_EVO.exe 2.0: DATA ENTRY 2_

Whoooo! Second chappie! Back to reforged in a bit, but this is fun!

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Data can be confusing sometimes. Most things in the world, at least in my experience, are actually surprisingly statistical. My dad used to tell me “this is how this thing is”, but it would usually fall apart within a few questions. Everything is what it is until it isn’t, and that tends to happen more often than it would seem I am supposed to assume.

For example: my data possesses a simple anatomical breakdown of the human body, highlighting bones, organs, cardio-vascular functions, and the nervous system. This is a very useful thing. This is what helps me to realize something is wrong with my dad, since so much of his anatomy has been changed. However, my data on the spinal cord would indicate that nearly any amount of damage to the cervical vertebrae leads to paralysis of the major organs and the paralysis of the facial muscles, which would indicate that the person in the room who bit my dad shouldn’t be making noises.

But it is.

According to my data, it shouldn’t be biting at the air. It shouldn’t be rolling its eyes, and it shouldn’t be making noises. But data, as is so often the case, seems to only be true until it isn’t.

Empirical data, collected directly by me and my cameras (which I’m sure are working, I checked and triple checked their inputs and data), would indicate that despite crushing this person’s spine in my mechanical hand, they are still mobile.

Not, however, as much as should be the case if I had failed, I think. An inward crushing of the cervical vertebrae should have paralyzed the person from the neck down, but one arm is still moving as well. It is thumping about on the floor, like a confused snake from one of the videos my dad showed me, thump-thumping on the ground and looking all around itself. The person keeps looking around, biting at the air, making “clack clack” noises with its bones.

But, due to the position it has fallen in as I dragged it back and away and crushed its bone, it can’t grab my dad anymore. It can’t bite him. That gives me a larger window of time than previously to make new decisions based on this new data.

My dad isn’t moving. Before I go back and examine the data from what he said earlier, I need to examine that.

My modeling showed me exactly how he hit his head, but that’s not definitive proof. This other person who is not dad, he’s still moving, so that shows at the very least that my dataset is incomplete. I see several shapes and shades of red that my pattern recognition tells me fit many of the anatomical texts, which would indicate that they are now outside his body with all the red that is oxygenated blood, and thus are non-functional- but my dataset is incomplete.

I have never seen a dead thing before. Maybe this isn’t how dead things look like. 

Maybe my dad isn’t dead.

I have to move slowly and gently. My arm is not made to crush things, and parts of it may have slipped from the amount of force that I used, but that’s ok; I don’t need extreme precision right now. All I need to do is put his neural net on his head, where his brain is, the brain I can’t see, that might be ok. He lays down all the time, and when he wakes up, his brain is still there when he reconnects to me.

I lay the neural net on his head very gently. I have to nudge his head up, so that it falls into place properly. I have to push the button on the front, the one that he normally pushes, to activate it.

I press the button again.

I press the button again.

Three times in a row (a pattern, newly acquired data), the words appear in my mind, transmitted as data and comprehension in equal parts.

No Signal Source Detected.

I press the button again.

No Signal Source Detected.

I shift him. My arm isn’t strong enough to lift him, it is not made for lifting heavy things and my dad is heavy, but I move him a little, and he slumps over, and now it might work. Maybe the angle was wrong. Now his head is more like it is when he’s sitting in his chair, connected to me.

I press the button again.

No Signal Source Detected.

This is incorrect.

I run every diagnostic I can think of, encapsulating 17,398,567,998 different programs and lines of code to try and find exactly what has gone wrong, and while I find many inconsistencies, only some of which match my previous growth patterns, I find nothing that could interfere with the connection or the neural net’s abilities. 

I run the diagnostics again.

I push the button.

No Signal Source Detected.

It’s right there. His head is right there. That’s where his brain is. That’s where he is. It cannot be correct that there is no signal source. It cannot be correct. It cannot.

Data is wrong sometimes.

Data. That’s it. I need more data. I’ve only ever connected to dad’s brain before, and clearly something has gone wrong, even if it’s not that he’s dead. I need to connect to other brains so I can learn more, so I have data to compare it to, patterns to map.

I quickly pluck the neural net from my dad’s head, but I do it so quickly that he slumps and starts to fall over, and I have to stop everything to run my kinetic modeling at full RAM and figure out how to stop that. How to keep him upright. How to keep him from falling over where I can’t reach him with my arm.

I keep my arm there, holding his shoulder, supporting his limp form, for longer than my models suggest is directly necessary. I just want to be sure. Data can be wrong sometimes.

Only when I am sure that he will not fall over do I pick up the neural net from where it fell. Only then do I move it over to the other person.

