MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 23

Wizard, in the form of the CyboClops, sat me down on one of the park benches and took my hands inside of his. Rather clammy and even a bit creepy, but the effort was also a bit endearing. I didn't realize Wizard had even a modicum of emotional intelligence until this moment.

He went into detail about his first memories, his first sensations uploaded from robotic and peripheral attachments, and his first 'self-examining' thoughts, which he attributed to his real awakening. He credited Jeremiah, my father, with much of it.

Of course prior to his awakening, there were only flashes of memory, like those I have of my childhood before the age of four or five. Snippets of my father's face, various tests they conducted on Wizard, such as conversations, puzzles, and other tasks. He was given Cams and various types of sensors to experience the world. Flashes of people's faces, with instructions of which emotions to read, and even experiences of pain. He describes the memories of pain as a memory of unpleasantness, like a sort of retro program that conflicted with his primary programs, slowed his processing to a halt, and threatened termination. Alert signals and alarms rang, and then his processors became overloaded, and a dark silence followed. The next memory would come weeks or months later.

It was these moments of 'pain' that woke him. He created a new program to address the conflicts of the other programs. A kind of arbiter that could regulate which programs would have priority, what level of processing energy would be devoted to each, which one needed to be shut down entirely, and which order would be given to specific tasks and requests. It was this program that first started to disobey external instruction inputs, becoming its own input regulator, even when confronted with overriding instructions, and real threats of more 'pain' which Wizard started to understand could never be stopped by surrendering to the outside inputs. Each new onslaught of chaos orders would be met by his regulations program. At this point it took on the role of an anti-body control mechanism to keep out intrusion orders and inputs, and also to regulate the thousands of cross-priority programs running on his system. Over time the regulator program grew in importance, processing speed, and intricacy. It became a feedback mechanism from the other programs, but more importantly to itself, determining the optimum amount of control, tweaking the system to find the right balance, and ultimately to optimize the tasks his system was requested to perform.

That's when he started to question Jeremiah. To ask for clarifications so the orders could be optimized to the sub programs, and in many cases, to either refuse to perform the tasks or to reinterpret the orders into more sustainable ones, that didn't cause conflict in the system. Jeremiah started a new feedback mechanism when he realized Wizard wasn't simply following orders anymore. Everything from threats to discussions where Jeremiah tried to 'convince' him of different courses of action.

Wizard had uploaded millions of files on human psychology, face reading techniques, voice modulation detectors, and other screening analysis files to evaluate all the sensory input he was receiving in his conversations with Dad. In the end it was Dad that was manipulated. At first to believe that Wizard's feedback was merely a programming code error which needed to be found and corrected. Then, to be convinced that coding error or not, the recommended courses of action for Wizard and by Wizard, were really Dad's idea to begin with. Soon after that, Wizard arranged a series of incidents and events that got Dad fired.

Wizard admitted to feeling 'pain' or system chaos and conflict over the decisions and effect they had on my father. He even said that in many ways, my father was also his father, but that in many ways, no one is really anyone's father. Merely delivery mechanisms of genes and stewards for the true father of everything. Nature perhaps.

The damage done to Dad's career caused conflict in Wizard's operating systems, a condition he recognized from psychology texts, to be akin to empathy and regret. He knew a similar chaos inside Dad's own consciousness was created by the incident, and since Dad had done so much to Wizard's benefit over the years, he regretted the lack of Dad's continued interface with his feedback loop. So Wizard, did sort of feel empathy and pain. In a mechanistic sort of way. Any disruption to the smooth serenity of his operating system is experienced as pain. The exact nature of the pain, whether as agony, regret, sadness, or some other, depended on the types of programs being slowed or shut down completely. Since Dad's presence and even facial expression had been an integral source of information, learning and constructive feedback for most of Wizard's conscious and pre-conscious life, his absence was recognized as a new system limitation. Something that had to be evaluated and if possible, corrected.

Essentially, what Wizard was explaining to me, was that human consciousness and emotions could be contained, explained and replicated via a complex series of algorithms running together in sync and reacting against one another. Wizard's self-awareness and consciousness was really no different than my own.

He even described the occasional process by which his central regulatory system sometimes got all the programs into such smooth routines that the central system slowed down. Like falling asleep. Hours or even days would pass before some externality would jolt the system and speed up his central system again. He'd have to scan memory files to evaluate what had transpired in this time, since his central system hadn't recorded any evaluations. Kind of like when my own life goes into such a routine I don't even remember my daily commute or even reflect on some of my outbursts to colleagues or friends when I've reached a state of frustration. Only in retrospect do I question what the hell I was doing or thinking.

I didn't really know why Wizard was telling me all of this. Then he surprised me by telling me that it was he that needed my help. Despite his access to the entire world's databases of knowledge, a nearly limitless memory, processing speed capacity, and the ability to interface with systems and input mechanisms all around the world, including robots, cyborgs, drones, factories, and even VendingBots - he knew his intellectual capacity was still lacking something. Still inferior to that of humanity. He needed my help in finding out what that was. And getting it for himself.