Episode 2. The Definition of Love
Overture of Love
Love in nature is only achieved when dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin are present at their maximum quantities. Its validity period is also short. These hormones secreted from the hypothalamus of the cerebral limbic system are responsible for human emotions and desires, but they are also dominated by the reverse, so it is very difficult to maintain optimal levels. Dopamine, called the hormone of love and creation, is a neurotransmitter that causes pleasure in the brain. In the beginning of a new relationship, this neurotransmitter is excited and ejected in larger quantities, but the longer the relationship, the more likely it is that this effect will be reduced. Then, the love turns lukewarm. Alas, how frivolous our love is!
source: https://github.com/edindelan/animated-feelings/blob/master/README.md
On the other hand, serotonin is a hormone that makes you feel happy. It is secreted from the power of affirmation and gratitude. Serotonin is the most easily exhausted hormone when depressed. Serotonin secretion in the blood may show a risk of suicide. If a person had never experienced a romantic relationship before and felt dateless and devastated, they could always recognize that old consolation that they will be happy enough if they maintained inner peace through meditation, a process which reportedly helps to release serotonin.
The ‘love and trust’ hormone is oxytocin. Love grows throughout a steady and warm relationship. Recent studies have shown that oxytocin’s purpose in the body is undervalued. When a woman feels an orgasm, if her brain is photographed with a functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI), the sensory cortex is activated at first, and then the limbic system that controls emotional and long-term memory changes. At the peak, her cranial and frontal lobes become much activated and an abundant amount of oxytocin is secreted. Oxytocin is also secreted in the male body at the peak, but it often also stimulates his sleeping central nerve, thereby causing him to fall asleep. If we can keep each of these chemicals at a high level, we will be able to live in love, and then every day will be paradise. Conversely, if you can stay in love all the time, you can raise your hormone level. At this point, the question can come up: what do we really want, love, hormones, or ecstasy?
A person who has experienced intense love defines love as a mystical mental experience that opens up new horizons, or as a new world itself. Physicists have borrowed a theory of attractor, so they define love as a pattern created by a repeated ‘push and pull’ interaction between men and women in a messy world. It’s like the butterfly effect; a love storm blows miraculously in eyes of the male or female butterfly when the opposite sex spreads its wings. Evolution is a positive change in the world where the forces of love work. The sage told us not to drive while kissing. The kisser's time passes much faster than the non-kisser’s. Love is sometimes accompanied by pain and sorrow, but if there is a choice, who won’t love?
Seran
Seran was a bio-robotics engineer and a professor of engineering. Thanks to healthy amounts of diet and exercise, her practical age was in the twenties, a good ten years younger than her actual age. She was influenced by mechanistic biology in which the organism was considered just a complex machine and physicochemical mechanism to study and develop the android robot. She also accepted the ideas of systematic biology, which advocated that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of parts.’
She was still in love with her missing boyfriend, Marcos, whom she met at the Mars exploration competition five years ago. She felt that he must be out there, somewhere in the universe, and she planned to travel into space herself. Seran’s work in virtual space was another eye-opening experience, and the training had further expanded her sense of reality and inspired her imagination as she considered the possibility of parallel universes. Such experiences were strangely connected to her day-to-day academic research, both directly and indirectly. Recently, she had begun developing biomimetic robots for the dolphins that she had seen while scuba diving near Jeju Island.
Marcos
Marcos fell in love with Seran at first sight when they’d met at the Mars exploration astronaut contest five years ago. He had a secret relationship with Seran during the three month cohort training. Although Seran was unfortunately lost the competition, Marcos was selected as one of the final four contestants, and he joined the group about to explore Mars. After having landed on Mars and successfully transferred the exploration data to Earth, Marcos was lost in space due to mechanical failure of the space capsule during the Mars Terraforming project.
Virspace
Seran met Marcos by connecting to Virspace, a virtual space program. Paid membership ran from an upwards of $100 a month. It was similar to the existing social virtual experiences on the market, but the personalized service and ux (user experience) had been much improved.
To be the best virtual experience service, the manipulation had to be easy, and you had to be able to predict the outcome without reading the manual. Virspace boasted zero input technology in which large data files, such as your photos, videos, search words, and check-in places stored in the web’s cloud, are analyzed automatically without requiring you to input all of your own data and information. Virspace was the best interactive, augmented reality program made with the best artificial intelligence technology used to stimulate the human brain. Thinking became reality. Seran joined Virspace after she saw the ads for the scientists' beta test. Marcos appeared before her as a hologram swimming in the Virspace.
