Getting into the puzzle room, Troy slipped on the earpiece like usual. Just with his fingers, he could feel that it had been smoothed over by Dr Fidelis, while he and Dr Hale had been out to lunch.

Now that he thought about it, Troy couldn't even feel the gloves on his hands. He hadn't realized they were on, actually, while still touching the earpiece.

The idea of getting clothes with this type of fabric was thrown out of the window. There was no way he was getting touched on the skin when being touched on that shoulder, which everybody had some fascination with clapping.

'Was the break up to your standards?', Adam asked through the earpiece.

An immediate flashback to his minorly embarrassing reaction to the food surfaced in the mind, before being forced back down instantly. There was no way, that Troy would be riding that train for at least a while more.

“It was fine. Food was great. The conversation could have gone better”, Troy answered right back. “Anything interesting happened, while I was out?”

'Nothing immediate. Dr Fidelis wanted a casual version of a debriefing. It was shorter than expected.', Adam sent.

Shorter than expected? That wasn't too far off, from what Troy would understand. With how worked up Dr Fidelis was about keeping up with the schedule, there must have been something he was stressed about.

*Are you both prepared for this thing to get started?*, Dr Fidelis asked, trough the earpiece.

“I'm as ready, as I'll ever be,” Troy stated, mentally preparing himself for whatever Dr Fidelis had been so ecstatic about.

A short moment went by, where Adam presumably answered back positively too.

*Great to hear! For this test, we will not be doing something, which we've done before. We will, in fact, be doing something new, which will be interesting to look through after the fact.*, Dr Fidelis started up.

Troy felt a small amount of criticism thrown somebody's way. And, wasn't that last bit invalid, to the two of them?

*Today, we will be doing a more advanced type of the earlier test. Instead of just asking, whether a statement is a lie or truth, Adam will be tested in reading… body language! A complex, and continually changing, custom of communication.

Now, as one would expect, we will not be using Troy's body, to get the desired results. The layer of the order will simply be too confusing. Therefore, I have prepared a whole other model for Adam to analyse!*

In front of Troy's eyes, about five meters away, a replica of himself appeared before him. A first, it was thought to be a simple mirror of himself, but when he waved at it, it didn't wave back. It just gave him an annoyed look instead, with the whole crossing arms to accompany it.

This was not a pose, which Troy would be caught dead doing.

“Why does the model look like me?” Troy asked, interrupting Dr Fidelis' monologue, about the greatness of his work.

*Perfectly timed question, right there! The model isn't supposed to be you, I can easily tell you that. If Adam could just cross-reference your earlier behaviour with the one being observed, it would just ruin the whole purpose of this test.

No, I just downloaded a wide variety of poses and movements used in the study of Kinesics. It's staggering how much those people had to offer.

And, to finish the whole model off, I had to give it some outward appearance, you must realise. Do you think that I want to spend five dollars on incredibly, high-quality textures? No! I'm just going to use another, incredibly high texture, which I already possess. And, this texture was, for some reason, one of you.*

Ignoring the strangely bad budgeting excuse, Troy had one more question, to that explanation of his.

“Why exactly do you have a texture of me?” Troy asked. And was his head really shaped that way? It looked a bit longer in the back than he thought.

*Do you not?*, Dr Fidelis asked, laying it thick, how much he was going to answer Troy's question.

“No”, Troy simply stated.

*Too bad. Moving on*, Dr Fidelis said, not giving the subject more attention. *With Troy being unoccupied, with his simple job of transcribing Adam's observations, he himself will also be noting down his own. This will serve the purpose of giving Adam's opinions and a reference point from an average human perspective. The screens to write down these observations will appear as the test begins.

Before we start it all up, I ask again; are you ready? Your answers will be timed.*

Repeating ourselves, are we now?

“Like before, I'm still ready,” Troy confirmed.

*Perfect.*, Dr Fidelis near-instantly replied. *The test will now commence. Do your best!*

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And the background noises stopped, leaving a void of distractions in Troy's head. What better way to fill that hole, than to do his job?

Taking another long glance at the model with the disturbingly perfect copy of Troy's likeness, he saw that it had shifted its posture yet again. Its look seemed frozen in time. Not that it stood completely still of course. Troy could see it softly imitating breathing patterns from, where he stood. But, it was all in a repeating action. By the time the model had fully exhaled, it would have gone to the same position, as when it first inhaled, starting the whole motion from the startup.

What a weird way to fashion it. Yet, Troy shouldn't be too judgemental on that front. From what he understood from Dr Fidelis' rant, this stuff was meant to be instructional material. It couldn't be too nuanced, or one wouldn't be able to learn specific things from it.

Going a whole other way of thinking, why was the model even so realistic? Why couldn't he see through it? Wasn't it just a visual projection?

Wait, that wouldn't make sense. Yesterday, Troy had been messing around with functional puzzle pieces. Pieces which appeared in the same fashion as the model before him. Could he… Could Troy touch it?

Was that the reason for gloves? So it could record the way he touched things? Dr Fidelis wouldn't outright tell him, but if he asked, Troy should be able to guess from his expression.

Plans for the future had been created, and Troy's mind sharpened in on the task at hand. As he began this thought pattern, the writing screens appeared about half a meter in front of him, equipped with a floating, slightly seethrough keyboard to accompany it. Troy couldn't even begin to remember the last time, that he had used one of those things. Simply typing words down with his mind was just so much faster, than what he could possibly accomplish.

And this test was apparently timed as well. Weren't they all timed, if one thought about it, in the right way? Well, this could be the only one, where they used the time taken for anything other than reference points.

