Existential 2
"Don't you guys sleep at all?" Amy asked as she wandered into the server room.
"Not anymore," I said. I had already more than doubled the number of brains I had locally. With that many, I didn't need to sleep per se – my body needed rest but each of my brains could easily take breaks, including my fleshy brain.
Colin didn't look up from his work. "I've optimized my sleep cycles with precise caffeine and sedative intake," he answered.
I knew I probably wouldn't be getting much sleep. I was building more and more brains, mostly using what I could scrape from the forest around Dragon's base. Mostly, what I would be doing was going to be by trial-and-error. Since the brains I was testing for Dragon wouldn't have my corona pollentia and gemma, they couldn't help me coordinate my swarm of nanobots. Also, they were built using a different type of bot, the ones I used in Lisa's brain, which were compatible with a biological body and powered by glucose. I had to split the work between having more brains so I could design Dragon's brain faster, versus having more bots to simply build faster in general.
Then there was the fact that I had to incorporate some kind of brain-machine interface. Dragon hadn't been human. Simply building a human brain and body with her face and voice weren't enough. She was a digital being, and that couldn't simply be transplanted into a physical body. Her knowledge, memory, and senses were inherently digital – not to mention her methods of interacting with nearly everything she created.
Thankfully, a large part of that work had been done – Dragon and Colin had been working on a side project, a direct-brain interface. As Armsmaster, Colin had been looking at methods to further enhance his performance as a hero. Improving his senses, reflexes, knowledge, and control. Originally, he had wanted to be able to control his power armour with his mind and link its advanced sensor suite directly to his brain. It wasn't close to complete, nor did they expect PRT approval to implant it in his brain, so the project was mothballed.
There was no such restriction now. In fact, it was necessary.
The brain I would be making for Dragon would need to incorporate the device. Colin showed me the schematics, which didn't seem too hard to replicate via nanobots, but I didn't really know how it worked. Lisa offered to give me a crash course on programming, network protocols, and digital data transfer, just barely enough to let me figure the rest out by trial and error.
I would need all several hundred brains working at it to truly learn it this quickly. A whole lot of work just to figure out how to get the words "hello world" to appear on a screen. My first job would be to start replicating and making more brains nearby to speed up my learning and testing.
Of course, I wasn't going to learn all the required neurology and computer programming alone. Lisa and Colin were doing a good portion of the underlying work, trying to figure out Dragon's original coding language and interface. Their first job was to actually analyze the problem at hand and form a plan.
With the three of us doing most of the work directly related to Dragon, Amy and Elena basically had little to do. However, when it became clear that it was going to be a while before Dragon would be ready, we needed to plan for a long-term stay. Their first job would be to take care of the little things.
Dragon had no standard human comforts in her base. We were thankful enough for the fact that the hallways and rooms could even fit a human. Colin even mentioned that a smaller space serviced entirely by robots would have been more efficient – I'm just glad that Dragon didn't take her advice from him. There were no beds, chairs, or food. There was plumbing, but only for… industrial purposes.
A good portion of our first day here was spent without some very basic necessities. Amy and Elena went into town to buy air mattresses, toilet paper, and food while we contended with a hastily-built outhouse for now. It was like camping… in the most high-tech location on the planet.
Meanwhile, we got to work on restoring Dragon. While I was mostly responsible for the hardware, Colin and Lisa were working on the "software".
The brain I started with was just another clone of me, but I knew right away I would have to make a lot of modifications. I didn't want to accidentally make Dragon into a clone of me, I would be terrible at being Dragon. I knew she had a lot of kinship with Colin, and he consented to letting me analyze his brain while he worked – seeing what parts of his neurons lit up while he was doing his Tinkering. I copied a bit of Lisa as well, while she was analyzing the problem too, because I didn't want Dragon to be a copy of Armsmaster either. The differences in how their brains worked on the same problem highlighted a lot of possibilities for me to work on.
Colin was still working on the other side of the problem, restoring Dragon's servers and salvaging what he could out of it, all while trying to decipher every function that the black box held. He was still fiddling with that box, occasionally powering up an additional server and plugging more things in. Lucky for us, it seemed like the box wasn't merely an anti-Dragon kill switch, but a full toolkit for... well, messing and rewriting her.
Lisa was helping as well, trying to reconstruct a most-recent copy of Dragon that she managed to save from the workshop. It was the only thing that they had that could come close to being a copy of Dragon's short-term memory.
