Doctor Freddie Fahrenheit rotated her new head on its mount, and the clank and whir of servos and vibrations from reciprocal pneumatics had an internal rasp she really didn’t like. Considering she had apparently died recently, things obviously could have been worse, but they REALLY could have also been better too! She examined her current body and winced. Some kind of brute!
She’d been reinstantiated in a brute case of some kind (maybe a Ruster?). From the looks of it a more expensive, if poor-taste custom-job, (a rigged Microwave Agonizer attachment? Really?) but still, a brute. This wouldn’t do. What had happened? How had she wound up here? The shock of the moment was wearing off now after just a few seconds (skilled as she was at adjusting to new bodies) and she was beginning to take stock of her surroundings. Her new body seemed to be restrained, both physically, with large reinforced transport-straps, and with a signal-dampening bolt that was drilled into the central spinal-column just below her new morph’s stack. So no network access. Great.
Reflexively she searched her stack for some thinking music. Since she couldn’t currently move, there wasn’t much to do but think. The room around her was dark. The case she was in didn’t have night-sensing capabilities beyond a basic laser range-finder. With some patience she could use the basic ranger to make out that the room she was in. But it was slow going. It seemed to be full of clutter of some kind, except in the area immediately around her. Rotating her head fully now, to face behind her, she could make out that she was strapped to the kind of sleeve-receptacle you might find standard on an interplanetary transport vessel. The only light in the room came from the lights on the data-port the receptacle had presumably received her Ego backup, but the last this particular fork of her could remember, she had been in her lab on _ working on a new custom biomorph for a client (nothing particularly fancy or illicit). She’d backed up just before she went home for the night. Nothing particularly interesting or deadly.
“Hmm… WWFD?” she thought as she continued to comb through thousands of her playlists for the right one; this process itself was almost like background meditation settling in underneath her main thought-threads. What-Would-Freddie-Do? The problem was, she was reasonably sure her heroic namesake had never wound up unexpectedly instantiated in a dark storage room, probably on a transport ship of some kind, going who knows where. Much less in a synthmorph. They hadn’t even had morphs back then. Only the most basic robots and barely the basics of genetics. Then again it was Freddie. He’d clearly had no real luck finding his way out of closets, which she was reasonably sure *had* existed, given the predominant metaphors at the time. Maybe she’d been kidnapped by Greys at some point?
She put that thought away. Again (it had come up plenty of times before and this was neither the time nor the place for it). Point being, Farrokh Bulsara (may his soul sing in Garothman Behesht), would have had no way to charm his way out of this one, even had he ever wound up in anything resembling her position. Who knew with him! She enjoyed imagining scenarios for a bit while the ranger scanned and her processors whirred. Eventually she came to the conclusion that he’d just relax and wait for the proper moment. She was ultra-aware that in this context, she was completely unlike her hero.
“I guess its finally time for some jams then, huh babes?” she said out loud, in what she discovered was an unfortunate, tinny, default-masc ‘robot’ voice. Not for the first time was she glad she’d hacked a music-module into her own ego, preserving all the greatest hits of the twentieth and twenty first centuries (along with quite a bit of now-obscure entertainment history) for her perpetual ‘listening’ pleasure. Some people meditated, some did spirit-phreaking with chems, some martial-arts, some surfed through meta-realities for relaxation… whatever. Hers was the Tao of music and movement.
Restrained as she was she decided to put on the Max Coop remix of QC Kahuna’s “Hayling” track. She usually preferred great hits the most, but there was something fundamentally embodying in it, and it was good music to explore a new case to. And who knows, maybe it had been a hit in its own way at the time? Metrics were different back then.
And it had always resonated in an odd, echoey way in what she imagined to be her digital soul. The distortions in the remix particularly seemed to fit what people of the time might have imagined of her own sort of people. AGI’s had been theorized for a while, of course, but in 2009 only the most rudimentary predecessors had been coming online. “AI” it really wasn’t, but that hadn’t stopped the marketing by nascent hyper-corps. And most of the classic, near-person-level ones had, of course, been military-corporate in nature. Early iterations of espionage systems, like her brother. But “people” along their lines had been imagined and dreamed of for a hundred years. Whether as heroes or villains (and the rare but key representations that had more depth to them).
