Man Machine Interface

[Otagia]

So you want to know my story? I don’t blame you. Apparently I’ve set legal precident. Governments across the world are racing to figure out exactly how to deal with me, some even want to remove me, permanently. To be perfectly honest, I don’t mind. In fact, I love the attention. From childhood, I’ve never really stood out. Utterly average, that’s how one of my friends described me. Average height, average build, average hair, everything but my intelligence is average. That’s the only thing I’ve ever really had to boast about: My brain. I’m a genius with numbers, and I’ve always had a knack for computers, which I suppose has lead to my current predicament. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My name is Victor Gelus. Two years ago, I was a programmer with Cross Applied Technologies, writing neural networks for military software, programs that could learn, changing their own code to better fulfill their duties. I was at the top of my field, with dozens of code-monkeys hanging on my every word, and the power to demand almost any budget I wanted for my projects. I was the king of my domain, the best of the best at making learning machines.

Then, my life went to hell: I was diagnosed with cancer. A lump the size of a turnip was pressing against my lungs and my heart. Malignant, the doctors said, inoperable, they said, would kill me within the year. I was twenty four, and still in the throws of my youthful delusions of immortality, and quite naturally refused to accept my impending demise. I couldn’t possibly be expected to believe that something as simple as a few rebellious cells would stop me from going on with my life! I had far more important things to do than die. So, I threw myself into my work, trying desperately to find some way to survive, or at least to forget my worries. I wrote some of my best work in that period, cranking out dozens of programs over the course of three months. And then, I stumbled upon my salvation.

I was working on a program for a military project that hoped to plug soldiers directly into their tanks, let the drive the things with their brains alone, like an extension of their body. They’d already taught a couple of chimps how to work the thing, but they were having problems with getting their human pilots to make the things move. Something about cognitive dissonance, thinking too much about what they were doing, I never quite understood it, I’m not a psychologist. Whatever the problem was, they needed a program to smooth the edges between the human mind and their shiny new toys, and I planned to deliver. I experimented with standard neural nets for a couple weeks, but didn’t have any success: The program never really got the hang of dealing with the unpredictability of the human mind, gave the driver one hell of a headache from this screeching noise only they could hear, apparently some sort of static that the neural nets never managed to eradicate.

Finally, out of exasperation, I got a plug installed myself, so that I could see what these tread-heads were complaining about for myself, to see if I could figure out what was causing it, and thus get rid of it. So, I spooled up the latest neural net and plugged in, feeding the data directly into my brain. I think this was probably the worst moment of my life. For all those women out there, childbirth has nothing on one of these first generation neural interface systems. If you want to know what it was like, you can think of it like someone dragging your fingernails over a chalkboard while sticking pins in your eyes and sucker-punching you in the stomach, all at once.

After I managed to pull the plug and stop crying like a baby, I went back over what I had felt and heard, trying to make some sense of the pain I had been feeling. After I tried plugging in with a few simple changes and resolved never to make fun of the poor tankers I’d been trying my prototypes on again, I came up with a solution: I’d stop trying to make the machine work with the brain, and start making the brain work with the machine. Not that I’d actually change the operator’s brain, but I could use the computer as a buffer, a wall between the user and the vehicle. The program would take a snapshot of the brain’s activity, record its actions, and then feed that to another program, which read the first program’s data and used it to run the vehicle. I know, I know, it sounds like a small distinction, but it made all the difference. The first time the program was run, I was using myself as the guinea pig, as always in those days. Thank god that I did, as it saved my life.

I’d finally lost the whole devil-may-care attitude about my cancer, and was resigned to my fate. I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it. So, what did it matter if I took a few more risks at work, made decisions that could kill me? After all, the doctors gave me only a little more than a month to live. Hell, the cocky bastards gave me an exact date. I even made a bet with them, that they’d be wrong. So anyway, I plugged myself into the computer for one last time, and then everything went black.

I woke up, if you could call it waking up, staring down at my body. I was gaunt and pale, like a human scarecrow. The cancer had taken it’s toll on me, and I was finally getting to see it for myself. It was quite impressive, but I didn’t quite get what was going on. Had I died? Was I stuck in some sort of limbo? I’d never been religious, but right then, I was starting to wish I had been. Then, I finally began to notice things. Everything around me seemed to be moving slowly: I could actually watch a fly’s wings flap as it lethargically settled on my comatose body’s nose. I could change my field of view, but not by much. Then, I turned it down, and was surprised to see my keyboard right there, plain as day. Only difference was that it was inverted. I stared confused at it for a few moments, before finally realizing where I was looking from: I was staring out at the world through the monocular eye of my computer’s webcam.

Needless to say, I was rather freaked out at this point. Had I been able to, I would have been running in circles screaming like a little girl. Thankfully for my pride, I wasn’t able to move, and vocalization was still out of the question. I think the camera wiggled a bit, but that was about all I managed. Slowly, I calmed down, becoming accustomed to my new condition. I even started to realize some advantages: Since I wasn’t stuck in my frail meat body anymore, I wasn’t going to die of cancer. Well, my body still was going to kick, if it hadn’t already, but my mind would live on, here in this computer.

Once I’d become accustomed to my new condition, I began to experiment. I began to realize that while I’d lost several senses- touch, taste, smell, the whole shebang- I’d gained several more. I’m not quite sure how you’d qualify them, as the experience is far different from anything humankind has ever known. I could feel the raw data in the computer, sense the branches leading off to others on the network, and the massive stream of knowledge that was my internet connection. I could even feel how to move along these, spread myself across the Cross network and then, after a bit of work, I spread like a virus across the computers of the world. Every computer was like a neuron, each one that I infected spread my consciousness further, made me smarter, faster, better. I turned my attention away from my vegetative body, and poured all of my attention into the vast frontier before me. And now, I am like a God in the network: Immortal, omnipotent, omniscient.

So now you know my tale, how I got to where I am today. Good. Carry it back with you, tell the world what I am. And tell them one thing in particular: People are afraid of what they do not know, but they should not let fear blind their judgement. I can be a good neighbor, I can use my influence in the world wide web to help you. Or, if you force my hand, I can bring your world crashing down around you. I can kill hundreds of thousands with a simple twitch. I control your satellites, your planes, your missiles. If you try to remove me, you will pay.

I am the new God of machines, and I am here to stay.

[Otagia]

OOC: Just something I wrote up for my creative writing class. Not actually canon for Otagia, but I might adopt it sometime later. Could even make an interesting counterpart for QUETZAL, or part of him...

[Arizona Nova]

Anikar sez: been there, done that, went mad for a bit and got bored with it.

Good writing though!