IO Vapoura - Part III: The Miracle of the Machine

  What is the difference between copying a file and moving it?
  It was a simple question, but it buzzed around Nariaki's mind like an insect that couldn't be caught. The answer was simple as well. At the same time, his identity wouldn't accept it. For all the advances they'd made, their technology had still been built on the foundation of the old world. The answer remained the same. He went over it slowly, one step at a time.
  When you copy a file, an empty allocation is encoded with a mirror of the data for later recall. The original is maintained. Unless marked, the original and the copy cannot even be told apart. When you move a file, the source data is copied to a new allocation, then the original is erased.
  The original is erased.
  Nariaki felt himself starting to recoil and took a breath, calming himself. He looked again into the pool of water in front of him.
  He didn't recognize his own reflection. Nariaki felt he should be moved in some way by the fact, but the only thing he felt was annoyance at the imperfections in the waters for reflecting his features. It wasn't his face he was concerned with, but the skull itself. Turning, he followed the bumps along the conical features of his skull as it protruded backwards. Many of his augmentations had been made in the world-that-was and were much less aesthetic than those made in the floating city. He hadn't thought about the parts of himself he wasn't born with in more than a decade. Not until today.
  Pulling up his own scan again on the vid, he compared it to his reflection. How long had he been operating completely out of the Moravec Trap instead of his own brain? The Trap was designed to slowly redirect more and more processes from the organic to the mechanical and as smoothly as possible. It had certainly done that. He hadn't even noticed, but the readings remained the same. The brain he had been born with was three years dead. Without the Trap, he would have died with it.
  The biomechanical that was cleaning her wings across from him stirred the waters. No matter. Nariaki didn't need nor want the reflection anymore. He couldn't accept the implications even knowing the answer.
  "Change your mind and your old mind dies."
  He knew there were failsafes and other measures in the Trap, but the simple act of moving data in and out of consciousness was actually destroying his identity. The identity wanted to hold onto something; to consider itself a structure of permanence. It couldn't accept that it was being effectively cloned and killed off thousands of times every hour.
  Nariaki sat down against a tree, looking out at the pools. Here, near the top of the city, water collected from the shielding plates above and fell in these pools. They fed entire communities. At least he knew he was "up" somewhere. He wasn't sure about much else.
  Closing the scans on his vid, he returned to the message that had triggered all of this. The formality of the letter didn't make for easy reading. It was redeemed by its concision.
  To the esteemed Nariaki Sado,
    My apologies for having contacted you directly, but the implications of our current line of research should not pass by many eyes until they can be proven or discounted. Your discoveries in the field of neuroscience and biomechanic implementation, combined with the augmentation of a successful Moravec Trap, make you specifically qualified to discount our own findings. It is my hope, as well as the hope of the research team, that you can indeed discount this research.
    Please find attached the hypothesis, testing and collated data from our project.
  Regards,
  Ghita Banerjee
  There was no need to review the data again. The team was correct. The technology of the Moravec Trap that saved the mind was also erasing it. But it retained a version of the data, and uncorrupted, so the Trap still functioned as a localized neural net that routed signals to the body while maintaining the identity of the individual. Nariaki was more interested in the parts the team had left out. The findings they had supplied him with were discovered, yes, during testing, but the tests had not been aimed at this discovery. He sent the reply request on the vid and waited.
  The name listed under the face that greeted him was Ghita Banerjee. With a quick nod, Ghita said, "Sado San, we hadn't expected a reply so quickly. Would it please you to provide more information?"
  "No, thank you", said Nariaki. "No more time was needed. No amount of testing can change the hardware itself. Your findings are correct. While I saw some of the findings based on the tests, I didn't actually see whether or not your team has made a successful imprint. May I ask as to the results of this effort?"
  Ghita looked stunned, then his eyes changed as if seeing Nariaki for the first time. "Your reputation precedes you. Please accept my apologies. I meant no insult by withholding this information. There has been no attempt at an imprint yet, although that is the ultimate goal of our project. The findings on data removal in the Trap will not help us win public approval."