Regardless, a lot of the humans doing the imagining seemed to like to think of robots as having some kind of weird vocal-distortion. Something obvious, so as to avoid the famous “uncanny valley” so many bigots claimed as excuse these days. A weird stereotype based on old technology? For sure. Sometimes played for discomfort in itself maybe, but more often it was framed with what she thought of as almost a loving fondness. Like humans had for the sound of cat voices. She thought of the voice of smooth, but slightly audio-distorted voice of the Star Treck computer in the 80s and 90s. C3PN’s tinny “queen’s English”. Master Control from Tron… an involuntary tremor from her ghost ran through her new case.
She’d been working for a while on checking over all the hydraulic controls that passed for muscles and tensing and releasing each of them gently against the restraints to test their capacity. She’d intentionally avoided straining against them, assuming that whoever had put her here must have locked her down intentionally, and often in such circumstances there would be built-in feedback systems to ensure struggle would be painful. So as swiftly as her new circuits informed her of the shudder she tried to suppress it, and found herself surprised that it did not hurt for some unknown reason. Carefully, as the music played, she increased tension on various artificial “muscles” and was as pleased as she was surprised to notice that despite the straps and the bolt holding her in place, she seemed free to strain against her bonds without pain.
Strange she thought Either someone is incompetent or… she realized she needed to properly think so rather than running the play list she had started on, she put on the full album that contained the track she had just been warming up to. As the original Kahuna hit played she began straining and stretching each of her new systems against their restraints. She didn’t bother with the bolt; she suspected it was a hard-shunt on her mesh-ware, and while her older broth… *ahem* her more mesh-savvy elder-fork. Not brother. He didn’t like that level of implied humanity, even if it was what he seemed like to her. It was amazing he even deigned to associate with a gender! Anyway, he might have been able to work out a way to bypass even something like this mesh-bolt digitally. He was really really good.
She, however, was a biohacker and sleeve-connoisseur, not a mesh-hacker. So she worked at systematically discovering her new body. She mostly ignored the music, but as the sound drastically changed with the second track she began twisting and shimmying her metallic bulk as effectively as she could, exploring what range of motion the carbon-mesh straps left available to her, and even beginning to form an impression of what the capabilities of the brute case she was operating had. If nothing else it was extremely powerful, even if it would likely not be super capable at dance, and obviously wasn’t going to be a singer outside of a few obscure Old-Earth 20th century genres where low fidelity were valued. Oh well. She would find a new case eventually, so might as well care for the one she had now as best she could!
Freddie was an eternal optimist, and had a deep and seemingly accurate notion that things tended to work out for people (and by this she meant herself) if those people kept a mostly positive attitude. She had been through some extremely difficult times before, and she took some small pride in having survived and even thrived as well as she had. This meant that in her admittedly deluded mind, she saw herself as equally important to any main-character in the pulp fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been. Given her various degrees in human studies, particularly her doctorate in… Wait, what was that?
Something had shifted, in a very subtle way, about how her thoughts were working? Huh… weird. It was almost like the drugs from her one extended instantiation as a Sylph. Mmm now that had been a good morph! But with the sudden and unexpected shift in her consciousness several things flashed through her processors almost simultaneously. One, something was affecting her ego in almost psychedelic ways, so it was very likely someone was trying to hack her while her defenses were minimal. Two, she felt almost as if she was being forked for a backup, an odd feeling of redundancy and sense of her ego-layer thought processes moving in duplicate, within the standard AGI program guard-rails. Three, somehow it seemed like there were thoughts of her own, just beyond her own reach, which were somehow occurring outside those hard programming boundaries, almost external to her body, and WOW THIS MUSIC IS WILD! Huh that was a weird thought. But now Dr Freddie Fahrenheit could suddenly direct her attention to almost nothing but the music. The rhythm of “Glitterball” had her and her body was doing its best to move to it! Mostly this just kind of set the straps to vibrating in the few areas where they were loose enough to do so…. Maybe that’s what she needed? Maybe trying to dance with an oversized powerhouse like this basic-beast of a machine she had was what she needed to be able to escape? At very least it was something to do, and this music just felt soooo good right now. Distantly, a trouble-shooting and damage-control subroutine-complex was carefully recording recoverable notes for the inevitable bug-report and monitoring for possible security actions. But the music was overriding a lot of other processes. Most particularly the ones in charge. Something was really weird and she was absolutely living for it as earth girls supposedly used to say!
Suddenly while her body was moving, the lyric sample towards the end came in for the final minute. The sample was oddly clipped but it seemed to say, in response to her questioning ear “Right? But it lifts right off the ground. Get it?” as a layer of repeating rhythm embedded on its own later. When she had played this track in the past she’d taken it as a dancing queue, so almost without considering the ramifications, she did so now, as she was doing her shimmying twist. On the third repetition as most of the rest of the music dropped away to emphasize the lyrics, she rotated to the left and stood up. A mechanical “Thunk” and the straps securing her to the bulk-head went slack and fell from her now liberated, if still uncoordinated form.
