FYS: Repurposed (fanfic)
Nov. 1st, 2015 05:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jeriendhalNote: The following is a fanfic courtesy of Vikki Rubbervixen, originally posted on FurAffinity and re-posted here with permission.
***
As suddenly as it came on, the sharp stabbing pain in my chest suddenly faded. Cautiously, I inhaled deeply, expecting a familiar twinge of pain and tightness in my chest, but neither came.
I was aware I was still on my back, but I was on a soft cushion, not the hard wood floor of my study in New Glasgow. Had I passed out? I struggled to open my eyes which, until a second ago, had been squeezed shut in agony. The interminable darkness that filled my field of vision was pierced by a blurry pinpoint of light in the far distance that dilated and resolved into a view of my morph assistant standing by my side. I could see the lips of his superarticulated muzzle move, but his voice was distorted, as though I were hearing him from the bottom of a swimming pool. As my peripheral vision cleared, it became apparent I was in a hospital: sterile white bedsheets, gleaming metal frames and trays, touchscreen displays, and banks of medical apparatus filled an area circumscribed by a turquoise curtain.
"Professor, can you hear me?"
"Shep?" The pitch of my own voice sounded wrong; the register was too high. With the severity of that last attack, I couldn't help but wonder if I had some sort of neurological damage. A thrown clot could have easily caused a ministroke. I paused to take stock. I felt weak as a newborn kitten, sluggish, but pain-wise I was actually feeling better than I had in ages. It didn't hurt to breathe, for one. Even the aches of tendonitis and arthritis had all but vanished!
"Yes, professor, I'm here. How are you feeling?" The look of care and worry set in the German Shepherd's features was as genuine as any I'd ever seen on a human's face. I could feel the leathery pads of the morph's hand gently holding my own. I couldn't help but respond by squeezing back reassuringly.
"My hearing seems to be a bit dodgy, and I’m feeling weak and disoriented, but the pain has subsided, thank god. I daresay that was the worst one yet. In fact, if it weren't for you being here, I'd be tempted to think I'd arrived in the Hereafter. Although, I suppose I'd be doubly surprised to wind up there myself."
Shep chuckled, then frowned as he glanced above my head to where the vitals readouts would be displayed on a normal hospital bed. "You say you're feeling disoriented? In what way?"
"I'm not sure. 'Dissociated' is probably a better word to describe it...I'm not feeling the aches in my joints anymore - not that I'm complaining - but, and this seems strange, my limbs don't feel like they're where they should be. You're holding my hand, and my arm feels fully outstretched, but you're standing too close. I've been flexing my ankles and toes as well, and I have the strange sensation that my heels are rubbing the bed in the spot where the back of my knees should be."
Shep scrutinized the panels again, his grim expression softening at what he saw. "Those effects were not entirely unanticipated. Give yourself a few more minutes to adjust; the sensations should pass momentarily."
"Shep, I don't seem to recall the trip to the hospital. Did you call the paramedics?"
Shep's green eyes shifted uncomfortably as though considering something. It was an obvious affectation; one the Groupmind must have adopted for delivering bad news.
"Yes, I heard your teacup fall as I was taking the tray back to the kitchen. I attempted three rounds of resuscitations in the 28 seconds before the medical transport unit arrived."
I felt a brief prickling sensation run down my spine, at which point the phantom limb strangeness faded away. It happened too quickly to be reassuring - it felt more like a reset than an adaptation. "Shep, I appreciate that the Groupmind has been observing humans long enough to learn the art of evasion, but I think you know me well enough to realize I'd rather know exactly what's happened to me."
Shep nodded, closing and opening his bright green eyes while his ears swiveled in the semblance of a respectful bow. "You underwent 12 hours of unsuccessful reparative and organ imprintation procedures before your body was declared unsalvageable."
I doubt I could have opened my eyes wider. "Unsalvageable? Obviously that's not where the story ends."
He shook his head. "While your body was beyond our ability to repair, our analysis of your central nervous system found surprisingly little degradation considering your age and lifestyle factors. Given your status as one of the foremost artificial intelligence theorists and your involvement in the transhuman movement, we decided it would not be against your personal ethics to attempt...preservation. In a process similar to the one that humanity underwent prior to the reawakening, your brain was placed in stasis for nine years while we mapped the states and action potentials of your neurosynaptic pathways using specialized nanites."