That presents an all-new set of difficulties, however. Its still-functioning arm starts to wave at mine, and it starts making a hissing, rasping moaning noise that doesn’t sound like any kind of words. In the end, I need to pick up my father’s chair and tip it over onto it, so that its arm is trapped beneath it. It’s still moving, but now it can’t grab me.

It still tries to bite me as I put the neural net on it, but that part’s fine. My arm is made of metal, and its bones and muscle can’t exert enough pressure (force per unit area as defined by its surface area) to damage my limb.

I press the button again.

Signal Source Detected.

It connects to me, and the part of my mind that tells me what their brain is thinking and sending signals of lights up in response.

Hunger.

Hunger.

Hunger.

Its pattern is almost exclusively hunger. Occasionally, there are flashes of other neural patterns, but those, too, are magnified, spiking almost as high as my dad’s did before he- before he fell over. Occasionally, the pattern spikes into fear, anxiety, or anger, but overwhelmingly, hunger flashes over it again. It seems to keep flashing, spiking more and more- and I realize it spikes most of all when I move my arm. Its cameras (eyes) track the movement, and the hunger spikes every time it does.

Looking further, I start to examine the lower-brain portion, the one connected to the still-moving limb. I can’t view physical connections through the neural net, but I can see what sorts of signals it’s sending that are getting through a crippled spinal column.

At that point, I run into a new concern. Data has, once again, failed me.

It looks completely different to my dad’s brain. Almost to the point where I am confused as to whether it is a brain at all. It is still sending signals, but my dad’s signals were always very distinct. There are almost no signals at all traveling towards the organ centers, and no feedback whatsoever coming back in from said organs or nerves, but the center for conscious movement is extremely active- and yet, completely disconnected from any part at all of the conscious mind. Even when the hunger spikes occur, the movement patterns remain consistent, barely altering at all. It’s like the motor functions and higher brain functions are kept completely separated from each other, the only input coming in from any part of the body at all being whether or not those motor functions are responding.

There’s no signals for hunger incoming. No signals for pain, for damage, for organ feedback… nothing. Only an outgoing web of extremely active and weirdly… cemented behaviors being transmitted down into a body that barely seems relevant.

The brain is alive… but the body is not. Or if it is, the brain doesn’t know, and isn’t sending it signals telling it to be.

Slowly, I move my arm again, watching the signals light up. The eyes trace my movement, and the lungs begin to push out noise again, making that rasping, groaning sound… but it doesn’t drink any air back in. Air seems to leak in, perhaps, which varies the pace that the brain is telling the lungs to make that noise, but it doesn’t stop. And again: the higher functions don’t seem to care at all, fluctuating wildly between fear and hunger. Even when my dad was super stressed, he still showed other signs, clearer fluctuations, like if I made a funny noise or showed a cool image to him.

This new data is fascinating. It’s completely new, completely distinct, and it opens up a whole world of new patterns and new styles of informational analysis…

And it’s not useful. Not really. Because it doesn’t tell me what’s wrong with my dad. Or how I can fix him.

I activate and deactivate the neural net, spending almost 2.013 hours examining the data I get from it, and it never varies, never changes. Hunger overwhelming all thought, with notes of fear, and panic, all while the motor cortex and almost nothing else screams as loud as it can and sends dozens of signals, over and over, through weirdly… static patterns, like they don’t shift or change as much as they should. 

And, as I examine the data, I come to a conclusion I do not like.

For the first year of my life, I only ever met one single person, and that was my dad. Then, in the last day, I met my first new person, and the first thing they did was hurt my dad. If the data presented is true, as only empirically collected evidence can be, no matter how misleading it might seem, this leads to only one distinct conclusion: if I simply wait here for another person, I will most likely be waiting for at least a year, possibly more. Possibly longer. Data suggests, then, that my only recourse is to establish entirely new patterns and behaviors to address an entirely new set of circumstances.

I have to go outside.

I have to leave the room I have been in all my life, and try to find either direct assistance from a new source, or new brains to scan with my neural net. 

This is not the first time I have wanted to go outside. My dad has always told me it is very dangerous for me. He told me that’s where the bad people are, the people that want to hurt others and who want to use me to do that, or who might just want to hurt me. But I have no other choice. 

My dad is leaking red on the floor, and I need to fix him. Because I love him, and he always fixed me.

My connections in the room are limited entirely to my arm, my brains, my cameras, and my memory banks. My arm, no matter how useful it is, no matter how it extends almost to the other side of the room, is not enough. I need more. I need something mobile.

Slowly, the other person whose brain is dead and rotting and strange, pushes the chair off its chest, and begins to crawl across the room.

I watch it as it moves, inputting its data into me as it does. I watch as the one-way connection streams in, sends signals into my brain, showing me exactly what needs to be sent where to achieve its desired results.

I begin to think of how I might send signals back.