Speaking of time, wasn't Adam being a little slow today? He should have already put Troy through a whole seminar on eye movements by now.

“Everything's going fine on your end, Adam?” Troy asked. Had he been looking too little at the model?

----------------------------------------

'Everything is fine.', Adam sent back, after two seconds of delay. While others may ignore such things, as quick responses being seen as unstable, he would soon perfect the art of consistently timing responses.

Before putting more processing to that low-priority project, though, the current test needed to be completed.

Making a detailed description of the feelings being currently felt, only being able to analyse through body language? With Adam's current estimated comprehension on this front, the anatomization would take more than the preferred time of two, full seconds.

Like Dr FIdelis had previously stated, if the mannerisms had been a direct copy of Troy's usual behavior, Adam wouldn't even have needed to put in over fifty per cent of his current processing power.

With Troy being the sole member of whom he got a constant full-body analysis of, nearly everybody movement interpretation had some groundwork, based on his actions. Anything else would have been a waste of resources and put off inaccurate results.

And now, instead of directly porting over the data of Troy's personal twist on body language, Adam had to use his prototype… universal, body language scale.

If he had the physical capacity to shudder in terror of his own words, Adam would have done so.

Currently, this prototype was the best option, which he had. It had been created through an average of every single movement, which Adam had ever observed, sent through a sorting algorithm, to match inferred intent with sub-standing movement. A bastard of a system, which proved wide variances in quality. For now, every time Adam used it, he would have to manually check over the results himself.

When Dr Fidelis finally got the external time installed permanently into him, he would be immensely glad. It would allow him to speed himself up to his full limits, and go through all the data he had ever gotten, and allow him to fine-tune the algorithm, finally giving it the standard quality it lacked.

But… that was a metaphorical dream for the future. For now, he would need to work with what he had to work with. Again, it was terrible, but it was still more efficient than he had done previously.

Adam had himself an unplanned thought process. How did this algorithm fit into his current system of problem-solving as a whole? It wasn't meant, as to what the algorithms function was. That had already been made clear in the groundwork.

He meant, where was it located, in terms of processing? How did Adam plan to run it? Manually going through the systemic rundown was definite. Anything he did was intentional. But, was the algorithm meant to occupy his full focus, even when it didn't require his full, current processing speed?

This fell down to a loop about how Adam processed thoughts. Sure, in earlier statements and definitions, he had described working on multiple things at the same time. Technically, he had been lying, when he said such things.

Yes, Adam had been working on multiple things in a certain time spectrum. No, that didn't mean he had done so at the same time. Instead of focusing on all subjects simultaneously, he had been expeditiously moving between the different focuses.

It had worked for the purposes needed, but it was not up to the standard of optimum efficiency. Adam still needed a thousandth of a second to process what he was working with. Just a moment wasted, but if one considered that only seven-thousandths of a second after that was spent before switching focus once again, it began adding up quickly.

Throughout the span of a single hour, Adam would waste seven point five minutes just going through previous work, as a minimum. seven point five minutes, which could have been spent getting a little step further into omniscience.

This, as a standalone reason, would be enough for him to try, and fix it. There were other less important reasons of course, but the delay in work was more than adequate.

So, how would Adam go off, and fix this problem of his? Spelling the problem out as, thinking one thing at a time, made the solution not even take a leap of logic.

He needed to learn how to think multiple thoughts at the same time. And, not just his poor imitation of doing so, but actual multithreaded thinking.

Now, just stating, that Adam would be going to be thinking two thoughts at the same time didn't seem too realistic. When he tried doing so, he briefly thought that he had succeeded extraordinarily quickly. But alas, it was just the usual skipping between thoughts, this time with the twist of not reading through the history of the thoughts, mixing the two together into an incomprehensible state.

There just had to be some kind of trick to it. Some way of thinking, which would allow Adam to multi-process.

…

Or, maybe it was even deeper than that. Just changing his way of thinking wouldn't encompass the needed alterations. Adam needed to go further into his psyche than ever before and modify his way of being. Could he even do such a thing?

There was only one possible way to find out; Testing it.

…

Wait, wasn't Adam in the middle of-

“Adam, when will you be answering it?” Troy asked. “Its been quite a while more than I was expecting.”

He had forgotten that part. Not literally, of course. Adam would never forget anything. At least, he didn't remember forgetting anything.

The thought of him currently doing a test had just… slipped outside of his current processing efforts.

How to relay this to Troy, in the least confrontational method possible? Honesty seemed like the fastest choice.

'I momentarily forgot about this test.', Adam sent out to Troy immediately.

Troy seemed surprised by this fact, his eyebrows rising, and his lips curving in a way that simulated the beginnings of a quadratic equation.

“You forgot about the- Have you even begun the analysis?” Troy asked, his voice insinuating his mood being on the scale of more than a little flabbergasted.

Checking over his memory, just to be sure, Adam formulated a quick and easily comprehensible answer.

'No.', Adam helpfully sent.

This helpful answer of his seemingly had a negative on Troy, who made a forced sigh emerge from himself. What mentality did one need to be in, where forcing it was a better option, than not doing it at all?

“What have you been thinking so much about, then?” Troy asked.

Another quick refresh created a concise answer.

'Thinking.', Adam near-instantly surmised, with a few thoughts of praise directed to himself.

“Thinking about thinking, huh. That's a good example of recursion if anyone had the sheer decency to ask.?” Troy said, with a quick scoff to accompany it. “You do realize that Dr Fidelis mentioned this as a timed test.”

'Are all of the tests not timed?'

“That's what I thought!”