnome user innerface [sic]." The boy is eight-years old and the experiment motivates him with hunger, blows, ontological dread, and other highly negative reinforcement, including being laughed at by gnomes, who chant "hai-zen-berg! hai-zen-berg!" when Zhenya is trapped in a Heisenberg-ian dilemma; so the story is also a thought-experiment in ethics, where the scientist(s) do poorly. In the game, Zhenya finds the "treasure" and finds it interesting, although his dog dislikes it: "There are so many handles you can pull, it’s like a big yellow hedgehog, with twisting knobbly gears which are never in the same place when you look. Dr. Olga said she couldn’t understand the treasure because it’s a qantumikal motor and it needs a qantumikal brain but I should understand it because I’ve got one.

She’s right. When I’m everywhere at once, I get all tangled up with the treasure and the handles become my arms like I’m conducting an orchestra, and I understand everything. But it’s scary when that happens, Mama. " The practical goal of the experiment seems to be the theft of energy from other universes. It seems they get far more energy than is safe.

CAUTION: "Zhena includes the death of a dog, also of Moscow.

RDE, 06/II/17