Living with the Cerberus Symbi
Chapter 1 - Andalusia
It’s a lovely April afternoon at the Parador Del Golf in Malaga, sitting on the bar patio. The old Spanish guy sitting next to me threw one of his snacks to the birds. Something spherical ish in shape… the little birds happily accepted it, but every attempt to peck it just sends the sphere rolling along the tile floor. The little bird gives up, and a pigeon tries it's luck next, but even with double the bird, the little ball just rolls away.
“That's just cruel.” The voice resonates in my skull, as if it came from inside my own mind, but it's not my voice. “I'm bored. When are we going to walk on the beach?”. The voice is a woman's, or… two? Three? She resonates with a faint harmony, each syllable oscillating in pitch, giving a soothing effect to her words. “It's been an intense week, Elle, let me enjoy my cerveza. Don't you appreciate the buzz?” I retort. She jabs back with “Not really? I don't know why you humans feel the need to dull your senses. It's the only thing special about you, don't squander it.”
I run my fingers through my hair, and breathe deeply as the Mediterranean breeze rolls in off the ocean. My fingers tingle, my skin raises in goosebumps from the cool evening breeze. “These are senses, they're just different. Don't you feel how everything… settles and spreads? The heightened sensitivity? After being locked in gloves and riding gear for a week straight, it feels nice to just… exist.” I say internally, without speaking, without using vocal cords, just reciting into my internal loopback. Elle pauses a heartbeat and responds.. “I guess. I was happier when we were flying through traffic at 130 kph on that antique combustion bike.”
I roll my eyes. She feels my eye roll as though she were doing it herself. “Well we only have an hour and a half before dinner reservation so, I'd better finish this and we can go to the beach.”
…
A few hours earlier, we're rolling out of Almuñécar for the second time, no longer blasting past the traffic but just plodding along. There are not many drivers around us, although there are plenty of cars. Hardly anyone drives themselves anymore. The trucks contain only cargo, cabs empty, and the cars only sleepy or distracted passengers.
The road still has a few people exercising automotive agency - taxi drivers still holding on, because it's their livelihood... Spanish abuelos that refuse to buy into the new nonsense... rich people with supercars flying along the road, eager to feel the torque their modern in-wheel motors use to rip rubber away from the earth, and the air bikes that have mostly replaced the old wheeled motorcycles that filled these hills years ago. Not gone, just… evolved.
I still prefer actual tires between me and the road rather than the cushion of air. To feel the vibrations rumble through my bones, watch the mirrors shake so violently that they're useless for actually looking backward. To have the challenge and the risk of managing the traction pie - one bad pull of the brake, that brief millisecond where the panicked ape brain overrides years of practice of smooth progressive inputs, that could send us sliding… or worse flying over the top end.
Not that Elle would let me grab a fistful of front brake. She has self preservation instincts, and if I bite the dust, so does she. So she lets me play ape on the bike, she even encourages it, since she gets the benefit of the qualia, the rush of the wind, the giddy feeling when opening the throttle and holding onto the bike as it rushes forward, the satisfaction of locking into a perfect rhythm in the curves: brake to set entry speed, trail brakes into maintenance throttle, see the exit, stand bike up and zoooooom out of the corner, and with the endless twisty roads they have here in Andalusia… we played for days.
But she calculates the limits in a way my meat brain can only guess at. We ride right up to the edge of the capability of the bike and tires, how much energy and awareness we have left to manage our own weight on top, and if I signal my body to ask for an instantaneous reaction the system can't deliver on, she intercepts the signal in the stem, attenuates it, corrects it, and passes it along to the muscles.
“You should have let me navigate. That old gps you're using sent us chasing geese” she chides.
“It was me" I say, to myself, to us. "I picked the wrong city for the base of the goat path road. Anyway this thing has found us a bunch of fun, if not optimal roads… the getting lost, having to turn back while a herd of cows watches us curiously is part of the fun.”
“What would be more fun is if you got the city right and didn't waste all your energy on this town traffic. Then we would be *on* the goat path instead of headed to the hotel.”
She's right. We doubled back, but I saw the distance to cover, 20km back to the correct city to start our ascent, and pulled the andon cord. When you're done, you're done, and we've been putting in 5-8 hour days of technical riding, exploring, navigating, renavigating after getting lost. Elle can feel the CNS exhaustion.. she can compensate for it to an extent, but .. meh. It was time to go home.
…
A taxi is right on my tail, fighting his way through the dense traffic as we head into Malaga's city center. He seems pissed… or, it could just be the all gas no brakes way these guys drive. Spanish drivers seem to be split between incredibly fast, aggressive, impatient… and a snails pace, simply an obstacle to be navigated by the GP racers surrounding them.
I realize that my GPS route was only taking us to Malaga, but not all the way to the hotel. (It wanted to add a 30 minute detour.. not sure why. I'm sure it would be a nice route but… I'm done.) I begin looking for a place I can pull over to set the new route but… there's really nowhere. All the side roads go up a hill and I'm not tryna stop on a hill. All the bike parking spots are filled to the brim with people coming down to the water on this warm Sunday afternoon.
“Are you really gonna stop to use that primitive thing? I thought you were done. Just let me navigate us.” - As Elle's voice resonates in my mind I know she's right. And she knows I have realized she's right, so she goes ahead. I feel my attention tighten - the tired haze in my mind clears, and I'm back in the hyperfocused locked in state. We played ape brain long enough, and part of her end of this bargain is this extended flow state that she provides.
Elle taps into sensors in the helmet which signal other vehicles behind and to the sides of us, letting me keep my eyes forward. And they need to stay forward because I can feel the zoomies, the desire to go fast, to squeeze a few more moments of exhilaration out of our trip.
She doesn't need to tell me when someone is in our blind spot ... the sensors know, so she knows, so I know.
She doesn't use words to give directions, and there is no second guessing as with the ancient moto gps we've been using most of the trip (its a left 500m ahead. Is that this exit lane or the next one?). She knows I don't like a line painted in the visual field to follow, so she just highlights the correct choices faintly, combined with the knowledge of which path to take she imbues to me without speaking, our course is set.
I ease into the heightened pace… I don't want to get pulled over, and I think they have auto speed cameras, but Elle's hunger for the qualia aches in my stomach. She placates me with a "I tapped their system and disabled the cameras, we won't get caught. Go faster."
You *what??* I thought, but she didn't answer and anyway there was no time to discuss - the ache was overwhelming and the road ahead beckoned. I began to wonder... did she really disable the cameras? Can she do that? How did she even get access to their net?
I open the throttle, letting the old Beamer bike roar to life, it's combustion engine singing the song of its people at 7 thousand rippems. We're flying now, dodging between cars and busses, weaving between seemingly stationary objects at a sickening lean angle through the roundabouts. I don't have time to smile, although I think it might be fun. Every moment , every millisecond our brains are processing input signals, both from meat sensors and electronic ones, making instantaneous decisions and corrections, and being an absolute menace to the people and autocars of this city.
We fly through the marina, through the industrial district, race onto the autovia, open the throttle even more. We peak at 200 kph. We've been on Euro units so long that I don't know what that is in mph but I declare it to be “fast as fuck”.
Finally we see the exit for the hotel, and only then do we let the speed drop, and Elle releases the hyperfocus, drops the sensor inputs back to emergency mode, and we go plodding into the hotel driveway at a casual ape brained speed.
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