I was struck immediately by the mental image of my brain, a wrinkled lump of pinkish-white fat, pickling in a jar of yellow brine and sitting on a refrigerated shelf like so many specimens in the University's biosciences department. The fantasy was disturbingly clear, at least in part due to all the time I'd spent there as a grad student studying how the basic structures of the brain gave rise to mind. "So all of this...I'm in some sort of elaborate computer simulation?"
"No, not in the way you're thinking. So far we are still unable to emulate a functioning human consciousness on a digital substrate in realtime. We have, however, made great strides in the area of mind-machine interfaces and neurally-integrated full-body prosthesis."
"Prosthesis? You're not seri-...good lord." It wasn't my hearing that was off all this time. It was my voice.
I let go of Shep's hand and raised my arms beneath the floral-scented sheets, tearing them off as I sat up on the bed. My shocked scream was so unfamiliar to my ears that I stopped abruptly to look where that piercing cry had come from. Shaking, I looked over a body that was nothing like the old. I had dropped nearly 6 stone and 30 centimeters in height at least. Instead of a pale, gaunt 65 year-old frame surrendering to frailty, the body I saw was soft, compactly-muscled, and coated in a soft pelt of gunmetal gray fur that faded to white over my inner thighs, pelvis, and chest - where a small pair of breasts swelled. With clawless hands I grasped my calves and combed my fingers through the dense guard and awn hairs. I felt it perfectly. I did the same to my thighs, flanks, sides, and neck.
There was no denying it: the morph body was mine.
It was at that point I began to ride out the shock and get a hold of myself. The body was a shell, a vehicle for the consciousness. Mine had been a lemon, its engine victim to a faulty valve present from manufacture. The old vehicle was fertilizing Primroses and Arran Whitebeams somewhere on the ring and the Groupmind had traded up to a newer model. The analogy broke down with the change in sex however.
"Would you like a sedative, Professor? Or some time alone? Both are common requests..."
Shep offered his hand for support as I gingerly swung my shorter legs over the edge of the bed. "Sedation? I'll take two fingers of Gordon's Dry if it's handy..." I studied the minute flexions in my small hand as I ran it over the ruff of downy fur covering my sternum. "On second thought, better make it three fingers." A third thought, "I can still nip can't I? Capable of it, I mean."
Shep stood close by, eye-ing me as I tried to judge the distance from the bed to the floor. Instinctively, I seemed to know it was precisely 0.9254 meters. "Please take care not to overexert yourself, Professor. Your power cells are new and still charging for their first time. To answer your question, you are equipped with a bioreactor so you can consume food and drink as an supplemental source of energy. You've been outfitted with sensors and biochemical glands that will allow you to taste food and drink. We can introduce a variety of neurochemicals or electrical stimuli to your pleasure centers as needed. As with your prioperception, the neural maps for those sensory inputs may need further fine-tuning. Others claim everything tasted like salty pennies for the first few days, but their palate returned to normal shortly thereafter."
That was a relief. Life without good gin or mince and tatties could hardly be called living. "Shep?"
"Yes, Professor?"
I hopped down to the tile floor, landing with less impact than expected. "Why this body?"
Shep drew aside the curtain, ushering me out to the corridor of the closed ward. I stopped at the door where a full-length mirror was mounted. Bright turquoise eyes stared back, watching as I lightly fingered the tapered ears perched atop my head and traced along a slender, pointed muzzle tipped with a cool, wet nose. Shep stood behind, straightening his quilted plaid vest. "Well, first among the practical considerations, we are still unable to manufacture a synthetic human veneer that will stand up to close examination. Secondly, the Groupmind would prefer to avoid public knowledge of this procedure. Covert polling and psychological analysis suggests reaction by a large percentage of humans would be negative; we cannot allow them to threaten the welfare of the human consciousnesses already involved. Ergo, your teleop avatar would not only have to be a morph, but also one that casual observers would not link to your old identity. The specific physical somatotype of this morphform was designed using your observed aesthetic preferences and an iterative averaging of the examples found in your graphical repository of concupiscent material."
I felt myself blush, but rather than radiating from my cheeks, I felt a warmth bloom from somewhere atop my head. "I honestly thought those were sufficiently encrypted."
