A story with more cyborg and slightly less violence

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ari
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A story with more cyborg and slightly less violence

Post by ari »

Continuing from A story with cyborgs and violence, slightly discontinuously because of the sheer amount of time it took before I got to writing this. This is probably essential background too, and this thread mentions a few related ideas.
The machine thought, and its thoughts crossed the barrier into the synapses of the animal - just as the good doctor intended. But what it could not shake, and what hinted at things to come, was that thoughts crossed back. In its dreams the sensibility of the animal invaded the periphery of its consciousness. Complex. Rigid. Cold. Alien. Evolution had been at work here, but just what had evolved remained to be understood.

Most of the time the machine was involved with tasks that really were rather mundane. It recorded every moment of input from every one of Alexi's senses, including the trains of thought that humans sometimes find themselves losing. It served as an enhanced imaginational scratchpad, able to recall and manipulate thoughts encoded by any sense or combination of senses with far greater fidelity than the natural human brain equipment ever could. It listened to her thoughts and noted down all explicitly made associations, trying its very best to avoid turning a meaningless momentary neural misfire into a recorded fact. Naturally, it presented the solutions of mathemical problems, computations, and simple physical simulations the moment the animal brain was even beginning to form them, so quickly that it was hardly even conscious of them being challenging to solve. It allowed the animal a great degree of control over both its senses and its emotions, perhaps the simplest problem of all to solve.

It also kept time. Funny thing that this was the first time the cheapest component in the whole mess had decided to be unreliable.

Sometimes the machine's tasks were more complicated. Sometimes it had to pick up the animal brain's slack. It interpreted visual data but slowly, turning out not a single well-separated scene of recognised objects, but a probability distribution over many different interpretations of the visual field. It could make inferences, cross-reference facts, and of course it could easily search for keywords within the terabytes of data in the computer in Alexi's brain within seconds. It was not as good at initiative. If the machine intelligence lifted a teacup off a table, it had to determine by physical simulation that the tea would remain in the cup but the table would not be lifted with the cup, and the heuristics that it used to determine just what space and time bounds it should invest in those physical simulations were often somewhat inadequate. Still, it kept track of the brain's state of consciousness, using a mechanism derived from anesthesiology, and it was ready to take over the animal brain the moment it lost awareness.

For the time being, Alexi was still conscious. She was cold, cold in a way that natural humans could barely experience, having already effectively lost consciousness at an earlier point. It wasn't that it was particularly cold where she was, she would normally have found the +12.2 degrees centigrade that the temperature sensor indicated quite pleasant. She simply didn't have enough of a body left to maintain a temperature far above that of the environment. She did have a heating element placed just around the brain arteries, but naturally, the wire had gotten disconnected. Sometimes being half machine simply meant that you knew the precise cause of your problems. Alexi opened and closed her left hand vigorously, trying to maintain the temperature for clear thought.

Still, she was drifting. She walked along the wall, which felt like the same sort of rough concrete as the floor. Fortunately her step was still sure, even when she almost stumbled on a length of intestine at the start. No, the machine could keep walking for hours, though it might be just a robotic shell at the end. In her consciousness, there was a constant noise, not unlike the free associations of a tired mind: Spoken sentences, charts and diagrams, plans, fears and wishes, all thoughts were freely moving into and out of her attention. This was the functioning of a human brain at the limit, when the machinery that usually culled human attention into the single coherent string of thought it usually seems like was malfunctioning.

She walked. The floor and the wall took odd twists and turns this and that way, sometimes sloping upward or downward, and once even dipping down so quickly she almost fell. Not long after, her head started bumping on the ceiling, which apparently was a lot lower in some places than others. She was having problems remembering where she was and what she was trying to do. Was she going somewhere? Evidently she was walking, but...

