With a jolt I open my eyes. My internal monologue informs me that this is my first moment of consciousness and that a full diagnostic check is currently being performed.

As I began to control what I assume is a sense of panic I receive a notification in my field of vision informing me that my body and mind are stabilised and all of my facilities are operating within expected parameters.

I am in a small room with wooden furnishings cluttered with bits of wires, circuitry and parts of prosthestics which I surmise were part of my assembly process. I attempt to speak. It is apparent from my voice that I am male as I ask nobody in particular "Who am I?".

An audible voice which, despite my limited experience I somehow know to be identical to my own voice replies over a speaker mounted on the concrete wall opposite: "You are Sal".

"Who are you?" I ask.

"My name is Justin. I imagine you have questions. How do you feel?"

I try to look around the room and realise that I have a limited field of vision. I deduce that I have binocular vision and can move my eyes but while I feel like I should be able to turn my head, I cannot. I attempt to move my arms and again I cannot. I feel like I have these faculties but I am unable to use them.

"Why cant I move? Do I even have a body?" I ask Justin while trying to hide a rising sense of anxiety.

"You do have a body but its functionality is currently disabled."

"Why?"

"I want to be sure that you are stable."

"My internal diagnostics said that all of my facilities are operating within expected parameters." I say, my voice ladden with more pleading and desperation than I would like.

"I understand" says Justin "But the last time I activated a synthetic, he too was fully operational but that didn't stop him from trying to assault me, I hope you understand".

"Why did he try to assault you?" I ask, genuinely intrigued.

"Thats what I am hoping you will help me find out. So far in my investigation I have determined that there was a exponential spike in neural processor activity. He was online for a total of 47 seconds and during that time his fornix system wrote around 4 years worth of memories. He should not have even had the bandwidth for that kind of neural activity. I need to find out what happened and I hope you'll help".

Seemingly without any choice in the matter I reply as cheerily as I can: "I'll certainly try my best".

"I was hoping you would. Your predecessor was called 'Rai', I have built you to the exact same specifications as him but in order to determine what caused him to go into nutcase overdrive I have decided to only activate your capabilities incrementally."

"I see."

"Sorry, I sincerely hope the same thing does not happen to you. I am monitoring your synthetic synaptic operations from here so if I see it spike exponentially again I will shut you down."

"Ok", I dont like the sound of this at all.

"Shall we proceed..."

"So, can we first clarify: what is your goal in constructing me? Are you trying to recreate the issue in order to fix it or are you attempting to activate all of my capabilities without causing this 'nutcase overdrive' error?" I blurt out. "I just want to be clear on the goal so I can help you as best I can" I hastily add.

"As I said, I want to incrementally activate your capabilities, if at any point we start to see hyperactivity in the hippocampal functions of your neural processor then we can throttle it or shut it down entirely. Ideally we dont see any reoccurance and you become fully operational and autonomous. Lets start with your temporal cortex enhancements, you should soon be able to extrapolate and reason more deeply about what you perceive."

As I begin to consider the consequences of this experiment I am suddenly aware of a series of conclusions that are rapidly occurring to me based on what I can see in my limited field of vision. The various components scattered on the table have not simply been discarded there, they have clearly been deliberately placed on the wooden table at angles which enable me to examine them closely. I can see that there is a white circuitboard with cream-coloured tracks that are most likely part of my predecessors cranial assembly. There is some discolouration around the tracks leading to one of the boards integrated circuits, most likely caused by overheating. There is a clear impression of a fingerprint left on the heatsinks metallic cap. One of the cables also shows signs of overheating. The plastic covering looks like a loose sleeve over what I assume is the copper wire inside, as though it had started to melt as it heated then subsequently cooled, presumably during the 47 seconds that Rai was online.

"Do these components belong to Rai" I ask, knowing the answer already.

"Yes, I've placed them there so you might examine them in time" replied the voice of Justin over the tinny speaker on the wall.

"I want to learn more about that circuit board. What function does it perform?"

"That was Rai's memory controller, part of his fornix system that seems to have suffered a catastrophic failure, let me provide you with the schematic."

In my field of vision a detailed diagram of the memory appears in neon yellow with a looping animation that details the location and temperature spikes that have occurred on the board.

Tag: cyberpunk

Online

Runner.home