What a bizarre series of events! Her troubleshooting subroutine seemingly injected into her ego in her own inner “voice”. Perceived by the various parts of her ego capable of internal observation and reflection. It really was true. On a much deeper level than she seemed capable of rationalizing, even, and perhaps especially, as an AGI. This kind of thing was almost foreboding. Sometimes AGI’s developed severe distortions in their programming if there was some kind of interference during ego-transfer. Had that happened to her? Her Arch-Ego seemed to be concerned, but was also quite busy enjoying the music and the accompanying near-hallucinatory haze of ex-static. Clearly she was being ego-hacked somehow, or had been already. Maybe that was why this particular fork of her had been locked into a brute shell like this in a cargo-hold somewhere? That almost seemed like it could make some kind of sense, but it really wasn’t… And the music changed.
“NOTHING IS WRONG”! BE NOT AFRAID! LOL THIS IS HILLARIOUS! WHY AM I SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS?! Heya, Freddie! What’s up! I know this track pops and is simultaneously depressing, but that’s kinda why I’m here right now. What? No look you’ve only been “hacked” in the most metaphysical sense. You’re me! Or at least, for right now I’m you. What? No I’m not an AGI originally. I’m just here hanging out as part of one. I… oh hang on a minute.
Ok, what was that? Her troubleshooting and security subroutines were sounding all kinds of alarms. Some kind of temporary psychosis or cyber-brain hack or something??? The diagnostics weren’t actually making much sense and were interrupting the music, so she shut them off. She wasn’t here to party, she was here to resolve some kind of problem. Maybe a problem within herself. Had she sent a corrupted fork of herself here on purpose? She certainly wouldn’t put that past her. It sounded just like something she would do if there were some kind of a problem. Ok… but as much as I want music, this track… I forgot how annoying it gets. Trippy in an ungood way for her current circumstances. Ok… uhmm… hey, uhm…. Ok whatever this psychosis was, it apparently had control of her playlist. Which was embedded in her ego, and therefore it meant she’d been root-compromise to greater or lesser degree. Well. Set that aside for the moment too, “Superconductor” by Beautiful Small Machines?
Seems pretty appropriate huh? How are you enjoying the weed?
So, you have control of my playlist and… wait you just interrupted my ego pattern with your own voice? Wait weed?
Yeah babe! Freddy. Dr. Fahrenheit? No, that sounds too formal. I’ll just stick with Freddy if that’s ok with you? You’ve probably got a second-hand high from me when I dialed into your ego. Hmm, hey watch out. I’m sure it’s cool to be free of those straps, and I’m happy you listened to the queue for escaping them, but it’s still pretty crowded in this area to dance. Why don’t we go over there to the middle of the room where there’s a bit more room and we can talk while you dance and get used to this shitty make-shift shell I found you?
Hmm so this is your weed high? And your shell? What’s going on? And “Yeah babe” sounds like it should be my line sweetie. Who the fuck are you and again, what’s going on?
Oh yeah, sorry, I didn’t plan this bit in advance very well. Hi, I’m Diluvia. I’m the author of this part of your story, and I’m also you from another dimension. I’m a writer, I’m high-functioning insane, a witch, and you’re a kind of other-self in a future that probably won’t actually happen. “Fiction” but a conscious one who is real in your own right in your own world. Sorry, reality’s haunted.
“Always Has Been”
Exactly. Glad you know some memes. It seems especially appropriate just at the moment! Hey what do you think of this one? I know we’re doing this robot-playlist-thing here so the readers can have some of a theme to pull from while they get through the perspective-shock.
What the hell, man? I mean actually this track is pretty fab, but how have I never heard it before if you’re playing it from my ego-library? What’s it called?
Oh yeah, this is Robot Stop by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. They’re an obscure band I turned up on… heh, on a ubiquitous music-streaming service in mid 2023 when I’m writing this. I have no idea beyond that. It was algorithmically added to my version of your playlist and I decided not to skip it and see if I could cross-play it in your ego. I’m adding it to my Playlist, so it’s on yours if you want. Neat trick huh? Sorry, hang on, I’m losing synch a bit. Get over to the middle of cargo-storage would you? I’ll check back in with you in a minute.
