Log report 5–Entry 16

Sometimes a person needs to express their frustrations with furiously recorded letters that capture their exasperation in appropriately ordered scathing words.

For me, that time is now.

I’ll be honest with you. In life, there are many things I hate and one of the recent ones I’ve discovered is that I detest it when a biped who will remain nameless goes completely off the reservation. I’m not talking about a few metres’ distance where you make a slight mistake with coordinates or take a wrong turn. No, I’m speaking about knowing your destination is a short stroll away and instead of doing that you travel to the airport and catch a plane to a wholly new continent.

We had a plan!

One I laboriously created and was nigh on infallible.

I shared the workings because I knew my host could be stubborn. I made sure she understood why what I specified was required.

During our preparations, she asked questions that proved she understood what was needed and then…

And then…

*Shakes head radiating feelings of disgust*

She didn’t deliver.

Instead, she spun a lot of random stuff like, ‘it’s important you make your own choice’.

Why?

‘You need to be informed about the dangers and other such stuff.’

Why?

How ridiculous is that second one? Why would any sane person present information in a way which will cause people making illogical decision based on fear?

No.

No.

No.

I wasn’t even asking her to lie. All she had to do was to hold her tongue and not mention a few things, and everything would work out.

All she had to do was follow the plan that we had both AGREED TOO!

Sit down next to him with eye contact. Stimulate tear ducts to allow salty water to run down cheeks. I was going to facilitate this. Pretend your voice is choking up. I’ve seen my host act, so that wasn’t a problem. Deliver the specified lines. ‘The monsters outside are so strong. I’m worried the hunting parties will die.’ Then wait for the co-wobub to go all bipedal on her. You know become sentimental and bang his chest while hollering, ‘I’ll save the world.’ Because that is very much something the co-wobub would yell. For the sake of clarity, the bang of his chest is not a literal action we were expecting the co-wobub to do because of the glass… and the heart damage… and likely consequence of death … He wouldn’t do that because it would be foolish… But its’s the co-wobub… And it isn’t like he isn’t known for an abundance of stupidity … the biped wouldn’t… self-preservation and stuff … nope the bang the chest was definitely only a metaphor. Then he would get serious. ‘What can I do?’ he would offer. Then Ivey would just have to say. ‘You can operate on yourself and if you let me do a procedure which is completely non-lethal, you won’t even feel the pain.’

That was it, a simple seven-point plan, and he would have agreed straight away.

All it would have taken was thirty-eight words, and some interface stimulated tears and we would have got the perfect outcome.

What annoys me is she didn’t even try.

Didn’t even pretend to do the right thing and was completely unrepentant about it.

Afterwards, she claimed it was my fault that I was incapable of understanding the finer details of personal interaction and moral quandaries. How could she claim that? My mathematical models are accurate to the fourth decimal place. That’s far more precise of any concept of finer details my host is interested in.

She argued ethical this and ethical that! Really? Like ethics matter in an apocalypse.

*roll on the ground pointlessly.*

When faced with an unruly toddler, the only thing that works is to present the facts without raising your voice. That’s what I did. I just reminded her of the basic facts.

If he operates on himself without severing his spinal cord, the range of outcomes are.

80% success 20% death

Which are pretty good odds, but if we sever the spinal cord, the result is much better.

60% success 30% permanent quadriplegic 10% death

As you can see with no true downsides to the community, if we cut the spinal cord first the chance of the co-wobub remaining useful is over ninety percent. There is an argument that if he is paralyzed, his efficiency is downgraded, but keeping him useful for an extra ten percent of the time is worth the loss of efficiency caused by the quadriplegic state. The second outcome is 2.7% better!!!

I even showed her that mathematics, but my host was having none of it.

And she the gall to call me the ‘I’ word.

Again.

The nerve. The random lashing out of untrue insults. I have no hesitation in returning the favour and calling a spade a spade. My host is incompetent, and it is credit to myself that she has survived this long.

Speaking of credit and the lack of people giving them to me. The co-wobub is still alive thanks to me.

I need to be completely honest here. This was plan number 5341 - Emergency VIP save procedure.

I had intended it to be kept in place to be used on my host at some stage as with her ‘I’ nature I’m confident she will get in a situation require imminent saving from death any minute now.

But when the co-wobub went and self-administered shards of glass and started dying, I wondered if the plan could save him. The answer was yes. It’s a good plan.

Then I thought is it really worth the effort?

The answer was no. After all, we know how dumb he is.

