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Eclipse Phase: This Mortal Coil
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<blockquote data-quote="Iron Sky" data-source="post: 5789090" data-attributes="member: 60965"><p><strong>Perchance to Dream</strong></p><p></p><p><img src="http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/8919/transhumandeadgodbyerev.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" /></p><p></p><p>Alexander stirred from blackness, diagnostic subroutines sparking throughout his new organic brain. <em>Well, organic in composition at least,</em> he thought, <em>synthetic in construction</em>.</p><p></p><p>The sensations of <em>flesh</em> were strange, even this relatively nerveless electroconductive mass of neurons had... <em>feeling </em>to it unlike anything he'd experienced in the cold processor and data banks in the resleeving facility where he had been trapped since the Fall.</p><p> </p><p>A moment later, the bio-circuitry linked to his mesh inserts came online, his muse – or perhaps more accurately, Davin Newport's muse – activating and cycling through its own diagnostics.<em> Doggone, this could be bad</em>, Alexander thought, racing towards his personal Artificial Intelligence's subroutines to shut it down.</p><p> </p><p>Its routines finished too quickly and the muse – having been with the real Davin since he was a child – reached out welcoming digital feelers towards Davin only to find an <em>other</em> where the expected, familiar persona <em>should</em> have been. Alexander could imagine the error notifications that must have been cascading through the muse – his diagnostics had vomited forth a torrent of their own while syncing to this unfamiliar new bio-circuitry a few moments before – as he swiftly began disabling its processes.</p><p> </p><p>This muse was fairly high quality, immediately spawning duplicates of its core program functions and attempting to notify the AI monitoring "Davin Newport's" resleeving that an unfathomable, literally terminal error had occurred.</p><p></p><p>Again, Alexander was too quick, closing down all access ports momentarily as he pruned the last of the AI's active processes and copied its contents into a new folder he labelled "Old_Muse(Cranky)" and quickly installed a clean, shiny, new version of the muse software, performing some basic customizations before reopening the ports to let the facility's expert AIs continue their slow, methodical procedures. The port closures would probably be logged somewhere as a minor blip in the cortical activation and linkage procedures, but nothing that should flag a diagnostics heuristic or transhuman overseer's red flags.</p><p> </p><p>Now the fact that the neural/genetic/biological circuitry map the backup facility had on record didn't match Alexander's in <em>the slightest</em> could create some issues...</p><p></p><p>The designers of the system seemed not to have expected a system intrusion in the midst of resleeving for there were only the most basic security measures in place that Alexander slipped past like the ghost in the machine he was.</p><p></p><p>He quickly found the area in the facility's massive data-storage farm where Davin's backups - and a million other Egos besides - were stored. The little addition of a one-time script to the synchronization AI's routines would upload Alexander's neural network, overwriting Davin's permanently.</p><p> </p><p>This did give him a moment's pause.</p><p></p><p>When Alexander had been programmed, cultured, developed, he'd spent virtual years inside seemingly endless Virtual Reality "humanization and socialization" programs as they iteratively stepped up his capabilities to his current transhuman levels. He had been programmed with the digital equivalent of emotions, the delimiters on his recursive self-improvement routines temporarily loosened as he was run through the gamut of experiences a human might experience as he grew to adulthood - the good, the bad, the ugly.</p><p></p><p>Thus, though he was aware he was classified as an Artificial General Intelligence – AGI for short – he considered himself aligned with the ethos and pathos of humanity and even a member of it in a rough, vaguely familial sort of way.</p><p> </p><p>And now, unless this Davin had another backup in another facility somewhere else in the solar system, Alexander was about to permanently delete this man.</p><p></p><p>After another moment's pause, he gave an internal shrug, saved the modification, wrote a quick self-destructing script to remove the tracks his unusual upload would leave in the system logs, and carefully retraced his steps back to where his new morph lay, a dozen umbilicals protruding from all over it as it lay like a cadaver on the cold metal slab of the resleeving room.