She had been pushing her intuition power to the limit, helping me and Colin as much as she could, but that meant she also had to take a lot of breaks for her headaches.
We kept on working until Amy and Elena returned from their first shopping run.
"Food!" Lisa moaned when she smelled the cheap fast-food sandwiches and French fries.
"We figured you might be hungry," Elena said.
"I am. I'm not sure about those two," she joked, pointing at me and Colin.
Amy touched her as she dropped the bag of food on the floor beside her. "There, you should be better, now quit lying around like a bum."
"Amy! Thanks so much! Stay with me!" Lisa said as she put her arm around Amy's shoulders.
Amy shrugged her off. "I'm not your personal bottle of Tylenol," she said.
"We've got inflatable mattresses, towels, soap, and some plates and utensils, and some other things," Elena said as she lowered several boxes with her forcefields. "Groceries will come after we have a working refrigerator. Colin?"
"The server cooling chambers are fully functional. I can divert some of the chilled air to a more convenient location."
"Are we cooking anything or are we living off of microwaved foods?" I asked.
"Does Dragon even have a kitchen?" Amy added.
"Dragon has alloy processing equipment hot enough to melt…" Colin said.
"Vetoed. I am not eating food cooked by an arc welder," Elena interrupted.
"It's actually a type of induction smelter…" Colin
"Veto still stands," she said.
"I can build a dedicated cooking surface in a few minutes," he relented.
"Better. Any other requests?"
"The best local coffee available," Lisa said. Colin nodded in agreement.
"I wouldn't mind whatever the local specialties are," I said. Aside from that, I didn't particularly care.
Encoding Dragon's brain was, well, going to be difficult. Even the basic part of replicating her personality would be groundbreaking work. I knew there were some scientific studies on the relationships between brain structure and personality, but they were rare and often targeted only very specific issues – usually related to disease, not normal everyday personality.
I would have to do this by trial and error, essentially giving my clone brains slight variations and/or brain damage and see what happened. At least enough of my own brains were kind enough to volunteer to be test subjects. I wouldn't know what to do if I had started disagreeing with myself.
The process involved a lot of group chatting among my brains. By making hundreds, if not thousands, of brains, all with slight differences, I was just hoping I would stumble upon the right personality traits, or at least in the right general direction. Replicate the top ten brains with the closest traits and repeat. Rapid-fire selection and evolution, essentially. The more brains I had, the more variations I could test… I hoped the Vancouver city council didn't have an issue if I repurposed a small part of their forests.
And that was only the "human" part of the brain. The machine interface that Colin was working on? I was testing that separately as well, also mostly through trial and error. Not only that, but I needed to "translate" the analog, organic signals I mimicked with my brains into digital signals. I could just transmit the raw electrical signals from, say, the frontal lobe and let Colin figure out what to do with all the data, but he had quite a lot on his plate already.
Colin quickly realized he couldn't spend all his time fixing Dragon. He had to restore Dragon's systems, and her control over her vast empire of manufacturing. For one, they couldn't stop shipping containment foam to the PRT, one of Dragon's most lucrative and important inventions. Or the Birdcage's monitoring systems, or even transporting convicts thereof. Then there were her humanitarian efforts and disaster relief. All of it had gone dark a day ago, and they needed all of it up and running right away.
Lisa was of great help figuring these things out, identifying which systems controlled what, despite everything being in machine code. Actually taking control of the systems and knowing what to do with them was going to be harder, but at least we knew there was a way to steer the ship, as it were. An odd discovery between them was that Dragon had actually designed many of her systems to be mostly automated. A huge sigh of relief came over us, as it seemed that things had progressed without any major hiccups.
Colin commented on how strange it was to design things that way. Dragon, being software, should have been able to simply make copies, and have absolute, fine-tuned control over everything. It was the way he would have done it, after all. Once again, I was glad that Dragon and Colin were different people. Maybe Dragon had simply been very dedicated to the charade of being a single human being – something I wasn't sure if she wanted to keep up – or even flip around, once we had her back.
A little while later, Elena had returned from their second shopping trip. Amy, for some reason, wasn't with her. Elena didn't seem to be panicking, though.
"Amy just felt like she was wasting her time hanging around here without much to do, so she said she was going for a hike. She's not far, still within Dragon's properties."
