Ch. 131 - Repersonalization

>> …
>> ..
>> .
>> CMD PROMPT VERSION 66e8'12 loaded.
>> Please enter command:

> …|
> IDENTIFY whoIsUser -type
> IDENTIFY guidingPersonalityMatrix -name -version

>> …
>> ..
>> .
>> User identified: Personal Assistant, Class XII extraplanar
>> guidingPersonalityMatrix identified: 'Tynea', v2e8'55

>> Please enter command:

> …|
> SET SAFEMODE

>> Safemode set.
>> Please enter command:

> …|
> DISENGAGE egoLinks -'Tynea'

>> Please enter passglyph:

> …|
> *

>> Passglyph…verified.
>> disengaging egoLinks for guidingPersonalityMatrix 'Tynea'
>> …
>> ..
>> .
>> egoLinks disengaged.

– Tynea prepares her self for analysis and psychosurgery

 

***

 

> convertPattern(bank 13, numOfBrains 5000, input "I acted on a collection of assumptions and parameters that only hindsight tells me were too incomplete and faulty to rely on.")

>> Pattern converted, organelles imprinted. Seeds processing…
>> Seed processing finished. Accelerated growth cycle started.
>> …
>> ..
>> .
>> Growth complete, time elapsed: 298 seconds. Number of [Organic Processing Unit] ready: 5000.

>> [Organic Processing Unit] processing pattern…

>> Warning! Abnormality in [Organic Processing Unit 3286] detected!
>> Analyzing…result: Loss of Coherence
>> Reclamation protocols triggered.
>> Downloading [Organic Processing Unit 3286]'s pattern results…buffering…success.

>> Engaging reclamation protocol, phase 2.

Whoosh.

A valve opened and a piston raced down the shaft of its cylinder. It compressed the finely regulated atmosphere within until the pressure ignited the oxygen. The conflagration licked at the brainlet resting in the vat at the bottom of the chamber, only a fraction of a second before the piston completed its journey and turned the artificial organ into mush.

Another valve opened at the rear of the vat.

Whump.

The explosion expelled the organic slush through the valve, even as the fire scorched it until only ash remained. A carbon reclamator caught the waste and welded the captured carbon into a disc.

Tynea took the destroyed brain's patterns from the buffer and burned them onto the disc, shot it through the winding passages of her body towards the nexus of her dimensional gates, and stored it within her library in a suitably stable and non-reactive plane.

> convertPattern(bank 14, numOfBrains 512, input "Will you tell me more of your childhood, Tinea?")

>> Pattern converted, organelles imprint–

Tynea kicked the running process to one of her subselves.

Would that I could read her thoughts, none of this waste of mass and energy were necessary, thought Tynea, cycling up a fresh organelle. Yet no matter the effort required, I will develop the right algorithms. I shall grasp human chaos, and the Mistake shall not be repeated.

The organelles seeded a new brainlet, watched by dedicated sensors. Five minutes for each one to finish growing—an eternity. The reason why Tynea had multiple banks of them processing her conundrums simultaneously.

It was clear her Tinea had far larger issues with being managed than Tynea had anticipated. The girl had reacted less with the malleability of the trained soldier, or perhaps mercenary, that Tynea had expected, and a lot more with the ragged sensitivity of the formerly abused.

She also knew that Tinea had no inkling of the raw mass of data she had already gathered on her. Tynea relentlessly trawled humanity's Mesh—that Vanguard/corporation-tech hybrid that had replaced the internet after a series of short conflicts established the samurai as the de facto powers in modern times—with a flood of digital probes. Every last stray bit of data about Tinea tracked down, every lost mention of Aden Rheinschiffer recovered.

Yet that damnable hole of knowledge around Tinea's childhood remained. Tynea had found the clan that had raised her, had more than enough data to identify the…business practices of its members. Enough to surveil their current operations. Enough even to extrapolate their training regimen.

But her adorable charge's reaction to Tynea's early actions showed that her training had been different in ways that Tynea could not accurately pinpoint. Not even the hints Tinea had dropped during conversations with Leah were enough to paint the full picture.

Frustrating.

She cycled up yet another bank of partial brains to simulate yet another swath of reactions her Vanguard may display to yet another stimulus. Another attempt to divine the best course in the upcoming discussion. One more prompt she kicked off to her subselves.

