The mad scientist is Kevin Warwick, a professor in the Department of Cybernetics at the University of Reading. In 1998, he had a silicon chip surgically implanted above his left elbow. The chip communicated via radio waves with computers that, in turn, signaled to machines that would open doors and turn on lights as Warwick approached, and greet him with a cheery "Hello."

He loved it. He and his computer were, he writes, like "a pair of Siamese twins." When the chip was removed after nine days, he felt bereaved--"as though a friend had just died."

So he decided to get a second implant. This one, scheduled for sometime next year, will attempt to tap directly into his nervous system and relay its messages to a computer. That way, he figures, he can store the neural messages of pain or pleasure or drunkenness, and play them back to his brain later.

"When I'm happy, we'll record that signal," he writes. "Then, if my mood changes the next day, we'll play the happy signal back and see what happens."

And that's just phase one of his plan. In phase two, his wife, Irena, will get a similar implant, and then the happy couple can link their nervous systems together via the Internet. "If I sprained my ankle," he wonders, "could I send the signal to Irena to make her feel as though she has injured herself?"

And, of course, there's sex. "What if the other person became sexually aroused? Could we record signals at the height of our arousal, then play these back and relive the experience?"

This experiment could backfire, resulting in permanent nerve damage, Warwick says, but he's eager to try it anyway. He figures he's pioneering a form of computer-aided brain-to-brain communication that will ultimately replace language. Who needs to talk when your every thought and feeling can be broadcast directly to your friend's brain? But Warwick doesn't speculate about what might happen if these intimate messages were intercepted by less friendly folks.

It all sounds pretty wacky, but Warwick gets even wackier. He figures humans and machines will ultimately merge into a superhuman cyborg species. In fact, he writes, if we don't become cyborgs, we will soon become slaves to our computers, which are already more intelligent than we are.

"Otherwise," he writes, "we're doomed to a future in which intelligent machines rule and humans become second-class citizens. My project explores a middle ground that gives humans a chance to hang in there a bit longer."

Down the Psycho Trail

Warwick's dream sounds like Ted Kaczynski's worst nightmare.

Kaczynski is, of course, the Unabomber--another nut obsessed with technology. Tormented by paranoid fears that sound a lot like Warwick's utopian fantasies, Kaczynski fled to a tiny cabin in Montana and then started mailing bombs to people he associated with the technological revolution. Now serving four life sentences in prison, Kaczynski was interviewed by one of the few magazines that could be considered sympathetic to his ideas--Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. Its motto: "Disarm Authority! Arm Your Desires!" Whatever that means.

In this interview, the man who killed three people and wounded 23 others waxes lyrical about his love of nature. When he talks about Grandfather Rabbit, he sounds positively warm and fuzzy. And a tad bonkers.

"When I was living in the woods, I sort of invented some gods for myself," he says, laughing. "I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit."

Hunting bunnies was his main source of meat during winters, he says. But sometimes he'd follow a rabbit through the snow only to see the tracks suddenly disappear. He was baffled, so he did what ancient humans used to do--he concocted a story to explain the mystery. "I invented a myth for myself: this was Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn't catch him and why you could never see him."

Every time he shot a rabbit, Kaczynski would say, "Thank you, Grandfather Rabbit." Then he created a fetish, carving a rabbit into a piece of wood. He planned to make a better one, he says, "but I never did get it done."

It is, his interviewer writes, "a poignant story." Sure, it's charming, downright cuddly--until you realize that Kaczynski didn't "get it done" because he was too busy making bombs and mailing them to human beings.

Gory Glory

Joe Coleman is a Hieronymus Bosch for our time. Like the great 16th-century Flemish artist, Coleman paints brilliantly colored, intricately detailed scenes of the macabre and the grotesque. Bosch painted saints and demons; Coleman paints pop stars and psycho killers.

The current issue of Juxtapoz features a stunning gallery of Coleman's creations. Jam-packed with words and images, the paintings are epics as dazzling to the eye as they are unsettling to the mind. Six of them are beautifully reproduced here in all their gory glory--including paintings that illustrate the lives of country singer Hank Williams, bank robber John Dillinger and murderer-cannibal Albert Fish. Coleman says he's "trying to put the 'pain' back in painting." Check it out.

Juxtapoz, available at full-service newsstands, is a bimonthly founded by underground cartoonist Robert Williams and devoted to what the editors term "lowbrow art." Coleman's work is pretty highbrow for lowbrow, but the issue also features a study of those cheesy '70s-era black-light paintings.

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