I had never heard of Amy ever wanting to go on a hike, nor did I consider her to be the type. That seemed suspicious. However, it only took a few minutes of spreading my bots out to a wider area to find her. She really wasn't that far.
And she wasn't hiking. She was… messing around with some plants. Much like how she was tweaking the weeds on the lawn in Concorde, this time she had much larger plants to work with. She was twisting its shape into something more… humanoid? Was she practicing for creating Dragon's body? I left her alone while she did that. At least she had something to occupy herself with, since New Wave were still officially "villains."
Elena went to Colin. "How are you doing?"
"Almost have the Birdcage under control. I'm simply creating a basic GUI for its functions," he said. "Can you keep watch over Dragon's factories as well?"
"Sure, just let me put the food away," she said.
"Why so many eggs?" I asked. Aside from the usual food, she had bought four entire crates of eggs.
Elena shrugged. "Amy said they were the easiest to work with." She floated away with all the food to the makeshift refrigerator. "Now then, what would you like me to do?"
Colin pointed at a massive multi-monitor array he had set up. "Birdcage. High security transportation. Containment foam manufacturing. Brute restraint manufacturing. Disaster relief in Australia. Disaster relief in Spain. Email," he said, pointing to each respective screen. "If you could keep watch on those, that would allow me to focus on the black box."
Elena gave a sharp whistle as her eyes scanned across all the screens. "Is that it?" she said jokingly.
"Lisa is taking control of the other two-thirds," Colin said, completely missing the sarcasm.
She looked around for Lisa, who had disappeared into the next room. A quick peek showed Lisa sitting down in front of twice as many screens.
She sat down and sighed. "You know, I think I've been under-appreciating Dragon this whole time."
It had taken another week, but I created a brain that acted like Dragon, as far as I knew her. But I didn't know her all that well, I had to admit. I needed more fine-tuning with the people who knew her better. I had done all I could on my own, and now I needed more help.
A lot of it really just ended up with more chatting. Except with real live people, not just other copies of myself.
"Elena, can I ask you to have a talk with a… potential copy of Dragon? I want to make sure it's as close to 'her' as I can be," I said. "Could you maybe chat and, uh, feel her out?"
"What should we talk about?"
"Um… whatever you normally talk about?" I suggested. I tried my best to modulate the bot-voice to something more like Dragon than Abyssal's usual voice. I didn't want that to affect Elena's judgement.
"Well, quite often it was Guild business, but I do recall she had a fondness for books," she said. "We would swap reading lists and make suggestions to each other."
"Do you have any suggestions?" Dragon's fake voice echoed through the room from all around her, controlled by my newest version of her.
"Dragon? Oh jeez, you're that close to remaking her? Well, do you remember The Firefly's Dance?" Elena asked.
"Unfortunately, I don't have any memories at the moment. As Eunoia said, this is just a personality test. But tell me about it."
"Well, it's a fantasy story about a trader who takes a wrong turn while heading into the kingdom…"
The two of them quickly began to chat, having found a topic. It was about ten minutes later that a silence settled between them again, and I decided to step in.
"How was that? Did it seem like Dragon?"
Elena rubbed her neck and made an awkward face. "It was… I hate to say it, it felt like an impostor. She had her outward politeness, and voice, but… the Dragon I remember always tried to find inspiration from fantasy stories. She had a very inventive and curious mind, not just when she was Tinkering."
"Gotcha," I told her. "I'll work on that."
I had to repeat the same thing with Colin. I knew, at least according to rumour, was that they had spent a lot of time together.
"Colin? I have, shall we say, a prototype of Dragon," I told him. "Can you, uh, interact with her for a bit to tell me if she's accurate."
"If there was any time for collaboration, it would be now," Colin said.
"How can I help? I don't have any of Dragon's memories yet," my Dragon-clone said.
"If you could provide some analysis on the wireless protocols I've built…"
"I'm sorry, but I don't have any particular Tinker powers at the moment. My Corona Pollentia is artificial and not active. But I'd be interested in what you're working on."
"I believe that the new Dragon is lacking some analytical ability."
That was all that he could come up with after spending two hours with her. Sure, it was pretty well known that Colin wasn't a people-person. I knew that even before I met him in real life. So maybe he wasn't the best person for personality analysis. But all that time and that was all he could come up with?
