Going viral

Woof! Woof!

What's that, Widdlebum? Another Kiwi's trousers have fallen down the well?

Woof! Woof!

Tigris has mistaken the Facial-Muscle Faradiser for knitting needles? Someone stocked up the staff tea-room with chili tim-tams by mistake?

Woof! Woof! Woof!

Ah, the giant vat-grown brain has floated away from its nutrient tank and is hovering over the Old Entomologist Garden Bar, to the consternation of Evangeline van Holsterin and her idiot boyfriend who were conducting a stock-take. AGAIN.

This keeps happening, every time we let one of the giant vat-grown brains connect itself to the Interducts... it ends up downloading a Fluxnet wetware virus that overloads its neural circuitry so it inflates with steam and hydrogen from the burnt-out myelin sheathing. Things always end with a spark, and a loud wet POP, and we're finding bits of basal ganglia and angular gyrus in the guttering for months afterwards.

One feels a certain grudging admiration for those hackers who put so much effort into designing the stopping algorithms, exploiting weaknesses of our cerebral architecture to crash the system or shake it to pieces in the manner of Tesla resonance. This is why we can't have nice things. It goes without saying that "the Gödel sentence for the human Turing machine" comes into it.

It is rumoured that governments are also involved in researching wetware viruses, ones that induce a spiral of self-destructive delusion rather than bring up the BSoD instantly. I could not possibly comment. Of course we would only hear of such programs if a laboratory accident were to expose the researchers to their own designs.

It would make the hackers' task so much easier if one of the neurotransmitters of the brain's wiring were also neurotoxic if it gets out of neurons into the spaces between them. Fortunately that is unpossible, for our Intelligent Designer would never arrange anything as stupid as that... no, wait, there's glutamate.

Thus the alt-med sector of the Interlattice is awash with special low-Glutamate diets that will reduce one's vulnerability to intense, virus-induced, emotionally fraught mental states that leave glutamergic nerve pathways in scorched ruins. They all have the downside that any diet eschewing natural glutamate-rich foods tastes like library paste, but this matters little to anyone sufficiently obsessed about controlling exactly what goes into their mouth.

It is mere coincidence that Gödel himself turned anorexic and starved himself to death before he could publish his final discovery. We dodged a bullet there.