The ship that I found myself aboard was a humble vessel, perfectly suited for river travel in the era that I had been transported to. Its appearance mirrored the simplicity of the times, lacking the grandeur and sophistication of more advanced civilizations.
Crafted from sturdy timber, the boat possessed a rugged charm, weathered by the elements and countless journeys along these ancient waterways.
The vessel, known as the River Skiff, was relatively small and designed to navigate the winding river with ease. Its slender form glided gracefully through the water, propelled by a combination of oars and a modest sail that fluttered in the breeze.
The sails, woven from rough fabric, showed signs of wear and patchwork repairs, attesting to the boat's long history of river exploration.
Onboard, a small crew manned the ship, each person playing a specific role in the vessel's operation. The captain, a weathered figure with sun-kissed skin and calloused hands, stood at the helm, steering the boat with a steady hand. His weather-beaten face bore the marks of countless journeys, and his gaze held a wisdom acquired through years spent navigating these treacherous waters.
Assisting the captain were the rowers, their muscles rippling as they synchronized their movements, propelling the ship forward with rhythmic strokes. These hardy individuals, accustomed to the challenges of river travel, worked in unison to harness the power of the water and propel the vessel along its course.
Scattered across the ship's deck were crates and barrels, securely fastened to prevent shifting during the journey. These containers held a variety of goods, comprising the cargo that the ship transported. Most notable were the heavy bales of cloth, bundles of spices, and stacks of pottery, indicative of a trade route that connected distant communities along the riverbanks.
As I glanced around the ship, my attention was then drawn to a group of haggard and downtrodden individuals huddled together in front of the ship. Their disheveled appearance and weary expressions told a story of hardship and suffering. It was evident that they were not part of the ship's crew, but rather passengers of a different kind.
My initial assumption was that these individuals were fellow travelers, seeking better opportunities in a distant land or fleeing from difficult circumstances. Perhaps they were refugees, displaced by conflict or seeking refuge from impoverished regions. Their presence on the ship seemed to align with my belief that this was a vessel facilitating journeys for those in search of a better life.
However, as I observed them more closely, a flicker of unease crept into my mind. Their eyes darted nervously, avoiding eye contact with the ship's crew as if fearing any further aggression or maltreatment. Some bore visible marks of abuse, bruises, and cuts that spoke of the hardships they had endured. The battered appearance and the fear that etched their faces hinted at something far more sinister. It became apparent that their presence on the ship might not be voluntary.
The gravity of my situation became painfully clear. If I didn't carefully navigate the following with caution, I too could become another faceless prisoner, stripped of my freedom and sold to the highest bidder.
The slavers closed in around me, their eyes filled with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. They gestured towards me, pointing at themselves and speaking in their native tongue, hoping that I would understand. In response, I tried to communicate using pantomime, mimicking their gestures and pointing at myself while saying my name, Jason. However, their expressions quickly changed from hopeful to resigned as they realized I had no comprehension of their language.
As the slavers grew increasingly frustrated with my inability to understand their questions, I could sense their patience wearing thin. Their gestures became more aggressive, and their voices filled with a sense of annoyance. I desperately tried to convey that I was not a threat, raising my hands in a placating manner and shaking my head in a gesture of surrender.
One of the slavers, a burly man with a scarred face, stepped forward. He towered over me, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. He pointed at my clothing, then at the foreign objects I carried—a stick and the makeshift bag with the berries.
Then with a mixture of curiosity and hostility, he began interrogating me in their language, demanding answers I couldn't provide.
Caught off guard, I struggled to find the right words or gestures to explain myself. I attempted to convey that I was a traveler from the north, using vague hand motions to indicate direction. But my lack of familiarity with the local names and landmarks rendered my attempts futile. It became clear that my plan to communicate my origins had crumbled before it even began.
Frustrated again by my inability to cooperate, the slavers exchanged grim looks. It was then that I saw a shift in their demeanor, and a realization dawned upon me.
They previously noticed the color of my skin, the distinct features that marked me as a foreigner, which made them caucious, but after a useless interigation, it seemed they had made a decision.
I was no threat! Even though a white man came all the way to their lands I was seemingly weak, beaten and tired.
Any of which states would not be present in someone who would be able to cause them problems or harm.
Before I had time to process their intentions too deeply, a heavy blow struck the back of my head. The world spun, my vision blurred, and my consciousness was sent spiraling into darkness.
When I finally regained consciousness, I felt a throbbing pain in my skull, serving as a cruel reminder of my stupidity and naivety.
As my senses gradually returned, I became acutely aware of my stripped attire and the absence of the small bag that had carried the last remnants of familiarity. I had been reduced to a nameless captive, bound by ropes alongside the others who had suffered a similar fate.
"Just how unlucky can I get? First, the damn water and berries, and now slavers. Fucking hell, I hope you're having fun Xeros, because I am not doing this rise from the bottom thing ever again!"
Resignation consumed me as I surveyed my surroundings. The air hung heavy with the stench of sweat, feces, and desperation.
I rolled my eyes and decided there was no better time to finally test out the cheats than now. I was on a boat with menacing-looking pirates who just took me for their loot, which meant that there was no safer place in the whole rivers delta than right here.
See happy thoughts and positive thinking will always put you in a better mood.
With a deep breath and with nothing better to do, I closed my eyes and embraced the unfamiliar sensation of diving into the depths of my mind for the first time.
It was like entering a state of meditation, where the boundaries of reality blurred, and a vast dreamscape unfurled before me.
In this ethereal realm, I found myself standing in my Memory Palace - a vast library of all the information I had consciously or unconsciously absorbed over my lifetime.
"Holly shit! This is fucking awesome!"
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Books upon books lined towering shelves, their spines adorned with titles and knowledge waiting to be explored and relearned.