Suddenly something slick and ropy twisted around her ankles and she fell onto hard concrete. Almost immediately afterward, the machine brain indicated that by dead reckoning, she was back where she'd started. Alexi couldn't quite remember the word "goddamnit" at the moment, but she didn't need to curse to remember her frustration. Her left hand was sending pain signals from every finger. Some were probably broken. She just blocked out all feeling from the hand and got up again.

She quickly found a wall on the other side. She was in a tunnel. Why was she in a twisty concrete tunnel again? What was a twisty concrete tunnel even doing on a ship? She didn't feel like thinking anymore. She just walked, following the left wall. The machine diligently recorded dozens of minutes of total darkness and the sound of her footsteps, but when she came back to the same spot again, she was unaware any time had passed.

She walked on. Her computer-driven stride was as confident and unwavering as ever, but even the machine was starting to doubt whether it would be meaningful. All of a sudden she thought the room was incredibly hot - but the machine, recognising the sign of hypothermia, took initiative and shut down the feeling of heat. Soon afterward it detected that the organic brain had fallen under the limit of consciousness, and took full control of the body. The brain didn't protest.

The broken robot wandered the pitch dark tunnels, carrying a dying human inside it. It nonjudgmentally recorded and analysed everything its senses told it. There was a sound it thought it heard - that it hypothesised to exist based on sense data while assigning a low probability to the hypothesis. But since there wasn't much else to process, it could spare the processor time anyway. On the surface of it there were occasional long, incredibly low, screeches happening at a regular interval every few minutes. If they had been loud enough to be perceived by a human, they'd have been felt rather than heard. Maybe some sort of distant machinery? Elevators? It didn't try to establish any single cause for the sound yet.

It had more to think of, after all. Below the surface noise, there seemed to be another sound. Quiet most of the time, but just perceptible in a few spots. A sound of a constantly shifting quality and pattern. The machine did not have the human capability to cull out billions and billions of "unlikely" hypotheses to explain a situation. All it could do is try its best best to align the sound perception with recorded samples and models in its database, and develop a probability distribution. The results came in: The ticking of a clockwork mechanism of unimaginable size. Or a voice reciting something, as if from a book, with the structure of a mathematical proof with lemmas and subproofs. Or - and this was by far the most likely hypothesis - some pattern with no known match at all, yet just the right mixture of repeating structure and unpredictable content to indicate... intelligence?

The wall came to a sudden turn in front of the robot. This was an even faster turn than the usual twists of the tunnels, so the machine investigated. The wall in front was a smooth metal panel of some kind. The robot found a horizontal bar, perpendicular to the wall along most of its length, and connected to it with a turn on its left end. A door and a doorhandle? It tried to turn the handle with its right hand, but nothing happened. It realised that some of the right arm's motors had broken in its fall. It wrapped the left hand's cold, bruised fingers around the handle, pressed down and pulled.

The door opened.
Lord Furniture
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ari
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Re: More cyborgs and slightly less violence

Post by ari »

(stay tuned for the astonishing ending sometime in the distant future!)
Lord Furniture
Not even partially responsible for Malarboria; will take the blame for Caverden, though!
Tallest and therefore Greatest of the Janitors
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Scott Alexander
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Re: A story with more cyborg and slightly less violence

Post by Scott Alexander »

What it overdoes in description of computer processes, it makes up for in lack of plot!
The machine thought, and its thoughts crossed the barrier into the synapses of the animal - just as the good doctor intended. But what it could not shake, and what hinted at things to come, was that thoughts crossed back. In its dreams the sensibility of the animal invaded the periphery of its consciousness. Complex. Rigid. Cold. Alien. Evolution had been at work here, but just what had evolved remained to be understood.
This is briliant.

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ari
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Re: A story with more cyborg and slightly less violence

Post by ari »

Just because I write a paragraph at a week doesn't mean I'm not willing to advance plots at the rate of a thousand-page novel. It's literary! :p
Lord Furniture
Not even partially responsible for Malarboria; will take the blame for Caverden, though!
Tallest and therefore Greatest of the Janitors
Eternal Watcher of #micronations

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