I murmured something about having plenty of time. That was a laugh, and he and I both knew it. I had so little to do, I almost welcomed them just for sheer entertainment value.
"Well, that's fine," said Long, "but rest assured we aren't going to try to waste any of your time. We intend to make it short and sweet, as they say." He did such a good job of keeping up the fiction of me being a busy man that I almost believed it myself.
"You probably know more about Electronic Living than I do," he said, and I felt for an instant that I did, "but we'll go over it anyway just so you understand me a little better. You'll remember back in 1958-1959 there was a lot of work done—or I should say a beginning made—in developing an electronic eye for people who had lost their eyesight. This was a start of Electronic Living in its crudest form. These early pioneers, using what little knowledge was available of the brain then, were actually able to insert a probe in the brain and enable the blind person to 'see' light. At first it was just the difference between light and dark, but after a while they did develop a kind of vision—and then finally, after much work, the system grew into actual electronic vision.
"This was, as I said, the start of Electronic Living because it advanced the basic premise that the brain can utilize outside electrical impulses for its own purposes. And of course it wasn't long before some experimenters had rigged up a human television receiver. What they did was set up a series of brain probes which were directly connected to a small television receiving apparatus, and the subject could then 'see' the broadcast image without the use of his eyes.
"Since this rough beginning, we at EL have done a lot of work, and we are now able to reproduce every sort of physical sensation known to man through electronic brain connections.
"And recently, as a further refinement, we have been able to capture internal brain voltages and use them to reproduce thoughtlike sensations. Unfortunately, these are still in the realm of strong emotions and not true thoughts, but they are extremely effective.
"Now, it is this combination of physical sensation voltages and internal brain voltages, when fed into your brain from a simple tape like this, that produces what we call Electronic Living."
With that he pulled a piece of tape out of his pocket as if producing an elephant from a thimble.