(A sci-fi story, originally published on Twitter.)

The early days of the Blink (Brain-Link) were surreal in ways I can barely remember. In the beginning it was just a bunch of us hackers, because it was too weird for anyone else to want to touch.

Getting the plug installed felt sketchy, even though it was all legit and above board and the FDA had approved it. When you had one, you hid it, you kept your hoodie up and didn’t flash it in public. You were a freak in a secret club.

And you were terrified, absolutely terrified, of breaking it and giving yourself brain damage.

The plugs weren’t great in those days. The bandwidth was terrible, and if you twitched wrong you’d skip a sense. But the content… the content was incredible.

The startup sense ran a chill and a jolt down your back at the same time. And then it would hijack your eyes and you’d be standing outside of the world. You’ve got to understand, it wasn’t polished and corporatized like it is now—

—they couldn’t inject for every sense at once, so you’d feel yourself sitting somewhere like you were in real life, gravity pulling on you, but it would make you see this great big sphere below you, and you’d get the fight-or-flight: I’m gonna fall…

Like most of the other freaks, I got addicted to that feeling. Nothing like a little bit of infinitely falling into the cosmic abyss to get the day started, I always said.

Then you could reach out with your hand and turn the world. Touch an ocean, feel the slosh of the waves. Touch a continent, feel the mountain crumbs and sandpaper deserts. Then pick where you want to go, any of the Blinksites, and be there.

My favorite—it was a personal Blinksite, anonymous. A sensory blog from someone who lived somewhere tropical, and every day they’d go sit out in the rain for ten minutes and upload it.

The raw roundtrip—brain to plug to plug to brain, none of the modern augmented reconstruction—cut out half the details and kept the strangest parts. I remember the electric rain smelled like mint.

You can find rainsites these days, but it’s just different now. Now, they really feel real, exactly the same as meatspace, and it’s great, don’t get me wrong, but back then—

Postscript

Earlier I was listening to some old midis I loved from the early 2000s web, and thought about how tech limitations have led to the emergence of new and beloved aesthetics like pixel art and chiptune.

It struck me as likely that this kind of pattern should repeat whenever a weird new tech medium comes along, and brain-computer-interfaces would be really exciting for this. Also inspired by @jackclarkSF’s Tech Tales in his Import AI newsletter (https://jack-clark.net)!

The first words I wrote down for this were: “Synthetic touch and smell. The sweet, minty aroma after the electric rain.”