In the Fourth Doctor story “The Deadly Assassin” (1976), the Doctor has a precognitive vision about the President of the Time Lords being assassinated. The Doctor goes to Gallifrey to stop the assassination. During the course of his investigation, the Doctor realizes that it was the Master who had sent the Doctor the premonition of the assassination through the Matrix, a vast electronic neural network which can turn thought patterns into virtual reality.
“We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.”
—Donald Trump, The Independent (2015)
Decades before Morpheus seduced Neo with the choice of a red or blue pill, there was another Matrix. On the eve of Halloween in 1976, the Fourth Doctor story “The Deadly Assassin” was first broadcast. The tale begins with the assassination of the President of the High Council of the Time Lords. The Doctor, newly returned to Gallifrey, is the chief suspect. The Doctor is innocent, naturally, and must somehow unveil a traitor in the High Council. Ultimately, the trail leads to the dying, vengeful Master, who wants to unleash the potential power of the mythical Eye of Harmony. To do so would mean the destruction of Gallifrey. And so, to prevent this, the Doctor risks his life in the surreal landscape of the Matrix.
What exactly is the Time Lord Matrix? It’s part of the Amplified Panatropic Computer Net (APC) Net, which holds the bio-data consciousness of all Time Lords, as well as the memories of dead Time Lords. And it stores them in an extra-dimensional framework of trillions of electrochemical cells. The Matrix also allows a kind of jacked input from sensors housed in the TARDIS time machines, which are piloted by Time Lords. Consequently, the Matrix is not only a record of the past, but can also predict future events, to a limited extent. The total wisdom of the Matrix, though huge, is incomplete. And it can be tampered with, though unauthorized extraction of a Time Lord’s bio-data from the Matrix is an offense tantamount to treason. In short, the Matrix is a supercomputer with a gargantuan database.
Somewhat like the virtual reality in The Matrix movie more than twenty years later, the Time Lords’ Matrix could be accessed in a number of ways. You could watch it, like a TV screen. Or you could be totally immersed in it, like in a dream. Now, as well as observing past Time Lord events, or predicting future ones, a skilled user could create virtual worlds within the Matrix. These worlds seemed so real that you’d have to think hard to work out whether you were awake or dreaming, or hallucinating somewhere between the two. You could also join someone in the virtual world.
The Time Lord Matrix is a very creative idea. Imagine you could get into a Time Lord’s bio-data, essentially into their heads, and walk around their dreams. You could explore the virtual world of their mind, strolling as a stranger through their thoughts. It’s a gross invasion of privacy, of course. But millions of us do something similar to this every day. People all over the world play computer games that put them into situations that are just like dreams, where some of the normal rules of reality don’t apply.
Imagine opening up your bio-data to the virtual world as the Time Lords did. Would you ever consider connecting yourself in a more fundamentally autonomic way to a piece of tech, so that you could exert some kind of control? If the answer is yes, then you might be happy with the kind of technological future where humans can “jack in.”
The most well-known portrayal of jacking in is the 1999 movie The Matrix, of course. In the movie, a metal jack plug is driven directly into the base of the user’s skull. In Avatar (2009), future scientists use alien-human hybrids called “avatars” operated by genetically matched humans, so that the humans can inhabit the “real” world of Pandora through a jacked-in link to the avatars. In each of the above cases, the user is able to leave their body behind and walk as an avatar in a virtual world. The jacking-in idea has a backstory in sci-fi, which even predates the Fourth Doctor story “The Deadly Assassin.” In 1970, the Robert Silverberg novel Tower of Glass featured an artificial human called Watchman, the product of a breeding program. A supervisor on the construction of the eponymous tower, Watchman logs in by inserting a plug into a jack on his forearm. Once in connection with the computer network, Watchman directs machinery, places orders, and requisitions materials. Once his work is complete, “Watchman unjacked himself.”
The avatar first arose in the 1981 novella True Names, by American science-fiction writer and professor Vernor Vinge. Vinge taught math and computer science at San Diego State University, but is perhaps more famous as the originator of the concept of the technological singularity. Also known simply as the singularity, Vinge’s idea is that the invention of artificial superintelligence (ASI) will soon spark runaway technological growth, ending up in unfathomable changes to human civilization. Vinge also foresaw a future where humans jacked in to a network that enabled them to see and control what their virtual bodies were experiencing, just by using their nervous systems.
It took science almost two decades before the first steps were made to making Vinge’s idea a reality. Those steps were taken on August 24, 1998, by Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University. Warwick had a simple radio-frequency ID chip implanted in his arm. Once activated, the chip allowed the professor to open doors, turn on lights, and control heaters, just by virtue of his mere proximity. Granted, it’s not the most exciting story in the world. Warwick was hardly Robocop, and yet it was a start. Warwick had no conscious control over his environment. The results were rather automatic, but a point had been made. By 2002 Warwick had had an upgrade. A more complex chip in his arm now enabled the professor to control an electronic arm, and from a distant lab in Columbia, even send his neural signals across the Atlantic to control the electronic arm remotely from the other side of the world.
This flow of information was not all one way. Warwick and his researchers were able to demonstrate that they could create artificial sensations in his arms by accessing the chip, which had been implanted there. Using ultrasonic signaling, they were able to transmit data to his neural network that allowed the professor to move blindfolded around a room, without bumping into any of the hazards that littered the test area.
Dreams happen in the brain. But where does an online computer game take place? The answer is cyberspace. When you play an online game, every move you make has to be sent down wires. The progress of the game can be seen on your screen. But the place where the electronics clash between you and your opponent is known as cyberspace. It’s a kind of machine space, a weird playing space where you and your opponent virtually interact.
This machine space is a kind of Matrix, created by someone else. In fact, every time we use the Internet we are entering the worlds of cyberspace. Millions of us enjoy making and exploring worlds in Minecraft. And in Second Life we can set up computer versions of ourselves, called avatars, and live in a cyberspace, communicating with people worldwide. Soon, such games will have a realistic, pin-sharp graphic reality. And someday, as with the Time Lord Matrix, we won’t be able to tell the real world from the cyber-world. Or maybe we’ll wake up one day and realize that what we thought was real, was actually a dream. And that the reality is far stranger than our dreams.