Chapter 6

Welcome Wastelanders to the Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland Audiobook Podcast! My name is Joe Gillis, and I’m the writer and narrator of this Serial Fiction Series. Alright, we have Chapter 6 today, but there is a new chapter every Friday, so be sure to subscribe.

One last thing before we jump into it: if you stay until the very end, you’ll get a peek behind the page with a quick tidbit about this chapter.

Alright, the story so far…

Instead of fighting off robotic overlords, Joe found himself in another MECHA IR environment being waterboarded in their 24 rip-off, I mean, inspired Warrior’s Creed. He quickly learned it was too much for him and realized that they needed a different approach. He knew they had to try something else. Problem was, the Board wouldn’t be happy with the wasted time and money on Creed. As if this upcoming Board meeting wasn't going to be bad enough, Maya alerts him that there is another issue.

Chapter 6

We stood there staring at dozens upon dozens of lab-grown brains, which sounds way cooler than it actually was. That’s because some of them were only the size of sesame seeds, floating in a petri dish. Others were larger, but none of them came close to the size of a small animal’s brain, let alone a human’s. I always wished it had more of a mad scientist vibe with human brains and whatnot, but instead we had the more realistic version of a lab.

“Uhhh, so why are we in the Brain Room?” I asked.

“Ya know it’s not called that,” Maya scolded.

“Uhhh, there’s a bunch of brains in this room, so, you know, come on,” I shrugged.

“And ya know they’re called brain organoids,” she reminded me.

“Uhhh… yes. But why are we here?” I asked again.

“Because we think some of them have reached consciousness,” she said, looking worried.

“That’s great!” I said with excitement.

“Not if you’re running experiments on them.” She still looked worried.

“Yeah, I guess that might pose some problems, huh, wouldn’t it?” I asked already knowing the answer.

“Yes, it does,” she confirmed.

“And I’d also guess that means that we’re shutting down experimenting on these things until we can figure out for sure if they are gaining consciousness.” Again, I knew the answer, but I really hoped I was wrong.

“Oh, yes,” Maya confirmed.

“Well, this sucks.” I was disappointed, but deep down I was also excited that our technology worked.

“It does,” Maya agreed.

“So you’re telling me that we may have thrown a ton of money at research that we just have to stop?” I let out a deep breath and muttered, “This is so not good.”

That’s when Sanjay finally weighed in on it all. “Yeah, but it’s pretty cool that we may have just grown a mind that gained consciousness, don’t you think?”

“I have to agree with Sanjay on this,” Maya said.

I began to feel a large pressure on my chest, and felt like I was having a hard time catching my breath. I wasn’t sure if they understood how bad this was going to be for me.

“Yeah, but how am I going to break this piece of expensive news to the Board? You know the slowdown will be louder to them than the amazing discovery. Man, I’m going to be lucky to maintain my President status, let alone get the Board to finally make me CEO after this fiasco.”

“Dude, who cares? It will all work out,” Sanjay assured me.

“Man, we’ve already lost a ton of control; a CEO is just going to be wanting to make money.” I was still worried.

“Growing the value of the company is the whole point of a CEO, you know,” Maya reminded me.

“And that’s not like that’s a bad thing for any of us,” Sanjay reasoned.

“Yeah, but I feel like I’m letting you guys down.”

“So long as neither of us has to do either of those jobs, and we’re getting paid… we’re cool,” Maya said with a huge smile.

That smile put me at ease and allowed me to figure out our Plan B. “Okay, I think I got it.”

"There’s our boy! Right there!” Maya belted out with excitement.

“Okay, okay, so here it is. Since our mind testing control center might be down for a bit, I think I gotta give them the Warrior’s Creed mission. You know, military games like Call of Duty… um, uh, what number or name are they on now?” They both shrugged. “Well, military games like Call of Duty 42, or whatever number-slash-name they’re on, are making so much money right now that they’ll forget about this mess with the possible windfall of money that would come from Creed. Now, I know we all want to remove the torture, so maybe we could split it up into two different missions: one for military training, complete with the tour of duty and torture, and the other as a counter terrorist unit mission for the public.”

“Sans the enhanced interrogation and torture?” Maya double-checked.

“Yep.”

“That would work.” Maya grinned and nodded.

“Good because that’s a solution I think I could sell to the Board.” I smiled back.

Sanjay nudged me with his elbow. “That’s because the military will pay a ton to use that as a training tool.”