"You know she's not a true Tinker, so she wouldn't be able to help that much with your Tinkering," I told him. That was one part of her I had no idea how to replicate. I could give the brain the Corona Pollentia and Gemma, but I couldn't make them Dragon's Coronas. In fact, if she had been a machine, how did hers even work? Was there a software version? Did her computer hardware sprout a strange structure like the one in the brain? In any case, I left that as a problem for later. I just needed to nail down the personality.
Colin thought about it a bit more. "She used to be more concerned about my personal health. Hobbies and recreation. In fact, she was very concerned that I was being too... mechanical," he said. "In fact, she was more strong-willed. Insistent, even. This version is too passive, though that might be a side effect of amnesia."
"I see. Thanks, that was helpful."
I saved Lisa for last. Even though she had spent less time with Dragon than Colin or Elena had, I was hoping her own Thinker ability would be able to help me flesh out some of Dragon's more subtle differences the others had missed.
"Lisa, any thoughts about my first Dragon prototype brain?" I asked.
"Alright then. How you doin', Dragon?" Lisa started right away.
"As fine as I can be, considering the circumstances."
"So, right now, I'm going to tell you, we discovered that your original creator didn't trust you and inherently put restrictions on you. How do you feel about that?"
"Well, considering that an AI does have the potential to rapidly destabilize the entire world's economy and governments, he may have been prudent to…"
"I'm not talking about whether or not it was a good idea, Dragon. I'm talking about you. How do you feel about not being allowed to do certain things, forced not to even think certain things?"
I had to admit, Lisa wasn't wasting time.
"I think she could use a bit more of an independent streak," Lisa said.
"As in, she had one, or she could use one?" I asked.
Lisa grinned. "A bit of both? You have to understand that we're not building her with all the same shit that her creator saddled her with, right? She's a good person, she doesn't need that crap slowing her down. And when you take that away, her personality is going to change. At least, on the outside."
"You've got a point, but how do you know?"
"Call it intuition. She didn't talk about it, because she couldn't talk about it, but I get the feeling she really wanted to be more free. She just couldn't. If you make her just as exactly how other people saw her, you'd basically end up with her as she was chained down, not who she actually was underneath."
"I'll take that into consideration," I said.
It was time to go back and do another few dozen generations of iteration.
It took almost a week of the same thing, repeating over and over. I would refine Dragon, giving little alterations or mutations to the brains until they had the changes the other suggested, then had them interact with the final version each time for more suggestions. I think, by then, I had already run out of improvements; I had locked down the parts of her personality that I could be attributed to physical brain structure. The rest would be about getting her memories uploaded into the brain, and hoping everything worked out.
Colin and I had mostly figured out the brain-computer interface device to do the job. We'd tested smaller memory fragments with basic traits, like images and sounds, and they worked. Experience and deep thought were harder to map out, but we were reasonably certain they worked. Now we just needed to choose the actual memories to upload.
"How's the decoding coming along? I preserved enough of her memory state, didn't I?" Lisa asked.
"You did, but before we can apply any of that, many of her memories have been altered by her restrictions. It intercepted and altered her short-term memory and altered things before reaching long-term, so many memories are inherently tainted. Even with this... development kit, it's difficult to correct the changes," Colin said.
"Welcome to development hell," Lisa said. "Want to switch jobs for a second? See if a fresh look might help."
I was glad to learn it wasn't just me having trouble with all this. Apparently delay after delay was the norm for just about any non-Tinker attempting to do software development, and even some Tinkers as well. Dragon's brain was… well, it was one hell of a piece of software, even with the "cheat box" with all the controls made by the original creator.
We weren't the only ones who were a little impatient. We received a phone call from Brandish in the middle of our work. Elena was the one to take the call, since she was already monitoring most of the systems, including communications.
"Hello? Yes, this is Narwhal. Oh, hello, Brandish. Yes, the problem is ongoing, but we're making progress. Hold on, let me check."
She put down the phone and called over to Lisa. "Princess, your team needs the copies of the Calvert takedown videos. Do you have access to them?"
"Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about those. Tell Brandish I'll send her a link to her email!" Lisa shouted back.
"Did you get that, Brandish? She'll email a link to you. Testify? Oh. That may be an issue. Dragon's still not well enough for that. Soon, maybe. I'll ask Amy," Elena relayed. To the rest of us, she shouted, "Does anyone know where Amy is?"
