1n1REzE

Peter Watts 135 Blindsight
could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich,
reconcile you with your whole childhood in the course of a lunch
hour or three.
Like so many other domains of human invention, this one had
learned to run without her. Human nature was becoming an
assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from
Production to product. Still. For me, Chelsea's skill set recast a
strange old world in an entirely new light: the cut-and-paste of
minds not for the greater good of some abstract society, but for the
simple selfish wants of the individual.
"Let me give you the gift of happiness," she said.
"I'm already pretty happy."
"I'll make you happier. A TAT, on me."
"Tat"
"Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I've still got privileges at Sax."
"I've been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I
might turn into someone else."
"That's ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had
would turn you into a different person."
I thought about that. "Maybe it does."
But she wouldn't let it go, and even the strongest anti-happiness
argument was bound to be an uphill proposition; so one afternoon
Chelsea fished around in her cupboards and dredged up a hair-net
studded with greasy gray washers. The net was a superconducting
spiderweb, fine as mist, that mapped the fields of merest thought.
The washers were ceramic magnets that bathed the brain in fields
of their own. Chelsea's inlays linked to a base station that played
with the interference patterns between the two.
"They used to need a machine the size of a bathroom just to
house the magnets." She laid me back on the couch and stretched
the mesh across my skull. "That's the only outright miracle you get
with a portable setup like this. We can find hot spots, and we can
even zap 'em if they need zapping, but TMS effects fade after a
while. We'll have to go to a clinic for anything permanent."
"So we're fishing for what, exactly Repressed memories"
"No such thing." She grinned in toothy reassurance. "There are
only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you