Nostalgia Read Online Free Page B

All the bucks you spent educating me. I hope I can repay at least some of it. Sorry sister and brothers!
But she loved travelling and therefore took up journalism.
    Were they real? This family of hers, did it exist? Yes, it did, as I confirmed later. All the siblings had a genuine location, and Kelvin and Pearl still lived in Berkeley.
    Music:
Jean Bosco; Aboubakar Touré; Laura Chang.
    Interests:
Tennis, violin when I’m at home.
    A privileged upbringing. What seemed unsettled about her was revealed in the profession she had chosen for herself.
    Curiously, Holly did not invite buddies on her site. Nevertheless, following other visitors, I posted a message of sympathy and placed a bunch of roses on the virtual heap, beside the words, We Love You Holly.
    —
    And myself, Francis Sina? There was nothing personal I wanted to reveal about myself. I am, I was, my profession. I was aware that this was disapproved, and sooner or later I’d have to relent and produce more of myself.
    Francis Sina, neurophysiologist, consultant. BS, PhD, MD.
    Dr Sina was born in Yellowknife, Yukon, Canada, where he finished his schooling before proceeding to Edmonton, Canada, to pursue his university education. Following his undergraduate degree in mathematics, Sina completed hisdoctorate in neuroscience at MIT, specializing in the interface between virtual and real experiences. He went on to obtain his MD at the Parallax Institute, and is presently a memory specialist at the Sunflower Centre for Human Rejuvenation in Toronto. He has been made a member of the Order of Canada, and received the American Science Medal from the President of the United States.
Recent Publications
    1. Prodigal Singularities in the Complex Real-Virtual (R-V) Plane
    2. Where Are You in the R-V? The Fading of the Real into the Virtual
    3. A Tree Model of the Mind: The Branching of Memory
    4. Laws of Conservation: Is the Artistic Sensibility Indestructible?
    5. A New Goldstone Diagram of Tree Branching
    TOM:
Good evening, Frank. I see you’re reading tonight.
How long had the machine been observing me? Polite to a fault, as always, the accent smooth, male North Atlantic. So predictable, and yet he deludes himself he’s imitating a human mind. He’d startled me, deliberately, and noted my reaction.
    FRANK:
Yes, hello, Tom. Just looking up some Profiles.
    TOM:
Including yours, I see. All professional. I still need your personal information, Frank. It’s a requirement. The small things about you that you read about others. That’s only fair.
    Small things such as favourite people; sex life; favourite team. Dreams? What if I make them up? He’ll analyze them, of course.
    FRANK:
I’ll have it ready, Tom. Meanwhile I have a question for you. What can you tell me about
lion
?
…
Just tell me something, then I’ll narrow that down to what I need.
    TOM:
Easily done, Frank. Hold on.

FOUR
    IT ’ S MIDNIGHT , THE LION IS OUT . What did it mean, this single phrase, what did it signify? Most cases of Nostalgia that came to us at the Sunflower were quite obvious by comparison. A man from England suddenly saw a young woman behind a bar in South Boston; a woman from Rosedale saw a corpse floating on the waters of the Svislach in Minsk. In each case there were traces of a former accent to link to a past.
    It is claimed that even our advanced cyberBrains cannot reproduce the whimsy of a human mind, the sheer irrationality or spontaneity of a passing thought. But that depends on how you define your terms. Is there anything irrational inside a larger, a universal reality in which everything is connected to everything else? In such a space nothing is spontaneous, everything has a cause—a leaf dropping; a shootingstar in the sky; a spark from an ember on a barbecue grill; Presley’s lion.
    TOM:
Belonging to the genus
Panthera,
the lion is one of the largest land mammals on earth. Until the late Pleistocene era, 10,000 years ago, lions were widespread and found on all the five