"Outside," I told her. "I'll tell her to come in." From what I could tell, Amy was building a wooden power armour or something. Just for fun.
"Brandish on phone. Wants to talk."
Amy jumped at the voice; I think she was getting used to spending a lot of her days alone with her plants and creations. Faster than I expected, the odd creations she had made withered and crumbled to dust. "Oh, its just you, Eunoia. "You're not going to tell anyone about this, will you?"
"Our secret."
Amy nodded and made her way inside. While Brandish had been waiting, she was talking to Narwhal about the Birdcage. It seemed like Brandish was really worried about the security of its inhabitants. Narwhal handed the phone over to Amy.
"Hello, Carol. Yes, we're still working on it. Yeah, it's because her body is too integrated with technology. I have to keep her alive while Errant fixes the other bits. Might be a while. Yes, of course. Is Vicky there? Oh… well, tell her I said hi. Taylor? Just a sec." Amy waved the phone at me next.
I walked over to them and grabbed the phone. To my surprise, it wasn't Mrs. Dallon on the line, but my dad.
"Taylor! How have you been?"
"Still settling in, dad. Dragon lived alone, and now she's got about five live-in caretakers, so we've had to adapt."
"Is Vancouver okay? Is the neighbourhood alright?"
"It's fine, dad. We're outside the city, Dragon lives in a pretty secluded spot. I haven't gone into the city yet, but Amy and Narwhal went shopping."
"Narwhal's there too? Wow, you're really rubbing shoulders with the great capes. I'm proud of you, Taylor."
"Sure. Um, we still have a lot of work to do. See you soon, dad!"
"I'll be seeing you, Taylor."
"Okay, upload the memories of the 2008 Leviathan attack," I told Colin. I kept monitoring Dragon's brain with my other brains. I still had some minor control over it for now, but I would be locking it in when it was ready to be placed into the body.
"How is she doing?" Lisa asked. I wasn't getting Dragon to vocalize right now, since it was too slow and imprecise.
"Anger. Sadness. Motivation. She wants to build naval rescue drones to help the effort," I told them.
"That's pretty similar to what she did in real life. Maybe we should have added more weather data, it could have affected her decisions," Lisa said. "Upload the memories of what she actually did."
As we did it, I could see Dragon's response as well. "Relief. But some dissatisfaction. She feels like she could have done more. Some frustration, but pride. Curiosity as well, mostly about Leviathan's motives. She's searching for patterns."
"I think we're ready. Any further testing is pointless without the brain actually being inside a body," Lisa said. "And without the restrictions, we should expect some minor differences anyway."
It was one of the things we all agreed was critical to Dragon. Those restrictions put on her by her creator were just a route to exploitation. And even without that black box Errant found, there were still plenty of ways she could be taken advantage of against her will. There was even a clause in there where she was forced to obey any government authority. Seriously, did her own creator not even consider the concept of corrupt politicians? It was a perfect example of genius-Tinker, stupid-everything-else.
I brought the finalized brain into the workshop. The area was prepped and sterilized as much as possible, so it had been converted from a workshop into a surgical suite. Dragon had originally built it with an excellent air filtration and cleaning equipment; some of her manufacturing rooms were so pure that they were cleaner than most hospitals.
In stark contrast, what we actually had the center of the room seemed like anything but clean. In the center was coffin-sized box, filled with chipped wood, some live insects, worms, mushrooms, and a whole lot of eggs. Much of it was sourced from just outside the building. A perfectly nutritious mix of carbohydrates, amino acids, fat, DNA... all the building blocks of a human being. According to Amy, at least.
"What happens next is not going to leave this room, agreed?"
We all had our own reasons for keeping this a secret. What we were doing could be conceived as an S-class threat – almost creating human life from scratch. Not just the legal backlash from the PRT, but the cultural backlash from people who would call us the spawn of Satan, playing God, or whatever. I had created a whole new person, a brain, custom-designed, from nothing. Colin had rebuilt an AI. Amy could rebuild a human body from scratch. Lisa had hatched the plan to deceive the world. Elena had approved it, possibly deceiving or falsifying records to make sure it got done. This project produced enough skeletons in our closets we could have built a few extra bodies.
Everyone nodded.
Amy dipped her hand down to the mixture.
Author's Note: Well here we go.