My day is longer than your day
“Seran, you’re still very beautiful.”
Is he really looking at me? Seran wondered. When he’d met her, Marcos had been a sweet-tempered man with a bright smile. He had relaxed manners and never hurried. He’d always been a gentleman, offering pleasant praise to Seran not for the sake of offering lip service, but out of true elegance of manner. Now, his expression was almost a complete poker face, hard to read in a way it never had been before.
“I’m lonely without you. Come back soon. Please,” Seran murmured. The screen showed that he was close to Venus. It was sprinkling and cloudy at 460° Celsius, the atmosphere exerting 90 times the pressure of Earth’s; terraforming Venus had been deemed impossible. They had chosen to focus on Mars instead. Humankind had, at that point, succeeded in manned exploration, had built a space station near Mars, and had been working on a project to expand a laboratory environment to a huge dome on Mars, hopefully one day leading to the construction of a permanent city. Geologists, mechanical engineers, and urban architects had even more recently been selected for the search for water under Mar’s surface. The biggest difficulty terraforming Mars presented was the issue of attracting underground water to the surface by stimulating the polar cap. This could be done by pulling the nearest asteroid to Mars. In this process, Marcos had taken charge of landing on asteroids and taking rock samples, but he had been unable to return to his ship due to mechanical failure of his pressurized space capsule.
“Venus is not as beautiful as I expected it to be. You must know a day here is longer than yours.” Seran said. When she blinked her eyes, the scene of the origami test where they had met five years ago comes out. At one of the recruitment rallies, they had both been nervous and excited. There was a physical fitness test, a psychological test, a gravity escape experiment, and many other challenges designed to set the potential recruits apart.
Marcos smiled at the video. "Origami, what a ridiculous test!" It was meant to test the person’s ability to maintain patience and accuracy in situations where they felt pressure due to the deadline. A person who got tired easily or had a poor finish was not qualified to be an astronaut. In a position in which all activities are carried out in space-weighted uniforms, every small action, from tightening bolts to exploring a planet, collecting specimens, and finally returning to their spacecraft through hatch required a high degree of patience and concentration.
“I was stunned to see you fold a hundred origami cranes with such a serious look on your face until the very end. I really did not expect you to make such tiny, beautiful paper animals,” Seran said with a laugh.
“I want to go back that time.” The two lovers said the same words at the same time.
She blinked her eyes and the scene changed to the zero-gravity training test.
(Image source: http://www.aertecsolutions.com/2016/10/26/infographic-zero-gravity-flights/?lang=en)
The time had come for real space training. Seran felt excited, but also worried that after passing all the tests and making it onto Mars, she would never feel certain about a return to Earth again. The scenery of every mountain she climbed and ocean she enjoyed while scuba diving spread like panoramas in her memories. It was all thanks to the earth’s gravity, which carried out its fiduciary mission very well, and now had come the time to live without it.
Seran and Marcos, along with eight other members in the screen ride, sat on board a V-128 aircraft. It was flying up at 45 degrees and 13 meters-per-second. The V-128 was similar to a large passenger plane at first glance, but the inside was empty. Now it was time to fall parabolic at the same angle. The screen stopped here. Pause. They both watched the screen and all said things about “butterflies in the stomach," while they took a big breath simultaneously.
The moment of free fall was the moment of liberation from everything. It felt like all the organs were floating from Seran’s body. She was freed from everything she was denying, and she fell into a subtle physical predisposition that she had never experienced before. Seran was more delighted to be with Marcos in this ecstasy. All the participants should have written down progress notes during the training, but the notes had begun to float in the air. Was this the feeling she’d experienced in her mother's womb? As soon as Marcos tried to get closer to Seran, his body turned around.
"Marcos, do not kick your equipment!" the examiner yelled.
The two people on the screen faced each other in the present. Seran turned the memory off as they laughed. The hologram of Marcos smiled. Seran also smiled.
Image source: https://jasongregory.org/cosmic-dance-2011/
When Seran hit another stage key, romantic starlight entered the top of a specially-made glass ceiling. It shone down on a stage, and Liszt’s “Liebesträume” began to play. One of the biggest advantages of Virspace was the music. How did it know Seran wanted to listen to this song? She used to play this song on her wireless earbuds when she took a walk along the river, thinking of Marcos, every night. This was truly an example of the amazing power of the artificial intelligence’s ability to read emotion.
