I-YENSCH BRACELETS
"Hold hands until you can play nicely together." Mrs. Johnson, my kindergarten teacher, said that to me and Jeremy Steeger once when we got in a fight. Stupidly, I thought this was pretty cool, 'cause it meant I could slug Jeremy and he couldn't get outta range. Of course, Jeremy had the same bright idea, and we spent recess pummeling each other.
I-Yensch bracelets are a high-tech approach to Mrs. Johnson's hand-holding solution, with one important difference: I-Yensch bracelets work. Once locked around the wrists of two wearers, each person feels the other's sensations — and shares the other's death, if things get that bad. Scorpius and I wore a matching pair to ensure our mutual safety while I was his "guest" aboard his Command Carrier. I had the secret code to unlock Scorpy's bracelet, and he had the code to unlock mine.
Sensations, such as pain from a knife wound (I wish that were only a hypothetical example), are transmitted along nerves by electrical impulses. If you tap into a being's central nervous system, you can detect and transmit its impulses. I-Yensch bracelets apparently contain both transmitters and receivers. Each bracelet in a linked pair sends the nerve impulses of its wearer to the nerves of the wearer of the other bracelet, causing both people to experience identical sensations.
I didn't feel a thing when I put the bracelet on, so I'm guessing the device didn't physically puncture my skin to tap into the median nerve in my wrist. I also don't know how it managed to pick up signals from all over my body and not just my arm. Finally, I'm not sure how it managed to filter which signals were worth sending and which weren't. How did it know to send my sensation of "choking death" to Scorpius, but not his "really need to pee" to me?
Not that I'm complaining. Really, I'm not. I'm just ... curious.
JOURNEY LOG REFERENCES
I-Yensch, You-Yensch
Into the Lion's Den, Part 1: Lambs to the Slaughter
Into the Lion's Den, Part 2: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
STARBURST TO ANY NOTE
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