Ribofunk

It seems that the bug in our brains has now produced a generalized visual agnosia. Nothing looks familiar. The sight of common objects produces no referents in our brains, emotional or intellectual. Everything seems an assemblage of basic, almost geometrical parts, out of which nothing whole can be synthesized, resulting in a generalized lack of affect.

Or so the Digireal experts tell us. It's kind of hard to tell exactly what's wrong from the inside.

All I know is that when I look at what I assume is Penguin, I see a stretched toroid with an irregular topography topped with filaments of varying lengths. I assume she sees the same.

It's hard to work up the emotion to comfort a toroid, but I try my best, and so does she.

Oberjefe Ozal has been fantastic thru all this. He never loses his composure, but always keeps the ovoid with the seven openings atop the horizontal broadening of his column as cool as liquid nitrogen. He seems to derive almost superhuman strength and comfort from the qawwali buzz in 'the shell-shaped excrescences on the side of his aforementioned ovoid. I don't know what we'd do without him.

I guess this bug is not going to be as easy to smoke as everyone first assumed.

Well, now I'm contorting my buccal orifice and fleshy red tasting member into phonemes that will signal an end to

our conversation, which the flat grey box that transcribes and transmits my voice will insure that you receive.

Maintain your homeostasis at a less-than-feverish amplitude, Mom! (Not too hard at McMurdo in July!)

Your loving guest son,

CENSORED

Dear Host Mother,

The agnosia cleared up by itself.

It's been replaced by a real mild neuro-deficit.

Amusica.

None of our pop-tabs sounds like anything anymore.

This one's pretty easy to take.

Except for Oberjefe Ozal, who's killed himself.

Your loving guest son,

CENSORED

Dear Host Mother,

Have I sent this message yet?

Wait a minute, Penguin!

We seem to be suffering now from TGA, or transient global amnesia. (At least we hope it's transient!) The herriots know that this kind of thing is related to damage on the underside of the temporal lobes, so they hope to squash the bug with a directed killer while it's busy there. Did I mention that we've got TGA? For a while we can't lay down any new memories. Maybe I sent you a 'vox already on it… Don't worry, long-term memory is unaffected. I remember how wonderful you and the other Moms and Dads have always been to me. I hope I don't let you down.

Wait a minute, Penguin!

Have I sent this message yet?

Your loving guest son,

CENSORED

Dear Host Mother,

The TGA seems to be subsiding. We've been ordered to try to get some sleep.

Everyone's receptive to that, but whenever we start to drowse off, we experience these tremendously magnified

myoclonic spasms. You know those little jerks your body sometimes gives just before passing into sleep? Well, these are the mothers of all such twitches, enough to knock you out of bed.

The mccoys are circulating now with somnifacients that should put us under.

Hopefully, when the new day dawns, this goo-screwing bug will have exhausted itself.

Sleep tight!

Your loving guest son,

CENSORED

Dear Host Mother,

We lost half the pod during sleep to Nightmare Death Syndrome, that Thai/Filipino/Khampuchean tendency to flatline during sleep.

Unfortunately, the somnifacients may have contributed to the high mortality rate, preventing the sleepers from jolting awake.

I don't know how to tell you this, so forgive me if I just blurt it out.

Penguin was one of the fatalities.

I almost wish the agnosia was back, so I wouldn't feel so bad.

I'm asking the new CO to send you an adobe of her and me thru the metamedium.

Just in case I don't make it home.

Your loving guest son,

CENSORED

Dear Host Mother,

It's been twenty-four hours since the last manifestation of the invader. The herriots are starting to feel safe about issuing an all-clear. And Doctor Sax is standing virtually by in the wings with a last-ditch experimental trope similar to CENSORED which they're going to try if there's another flareup.

Keep your fingers crossed (webbing and all)!

Your loving guest son,

CENSORED

Dear Host Mother,

We've all received our shots of aldisscine, Doctor Sax's new trope, despite its high LD rating.

There was really no choice after we all went body-blind.

What's body-blindness? I can imagine you asking.

It's total loss of proprioception, the multiplex feedback from your muscles and nerves, skin and bones, that allows you to tell-mostly subliminally-what your body's doing.

We're all isolated now in our heads like puppet-masters whose strings leading to their puppets have been tangled, or like a telefactor operator who's lost his sensory feed. It's not that we can't move our limbs or anything. There's no paralysis. It's just (just!) that aside from visual feedback, there's no inherent sense of where any part of you is! You might as well try to operate someone else's body as your own under these conditions. It's not pleasant, watching your proxies tripping over their own feet, missing chairs, their mouths, the D-compoz unit-

But you can get used to anything, I guess. And the experts are confident that the aldisscine will stop any new deficits from popping up.

Anyway, I'm kind of glad Penguin didn't live to experience this. I never got a chance to tell you, but she used to be a dancer in regular franch life.

The orders have finally come down from Brussels for our pod to be rotated out. There's talk that if the body-blindness proves permanent, they'll try to fit us all out with onboard stabilizer chips and nanosensors to simulate normal proprioception.

What's one more bodymod nowadays, huh, Mom?