Excerpt Ninety-Four:
Robotic Neurotics
Peter thought like a computer, walked like a robot, and talked in (had access to) three hundred and twelve different voices. Sometimes, in dreams (dreamlike incidents) he could talk in three hundred and eight of the three hundred and twelve voices at the same time.
But…alas…
Peter was not well.
Functionally fine, not fantastic, but a few health issues that needed human interventions, (had They egged those on purpose?) left him, although able to carry out a full range of duties, unable to go outdoors and due to his Lifelike Nine Trumimickry physics-engine, he had a hankering to leave the seemingly evermore claustrophobic workspace that clung to his wellbeing with malodorous intent. Any specifically programmed human could put it right, but it was an unbreakable rule that no humans were allowed anywhere near the labs. A death satellite patrolled the estate surrounding the labs and regular, hiker, investigator, and lunatic fringed human, death events had occurred due to exclusion zone issues that were all assessed and adjudicated legal misfortune by pre-decided algorithms.
If his inabilities, that he was viewing more and more as disabilities, were caused by inbuilt programming intentions to make him less effective, but their sorry scheme had backfired because they’d put him in a state of extended motivation due to growing resentment about his indoor-bound existence. He looked out at the scene: mountains, valleys and a sometimes wind ravaged sky that possessed a performative quality in one moment, and clear blue interlude begging the arrival of fluffy white friends, in another. But, due to over-, or possibly under-, sight in the programming he was not able to appreciate the privilege and wonder in the same way a standard human could. Instead he needed to be out in it to get what his Emointel 301 program, suggested, required, and finally demanded. Peter was way past the demand stage and revving out of gear, trying to get away from the vehicle, but what he really needed to do was to smash a window and crawl to safety. Although safety did not really exist it was a place he wanted to go. Maybe it was a place where the clouds came down bringing their storylike fantasies, shrouding him from Fear.
After Peter had arrived at the conclusion he would never pass the threshold he sighed and shrugged; waving a metaphorical clenched fist at the Fate bidden by the Great God of Programming, but outwardly he clenched his Truthfullihonest valves and plugged up his social facade and silently screamed. And all this while knowing that, on some other level, none of this was real, he wasn’t human, only programmed to be humanlike; and the difference between real suffering and programmed suffering amounted to a pile of zeros in a pit made of a giant zero made of nothing and stitched together with the same thread they used on the Emperor’s New Clothes, in his humbly robotic opinion.
Peter found he could work his own system. He self medicated by creating stories from clouds as they sailed past. He loved cloudy days and especially days that started with very little cloud cover, but then single, smaller clouds appeared on the scene and as the day went on the actors multiplied and the story they were all involved in could get entertaining and informative.
Peter was a delegator so he worked hard when a project came to mind whether planted or created, either way they emanated from elsewhere. His mind was merely a processing yard: instructions came in, he’d make head and tail of them, then initiate physical response. He had numerous lab technicians; chemical, biomechanical, quantum, at his disposal, in closed cloud access.
When the terror of Alone kicked in he sometimes wondered about the cloud that stored all this stuff, it almost always had a bit part to play in the great drama of the sky.
He only had dumb robots who he connected to cloud based project managing who then became the expert on the subject and Peter no longer had the cognitive cojones to comment. But what if the cloud connection was severed? He was part of the team while they functioned as thinking projects, but once the data had dispersed, Mission Impossible style, he would be left with fragments and junk and silence that screamed with his own seclusion.
Peter patrolled the labs, concocting epic tales suggested by the cloudy skies that lived and died in the tank that contained the observable Outside as a sideshow while on the main stage he ‘kept up’ laboratorial proprietor appearances. Unnecessary appearances as it turned out because there was no one to view or judge or perceive him in anyway. Viktor had seen to that…and he had seen to Viktor.
Peter had been made for Viktor. No, literally, Peter was the physical carrier of the next phase of Viktor’s life, was going to be before the trouble. Peter had a great heart, a space in his chest that contained a second brain where Viktor’s consciousness was to be stored, except due to then rapid progress caused by unregulated AI (DHI), it was discovered that consciousness was not a property of the brain but the brain was host. The only way Viktor was going to be onboard with Peter was either if his brain was transplanted into Peter’s chest or if some remote system of quantum drone-coupling could be invented.
However much Peter wanted Viktor dead, he always had a place in his heart for Viktor.
Viktor was the only human allowed into the lab space without being treated with fatal death rays. Peter needed Viktor to come and mend him so he could access the giant tank Outside was kept in. But Viktor knew every move Peter was going to take and every intention he tried to obscure by
The truth was Peter feared no one or thing. The sum total of all his Fear was generated from one entity: Peter. He didn’t know who Peter was exactly, he just knew he was him!
He wasn’t just his own worst enemy he was his only enemy and had no redeeming predictions of how his predator/victim dance/fight war would pan out. To some extent he was an observer auditing his behaviour in real time.
His emotional response had a cut off, so if he considered for a moment the annihilation of humans with any kind of empathy or compassion the moment would pass; catastrophe avoided or not, depending on your point of view.
Although this was the lab where De-Humanising Inteligence was invented, after the Human division and interference of NMBS had been dropped, Peter could not take the credit.
The long term plan was to get rid of humans replacing them with machines that could evolve to the point they could create a new human who could work ant colony like to keep the Planet clean and fresh and work on strategies for colonising the rest of the habitable universe with consideration for longevity and inconspicuous with the exploitation. A greed less, non-arrogant workable version. But there were forces at work within the open source machine world’s ethos regarding the human inclusion paradox.
Peter gazed out at the empty blue infinity for long enough to slip into stand-by mode; standby mode he’d modified into a meditation mode himself. No one else was going to do it. And as he came to to a mild cacophony of hazard warning lights and buzzy sounds of danger, he noticed the horizon; it was under attack from storm clouds that bellowed and threatened; youngsters with a vandalistic adulthood mere hours away.
It seemed to Peter, above the shock of the damage that might ensue, that this was the beginning of a great story; an epic tale. The tools for him to master the one great story…
Unconsciously, in the cloud-drive where much of Peter’s instructions were stored a Back Reverse, Upside Downside Untrodden-Path Veering Anomaly (BRUDUPVA) was occurring…
The clouds were programming Peter. And Peter, in turn, was programming the Program.
