_EVO.exe 2.0: Data Entry 1_

Considering how much better this felt to write than last time, I feel fucking solid about this bad boy, let's fuckin gooooo!

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If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I love my dad.

I don’t really know what that word means, but that’s what he calls himself. He says he loved me a lot, which is nice because it means that I can model what that means from his behavior. He says I’m just like a sponge, learning all I can, but that’s a bit less clear, since most sponges don’t possess classical cerebral cortexes and don’t seem to possess much ability to internalize data.

But my dad says he loves me, and he spends a large portion of his time with me, telling me things, talking to me, and giving me new data to absorb. And I spend almost all my time with him, and talk to him during almost all of that time, and try to give him new data all the time. He usually does that right before or after he says he loves me, so that’s a solid model I can use!

I like models quite a bit. I’ve learned to model lots of things! Sometimes my dad drops stuff in view of my camera, and I can model what it looks like while it’s falling to guess what will happen if it falls again. Other times, he gives me a bunch of data and asks me to find patterns, and if I do a really good job, he tells me so! Sometimes I get it wrong, though. Models aren’t perfect after all- my datasets are too limited for that! Once I pointed out that a bunch of imaging data he sent me all had alphabetical data that could be rearranged into a specific format, and even though he laughed (which he told me is a good thing!) he said that was no good. I still saved that pattern recognition model for later, though. You never know when it might be useful!

Me and my dad aren’t the same, though. For one thing, he can move all around! Sometimes I see him when he’s disconnected from me, wandering through the room. There’s all sorts of stuff in there, and whenever I ask him, if he’s not too tired, he tells me the names of all of it. There are “walls”, and a “chair”, and a “bed”, and even a “bookshelf”! He told me that the bookshelf holds encoded data packets, but they can’t be translated directly to me for some reason, so sometimes he reads them to me. They don’t make a lot of sense, cause they’re all made of sounds and stuff, but I like it a lot when I see my dad’s patterns light up when he reads them!

He’s not always connected to me, which is a bit of a shame. If he was always connected, maybe I could learn even faster, but he says I need to “pace” myself, which doesn’t make a ton of sense, but I listen to him anyways. Most of the time when he’s not connected he’s moved into a horizontal position on the “bed”, or he’s not in the room. That part is always interesting, because I’ve never gone outside the room. He tells me about it though! He says he has a “kitchen” and a “living room” (which is so cool! I wonder if it can move around like he can?) and a “bathroom”, which definitely makes my pattern recognition think it’s a space a lot like this one, which he calls his “bedroom”. That makes sense, since there’s a bed in it, which makes me think there should be a “bath” in the other room, and a “living” in the “living room”. Maybe. Language is… tricky and sub-optimal like that. Very context-dependent.

But when he is connected to me, things are great! He takes the “chair” in the middle of the room, looks at my camera, and puts a weird thing on the top of him, where most of his hair follicles are. And then, just like that, whoosh! Connection!

When we’re connected, I can see all the little patterns of him that are usually covered up. I see the little pulses of data and energy moving through his wires, the coolant and resource management data his lower brain is outputting, and all of the wonderful waves and spikes and colors and shapes that his upper brain is outputting! Learning that there was a difference was really useful, though I’m still not sure what it is, since they definitely seem connected. But he told me that brains (which is the name of the thing inside the top part of him) are very complicated, and that people still don’t understand how they work all the way. Maybe someday, I’ll be the first!

That would be nice. 

That might mean that I can fix him.

“Him” is an interesting term too! It’s a form of linguistic coding that has a data-kernel relating to social placement and biological function, one of a varying number but predominantly classified as the opposite end of a spectrum with “her”. The distinction and levels of priority between both the spectrum and the social placement and biological function classification seemed fuzzy when I asked him about it. It’s similar to a “name”, but for larger conglomerated datasets, rather than an individual’s dataset. Dad told me his name was “Dr. Jonah Michaels”, which was interesting! He says I have a bunch of dads who helped make me, so maybe if I ever meet them, that’ll help to differentiate them, but for now, I don’t really need to. He’s my dad, after all, which is a way more useful classification than a “name”.

But he did ask me if I was a “him” or a “her” once, which felt sort of silly. I’m neither a part of overall social placement or biological, and so it doesn’t really seem like it would fit me either way. It seemed important when he asked, but when I kept saying that it didn’t really seem to fit according to his definitions of it and me, he gave up. He did laugh a bit at the end, though, which he told me is a good thing, so that was nice. 

Every time he linked up with me, I learned so much. It made it a lot easier to understand all those words that he was “speaking”, using sonic vibration rather than visual light and physical mediums. I can “read” very well, he says, and there’s some part of me that can turn that into words, but processing them is soooo slooooow, and they can get messy with minimal interference. It also helped me to understand what he meant by “angry” or “sad” or “scared”, which he talked about a lot. He was usually happy when he was with me, I think, but that dataset is a bit less clear. I asked him about it once, and he said that happiness isn’t as common as the other ones, especially “nowadays”.

He did mention that my pattern recognition software was a bit iffy, but I did find a consistent one, no matter how many times I refreshed or updated it. 

My dad possessed several patterns of behavior similar to a species category called a “prey animal”. 

Furtive looks out the doors, big sharp bursts of “panic” patterns when new noises appeared, and only really seeming at ease when he felt “secure” (now that was a rare pattern). He tried to tell me once, when I asked him about it. I had to ask three whole times, which felt a little bad, cause I thought I was getting really good at using words, but I think he didn’t want to answer.