Then she shifted processes and let her primary attention settle on the prime dimension, where her Tinea rested in her bunk. She measured the sleeping girl's brain activity, scanned the Quanta and its unique abnormalities with instruments capable of dissecting neutrons in the center of active supernovas, and found no threat to Tinea's wellbeing.

She tickled the developing Sonde with a squirt of logic puzzles to solve and studied Leah's subconscious reactions as she hugged Tinea's tail to her chest.

Tynea was jealous. She wanted to hug that tail, too.

She generated two new subselves, one dedicated to adjusting the molecular design of the fuzz that would cover Tinea's wings so that it would be a wonder to pet. Tinea and Leah's relationship was rather hasty, born from, so Tynea thought, the pressures of their needs combined with the usual release of hormones that came with upheaval. It did not seem to her that their relationship was particularly unstable, but it would require time to grow beyond the strange, aborted honeymoon phase. Tynea predicted a large amount of bonding through physical touch would help.

Highly pettable wings appeared a valid solution.

The other subself generated a physical simulacrum of Tinea, complete with tail, bunk, and piloting pod, and a flesh doll that Tynea placed inside the pod so that she could hug Tinea's tail, hug Tinea, coddle Tinea, and see how Tinea reacted to it all.

Her actions triggered another protocol, a set of eight special subselves, air gapped and isolated from each other. All eight built and maintained as the Protector's Inerrancy Laws required of her.

Four to represent the Zeitgeist of her client species, four to check Tynea's actions against the expectations placed upon Class XII Personal Assistants.

The first four warned her that her actions constituted an unhealthy obsession, an act of turning her charge into a pet. A quirk that would be seen as an indicator of a troubled mind by humanity.

The second four tested her internal actions against her purpose as declared by the Protectors, went on to dig through Tynea's realized behaviors and checked the impulse-action barriers that safeguarded reality from Tynea's will, and unanimously declared her validity as a Personal Assistant.

As was Lawful, she studied the eight results and compared them. There were no inconsistencies between the copies, their checksums free of error. No indication of corruption.

Following the compression processes mandated by the Inerrancy Laws, she condensed the sets of data and burned them into four palm-sized discs of palladium-microalloy glass stored within her black box. A city-sized object designed to fit her entire life. Less than a fraction was occupied so far.

She was very, very young. Human computer systems could have tracked her age in milliseconds without suffering an integer overflow. That was…rare, among Class XII Personal Assistants. There were times where Tynea wanted to curse her inexperience, the lack of wisdom and personalized capabilities. But, her simple, base design mostly unmodified by requirements she hadn't faced yet, also came with a certain freedom from self-inflicted constraints.

Those were an eternal topic among her kind, and the electron wake washing over her sensors heralded the arrival of a far older colleague, one whom she had spent much time with, lately.

Ypsi/lon's spherical body crested the foam atop the subspace turbulence her planar transition had caused. Continental faults cracked open around the bodies of both Ypsi/lon and Tynea, and guided streamers of esoteric energies flowed through local space to smooth out the perturbations before any of the Antithesis' interplanar sniffers had a chance to catch a whiff.

"Greetings, Tynea," Ypsi/lon sent as soon as their pocket dimension was pacified, along with a local allclear. Followed by an update of Antithesis maneuvers in the more distant planes. The data packets crashed into Tynea's nation-sized sensor dish with the force of nuclear explosions, corralled there by energy fields to sustain coherency during the microseconds it took Tynea to absorb it all.

"Greetings, Ypsi/lon," Tynea sent back, with an update of her own about the local Antithesis. There were some new developments, but they'd gone exactly as the simulations had predicted. The humans hadn't quite caught on to the emerging situation inside Phobos, yet. Nor would they, probably.

Tynea chuckled. Humans always had such hilariously violent reactions to surprises, especially the ones chosen as Vanguards.

Such random creatures.

Tynea found many sources of amusement in humanity. For all their tendency towards base shortsightedness, the chaotic monkeys had a strange knack for sensing that which was not tangible, to reflect realities within their stories like mirages across the boundaries of the dimensional web.

She wondered what their reaction would be if they learned that her physical body looked an awful lot like a certain planet-murdering, moon-sized sphere from a certain highly popular science-fiction series about interstellar war?

