Woman of SCIENCE: A Story of Technological Transcendence in an Imperfect World.
Chapter 1: The Best Laid Plans Of Mice and Men...
Begin Act 1, Scene 1 - Revelations
Well, you try to scream. While that's what you think you are doing, at first, it quickly becomes obvious that it's more of a squeel than a scream. And that your body doesn't... quite seem to be working the way you expected it to... and the darkness. There's something over your face, something clinging to you, and stabs of pain in the back of your head.
You reach up, awkwardly, every movement of your body screaming to your brain that something is wrong. You claw at the thing wrapped around your skull, the plastic and metal and wires, trying to dislodge it, wrapping your fingers around it as you roll onto your back and struggle until suddenly, with a rip of pain and a large popping noise, you can see again, though your vision briefly flashes brightly before dimming and some sort of... static... seems to rush across your eyes before everything settles down. You didn't manage to remove the device itself, just the blinders that were covering your eyes. At least you don't feel so incredibly trapped anymore.
The world is huge. Your machine looms above you, blinking merrily away, and the distant door to your small laboratory seems to be a baseball field away. Some liquid (blood, probably), drips down the back of your head and out from under the metal and plastic object that seems to be fastened to your skull, staining the fur down the side of your neck. Your mind is hazy - your vision swims a bit as you look around, and you wonder if you're experiencing some sort of serious damage to your optical system. You try to get your bearings - table metal, stretching out before you. Wire mesh, and on the other side, your machine. Next to the machine, a chair, reclined, with your body on it, and next to that a computer keeping track of a variety of details.
Okay, take a second - you're a genius, you can handle this, put the pieces together. Figure out what is going on. How did you get here? What were you doing... the machine. Ah, yes, you remember.
Your glorious experiment. You'd finally finished it. The tests on your lab rats had been conclusive - it worked. You take a minute to review the theory and implementation: You'd built a device that could upload a mind, maintaining a link to a body so that the body could continue to be controlled through a wireless interface. Earlier experiments in digitizing minds had resulted in almost instant madness on the part of the mind transferred - containment in the computerized environment was insanity inducing, an instant and endless wave of indecipherable input you hadn't managed to get around, until you'd had an amazing idea - by maintaining the link to the subject, you could insure that the location of the mind was changed while the actual environment it perceived remained identical. From there, you could slowly introduce them, bit by bit, to additional stimuli beyond their existing capabilities, building them up into something more. Arthur, one of your test subjects, had proven this concept quite effectively - while there were basic limitations to the core structure of the rodent brain, you were not only able to greatly enhance his intellectual capabilities through gradual expansion of his consciousness, but, hile he maintained the connection to his original rat body, you slowly gave him access to control and feedback mechanisms for a small robot you'd built; the results were astounding. Eventually, he'd used his original body less and less, and you steadily increased his access to basic computational resources, and you'd effectively created an artificial intelligence at the level of a young child in a robotic body, all from the simple base of a rat.
It had been an empowering experience, and the potential it held for your own improvement was obvious. You went over the numbers, the requirements, made modifications, and you were sure it would work. Since you'd continue to have control of your own body, at least to begin with, you'd be able to control the machine and introduce gradual changes, just like you'd done with Arthur. You'd created a new input device, sat down on the chair you saw yourself still sitting in, made a backup of the previous occupant before resetting the machine to a blank slate, and selected yourself as the input target. It had seemed so straightforward, so simple, but clearly something had gone wrong.
You swish your tail back and forth, as you go over the individual minutiae. The settings, the configurations. Something had definitely happened - were you in the machine, now? Was this a product of madness, were you were experiencing some warped reality and were you rapidly losing your mind? Unlikely... all of the variables were correct, all of the settings, the parameters for basic structure, the resource allocation, the input, the output, the... oh.
Oh no.
The device. The device that attached Arthur's body to the machine. You'd never disconnected it. And when you'd configured the machine to read from your device, that was all you'd actually done - read from it. It wasn't configured to send anything back. Those settings were still as they'd been... before...
Your tongue runs briefly over your long, sharp front teeth. You rub a hand along your snout, sending your whiskers tingling. You drop to all fours and took a few hesitant steps.
It is undeniable. You screwed up.
You are a rat.
An amazing, undeniably incredible product of science, a rat being controlled by an uploaded mind from a remote location, but in all practical terms, you are a rat.
Well, that all makes perfect sense at least. You've figured out what was going on. But an incredibly important question remains. What the hell are you going to do now?
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Topic: Woman of SCIENCE! Transcendentia Dementia - Chapter 1, Act 1, Scene 1 (Read 3256 times)