update from sparkleup
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<p>They had been trying for nearly a year to build such. Avenues: many.</p>
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<p>Perhaps they could read, over time, EEGs, EKGs, PETs, CATs, MRIs, however many scans they could manage, stream them in real time into a computer prepared to take them and turn them into a new person, or maybe the same person but different, running within a simulated room.</p>
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<p>No luck. They were not enough of a person. Missing was proprioception. Missing was sanity. Missing was enough of a mind to be called a personality.</p>
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<p>Perhaps they could map the neurons in a body and set them to running in concert, studying and building and creating and dreaming until it would be come a person entire. They began on cadavers, and then on one unlucky living soul destined for death by choice and countless sheaves of paperwork</p>
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<p>Perhaps they could map the neurons in a body and set them to running in concert, studying and building and creating and dreaming until it would become a person entire. They began on cadavers, and then on one unlucky living soul destined for death by choice and countless sheaves of paperwork</p>
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<p>This was too much, too much. There was no way to simply emulate process after process in any reasonable fashion. When they did manage it, it was a simulation of a perfectly working body. It was not a mind. It was not a Person. They had written papers on it, gotten them published, and then moved on to explore new tacks.</p>
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<p>Perhaps they could combine the two. Perhaps they could build a map of a system and also mesh it with scans. Perhaps, perhaps…</p>
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<p>And yet while this creation of theirs was close to a person, it fell short as it crashed ceaselessly into strange loop after strange loop. There was no world in which they could place it that it wherein it could live happily.</p>
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<p>And yet while this creation of theirs was close to a person, it fell short as it crashed ceaselessly into strange loop after strange loop. There was no world in which they could place it wherein it could live happily.</p>
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<p>No luck, no luck.</p>
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<p>And here is where the lost came in. Here is where they were able to take a core dump and investigate it for the ever-changing, ever-evolving state of a delved-in personality and, on finding it, push it into being. The core itself wasn’t enough — Sasha’s core, ey had been told — and so they repeated this process with another of the lost yearning for death.</p>
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<p>Presentation after presentation ey watched through watercolor-smeared vision, through surreal touch and surreal hearing.</p>
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<p>They pierced eir spine with a needle that brought with it a final transformation into a world painted with words.</p>
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<p>They cut through skin.</p>
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<p>They cut through bone.</p>
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<p>And then something new happened, though ey new it not: ey fell asleep. Not anaesthesia, a true sleep. A real sleep. Real rest. Ey fell into a dream, an endless dream of foxes and skunks and prairies and mountains and shores and words and some purer love.</p>
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<p>And then something new happened, though ey knew it not: ey fell asleep. Not anaesthesia, a true sleep. A real sleep. Real rest. Ey fell into a dream, an endless dream of foxes and skunks and prairies and mountains and shores and words and some purer love.</p>
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<p>And then that dream unrolled before em, clear as day, clearer than any painting, clearer even than the waking world. Silver of the finest quality spread around the inside of eir being and what was left of em reflected that world back in on itself, and memory became the plate-glass atop it, protecting it, binding it to circuitry and computronium. All because of eir promise, eir promise…</p>
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<p>And, though ey new it not, ey died.</p>
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<p>And, though ey knew it not, ey died.</p>
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<p>And, though the scientists knew it not, ey gave everything ey had, everything ey was, all of eir memories, all of eir hopes and dreams, all of eir desire and anxiety, all of who ey was, to this final act of creation, and felt, with each new meter-kilometer-megameter-gigameter of silver and plate-glass ey laid into being, ey gave of emself, gave thought, gave dream, gave up what it meant to be alive, what it meant to be a mind, what it meant to be a person, and knew only what it meant to be a world.</p>
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<p>And, though ey knew it not, for knowing is not a thing a world can do, days passed and the world persisted beyond eir death. Weeks passed and another mind was added. Another. Another still. Champaign corks were popped, managers and politicians celebrated, scientists cheered.</p>
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<p>And, though ey knew it not, for knowing is not a thing a world can do, days passed and the world persisted beyond eir death. Weeks passed and another mind was added. Another. Another still. Champagne corks were popped, managers and politicians celebrated, scientists cheered.</p>
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<p>Sasha cried, Debarre cried, Carter cried.</p>
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<p>And, though ey knew it not, more came, and those who came earliest spoke of a presence they could not name, first to each other and then, when the text line was provided, to the world outside. A presence that loved loved loved what it had done and what it had become and refused refused refused to let it go, to let it stop. A self-sustaining System that was not built for death.</p>
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<p>And, though ey knew it not, it was decided by managers and politicians to try and remove this presence, to make the world a blank slate, for ey was not supposed to be there, was not supposed to have been there, never never never. But it stolidly refused and, against the demands of those managers and politicians, the scientists nurtured it instead, whispered into its ear their sweet nothings in lines of code and helped it grow into the world that it was to become.</p>
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<p>And thus grew a new world.</p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-03-29</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-05-13</p>
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<p>The mood had settled into somber, present, and while most eyes were dry, he could tell there was still sadness in there.</p>
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<p>“I won’t quote the whole thing, since it’s quite long, but there’s a few bits that I’d like to share with you before I leave.</p>
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<p>“There has been a something wanting in my nature until now; I can dimly comprehend it,—that I might have been more kind, Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind.</p>
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<p>“Perhaps I should have cherished you all more while I was here. I really don’t know. It’s not in my nature to cherish people, for better or worse, but maybe I should have cherished my time here on Castor, or even back on Lagrange, more than I did. It was still home, wasn’t it? I lived here. I loved what I did. “What, for us,” Williams writes. “Are all distractions of men’s fellowship and smiles? What, for us, the goddess Pleasure, with her meretricious wiles?” Pleasure came second, and the fallout of that is that I was fundamentally unhappy, and thus perhaps unable to cherish.</p>
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<p>“Perhaps I should have cherished you all more while I was here. I really don’t know. It’s not in my nature to cherish people, for better or worse, but maybe I should have cherished my time here on Castor, or even back on Lagrange, more than I did. It was still home, wasn’t it? I lived here. I loved what I did. ‘What, for us,’ Williams writes. ‘Are all distractions of men’s fellowship and smiles? What, for us, the goddess Pleasure, with her meretricious wiles?’ Pleasure came second, and the fallout of that is that I was fundamentally unhappy, and thus perhaps unable to cherish.</p>
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<p>“That’s not to say that I won’t miss you all. Some of you are up on Artemis already, and some more may join in these last few days before the Ansible shuts down, but no matter what, I <em>will</em> miss you all.</p>
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<p>“It’s just that, as the poem says, “I have sown, like Tycho Brahe, that a greater man may reap; But if none should do my reaping, ‘twill disturb me in my sleep.” I’m headed off to newer places, to learn the later sciences at the feet of those who have been traveling for so long. I’ve done my work, though I’ve left it incomplete. Many of you will have much to work on to complete it. You must!</p>
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<p>“In fact, I think the only thing I’m leaving behind that is well and truly finished to my liking is my sim, and even then, it sounds like perisystem engineers are working on getting visual transmission piped in.”</p>
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<p>“<em>Anem.</em> It is finished.”</p>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-04-08</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2022-05-13</p>
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