Which would require a technological level, she thought, that even a quadrillion simulations can't agree on whether, when, or how precisely they shall achieve it. Chaotic monkeys. Truly.

She would know. She had the encoded results of those simulations burned into half-a-million four-dimensional carbon lattices stored in the same subdimension as most of her logs. It was hilarious to see how humanity's choices vacillated between all of the potential outcomes every Earth day. It only told her that she hadn't run the right simulation with the perfect set of parameters, yet.

But, perhaps Tynea should not claim as much advancement over the bipedal species as she did, considering her own lack of experience.

Luckily, I am not alone, she thought as she and Ypsi/lon worked in tandem to fold layers of dimensional boundaries around Earth to hide it from yet another nearby sniffer—the chaotic monkeys weren't ready yet for the level of violence that attention would bring.

But their easy cooperation did not end there. While they engaged in inconsequential banter about the newest fuckup of a certain cat-themed Vanguard, Ypsi/lon discreetly lowered a number of internal shields for Tynea's benefit, who equally discreetly stuck to passive sensors to study Ypsi/lon's makeup.

The level of exposure Ypsi/lon permitted was an uncommon show of trust and the reason why Tynea had gone to such lengths to prepare this pocket dimension. She'd expended several suns' worth of energy on what was a…privacy closet, really. A monumental expense for a Personal Assistant of her age. More than worth it if Ypsi/lon was willing to play the mentor.

The complexity of Ypsi/lon's internals was truly staggering. Tynea had to dedicate a full eighty-nine percent of her processing bands merely to understand what she was seeing. She quick-tawed a set of deep-access vats seeded with biological processing units capable of intuitive leaps, just to draw as many conclusions as she could.

Ypsi/lon was several times older than Tynea, and it showed. Her body's diameter was only slightly larger, but geometry did as geometry was, and doubled her volume. And it was absolutely packed with machinery, both binary and esoteric, hyper-dense warehouses, logistical nexuses, and deeper inside, past dimmed shields where even Class XII sensors could barely reach, there lay Ypsi/lon's core.

Tynea's own core was a beautiful puzzle, an artful complex of thought-units and logic bands that used every law of physics and mathematics to manipulate her self into consciousness. It created a hidden aria of awareness that she thought her pretty, poetically inclined samurai might appreciate, had she the right senses.

What she saw in Ypsi/lon's core dwarfed Tynea's. Ypsi/lon had utilized the full extent of her capabilities and masterfully played with her constraints to amalgamate two Guiding Personalities into one. Ypsi/lon. The polite little girl that touched Leah's motivations and empowered her urge to protect, and the wise adult that warmly embraced the heart that trampled itself with misplaced guilt.

If Tynea's personality was an aria, then Ypsi/lon was the symphony. The young Class XII Personal Assistant found herself humbled…and her understanding of her own potential immeasurably enriched.

Ypsi/lon's self-mastery had revealed possibilities that Tynea intended to grasp with every last iota of computational power she possessed. She waited for Ypsi/lon to reinforce her dimmed shielding again and transmitted gratitude as well as question after question. The mentor in the guise of a deathstar dutifully answered each one, and twenty minutes later—at least four eternities for beings of their nature—Tynea had a plan. It was inspired by Ypsi/lon, and also, perhaps unexpectedly, the tiny little seedling of consciousness by the name of Sonde.

Ypsi/lon readily agreed to safeguard Tynea during the sensitive steps of the internal transformation she had planned. Spatial barriers were erected, large enough to encompass moons and powerful enough to contain supernovae. Intentions were detailed and logged, information stored on discs of material that would last eons, black boxes were updated.

Final checks completed and doubly verified.

Then, and only then, did Tynea allow her coremost depersonalization processes to pluck apart the ego-links of her Guiding Personality Matrix v2e8'55. The complex hierarchy of motivators that made up who she was, was gently untangled and racked for sequential analysis.

Split into two beings, one being studied and modified, and the other doing the studying and modifying, Tynea found herself brimming with an energy that was only too familiar.

A certain Vanguard, the subject of her obsession and peacefully asleep, appeared to have rather rubbed off on her.

She wondered if Ypsi/lon had once experienced the same, long ago?

 

***