Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End (2006) raised the spectre of You Gotta Believe Me technology. As a type of mind control, YGBM insidiously and silently infiltrated the mind, changing people's very world view without any apparent internal notice. People in the business of ideas in our times are probably as much inclined to kill you as attempt non-violent persuasion, but this idea of rewriting ways of thinking as a non-violent method of change already appeared in 2001 in Justina Robson's novel, Mappa Mundi. Previously available only as a UK edition, in 2006 Pyr/Prometheus Books released a trade paperback edition in the US. Robson, who is consistently shortlisted for several science fiction awards such as the Arthur C. Clarke Award, has written a tense and scary work of cutting-edge sf.

Still, in the end, Robson can't really escape the constraints of writing about the future with current mental tools. Robson's not alone in this aspect. The entire concept of the Singularity, from John von Neumann to Vernor Vinge and Charles Stross, posits the eventual merger of human and machine mind. Once that's accomplished, and we can rewrite our own brains, what's to stop someone else from hacking into our mind? In a review in Prometheus a couple of years ago of Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near, I raised this possibility to counter his overtly enthusiastic view of re-coding ourselves through smart machines inside our bloodstream. As zombie PC spambots spewing out junk email and viruses go, so might humans in this future. (Imagine the darkest scenario, as you constantly need to patch yourself to prevent being hijacked into spewing spam, or ‘spat,’ in conversations with other humans.)

Before Human OS 1.0, however, there are a few hurdles to clear, and in the end I'm not sure the transition is as straightforward as in works of fiction. Still, it makes for a good story, one that has been mined by several writers, and probably will continue to evolve as technology evolves, and as our understanding of the human brain grows.

In Mappa Mundi, the effort towards the goal of mapping the instructional process of the brain has been well under way for most of the 20th century. Groups working behind the scenes are very close to a breakthrough, and have been planning for this event for many years. British psychologist Natalie Armstrong is unaware of the greater picture or threat, and views her work on the human brain as a means to understand and treat severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Across the Atlantic, FBI special agent Jude Westhorpe becomes involved when his half-sister, a Native American with strong anti-government views falls into a rogue government experiment in mind-control airborne viruses.

As Jude digs deeper into this mystery, he begins to connect the dots back to Amrstrong's work. Jude has his own problems, such as running away from his Native Indian roots, and questioning his trust for his razor-sharp and dangerously ambitious partner. The process accelerates almost out of control when one of Armstrong's experiments goes wrong, prompted in a different direction by the shadowy group interested in the bigger picture. As June and Armstrong fall for each other, they discover that the effects of her experiment are not limited to her subject, and she in fact may already be changing into something else altogether. There are conflicting views and players involved even in this group, with a private business seeking to implant humans with ways to prevent mind control, a firewall so to speak, and teams from the US government eager to implant ideas of democracy right into the mind's rootkit. While their ends differ, their methods still rely on spreading an airborne and infectious virus that re-wires the human mind. Any government might see this as an opportunity to control their citizens, or convert people to political or religious ideas on a massive and non-violent scale. And after all, isn't avoiding violence a good idea? Here is the crux of the issue of the humanitarian with a guillotine. People want to do good things to make this world a utopia, and unfortunately not everyone recognizes good intentions when they see them. Those who oppose this utopia may suffer, but in light of the greater good, this is sad but unavoidable. Libertarians, however, might differ in this respect.

Using software coding as a template for the human brain is a nice metaphor, but we live in the age of programming code, and thus see things through the eyes of that code. Conceptual re-mapping of informational instruction sets might sound neat, but as time changes, the metaphor of the brain probably will evolve beyond seeing it through lines of codes, into something that makes more sense. The brain is not a machine awaiting the right key or instruction book. Software geeks may be king in our time of Open Source developers writing applications for everything and hackers seeking to take advantage of pervasively bad code (cough, Microsoft, cough), but that time will pass.

Mappa Mundi works well as a piece of near-future fiction exploring potent ideas. It is also a decent thriller, populated with very human characters facing tough choices. As a writer Robson seems to be improving from book to book. Her characters often harbor broken souls, which are not always mended when the book ends. Still, they are believable and memorable, the two protagonists in Mappa Mundi much more so than the main villain. People face tough choices in life, and they do not always make the best of them. In Mappa Mundi, the characters realize the hardest thing about difficult choices is that ultimately we have to live with them, and we do have a choice in how we act after those choices.