New selves

Kelly leaned forward, brushing some of her hair from her face as she smiled ever wider. "Have fun, you two? I've heard the videos my brother plays on his laptop, I could've mistaken your little howl fest for one of those if I didn't know better..."

Ivy and Beth shuffled uncomfortably next to each other. "Look, Kel, we appreciate your help but this is kind of new to me and Ivy, could you give us a little bit of a break?"

With a sigh, Kelly shrugged. "A little. A tiny little break. I still have a million questions, but I've got to help you with this new puzzle!"

"What puzzle?" Ivy frowned. "I thought it was pretty obvious that it's two minds in a body and we, well, just had a little fun."

"Oh, it's not that easy, Ivy. You and Beth, you might have the original brains and body, but if it was really just four brains doing their own things, you wouldn't be operating so smoothly." Kelly held up her phone, wiggling it. "I did a little research while you were doing a little... upstairs research on each other. There's actually a pretty big danger with those mixed modes in that headset, from the white papers I read. There's even a little scandal where Hideki possibly bribed a few scientists to halt their research into the complications that come about with it, possibly signed off by Reiko Hasegawa herself."

"Who?"

Kelly rolled her eyes at Ivy. "I thought the Luke side of you would make you better at putting the pieces together that she's a top exec at Hideki. One article suggested that the side effects might even be something that she would encourage users to--"

"WHAT side effects!" Beth threw her hands up in the air as Ivy sat down.

"Dramatic much, Beth?" Kelly snorted, but neither of the other girls seemed as amused. "...Fine. I read a white paper called Interleaved Personality Generation in Weighted-Filter Neural Filter Pathways. Clunky title, like they always are, but the premise is when you start mixing minds in the mode you're using, they become harder to un-mix. I mean, technically, it's easy, pull a plug and you're chopped in two again. But what the researchers found is almost instantly, you start forming memories and connections between the brains, and the way the signals start to alter brain states is almost immediate, as the Ascend really bombards the brain with these new signals as a response to the algorithmic weighting. It's changing your brains to become compatible with one another, to the point that pulling you apart, basically 'killing' this mixed personality, will make you feel more and more incomplete."

Beth shook her head, confused. "That... doesn't make sense, the manual says the brains stay isolated in their own little space, and they think normally while the Ascend does all the filtering and heavy lifting to make us... us."

Kelly snorted. "Yeah, and Burst Cola says it is the health drink choice of athletes. It's practically more sugar than water! Corporations lie, Beth. They're made of lying liars who wear suits and lie and make money and then lie more. Reiko is hiding something about the Ascend headsets either for profit or for some weird tech-brain idealism that these tech company people get caught up with. Like, making 'a better world for all' or whatever, and they think they have the way to do it. But I would think that Hideki wouldn't want to scare away people who might think their brains are going to get squished together."

After calming down from her rant for a moment, Kelly took a deep breath. "The simple fact of the matter is, the research suggests that there's no way that the algorithm protects you, because while it can mix the output of your gray matter together, it doesn't do anything on the sensory input that goes back into your head. You think your own way, you experience the world through the mixed decisions, you start then thinking the same way as those mixed decisions would. It's behavior modification on top of everything else. It wouldn't seem like it to start, but it's already burrowing around in your brains to keep combining your thoughts and be like one singular mind--and not just that, but to like it too."

Ivy and Beth frowned at each other, as Beth then took a seat. She put her hands on her head, while Ivy turned to Kelly next. "Well, we can just disconnect now, and be done with it. We haven't formed a lot of memories yet, it's not like we lived in one body for a year and now we can't figure out who is who because all those memories happened to each brain in parallel. I can just take this mask off at any time."

"Okay, then do it."

With a huff, Ivy reached up to the bottom of her mask. She had her fingers right at the underside of her chin, where the bezel touched her skin. But, she paused. "...Well if I do that then Luke is left out, and I don't want him stuck in the hospital bed all alone."

"See! See!" Kelly pointed at Ivy, her excitement at being proven right only growing. "It's an addiction! You can't stop because your minds want it to remain. Even if you did somehow muster the willpower to do it, you and Luke would probably not be able to think straight until you stuck yourselves back together. Because your brains are the main ingredients in a smoothie of cognition now! You can't un-smoothie a smoothie and dump out the whole banana slices and strawberry and avocado--"

"You put avocado in your smoothies? Gross, Kel."

Kelly threw a couch pillow at Ivy. "It makes it creamy! That's beside the point! The point is, for better or worse, this mixed brain of yours is only going to keep getting less lumpy over time until you're going to be mentally inseparable. Of the trial participants, there was twelve pairs combined, and none of those pairs were able to remain disconnected for more than three days before they had to 'become whole' again. That came up a lot, feelings of incompleteness, being segmented or like there is some sort of phantom mind missing, all that. It's even worse for those who are using the transmitters, they lose all sense of their old self and can only see the shared body as their 'true' form. All of them are currently hooked up in hospital beds on life support systems, and cared for by their own mixed-mode body..!"

Ivy and Beth stared at each other in horror. The thought of all that hadn't even occurred to them--they forgot there were two other physical bodies elsewhere in town, lying around with no interaction with the world. One was fine, technically, hooked up to the IV drip that replaced physical food for now. The other needed to eat, among other things, to survive. Becoming addicted to being in one body--addicted really isn't the right term, just becoming interwoven to that body--meant sacrificing the other, in a sense. And if something happened to either of those bodies...

"So we've got two options," Ivy finally said, breaking the long silence. She looked between Beth and Kelly. "Either we find some way to reverse the neural effects of this and never do it again..." Ivy and Beth both hated that idea, but they also recognized it was due to their mixed personalities wanting to persist as their minds really were like a unique being now. "Or, we find some way to help make it more permanent."

Kelly smiled, sprawling back in her seat. "I might be able to scrounge up some email addresses for people who might be able to help. As long as I can document the whole thing." She really is going to make an incredible journalist, one day.

It was pretty clear that if Kelly was right, the problem was far too big than anything a bunch of teenagers could manage. Maybe at first, for the next weeks or months, the effects wouldn't be too terrible if they used the headsets every couple days just to deal with the separation addiction part, but it'll eventually snowball. They needed outside help to solve this.

"Who would even know what to do about this?" Beth asked.

Kelly tapped her cheek as she pondered. "Well, the first obvious choice is someone at Hideki, right? But there's that whole cover-up of the issue in the first place... We could go ask those researchers about it, I think they're at Shaw Biosciences. Luke's dad has an in with Yabusa, but I don't think they know much about what to do about pure organic problems. Oh! King Enterprises popped up a couple times in my search with something called a 'neural harness' so there might be an independent group that would know about this issue."

A few options, at least. But, which one was worth pursuing?