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Joseph McElroy


Plus

Plus

Joseph McElroy

This is the story, set in some unspecified future, of Imp Plus, a disembodied human brain controlling IMP, the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform, in earth orbit. The brain, removed from an individual with a wife and a child, begins to develop self-awareness as it orbits the earth in a space capsule.

The brain's function, as part of a solar energy project, is to observe growth inside the capsule and to transmit information along the Concentration Loop to the scientists on Earth whom it knows only by sound: the Good Voice, the Acrid Voice.

At first it fumbles for memory, for words, links, awareness of what is happening to it. But little by little, the brain develops a consciousness apart from its function and from its project-programmed self - begins to withhold information, to distinguish motives in the communications from Earth, to grow strange, terrifying, oddly beautiful appendages, a body of limbs, nerves, forms for which there are no names, forms spontaneously erupting from its thoughts (and new feelings) - begins to deliberate about its fate, to refine a plan of its own, a marvelous collaboration between itself and the sun, and the universe...

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