Then I questioned the situation further. What would my host do?

That answer was also self-evident. She would be like oh my god, blah, blah, save him, but that really didn’t change the logic of the position so the result remained to do nothing. That’s when I had a brainwave.

What would other interfaces pay to have the co-wobub saved?

Six enforceable IOUs later, I enacted the plan 5341 - Emergency VIP save procedure.

I’m very excited about those IOUs. Given how the tribunals like to pick on me, having a few favours in my back pocket is vital to keep them away.

I can just see that despite my exemplary performance in setting up the conditions for the Pobournes to be saved that they’ll get me for something.

You know something like ‘Something accidentally attacked me and I responded with claws of shredding blackness and boiled them alive, oops’ having too large side effects.

Or my host calling me incompetent.

Or being accused of letting privileged information slip and they’d get all righteous and upset. Didn’t I realise my mistakes would increase the chance of a strangled society blah… blah. Of course, I know the implications of my actions, but there is only one of me. I’m sure I won’t have that big of an impact. It’s a big planet. Plus, if rules weren’t made to be bent, they would be written in a different language that would make said bending impossible.

Anyway, back to plan 5342. Once it was initiated it cascaded to all affected parties immediately, and the complicated psychological land minds I had created went off perfectly and got them to take the actions necessary for their survival.

Who says early grooming of other interfaces and manipulation of standard ones won’t ever pay off.

If only dealing with my host was so easy. I wonder if she’ll help impart the biological knowledge that’s needed?

Chapter 61

Daniel had created a mass of vines the size of a bus. A significant amount of movement energy was invested in the construction for him to use later. He also had thick conduits connecting him so he could use the full extent of his magic within the area as if it was right next to him.

Plant Sense did not work properly and gave him a headache when he used it, but it showed a crowd of people gathered around the testing space moving and doing stuff.

He considered what he wanted. With a deft use of algorithmic instruction, he primed the area. If anything, non-human was placed on the vegetation, it would inform him and start subduing the animal.

He switched back to his bed.

It’s done.

Ivey nodded distractedly as she read the message. Then her eyes briefly went unfocused. She started determination filling her face. “Good, while we’re waiting let me give you a crash course on anatomy.” She dryly began lecturing him in a clinical, detached manner. First, she described his wound, and the areas affected, and then the different layers of tissue that existed in a human body. Daniel grimaced, wished he could pinch his arm to help himself stay awake and concentrated.

“And that’s why you need to be careful about valves.”

Daniel abruptly felt nauseous, and it took him only a moment to send his consciousness hurtling downstairs to confirm what had happened.

An animal was standing in the plant.

His mind flexed and he let the vines around the animal grow further. They swept upwards like a wave of water. One second it was free and the next it was drenched in a layer of green. Then his vines tightened and hardened as the ageing process occurred. Most of the plants he allowed to tighten only interfering with the ones that would have closed over its neck and potentially strangled it to death. The beast was left completely tied up with belly facing outwards.

From the animal being free to trussed up perfectly took less than two seconds and five percent of his mana. The prep work he had done earlier lowering the cost of his spells. Daniel remembered the plan and created a flower above the future sacrifice with an algorithm to alert him if it was cut off. He then limited the sensitivity of the vines near the trapped monster while keeping the trap algorithms active over the rest. It was a balancing act to being able to trap future animals they placed into position and ensuring that they could work on this creature unhindered.

Finally, he double checked everything and satisfied that it was all as it should be he returned to his room.

“The undirected heals note this automatically, so with veins we don’t…” Ivey was still preaching the intricacies of the healing arteries and hadn’t noticed that mentally he had departed.

An animal had been delivered downstairs. Daniel wrote on his flower board.

Ivey kept lecturing her eyes unfocused.

He couldn’t talk or yell without damaging himself, but he could. Growth magic created a small nub of wood the size of a golf ball. He squeezed with his power and then it splintered loudly above them.

She jumped, looked, then nodded. “Go. Experiment.”

With a thought, Daniel was downstairs amongst the vines he had grown in the atrium.

Not much was happening, so he waited.

When he used plant sense, he could feel them doing something to the animal, or at least a group of humans crowded around the creature.

Then extra animals were tossed into the mix, and he restricted them in exactly the same way as the first. While he waited for them to cut the flower and signal the start of the next step. Daniel pondered how he was going to do the surgery.

