Paradigm - Part 8(Sorry for opening a can of Internet drama on you guys. Here's moar storee to make up for it. Also, I apologize for the delay in getting this one out. I was doing some revisions, and I wanted to make sure everything was sorted out before I went forward. Hopefully it'll be a better story for it; I'm still kinda rusty in this department, so that's mostly just me crossing my fingers. I added shiny buttons, too! Yay!)   Iris moved quietly down the hallway leading to the library, avoiding as many of the curfew bots as possible—if one were to take notice of her, it would be obligated to stay with her in the name of “safety” until she returned to her room. She stayed close against the walls and ducked around corners to avoid the patrols; hacking into classified research was something best done in secret, she noted with a quiet chuckle. After a few nerve-wracking minutes, she made it to the library's entrance, where she swiped a key she had stolen from a janitor robot while it was preoccupied with lifting a particularly stubborn mark from the floor. She slipped inside the dim room and, with a twinge of apprehension, connected herself to one of the database machines. Once inside the mental landscape, she edged through the still-open security hole to the complete list of files on Subject Seven. She was surprised to discover that the vid she had watched earlier was the second to last on the list of files. Good; I should be able to wrap this up quickly, then. She opened the last file on the list and began watching. Case Study Log – Subject Seven – April 23, 2037 – Hospital Security Monitor The holovid camera was mounted in the upper corner of a hospital room, and it was centered upon a bed in the center of the room, upon which there was an unconscious girl. It took a moment for Iris to recognize the girl in the room as Alice—she appeared to be wasting away, sick and frail. Two scientists, a man and the woman Iris recognized from the interviews, were discussing quietly with each other, almost below the noise threshold of the camera's microphone. Iris strained to listen. “Has she woken up yet, Liz?” The man asked the interviewer. Liz sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “No, and the neural scans are still showing very limited brain activity. She's deep in a coma.” “Do you think she can hear us?” “I don't know. That kind of thing varies from patient to patient.” She frowned. “It might not matter, anyway; I'm starting to doubt she'll ever wake up.” “Is it possible that what's happened to her is similar to the augmented soldiers that we needed to...” he paused, searching for the right word. “Eliminate?” Liz shrugged. “I suppose it's possible, but her AI should have been contained within the malfunctioning device. There's no way removing the Floodgate could have caused this much damage. It only had the smallest of physical connections to the brain tissue.” The man began pacing, deep in thought. “Could the very act of removing the AI have done this? I heard rumbles from higher-up about that when they were discussing how to deal with their brain-damaged...subjects. Something to the effect of a piece of the person being ripped out along with the program.” “That can't happen. Everything we know about AI and our own psyches suggests that the two are almost completely incompatible.” “Almost.” “That's beside the point.” Liz ran her hands through her short, dark hair in agitation. “AI are much more basic. All they can do is what they're programmed to. If a person were to somehow link up with the programming, they'd become locked into the same mode of thinking. It would be like that cleaning robot over there—” she pointed to a small, hovering robot that was dusting the blinds, “—but in a human's body. Uncanny Valley to the extreme, Marco.” Marco stopped pacing and contented himself with shifting from one foot to the other. “Who's to say that's what would happen, though? What if instead of the human becoming a program, the program would become—” “Human?” Liz nearly spat the word. “Impossible.” “Impossible,” Iris said in unison with the vid. She shivered and paused the playback, unable to explain the odd sense of déjà vu that had been rising within her since the conversation had begun. It wasn't simply that the two were mentioning the same issues she had been pondering earlier. It was that she felt almost as if she had dreamed the conversation before, even though looking at the scientists offered her no further sense of familiarity. Maybe she had heard it in her sleep once while she had been dozing off in class? That had to be it. She shook off the eerie sensation and resumed the file playback. |
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