Been a while since I wrote one of these. But let’s get wright back into the saddle with two unrelated scientific discoveries that have some very interesting possibilities.

1) Due to abnormal brain construction, there is a woman who literally knows no fear.

2) The development of a small electronic device that blocks pain signals in the human body.

These two discoveries may seem entirely unrelated, and also great news for the bio-medical community, but they open up some serious possibilities.First, the positives of both news items in brief: “SM” lives a life of wonder, free from the constraint of fear or doubt. Every choice she makes is the right one, and the only thing holding her back is whether or not she’s actually intrigued or interested by something in the first place. It’s like the old parable of the kitten and the food processor. The other news item is great for those living in chronic pain or that want to undergo surgery but for one reason or another can’t use anesthetics, like people with allergies to opiates or Scientologists giving birth.

The negatives of course are that this woman is very likely to be killed by some sort of creature or plant with a bright blue tinge to it, and that doctors often forget to take various surgical implements out of people – pain being the body’s way of saying there’s something wrong, it’s not like you’re going to notice that this device is still in you until you happen to lean on the grill while flipping burgers and wonder why things smell like bacon when you’re doing chicken teriyaki.

But it’s the possible combination of these two discoveries that things get interesting.

Warfare

Ethical issues aside, implementing this in some sort of super soldier program would literally produce modern day berserkers. You are going to have people on the field of combat that only notice when they get hit by something because if it hits their armour they’re going to be knocked down for the amount of time it takes to get their breath back, and if they’re hit in the fleshy bits they’re not even going to notice till they bleed out.

Furthermore, you’re going to have soldiers that never run away, never give up and will fight to the death if so ordered. That’s a seriously dangerous situation for civilians, given what certain soldiers have been known to get up to when they’re not under a strict code of discipline from above, regardless of which army you might think I’m talking about here.

Personal Lives

A lot of people wish they weren’t the spineless jellies that modern life has kind of turned everyone into. But stop and truly think about what it would be like to not be afraid of anything, even physical pain, ever again.

Never mind the fact that McDonald’s in southern states of the USA have placed signs over the grill plates that say “Do not place hand on grill when in operation” due to the number of people that apparently don’t seem to notice until they’re serving up Big Mac’s Epidermus. Which leads me to point out…

Industrial Accidents

Hundreds of people die each year doing amazingly stupid things on the job, be it removing the restrictors from nailguns to just seeing if they can get that coin out of the belt sander’s drive mechanism to rubbing their genitals with the low grade sanding belt on said belt sander. Now, i’m not saying we’re all going to be implanted with the pain blocker, or going to be  forced to get our ability to process fear removed en-mass by some large, Orwellian conspiracy. I am saying that there are going to be a few dickheads that show up to work with this stuff already geared up though, like those guys that show up to work on Monday, still tweaking on E.

Sex Life

With pain signals being countermanded, you know there are some people into extreme S&M that are going to try out something very very stupid.

And I’m quite serious when I say that the advantage something like this gives potential date-rapists is huge. Let’s say some schmuck that can’t get laid takes one of these little INS2s out to a party. He’s not going to need Rohypnol, just a lot of coffee to stay awake. Wait till someone passes out, slip the device on, and they’re not even going to know what’s going on, they’re not going to wake up, and there’s not going to be any residual chemicals in their body for a blood or urine test to show that they were drugged.

Considering the number of porn sites out there that already have douchebags fucking chicks that have passed out, there’s going to be a whole boom in sleeping porno.

All this leads us to the questions of the day:

1. The Buddha said that to live is to suffer – will the combination of these technologies prove him wrong?
2. The difference between zombies, and people playing Left 4 Dead is the ability of L4D players to feel pain when you throw a shoe at them and tell them to get off their fat arses and do some dishes. If they no longer feel pain, are they just zombies now?
   1. Is it irony for zombies to be playing L4D?
   2. If a really fat guy keeps playing L4D with one of these things on and doesn’t notice the pressure building up in his bladder/bowels/intestinal tract, will he explode like the Boomer?
3. If we start to fit out people with these devices for chronic pain, how long will it be before we start using them for even the most minor of inconveniences such as paper cuts and headaches?
4. Pain is the body’s way of pointing out something is wrong, or that you’ve done something really stupid – often both at the same time. If people are no longer learning from their stupid mistakes with this inbuilt learning mechanism, will we raise a generati0n of invalids who manage to cripple themselves early in life?
5. If we can turn off pain with contrary electrical signaling, surely we can also increase it many times over without doing any actual physical harm. If being touched with pillows could be turned into excruciating agony, would this be a “moral” way of torturing people (bearing in mind that no form of torture is ever really moral considering the psychological damage) for information (considering that the use of torture in our War on Enemy-du-Jour looks to be never ending)?

You might also like to read:

1. More on currently available Cyberpunk
2. Cyberpunk pt18: Transhumanism

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