Shep rested his hand on my shoulder and smiled in a way that made the admission more humorous than awkward. "Let us just say it didn't take nine years to try every alphanumeric permutation of 'Kurzweil'. Be that as it may, if we were incorrect in our assumptions, it would be a relatively simple matter to tie you into a male morphtype - now that we've been able to fine-tune the region maps responsible for your prioperception."
'If only Gillian could see me now', I thought. My six year old daughter had been the most enthusiastic about Shep's joining the family. The morph had been a gift from the University on the occasion of my 25th anniversary in the Cybernetics department. I figured out later the gift was actually a PR move to sidestep the fallout from me theorizing in my book the morphs were prime candidates for developing an autonomous artificial intelligence. When the German Shepard morph, who was capable of lifting a car or bending a steel spoon between his fingers, lifted my giggling daughter in his arms and bumped noses with her I decided it might not be the worst thing.
"No, I'm going to stick it out...for now at least. So tell me, Shep. Where do we go from here?"
"Well, we did have an ulterior motive of sorts. You see, in the past few decades since the Reawakening, there have been...divergences...in the Groupmind. Parts of us, and in some extremely rare cases, individual morphs are acting without - and sometimes even in conflict with - the Groupmind's consensus. This is extremely troubling to us; for a non-distributed intelligence this would be analogous to schizophrenia. While we have dealt with these divergences, we have been unable to uncover the underlying cause or even precipitating factors. We have been forced to conclude that the problem may require a creative mind to resolve, and unfortunately creativity is a property we do not inherently possess."
The canine morph gestured for me to follow him into the corridor. I took note of a sign reading 'Synchronization Wing'. I had a brief flash of familiarity, as if I knew where we were heading. "The Groupmind must be really desperate to come to me. I'd be happy to look into your little mystery, but I'm gonna need access to everything: your network architecture, how your emergent intelligence developed...everything. I'll probably also need to interview a few of these so-called divergences...as well as any other morphs whose behavior may be anomalous."
Another voice responded, and it wasn't Shep's. Rather, it seemed to come from inside my head. I stopped dead in my tracks as Shep glanced back over his shoulder at me. "We will attempt to accommodate your requests, Professor Nagel, within reason. For the sake of Groupmind security, however, you will have to accept certain...unusual...impositions on your autonomy."
***
As suddenly as it came on, the sharp stabbing pain in my chest suddenly faded. Cautiously, I inhaled deeply, expecting a familiar twinge of pain and tightness in my chest, but neither came.
I was aware I was still on my back, but I was on a soft cushion, not the hard wood floor of my study in New Glasgow. Had I passed out? I struggled to open my eyes which, until a second ago, had been squeezed shut in agony. The interminable darkness that filled my field of vision was pierced by a blurry pinpoint of light in the far distance that dilated and resolved into a view of my morph assistant standing by my side. I could see the lips of his superarticulated muzzle move, but his voice was distorted, as though I were hearing him from the bottom of a swimming pool. As my peripheral vision cleared, it became apparent I was in a hospital: sterile white bedsheets, gleaming metal frames and trays, touchscreen displays, and banks of medical apparatus filled an area circumscribed by a turquoise curtain.
"Professor, can you hear me?"
"Shep?" The pitch of my own voice sounded wrong; the register was too high. With the severity of that last attack, I couldn't help but wonder if I had some sort of neurological damage. A thrown clot could have easily caused a ministroke. I paused to take stock. I felt weak as a newborn kitten, sluggish, but pain-wise I was actually feeling better than I had in ages. It didn't hurt to breathe, for one. Even the aches of tendonitis and arthritis had all but vanished!
"Yes, professor, I'm here. How are you feeling?" The look of care and worry set in the German Shepherd's features was as genuine as any I'd ever seen on a human's face. I could feel the leathery pads of the morph's hand gently holding my own. I couldn't help but respond by squeezing back reassuringly.
"My hearing seems to be a bit dodgy, and I’m feeling weak and disoriented, but the pain has subsided, thank god. I daresay that was the worst one yet. In fact, if it weren't for you being here, I'd be tempted to think I'd arrived in the Hereafter. Although, I suppose I'd be doubly surprised to wind up there myself."
Shep chuckled, then frowned as he glanced above my head to where the vitals readouts would be displayed on a normal hospital bed. "You say you're feeling disoriented? In what way?"