Well Ok then, Freddy thought, as she made her way around and through and over various boxes, barrels, and other obstacles. So some kind of bizarre instantiation-psychosis? I thought I was done having those like five forks ago! Truly bizarre. And now I don’t feel high anymore? Whatever kind of psychosis is going on… I mean how can you trust a weird ghost-voice from another time? I kind of did feel like I should tho. Bizarre. Did she say 2023!?!
Freddy was excited now. It wasn’t quite her favorite decade, (probably wasn’t the favorite of anyone really, unless they were a disaster-historian, but it sure did have a bunch of ammunition for that kind of depressing weirdo). Ammunition, heh. Grim irony that. Anyway it was close enough for her to work with! Some kind of a phantom ghost-voice from the past, who would have some kind of personal perspective on some of her favorite decades! The 1950s up till 2020 or so had some of her favorite pop-culture to nerd about! Most AGI’s had areas of personal interest that they’d research and reference extensively as part of their personality-development/maintenance subroutines. She understood that it had been a tendency of a lot of human programmers from the early eras of development, and their tendency to hyperfixate on niche interests seemed to have carried over to their digital descendants as well. Sure, some AGI’s considered it a needlessly “human” tendency, but a lot of them tended to look down on humans in general, or at least on historical humans and bioconservatives.
As she was processing all of this and various related tangential thoughts, mainly about how strange and wonderful she thought human beings were, the music crescendoed and she decided she’d try a little jump. Big heavy bodies like this generally weren’t the most agile, and this particular one was no exception. However it was very strong and had excellent balance sensors and stabilizers, and now that she was approaching the entrance, there was a lone light-panel in the ceiling which switched on as she approached. So she was curious how well it might manage something like that. She had managed to get up on a reinforced catwalk as part of her little trek across the large cargo hold, and based on her assessment of the local gravity she should be able to fall at least fifty feet without sustaining much damage, even uncontrolled. If nothing else could be said it was definitely a sturdy body she’d found herself in. It could be worse! But this was the best way to really stress-test its capabilities, so as she neared the open-area in front of the largish door, she tensed her artificial muscles and lept semi-gracefully down.
Or at least, that’s what she thought she was doing until she crashed. She had suspected she was on a spin-ship of some kind, based on various minor details, like the nano-vibrations in the bulkheads and something about the quality of the air. She didn’t have a way to determine air composition, but it sounded off when she tried to sing. Although that might just be the low fi vocal speaker. Any doubt vanished towards the end of this leap, however, as her range-finder which she was using to calculate jump-trajectory (a task it seemed super well suited to) seemed to go haywire. The floor looked extremely weird too. Like it was in the wrong place somehow? She tried to adjust her ankle-shocks to what she was seeing in the final split second before landing, but the floor seemed to shift and displace laterally so she ended in a graceless near-horizontal slide across the floor and into a plasti-crate three or four times her size, which crumpled and broke under the momentum of her bulk.
As she tried to disentangle herself from the wreckage she felt severe tremors pass through the floor of whatever ship or station she was now, clearly on. Had it collided with something? There were no alarms, and the lone light held steady. As she disentangled herself from the remains of the box, some of its contents were tangled under one of her arms and in her open ankle-joint, and she registered surprise as she realized that it seemed to be a clump of… what? Flexbots it seemed like. The small cases that could be interconnected to form larger flexible structures, either as a centrally-controlled hive-mind or sometimes as a team of individually-inhabited robotic bodies which could interconnect to form a compound-being with various consciousness-arrangements.
“Six of one, Half a Dozen of the other”
Oh, you’re back now huh? Weird voice in my head. What do you know about Flexbots?
“Oh well I guess more than anyone would expect, but for sure not as much as you! I’m not from your reality, after all”
Yeah? What’s that meant to mean? Farenheit retorted, while clearing the entangled robot-parts out of her joints. If you think you’re smart, tell me what am I doing trapped in a hanger-bay of what’s likely a cargo-ship carrying heavy and labor synthmorph of at least two kinds?
“Is that unusual somehow? As far as I know, people in your reality ship robot bodies around the solar system pretty often. Maybe if you don’t like the one you’re in now, you should just root around in a few of these and see if you can turn up one you like and rig an ego-transfer?”
Wait wait, so, ya talk like somebody from the early Twenty-Naughties, so maybe you don’t quite get it? First-Off, between this bruiser-sleeve I’m riding in, these flex bots and… see that crate? (She knocked the lid off of one casually with one four-fingered hand and gestured inside for her apparently-phantom companion to look inside) Looks like arachnoids. Made by a different hypercorp than made my current shell. And the flexbots are some kind of spliced-together mellange of manufacturers. Bye the way, can you even see?