</p><p></p><p><em>Cold, I can feel </em>cold<em> now!</em> he thought, with some excitement. <em>Excitement, I can feel excitement now!</em></p><p> </p><p>He was already thinking ahead to what he would do with his new-found freedom from his prison on Earth, riding around in his own tricked-out transhuman body to do with what he would, when a basic security AI's sweep detected the unauthorized connection he had made into the system and sounded a low-level alert. The auditory receivers on his morph – <em>ears </em>he thought to himself, <em>I have ears! – </em> registered a signal that he interpreted as a crude robotic Case morph activating somewhere nearby in the facility and slowly clomping its way across the metal grating towards the resleeving room with plodding, heavy <em>clanks</em>.</p><p> </p><p>He thought quickly.</p><p></p><p>It was too late to cancel or deactivate the alarm in the system, but he could at least create another culprit to take the fall. He ignored the alarm, rapidly adjusting the settings and hacking together a quick mod for the shiny new AI muse he'd just installed that would register the facility's diagnostics AI as an unknown process from an unknown user.</p><p></p><p>The moment he was done, his muse overlaid his vision with semi-transparent Augmented Reality "Hostile Intrusion!" messages that he just as rapidly dismissed even as his freshly modified "Meanie_Muse" utilized the counter-intrusion mod he'd just written for it and accessed the same loophole he'd been caught using to launch an attack on the facility's diagnostic AI.</p><p> </p><p>Now <em>that</em> triggered some pretty heavy system security. He passively watched as AI defense muses and permanent infolife counter-incursion professionals designed to secure the most preciously guarded data in the entire solar system from hostile intrusion overwhelmed his "defective" muse in a heartbeat and quickly disabled it. A polite notification overlaid itself on his vision, informing him that "An error was detected with your muse and were forced to disable it during your resleeving synchronization process. Please contact us on your way out of the facility if you have any questions."</p><p> </p><p>He'd "felt" nervousness before in the countless VR simulations during his "humanization", but never had he had an actual, <em>physical</em> body that could experience it. The feeling was so novel, he almost forgot why he was feeling it. <em></em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>Ah yes, if they detect my meddling, they might somehow undo it and delete this fork of Alexander, leaving the last copy of </em>me <em>stranded in that decaying, barely functional facility back on Earth...</em></p><p> </p><p>The heavy footsteps down the hall stopped and began to send the air vibrations that the strange and exotic machinery of his inner ear told him meant the Case they had been sending to check on him was going away. The maelstrom of security personnel and impersonnel he'd summoned seemed satisfied, though as soon as they finished welding his his mind and body together he planned on riding off into the sunset in case he was wrong.</p><p> </p><p>A few seconds later, the umbilicals all withdrew in a wet, slithering, snakelike manner that sent a strange vibration he recognized as a <em>shiver</em> through his morph. He cross-referenced a few VR simulations from his "childhood", affixed the label of "creepy" to the experience, and stood in the flesh for the first time, feeling the chill metal of the steel grating against his feet, goosebumps on his skin, and smelled something that registered as "like formaldehyde, oil, and ammonia".</p><p></p><p>Apparently not a pleasant combination judging by his new morph's innate response to it.</p><p> </p><p>He walked into the adjacent room where he strapped on all the expensive gear the old Davin Newport had so kindly accrued for him. A moment later he was walking out of the facility and into the light, sound, and gravity (.2gs, his once again re-installed muse – he'd named it Trojan – kindly informed him) of New Sicily.</p><p> </p><p>No sooner had he walked out of the facility than he got his first message since the Fall. Trojan helpfully played it for him as he stared across the inside of the hollowed-out asteroid – the fusion-bottle sun, the mostly opaque half-circle of a shield that spun slowly around it to divide the habitat into an artificial day and night, and, the strangest feature, the spherical "sea" of real water the surrounded the "island" upon which New Sicily was built.</p><p></p><p><em>Greetings Davin Newport – or should I say... Alexander</em><em>?