  Nariaki hesitated a second, realizing he'd made a leap ahead that the team hadn't taken. "The erasure isn't exclusively native to the Trap. An organic human mind does this as well. At the cellular level, one crystalline version of the protein Kinase is created to store long-term memory, while another version of the same protein erases the data so that it can store memory again. It happens much more slowly than a trapped mind, but it's a similar process."
  Ghita wasn't listening anymore. His eyes were looking past Nariaki. One of his hands absentmindedly brushed his head. Nariaki needed him to focus, saying, "Behavioral memory is presynaptic and isn't erased in the same way, but there's nothing to do about long-term memory. Your team already has a psychologist, a binary scientist, an abstract mathematician, database experts... you've got physics and biology covered, but I don't see the doctors or simulation experts. If you're going to copy a human mind, you're going to need those as well."
  Ghita was with him again, nodding along. "Yes. We bring in more specialists at every stage. I expect some will leave before this final round. This has been a trying project."
  Nariaki smiled. He could feel himself getting tied in with the project even before confirming. "I know two doctors specializing in nervous systems that have worked with me before. I would like to consult as well, with your permission of course."
  Ghita smiled for the first time, then his face grew serious. "This has to be perfect. The only network that could house active data of this size is controlled by ODN. We won't even be approaching that system with our request unless we have solid findings."
  ODN. ODN was more an "it" than a "he", but Nariaki had never been able to stop himself from projecting human ideals on the thing. ODN was the reason there was still an Earth. It had hacked almost a hundred missiles on the day that broke the world, turning the promise of death into dull thuds. He hadn't hacked them all and had admitted to purposefully allowing some of the missiles to land. Even floating as a mind in the satellites and spaceships above them, Nariaki still felt mixed feelings towards the creature. It had given him his life, but it had let others perish based on simple calculations.
  "If you're sure about these doctors", began Ghita.
  "I'm sure. Are you sure Halcyon's mainframe can't handle the load?"
  "Maybe for a dozen or so imprints, but not to house hundreds or thousands."
  "I'm in. I'll message you when I get definites from both doctors as well."
  Ghita made a quick bow. "Thank you, Sado San. It is an honor to have you with us."
  The feed ended, returning to the original message.
  ODN. The humans below had become little more than animals. They bred and killed and barely resembled the species Nariaki remembered so tenderly. In their own way, they fought to help the species survive simply by breeding. Nariaki was in his own battle, hoping to bring quality to those here in the sky carriers that had been salvaged to form Halcyon. He felt indebted for the life he was given and should feel that same debt to ODN. The ones below that knew of the machine blamed it for the holocaust. The ones in Halcyon were all a part of the pact with the creature, a treaty between man and machine.
  Nariaki reached down towards the blue flower next to him, caressing a petal. He recognized it. They were called Forget Me Nots. Interesting find on a day like this. He knew already that he would offer himself as one of the first copies. It was too tempting. His curiosity would drive him to it. Trying to resist only meant delaying the inevitable.
  "Hello? Hello?"
  Nariaki looked around for the voice, then realized it came from his vid. He'd completely forgotten the call he'd made.
  The voice called out, "Is that the shielding I see? What are you even doing up there?"
  Nariaki picked his vid up and smiled at Miles. "I'm lost. You should know that. But I have news and I need you on a project. Is Jen there?"
  "Nope, she's down for conversion. Hey, give your vid a spin. Let me see the place."
  Nariaki stood up, holding out his vid while he turned around. He heard Miles call out for him to stop. Nariaki held it still, then realized where it was facing and pulled it back.
  Miles was smiling. "That girl's got some nice wings. I swear you don't leave your head long enough to even notice these things. I'll come get you. Make sure she doesn't leave. What's the project?"
  Nariaki paused, trying and failing to find a good way of stating it. "We're going to copy a human mind, Miles... and you're the best we have. I need you on this."

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