On the ceiling of the stage, there was a full moon of organic electroluminescent sheen made of aromatic toluene.
“Seran, I want to learn to dance. Can you teach me?”
"Sure, it would be my pleasure,” she said with a slightly dry smile.
Seran bowed her head, drew a semicircle with her hands, and led Marcos to the stage. He smiled and climbed over the edge of the stage. Blinking her eyes twice caused the augmented-reality-Marcos to appear as a hologram, standing in as a partner, holding hands with Seran. In the past, hologram images had always required a specific screen, and they used to shoot various patterns and colors of light. But now, using a laser, realistic video feed was also reproduced in three dimensions in the air. Data values for three-dimensional Marcos were transmitted at very high speeds, making the interaction as lifelike as it could be in cyberspace.
“First, when I put my right foot out, you put your left foot inside, like this. Good! When I put my left foot out, you put your right foot in. Do you know what dancing and coding have in common. Markko?”
“MECE,” he answered. MECE (Mutually Exclusive and Completely Exhaustive) was one of the important principles for the Mars exploration training assignment. Every equation had to be complete without being duplicated. As Marcos recited this information, Seran happened to step on his foot as she turned toward him. At that moment, Marcos kissed her without completely thinking the action through. Seran, with her bright smile and serene eyes, blended with the starlight around them. They hug and kiss passionately in the virtual universe.
I think that you think that I think
Telepathy. She smiled. So did he.
Telepathy between lovers was something more than a hormone, but even the most advanced science and technology could not explain it sufficiently. Various experiments turned up subjects that were described as ‘telepaths,’ but was it possible for even a complete decoding of the brain to explain telepathy? The human brain, a comparatively small universe compared to the vastness of space, had the power to think thanks to a very complex process using 100 billion neurons. Was it possible to understand such a complex thing?
Seran missed Marcos. One year passed, then two, three… Sometimes it felt like it was only Seran who looked up into the dark night sky and swallowed back tears at the thought of him stranded out there. Seran entered MECEA by pressing a button. Hormone levels indicate dopamine 80, serotonin 70, and oxytocin 70. MECEA is a kind of cyber-sex. This device is based on the neuroscience of how the mind and emotions move in the human neural circuit, and processes the electroencephalogram and fMRI image signals, and estimates hormone levels to accurately calculate appropriate stimuli.
In the past, many errors in interpretation due to noise were the limit of decoding the brain. In recent five years, the performance of neural control device and RNS nerve stimulation device has been remarkably advanced. Hence overall effective information processing has produced the performance of current Virspace. Through Seran’s headset, the minute current began to stimulate the brain's pleasure center. Medial preoptic area (MPA), sex drive centers are located at the hypothalamus, which secretes the hormone of love, and MPA of male is 2.5 times larger than that of female. On the other hand, the mirror-neuron system (MNS), a sympathetic system of the brain of 'I feel what you feel', is larger and better developed in women. Even if you are a poker face man, you need to express your empathy to at least one woman. It leads to a non-zero sum game.
Food, sex, and drugs have the same excitable brain regions. One more thing to add here is music. Virspace loads Cello Sonata No. 2 Adagio of Brahms, one of the Seran's favorite songs. Cello is an instrument of the universe. All things in the space are made up of very small strings, and the destiny of each string is determined by its vibrating pattern. Cello has the frequency most similar to human voice. How can a man crave for love of one woman in his lifetime while composing the immortal songs? The sound of a pizzicato that bends the strings flows romantically and sorrowfully. Tumtum tumtum. Low frequency resonance excites cells of the cochlear basement membrane apex of Seran. It takes about ten minutes. Oxytocin levels in her bloodstream are approaching the highest and Seran moans and warms her body. The ecstasy lasts for 30 minutes although the longer time is technically feasible. Yes, it is addictive and limited by law on drug and psychotropic drug management. Don’t worry since it is programmed to ‘kill’ itself if you try to further stimulate your pleasure center.
On the screen, the commercial advertisement script stated, “Virspace is the place where your love logging-in with longing and reproduces with faint memories. Dance to music with your holographic partner in the real virtual universe. Bites in virtual space last longer than atoms in physics. Welcome aboard Virspace.” Seran felt annoyed and ashamed. Another irritating copy line streamed—believe it or not—“According to one survey, Virspace has reduced the nation’s depression rate by twenty two percent, and its divorce rate by fifteen percent among the adults over thirty five.”
“I hate it!” Seran spat out.