“Yeah, you know it. Especially since most of the military soldiers were already MECHAS,” I said.

In the past few years, all of America’s armed forces turned to our MECHA tech to operate their planes, tanks, and pretty much everything else. The instantaneous response time gave the MECHA/Soldiers, or MECHAS as they were called, the upper hand in battle. Even though the MECHA tech only gave you milliseconds of an advantage over a non-enhanced soldier, those milliseconds made a huge difference in life-and-death situations.

Add in the visual and audio advantages for ground forces, and you were heading into a new era of warfare. By linking the visual and audible parts of the brain to our MECHA tech, we could provide simple things like distance data or ammo count via our HUD readout like in video games, to the more advanced neural linked network by doing things like triangulating gunfire to pinpoint the enemy’s location. It also enabled audible stealth communication between squads and platoons without saying a word out loud through a telepathic-like form of conversation transmission. This was done by feeding the internal audio playback directly into the auditory center of the brain, where the brain translates electrical impulses into sound. Besides internal audible communication, it didn’t take too much more work to bring sound from the outside and bypass the inner ear to reroute around any damaged nerve cells—thus, allowing the deaf to hear again. It was great for any soldier whose hearing was damaged in battle, or the non-military bonus of helping the hearing impaired navigate the world a little easier.

 In no time we had the equivalent of the universal translator or Babel fish built in that eliminated the language barrier, allowing allies to speak and understand different languages by instantaneously translating both directions. This allowed for better communication and helped in deescalating situations in foreign lands.

With all of this in play, I was pretty confident in my next assertion. “Man, getting them to purchase a training simulation as real as ours should be as easy as taking candy from a baby.”

For some reason, Sanjay dropped his head and shook it with disapproval.

“What!?’” I asked.

He continued to give me the evil eye as though I should know exactly what he was implying from his stare, then he finally verbalized his thoughts. “That’s pretty messed up.”

“Selling to the military?”

“No, taking candy from a baby,” Sanjay smiled.

“I have to agree with Sanjay on this one.” Unlike Sanjay, Maya explained her reasoning. “Where did this whole idea of taking candy from a poor little baby come from? I bet the poor kid was left crying. I mean, come on, of course it’s easy to take candy from a baby—it’s a baby. What an evil thing to do.”

“Dude, it sounds like you have another saying you need to retire,” Sanjay joked.

“Man, babies shouldn’t be eating candy anyway,” I reasoned. “I could have said something like ‘Shooting fish in a barrel.’”

“Wh—what is wrong with you?!” Maya threw it down with her serious voice.

“What?” I asked innocently.

“First you’re going to steal from some poor baby,” Maya continued, “and now you’re going to shoot some defenseless fish?”

“Hey, I’m totally cool with you giving them a gun to defend themselves,” I could tell I was breaking down her defense. “I got it. Maybe they could have laser beams attached to their heads?”

She smiled. “You know they will.”

“Freaking mutated sea bass,” I joked.

“I don’t care if they’re on the endangered list; mine will be sharks with freakin’ laser beams attached to their heads,” she said mimicking Dr. Evil’s voice.

We both laughed.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” I said.

“What just happened here?” Sanjay asked.

“Austin Powers, baby!” Maya said with a British accent.

“Uh, that’s not an answer,” he pointed out.

“But it was,” I continued. “It just wasn’t the one you were hoping for.”

Man, it was as easy as taking candy from a baby, or whatever one might say instead, to sell them on my recommendation of splitting up the mission and delivering an experience just for the U.S. military.

Unfortunately, I had already thrown chum in the water by telling the Board about the torture part.

This concludes Chapter 6 of Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland. Written by Joe Gillis. Read by Joe Gillis.

Okay, just in case you’re wondering, yes, brain organoids are the real thing. And just like in Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland they think that they’ve even hit the point of reaching consciousness. So, that brings us to the philosophical question on whether or not we should continue to conduct experiments on them if they may have reached consciousness.

Is it worth it to be able to use that knowledge to help heal someone or develop tech that could improve our lives?

Well, that brings us to the end of another chapter, but don’t fret, this Season of Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland is just beginning.

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Alright, my friends, join me every Friday for a new chapter of Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland.

Thanks for joining me on this crazy journey! See you on the flip side!

Post-Apocalyptic Joe in a Cinematic Wasteland copyright 2023, Joe Gillis, All rights reserved. This is a Jowagi Production and is distributed by Slacker Entertainment.