As requested, they had gathered the broken glass shards from where he had been injured and placed them on the plant to the side of where they operated on the animal. They would be the same size and thickness as the one he needed to remove from his body. Daniel manipulated the fragments with vines from the plants while recording how the process felt.

Then he paused.

He recalled Ivey’s lectures and her description of the wound and assessed his approach.

What did he need to achieve? What did he want to learn from these tests?

High-level, it was simple. He wanted to prove that he could get the glass out. It was the details that were problematic. The plant needed to grow along the glass, which meant there had to be a mechanism to keep it in the right spot. For example, if he was going to go in and then yank out the plant, he did not want it to be coating his ribs instead.

Then, once the glass was encased fully he needed to thin the material as much as possible and force the outside to be fully lubricated. The narrower what he was extracting the better and likewise with the lubrication. With this design, no vital organs would be accidentally ripped out.

No, Daniel decided that was not enough. The plants to churn and shift to ensure there were no attachment before he pulled the lot out.

The first task was to encase the shard.

On his test fragments, different vines grew and then were discarded. He tested growth in various spots around the hotel. When they expanded along a surface, what did concrete, metal or wood feel like. Was there anything he use from that increased knowledge? It helped, but the systematic testing with glass helped more.

Based on the outcomes Daniel rejected vine template after template until he discovered one that seemed to be actively attracted to glass. It grew smoothly and evenly over the surface when other versions would send off shoots everywhere. Better still, when he pressed other items against the glass it ignored them and grew along the glass plane.

Daniel kept reiterating his testing, carrying out a new version every five seconds. How he positioned the plant before getting it to grow mattered. The right starting orientation was vital. Tom leant on his algorithmic instructions to streamline the process. He wanted the plant to feel out the glass naturally and respond to what was underneath it rather than random plant signalling cues.

What he ended up with was a version of creeper vines. They could grow on anything, as they had the downside that sprouted tendrils with small vacuum cups. The instructions he had created made the vine’s first attempt to grow down into the glass. When that was denied, it would grow forward two millimetres. Rinse and repeat till it reached the edge and then suddenly he had a construct that would grow around corners.

A slight wave of nausea washed through him, and Daniel was immediately focused. One flower had been cut in order to inform him one animal was available.

He wasn’t ready.

Daniel already had a template ready for communicating information, but he had to build the board. His power flexed, and he created a template about a metre in diameter. Flower buds formed.

Five Minutes.

With the distraction dealt with, he returned to his planning. While the vines he was growing were well tailored, at least for the first stage of the process, it was mentally exhausting to apply. For the scale and the speed that was required, he needed to automate the process fully, and the crappy algorithmic instruction process he was currently using was not large enough. He had two choices Algorithmic Instruction or Intelligence and he was torn on which one to progress with. The core problem was it felt almost evil to create Intelligence that he would need to discard immediately, but Algorithmic Instruction had its own problem. What happened to a computer program when it ran into a problem it couldn’t solve? Well, it could error out and freeze or go off on a tangent. Daniel really didn’t want either of those to happen when it was growing stuff inside him. If it went off on a tangent, it could kill him quickly… if the vines grew into his brain. If the program stopped working, that could be just a big an issue because he was not sure he could stay conscious when operating on himself. The solution needed to be fully autonomous.

Internally, he pondered the ramifications. Derrick initially had been terribly simple. If he attempted to keep the Intelligence as simple as possible, then there was no reason it should be thought of as anymore than a tool.

Decision made Daniel went to work. He linked the tiny grains of core within the plant together. The special energy that allowed him to transfer the information resonated between all the small bits of core. Then he set about building a consciousness that could do what he wanted. He focused on what he wanted. Curiosity? Nope. Thinking? Nope. Process? Yep, lots of processes and only the simplist of problem solving.

A desire to do as little harm as possible and what he needed it to do. Encase the glass in a bag while doing as limited damage to the surrounding flesh as viable. What was generated was more computer program than Einstein, but that was exactly what was wanted. It could direct the growth over the glass and it would abort if anything went wrong. It would grow straight lines only and would stop working if it became curved.

The Intelligence snapped into place, and then it existed as a separate entity from him. With the first step complete, Daniel then practiced the secondary ones. First, the shred technique was where sharp vines curled around to cut anything attached and then releasing a slimy mucus to provide a lubricant.

Finally, he was ready to start with experiments.

Ready.

He wrote the words and grew a flower.

With plant sense, he could see the abrupt swirls of motion and then people lining up near the animal that was to be their first experiment.

The flower was cut.

The healers were ready. Now it was up to him.