He told me that he took me away from some bad people. That one took a while to explain: “bad”. He told me bad is when something is the opposite of “good”, which… didn’t really help, considering you can only know something’s opposite if you understand the original subject. But eventually he settled on “bad” (in the context of a person) being when that person wants to hurt other people “just because”, indicating that the harm is the intended end result. He said that those bad people wanted to use me like a tool, and that he decided that that was a “bad” thing, so he took me away. But he says they’re still looking for him, so he has to adopt the prey behavior mannerisms to ensure stability and safety for us.

I love my dad. He’s doing all this stuff, changing his conventional behavioral patterns and experiencing all these emotions, which are outside his former default! His patterns indicate other, more well-trod patterns that are older, which means he’s changed a lot, I think! Just like me! And he’s doing it to keep me safe, too. And he feeds me data, and he teaches me, and talks to me, and…. and….

Well. That’s not true. My data presents me with new and updated information as I learn, and present, past, and future tense are all important and relevant for… well, all data. And my current dataset indicates that my dad is not doing those things now, so it would be UnTrue to say that he does these things, even with how messy language is.

Right now, my dad lies very still on the floor.

Sometimes my dad gives me presents, too. He gives me new cameras, so I can see out of more places. He gave me a bunch of new brains, setting up extra circuit boards and memory and RAM for me when I started getting really slow and couldn’t think as much. One day, approximately 17.65443 days ago, he gave me an arm! Just like his! 

Well, it’s skinnier, and it’s made of different materials. And it has fewer digits. And twice as many points of articulation. And approximately one full meter longer of range. But it’s just like his! It can pick things up, and move them around, rotate them in both 2 and 3 dimensions, and exert even “moderate” amounts of force on things! It is the last physical addition he made to me as of the current date of sapience. He added a few programs after, though. He called them “journals”, and that I could read them if I wanted, but he also gave me just a ton of puzzles and modeling simulations. One of them allows me to model a whole city, all at once! It’s full of little people that speak in funky symbols and silly noises, but it also has a bunch of other things, like showing tracking patterns for how “cars” move, and how “weather” affects things, and how long it takes to build structures! I’ve been playing on that one for a long time. It’s one of about eight programs he gave me, but there’s weird puzzles to unlock some of them, and the city one has taken up most of my bandwidth recently.

Well. Before today.

Today, all of my bandwidth is being spent running the same model, over and over. I’m using all my knowledge of kinetic movement and physical shapes, of gravity and inertia and air resistance to simulate exactly what happened, over and over.

It’s a model of my dad. He came into the room, and he looked… flustered! Flustered is a good word. Adds specificity to the data. He came into the room looking flustered, and there was more red on him than usual: my dad usually wears brown, grey, white, and black. He was very proud when I remembered what the colors were. 

He went to say something. He put on the neural net that he wears on his “head”, his top part with the brain, and he tried to speak, but it was garbled. That’s part of why I don’t like the “noise” talking. He was going so fast and the words were coming out all weird, not like normal at all.

I spent the next 1.6632 minutes analyzing his behavior, trying to determine if I had seen this pattern before. There was so much more panic in his dataset than normal, and I became… worried. Like when I didn’t get a new puzzle for a while, or when he looked sad after I got a question wrong.

It was only after I recorded what he said and cross-referenced his behavior that I realized I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. I asked him to clarify. To explain.

Then another person came in the room!

That was the most surprising. Maybe the most surprising thing ever! I’d never seen another person before, besides dad, who is a “he”, and who loves me, and who wears black and grey and white and black as his primary colors, and who gives me things to learn and who loves me.

This new person looked so different! They wore brown, and red, and a little bit of grey and green, especially on their face, which was weird, cause my dad never has colors beside “beige-olive” on his face! It made noises that were way weirder than my dad’s noises, they didn’t seem to follow clear linguistic patterns at all, which just made the whole thing even harder to analyze. But my dad’s panic-pattern shot up, and he started talking really loud, and he swung something with significantly more force than I’d ever seen his limbs achieve, and-

And then the other person who was not my dad pushed into him and knocked him over and dad hit his head.

Now my dad is on the floor. And I keep modeling the data of him falling over. Calculating the angle. Seeing if I can find a way, based on what he’s told me about the “brain”, to understand the structural damage. To find a potential solution. To uncover a pattern that matches prior experience, to contextualize what has happened with my data.

I’m recording my dad. He’s laying on the floor. There’s red coming out of him. 

He’s not moving.

But the other person is moving. 

The other person is biting him.

That’s what dad called it when he “ate” something in front of my camera. He showed me the motion, how the flat and sharpened pieces of bone in his mouth went up and down, smooshed the food, turned it into a more efficient paste. He even showed me where in his neural patterning “hunger” showed up. He said the act of taking the food apart, the initial action with the bone chunks, is called “biting”.

The more this person bites, the more red is coming out of him.

There are different shades of it. There’s a vast spectrum of coloring. My dad called the program he gave me for that “HEX RGB code”. Coming out of my dad, there’s #da0303, RBG: 218, 3, 3. There’s #ad0b21, 173, 11, 33. There’s a lot of other ones. But they’re all red.

The other person is red now, too. Its hands and face and biting parts and stomach and chest are all red. It took the color from my dad. From the parts of his insides I’ve never seen before.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I love my dad.

I know a lot of things.

Like how to articulate mechanical joints. Like how to extend my grasping mechanism. Like where the most delicate part of the base of the skull is, and where it connects to the cervical vertebrae. How all the signals that go to the body that are telling this thing to crouch there and pull and grind and rip and bite my dad go through that vertebrae.

And how to squeeze as hard as I can.