Pelican

"Then sayd the pellycane
   When my byrats be slayne
With my bloude I them reuyue
   Scrypture doth record,
   The same dyd our Lord,
And rose from deth to lyue."

                      Skelton, "Armory of Birds." 1510

---

The air was cool. The sky was grey, almost matching the colour of the sea.



I was sitting at a table under a large umbrella on the seaward side of a pier. My arms were hanging at my side. The umbrella was blue and white.



Behind me, a crowd gathered in the pavilion to see a collection of colourful gacha machines. I could hear the call of birds, the waves, and the cheerful sounds of people enjoying the holiday like atmosphere of the surroundings.

In the chair opposite me sat a large pelican. Neither of us said a word.



She regarded me with a look of both kindness and wry amusement.

Then I awoke.

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October 2 - On board the "Relentless", on route to Dragon's Egg from Paquin

The aroma of freshly brewed coffee permeated the galley. I sat hunched over my cup, willing myself awake.

It had been a particularly vivid dream. It lingered like a physical presence in the room.

A pelican.

A pelican under an umbrella.



Almost instinctively. I reached for the list of Umbrella file names I had been decoding.

Of the file names I had yet to open, three contained the same letters as the word pelican.

• cliMate clAMp Point gone or lap lan
• crino CloRine trap
• raison sUeT cliNt purse pro void

Of these, only one contained uppercase P indicating the start of a word.

cliMate clAMp Point gone or lap lan

There were three other uppercase letters. This meant a four word puzzle. I began to sift through the letters.

P...

Protocol

This word had shown up before.

A...

Alliance

The rest of the puzzle unfolded from there.

Alliance Mental Mapping Protocol.

Interesting. An Umbrella file on an Alliance protocol.

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Excerpts from the Alliance Mental Mapping Protocol (AMMP)

"Many people have experienced being able to perform actions without their conscious mind needing to exert much control. Frequently dialed telephone numbers can appear to be memorized by your fingers instead of your mind.

"Dancers, athletes and musicians drill reflexivity until their bodies know what to do without conscious control. The whole human mind/brain/sensorimotor system uses a function known as cognitive mapping to allow it to function at high levels.

"A graduate student studying autistic savant syndrome was tasked to memorize calendars. At the end of the experiment, he was able to tell you what day it was on any given date within the period covered by the calendars he studied. He didn’t have to calculate or remember to get the right answer, he just knew it. His brain took the information in and arranged it into a cognitive map in order to make it easy to get at.

"Certain repetitive tasks performed so many times that without even trying to develop the ability, via simple repetition, the brain builds up a cognitive map that allows those tasks to be routinely fulfilled without the conscious mind needing to exert much control.

"These few examples are a shadow of the sort of ability that could be deliberately inculcated."

---

"The Alliance Mental Mapping Protocol (AMMP) is not as invasive as the Academy's so-called 'reader' program. Candidates are chosen who have shown a natural aptitude for mental mapping, cognitive mapping and certain analytical processes. Most of these have already been preliminarily trained.

"A mental map is mentally placing all of the objects in a room in your mind, a cognitive map is when you runs simulations in your mind of that room.

"The original program was a set of drill training in certain memorization and cognitive processes. Certain meditative processes to screen out distractions and better focus on given tasks. Different specialty categories would include combat engineering, tactical assessment, decryption, signal analysis and profiling.

"Certain intensive techniques include using sensory deprivation therapy and sound/visual induce time dilation.

"Later enhancements to the program include nootropic drugs and other biotic and chemical cognitive enhancers, the Ubermann sleep schedule, Gansfield effect controlled hallucination, lucid dreaming, dream-learning and the Treadstone protocols."