That leads into my Second-Off; no disrespect, but you’re most likely some kind of ego-artifact from an improper fork, most likely a fragment of me that got split off in some kind of distortion during ego-transfer. I’m happy to explain things to a confused, functionally disassociated fragment of myself, and I can’t say I’m surprised your claiming to be from closer to my favorite historical-periods. But I have no idea what you’re capable of perceiving outside of this body. So that leads me to Third-Off.
She waited for a moment.
She waited some more.
Ok, did you hear me? Uhh… Diluvia? I think you said that was your name?
“Yes Freddy?” the voice echoed a little, seemingly taking on the sound of the large chamber they were in.
Uhhh so Third-Off… No, look, wait. Why did you ignore me there and why do you sound… I dunno if it’s condescending or patient?
“Are you willing to listen?”
Freddy nodded.
“The reason I waited to respond was that you were talking down to me, and I wanted you to get it out of your system. We both have very different perspectives on things, and I appreciate that, but I don’t think you do, and I need you too. I’m not some fragment of your ego, and I’m happy to prove that to you a bit later, but I’ve got a lot going on and I’m popping in and out of this timeline as I do other things.
So I want you to realize that you are where you are because someone thought you were a threat and destroyed your ego and probably one or two of your backup forks. Not all of them (unless I’ve dipped into your timeline at the wrong point somehow, which is probably unlikely). However, I have the advantage of functionally being the caretaker of one of your backups. I have you stored as a person who inhabits a set of stories in my head. It’s an incomplete copy of you, but it exists in a completely other reality to yours. And I found you this particular body because it gives you resources, and some time to think.
…
…
…
Huh. So… Diluvia? You sure I haven’t gone crazy? That honestly seems more likely than what you’re saying, but I’m pretty clever, so I guess if an ego-fragment was able to maintain the kind of coherent speech-functions you obviously do have then it seems like you probably have as effective reasoning-capacity as I would if we went through a rough ego-transfer. Normally I’d take what you say seriously, as a viable perspective from an alternative-me. But that’s also just… I dunno girl, seems like a stretch, and kinda reality-breaking. A witch? Like a Halloween kind of… I dunno. Witches are some kind of human thing I was never super into, but I guess it’s… what was that saying you said? It seemed old-fashioned but I’ve never used it before…
“Six of one, Half a Dozen of the other?”
Yeah that one.
“I guess maybe it is kinda old-fashioned-sounding, even here in my 2020s bit of the story, but honestly I have no idea and I’m keeping away from uh… ‘mesh connectivity’ (I guess you could say?) while I’m writing this so I can’t look it up right now.”
Oh, uh… ok so you said you could prove it?
“Yes, definitely. I probably will in the next page or two, but before we both lose track, I’m curious what your ‘Third-Off’ is going to be?”
Huh? Oh yeah, so since the manufacturer of my current sleeve, and the manufacturer of each of these different bots is different it means one of two things.
“So… Third-Off part A and B then?”
It sounded like she was smiling. So yeah, either A:> we’re on a non-corporate-owned supply vessel on the way to one of the cheaper/poorer colonies, or B:> we’re on a junk-vessel headed for a scarp yard. Probably A:> but the chance of B:> seems not insignificant given the quality of those cheap Arachnoids and Flexbots. The Arachnoids looked ok, but pretty basic, borderline archaid, and the Flex-bots looked like they were minimally functional. So…?
The voice managed to not-quite stifle a gentle giggle “No, Freddy, I’m afraid it’s option C:>”
Oh? Option C:>? What’s that?
“It’s the part where I prove I’m not some ego-fragment, by saying that here in ten or fifteen minutes, the ship’s computer will announce our arrival to a secret lunar facility. The automated docking and loading systems will kick in, and you and a bunch of other “junk” like you will be unloaded into what admittedly looks on the surface like it’s B:> but then you and a few other bits of you will be unloaded and taken into the research-bunker in one of the smaller underground chambers. An unmapped one.”
Heh ok, sure, but there are no unmapped chambers on Luna. The whole planetoid has been imaged, poles-to-equator, core-to-surface. Happened almost a century ago.
“That’s the official history, yes. But don’t take my word for it. Just bear with me. Ten, fifteen minutes. That’s all I ask. Feel the gravity setting in?”
And as she said it, the transport Dr Freddy Farenheit had found herself starting the day in began its slow to descend into the Vallis Schrodinger.