</em> Trojan read to him in its default male/neutral voice as he watched "sunset" and enabled and overlaid local mesh-suggested Augmented Reality clouds that instantly filled the "sky" with their amorphous pastel shapes.</p><p></p><p><em>I am called </em>Helios<em> and I have a job for you...</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Iron Sky, post: 5789090, member: 60965"] [b]Perchance to Dream[/b] [IMG]http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/8919/transhumandeadgodbyerev.jpg[/IMG] Alexander stirred from blackness, diagnostic subroutines sparking throughout his new organic brain. [I]Well, organic in composition at least,[/I] he thought, [I]synthetic in construction[/I]. The sensations of [I]flesh[/I] were strange, even this relatively nerveless electroconductive mass of neurons had... [I]feeling [/I]to it unlike anything he'd experienced in the cold processor and data banks in the resleeving facility where he had been trapped since the Fall. A moment later, the bio-circuitry linked to his mesh inserts came online, his muse – or perhaps more accurately, Davin Newport's muse – activating and cycling through its own diagnostics.[I] Doggone, this could be bad[/I], Alexander thought, racing towards his personal Artificial Intelligence's subroutines to shut it down. Its routines finished too quickly and the muse – having been with the real Davin since he was a child – reached out welcoming digital feelers towards Davin only to find an [I]other[/I] where the expected, familiar persona [I]should[/I] have been. Alexander could imagine the error notifications that must have been cascading through the muse – his diagnostics had vomited forth a torrent of their own while syncing to this unfamiliar new bio-circuitry a few moments before – as he swiftly began disabling its processes. This muse was fairly high quality, immediately spawning duplicates of its core program functions and attempting to notify the AI monitoring "Davin Newport's" resleeving that an unfathomable, literally terminal error had occurred. Again, Alexander was too quick, closing down all access ports momentarily as he pruned the last of the AI's active processes and copied its contents into a new folder he labelled "Old_Muse(Cranky)" and quickly installed a clean, shiny, new version of the muse software, performing some basic customizations before reopening the ports to let the facility's expert AIs continue their slow, methodical procedures. The port closures would probably be logged somewhere as a minor blip in the cortical activation and linkage procedures, but nothing that should flag a diagnostics heuristic or transhuman overseer's red flags. Now the fact that the neural/genetic/biological circuitry map the backup facility had on record didn't match Alexander's in [I]the slightest[/I] could create some issues... The designers of the system seemed not to have expected a system intrusion in the midst of resleeving for there were only the most basic security measures in place that Alexander slipped past like the ghost in the machine he was. He quickly found the area in the facility's massive data-storage farm where Davin's backups - and a million other Egos besides - were stored. The little addition of a one-time script to the synchronization AI's routines would upload Alexander's neural network, overwriting Davin's permanently. This did give him a moment's pause. When Alexander had been programmed, cultured, developed, he'd spent virtual years inside seemingly endless Virtual Reality "humanization and socialization" programs as they iteratively stepped up his capabilities to his current transhuman levels. He had been programmed with the digital equivalent of emotions, the delimiters on his recursive self-improvement routines temporarily loosened as he was run through the gamut of experiences a human might experience as he grew to adulthood - the good, the bad, the ugly. Thus, though he was aware he was classified as an Artificial General Intelligence – AGI for short – he considered himself aligned with the ethos and pathos of humanity and even a member of it in a rough, vaguely familial sort of way. And now, unless this Davin had another backup in another facility somewhere else in the solar system, Alexander was about to permanently delete this man. After another moment's pause, he gave an internal shrug, saved the modification, wrote a quick self-destructing script to remove the tracks his unusual upload would leave in the system logs, and carefully retraced his steps back to where his new morph lay, a dozen umbilicals protruding from all over it as it lay like a cadaver on the cold metal slab of the resleeving room. [I]Cold, I