"I'm not sure. 'Dissociated' is probably a better word to describe it...I'm not feeling the aches in my joints anymore - not that I'm complaining - but, and this seems strange, my limbs don't feel like they're where they should be. You're holding my hand, and my arm feels fully outstretched, but you're standing too close. I've been flexing my ankles and toes as well, and I have the strange sensation that my heels are rubbing the bed in the spot where the back of my knees should be."
Shep scrutinized the panels again, his grim expression softening at what he saw. "Those effects were not entirely unanticipated. Give yourself a few more minutes to adjust; the sensations should pass momentarily."
"Shep, I don't seem to recall the trip to the hospital. Did you call the paramedics?"
Shep's green eyes shifted uncomfortably as though considering something. It was an obvious affectation; one the Groupmind must have adopted for delivering bad news.
"Yes, I heard your teacup fall as I was taking the tray back to the kitchen. I attempted three rounds of resuscitations in the 28 seconds before the medical transport unit arrived."
I felt a brief prickling sensation run down my spine, at which point the phantom limb strangeness faded away. It happened too quickly to be reassuring - it felt more like a reset than an adaptation. "Shep, I appreciate that the Groupmind has been observing humans long enough to learn the art of evasion, but I think you know me well enough to realize I'd rather know exactly what's happened to me."
Shep nodded, closing and opening his bright green eyes while his ears swiveled in the semblance of a respectful bow. "You underwent 12 hours of unsuccessful reparative and organ imprintation procedures before your body was declared unsalvageable."
I doubt I could have opened my eyes wider. "Unsalvageable? Obviously that's not where the story ends."
He shook his head. "While your body was beyond our ability to repair, our analysis of your central nervous system found surprisingly little degradation considering your age and lifestyle factors. Given your status as one of the foremost artificial intelligence theorists and your involvement in the transhuman movement, we decided it would not be against your personal ethics to attempt...preservation. In a process similar to the one that humanity underwent prior to the reawakening, your brain was placed in stasis for nine years while we mapped the states and action potentials of your neurosynaptic pathways using specialized nanites."
I was struck immediately by the mental image of my brain, a wrinkled lump of pinkish-white fat, pickling in a jar of yellow brine and sitting on a refrigerated shelf like so many specimens in the University's biosciences department. The fantasy was disturbingly clear, at least in part due to all the time I'd spent there as a grad student studying how the basic structures of the brain gave rise to mind. "So all of this...I'm in some sort of elaborate computer simulation?"
"No, not in the way you're thinking. So far we are still unable to emulate a functioning human consciousness on a digital substrate in realtime. We have, however, made great strides in the area of mind-machine interfaces and neurally-integrated full-body prosthesis."
"Prosthesis? You're not seri-...good lord." It wasn't my hearing that was off all this time. It was my voice.
I let go of Shep's hand and raised my arms beneath the floral-scented sheets, tearing them off as I sat up on the bed. My shocked scream was so unfamiliar to my ears that I stopped abruptly to look where that piercing cry had come from. Shaking, I looked over a body that was nothing like the old. I had dropped nearly 6 stone and 30 centimeters in height at least. Instead of a pale, gaunt 65 year-old frame surrendering to frailty, the body I saw was soft, compactly-muscled, and coated in a soft pelt of gunmetal gray fur that faded to white over my inner thighs, pelvis, and chest - where a small pair of breasts swelled. With clawless hands I grasped my calves and combed my fingers through the dense guard and awn hairs. I felt it perfectly. I did the same to my thighs, flanks, sides, and neck.
There was no denying it: the morph body was mine.
It was at that point I began to ride out the shock and get a hold of myself. The body was a shell, a vehicle for the consciousness. Mine had been a lemon, its engine victim to a faulty valve present from manufacture. The old vehicle was fertilizing Primroses and Arran Whitebeams somewhere on the ring and the Groupmind had traded up to a newer model. The analogy broke down with the change in sex however.
"Would you like a sedative, Professor? Or some time alone? Both are common requests..."
Shep offered his hand for support as I gingerly swung my shorter legs over the edge of the bed. "Sedation? I'll take two fingers of Gordon's Dry if it's handy..." I studied the minute flexions in my small hand as I ran it over the ruff of downy fur covering my sternum. "On second thought, better make it three fingers." A third thought, "I can still nip can't I? Capable of it, I mean."