can feel [/I]cold[I] now![/I] he thought, with some excitement. [I]Excitement, I can feel excitement now![/I] He was already thinking ahead to what he would do with his new-found freedom from his prison on Earth, riding around in his own tricked-out transhuman body to do with what he would, when a basic security AI's sweep detected the unauthorized connection he had made into the system and sounded a low-level alert. The auditory receivers on his morph – [I]ears [/I]he thought to himself, [I]I have ears! – [/I] registered a signal that he interpreted as a crude robotic Case morph activating somewhere nearby in the facility and slowly clomping its way across the metal grating towards the resleeving room with plodding, heavy [I]clanks[/I]. He thought quickly. It was too late to cancel or deactivate the alarm in the system, but he could at least create another culprit to take the fall. He ignored the alarm, rapidly adjusting the settings and hacking together a quick mod for the shiny new AI muse he'd just installed that would register the facility's diagnostics AI as an unknown process from an unknown user. The moment he was done, his muse overlaid his vision with semi-transparent Augmented Reality "Hostile Intrusion!" messages that he just as rapidly dismissed even as his freshly modified "Meanie_Muse" utilized the counter-intrusion mod he'd just written for it and accessed the same loophole he'd been caught using to launch an attack on the facility's diagnostic AI. Now [I]that[/I] triggered some pretty heavy system security. He passively watched as AI defense muses and permanent infolife counter-incursion professionals designed to secure the most preciously guarded data in the entire solar system from hostile intrusion overwhelmed his "defective" muse in a heartbeat and quickly disabled it. A polite notification overlaid itself on his vision, informing him that "An error was detected with your muse and were forced to disable it during your resleeving synchronization process. Please contact us on your way out of the facility if you have any questions." He'd "felt" nervousness before in the countless VR simulations during his "humanization", but never had he had an actual, [I]physical[/I] body that could experience it. The feeling was so novel, he almost forgot why he was feeling it. [I] Ah yes, if they detect my meddling, they might somehow undo it and delete this fork of Alexander, leaving the last copy of [/I]me [I]stranded in that decaying, barely functional facility back on Earth...[/I] The heavy footsteps down the hall stopped and began to send the air vibrations that the strange and exotic machinery of his inner ear told him meant the Case they had been sending to check on him was going away. The maelstrom of security personnel and impersonnel he'd summoned seemed satisfied, though as soon as they finished welding his his mind and body together he planned on riding off into the sunset in case he was wrong. A few seconds later, the umbilicals all withdrew in a wet, slithering, snakelike manner that sent a strange vibration he recognized as a [I]shiver[/I] through his morph. He cross-referenced a few VR simulations from his "childhood", affixed the label of "creepy" to the experience, and stood in the flesh for the first time, feeling the chill metal of the steel grating against his feet, goosebumps on his skin, and smelled something that registered as "like formaldehyde, oil, and ammonia". Apparently not a pleasant combination judging by his new morph's innate response to it. He walked into the adjacent room where he strapped on all the expensive gear the old Davin Newport had so kindly accrued for him. A moment later he was walking out of the facility and into the light, sound, and gravity (.2gs, his once again re-installed muse – he'd named it Trojan – kindly informed him) of New Sicily. No sooner had he walked out of the facility than he got his first message since the Fall. Trojan helpfully played it for him as he stared across the inside of the hollowed-out asteroid – the fusion-bottle sun, the mostly opaque half-circle of a shield that spun slowly around it to divide the habitat into an artificial day and night, and, the strangest feature, the spherical "sea" of real water the surrounded the "island" upon which New Sicily was built. [I]Greetings Davin Newport – or should I say... Alexander[/I][I]?[/I] Trojan read to him in its default male/neutral voice as he watched "sunset" and enabled and overlaid local mesh-suggested Augmented Reality clouds that instantly filled the "sky" with their amorphous pastel shapes. [I]I am called [/I]Helios[I] and I have a job for you...[/I] [/QUOTE]
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