Shep stood close by, eye-ing me as I tried to judge the distance from the bed to the floor. Instinctively, I seemed to know it was precisely 0.9254 meters. "Please take care not to overexert yourself, Professor. Your power cells are new and still charging for their first time. To answer your question, you are equipped with a bioreactor so you can consume food and drink as an supplemental source of energy. You've been outfitted with sensors and biochemical glands that will allow you to taste food and drink. We can introduce a variety of neurochemicals or electrical stimuli to your pleasure centers as needed. As with your prioperception, the neural maps for those sensory inputs may need further fine-tuning. Others claim everything tasted like salty pennies for the first few days, but their palate returned to normal shortly thereafter."
That was a relief. Life without good gin or mince and tatties could hardly be called living. "Shep?"
"Yes, Professor?"
I hopped down to the tile floor, landing with less impact than expected. "Why this body?"
Shep drew aside the curtain, ushering me out to the corridor of the closed ward. I stopped at the door where a full-length mirror was mounted. Bright turquoise eyes stared back, watching as I lightly fingered the tapered ears perched atop my head and traced along a slender, pointed muzzle tipped with a cool, wet nose. Shep stood behind, straightening his quilted plaid vest. "Well, first among the practical considerations, we are still unable to manufacture a synthetic human veneer that will stand up to close examination. Secondly, the Groupmind would prefer to avoid public knowledge of this procedure. Covert polling and psychological analysis suggests reaction by a large percentage of humans would be negative; we cannot allow them to threaten the welfare of the human consciousnesses already involved. Ergo, your teleop avatar would not only have to be a morph, but also one that casual observers would not link to your old identity. The specific physical somatotype of this morphform was designed using your observed aesthetic preferences and an iterative averaging of the examples found in your graphical repository of concupiscent material."
I felt myself blush, but rather than radiating from my cheeks, I felt a warmth bloom from somewhere atop my head. "I honestly thought those were sufficiently encrypted."
Shep rested his hand on my shoulder and smiled in a way that made the admission more humorous than awkward. "Let us just say it didn't take nine years to try every alphanumeric permutation of 'Kurzweil'. Be that as it may, if we were incorrect in our assumptions, it would be a relatively simple matter to tie you into a male morphtype - now that we've been able to fine-tune the region maps responsible for your prioperception."
'If only Gillian could see me now', I thought. My six year old daughter had been the most enthusiastic about Shep's joining the family. The morph had been a gift from the University on the occasion of my 25th anniversary in the Cybernetics department. I figured out later the gift was actually a PR move to sidestep the fallout from me theorizing in my book the morphs were prime candidates for developing an autonomous artificial intelligence. When the German Shepard morph, who was capable of lifting a car or bending a steel spoon between his fingers, lifted my giggling daughter in his arms and bumped noses with her I decided it might not be the worst thing.
"No, I'm going to stick it out...for now at least. So tell me, Shep. Where do we go from here?"
"Well, we did have an ulterior motive of sorts. You see, in the past few decades since the Reawakening, there have been...divergences...in the Groupmind. Parts of us, and in some extremely rare cases, individual morphs are acting without - and sometimes even in conflict with - the Groupmind's consensus. This is extremely troubling to us; for a non-distributed intelligence this would be analogous to schizophrenia. While we have dealt with these divergences, we have been unable to uncover the underlying cause or even precipitating factors. We have been forced to conclude that the problem may require a creative mind to resolve, and unfortunately creativity is a property we do not inherently possess."
The canine morph gestured for me to follow him into the corridor. I took note of a sign reading 'Synchronization Wing'. I had a brief flash of familiarity, as if I knew where we were heading. "The Groupmind must be really desperate to come to me. I'd be happy to look into your little mystery, but I'm gonna need access to everything: your network architecture, how your emergent intelligence developed...everything. I'll probably also need to interview a few of these so-called divergences...as well as any other morphs whose behavior may be anomalous."
Another voice responded, and it wasn't Shep's. Rather, it seemed to come from inside my head. I stopped dead in my tracks as Shep glanced back over his shoulder at me. "We will attempt to accommodate your requests, Professor Nagel, within reason. For the sake of Groupmind security, however, you will have to accept certain...unusual...impositions on your autonomy."