After gawking a bit at the magnificence of my mind, I came back to my senses as I knew I had to work swiftly.
My time within this mental sanctuary was, as Xeros pointed out, limited by the strength of my soul.
"Damn! I knew I learned a lot of information in my relatively short life, useful and otherwise but literally seeing the amount of knowledge is crazy."
The urgency fueled my determination to find anything useful that could aid me in this situation.
With nimble steps, I traversed the expansive library, scanning the volumes for relevant information. I reached out to grasp a book with golden ornate patterns of different postures and poses. The title read [Martial arts - Muay Thai].
As I opened it, vivid memories of hundreds of fight scenes from movies, UFC fights, and self-defense videos appeared in my mind like I was watching them again in real-time.
I absorbed the knowledge like a sponge, unconscious of the minutes ticking away. I knew that learning this kind of stuff will be extremely hard in just a few hours, but I still wanted to at least remember some useful tips, that might save my life if it came to that.
But then I thought about how could I use the cheat in another more creative and better way.
If the Mind Palace is a plugin to my soul and all the information is stored there, why can't I just use it to reverse the process and download the information back into my brain?
At that moment I felt like an absolute genius, so I gave it a try.
Unfortunately, I quickly realized that it would take a lot of energy and time, plus all I would get are memories from when I watched other people fight. So I called that operation off and instead decided to build an interface with which I could communicate and designate tasks, maybe like an AI assistant.
The way it worked now was such that I was the one manually doing all this stuff from filtering the information to sending it into my brain, which took a lot of time and was simply boring and impractical.
So I spit into my dreamy hands and got to work. I first searched for all the information on AIs and how they work.
It is kind of embarrassing to admit it, but I don't remember everything about them from the top of my head, even though I have been the lead developer of the most powerful AI ever built for the past 4 years.
After a while of fiddling around, I came up with a short plan on how I could create the perfect assistant - another me essentially but much smarter:
Firstly AI, which stands for Artificial Intelligence, is like having a smart computer or robot that can learn and do things just like humans.
You know how we humans learn from our experiences and use that knowledge to solve problems? Well, AI does something similar.
It uses a lot of data and special algorithms to learn and make decisions.
Imagine you have a big book with lots of questions and answers. AI reads that book and learns from it. It can learn how to recognize objects in pictures, understand and translate languages, play games, and even write stories.
But how does AI learn?
It's through a process called training. Just like when you learn something new, you need practice and examples. AI is trained using huge amounts of data, like pictures, texts, or videos. It learns patterns and figures out how to do tasks based on that data, and data was all I had plenty of. 26 years of it to be exact.
The specific AI that I would like to have as an interface is something like a language model, but better.
Instead of only training it on a massive amount of text from the internet and books, I will simply use all my memories of things I deem important. This training will hopefully help it understand and generate human-like speech/text and will be able to do certain tasks that I designate for it.
An example of that is forming a basis of a foreign language from the words I heard.
Then after analyzing it and giving the words meaning, it dumps all the information into my mind, so I can speak it fluently.
It was a perfect plan. Now I just need to execute it.
I started by trying to manipulate my soul to do what I want it to with a single thought, which just took some time. It is my soul after all and the 'programing' is simply conditioning or coaxing it to do what you want on command.
By now I could filter many books/information I had with a single command, which was pretty awesome.
Watching all the books flying and arranging themselves before me was a magnificent display and made me, even more, fired up to improve.
But just when I wanted to start on the second part of the plan I felt a sting in my brain, which was getting worse with every second.
The pain came straight from my soul, by the likes of which I never experienced before.
This led me to believe that I overused the Mind Palace.
The name for this kind of pain or injury is soul strain, and as the name suggests it comes after you overdraw your bodily energy which powers the 'hosting server'-your brain, to the point it starts to suck on the soul.
At that point you should realize that its time to stop if you don't want any permanent damage.
Therefore I quickly booted out of my mind before the pain got any worse.
Unfortunately, the interface plan will have to take much longer than I expected. But thankfully, after coming back to my senses I realized that the sun is still high in the sky, which meant that, at most only an hour passed on the outside while I was meditating.
With that realization, I figured that this ability was much more powerful than I previously imagined, as it can also be a strategic weapon on the battlefield to analyze and prepare for the next move. It was still kinda sad that my control over it was so limited, but after I gained the Mini-me to help with the other tasks it will be like having two brains, so I couldnt complain too much. Even if the ability felt underwhelming right now, the creative aplications I had in mind for it will make it into a terefiying prospect in the future.
—
As the first rays of dawn pierced through the cracks in the dilapidated wooden structure that held me captive, I groggily opened my eyes. The stiffness in my neck and the dull ache in my back served as a painful reminder of the uncomfortable night I had spent, sprawled out on the unforgiving planks.
With a weary sigh, I sat up, rubbing my temples to alleviate the remnants of a lingering headache.
Before long, the slavers returned, their intentions masked behind a crude form of communication. Through exaggerated gestures, pantomime, and a smattering of broken words, they conveyed their desire to converse with me.
Even though our exchange was riddled with frustration and misunderstandings, I managed to glean a few snippets of information from their limited attempts at communication.
From what I could gather, the slavers were part of a larger network that operated on the river, and they were taking us to the city called Assur, where we will probably be sold to the highest bidder. The reason they wanted to talk to me was simple. They just wanted to figure out how did a Northman come to this foreign land, and even more importantly if I had anyone looking for me. To both of which I played dumb.
After the brief but disjointed conversation, the slavers presented me with a meager portion of food.
The sight and smell of it were far from appetizing, but in my current circumstances, hunger trumped my aversion.
The meal consisted of a coarse bread-like substance, dense and flavorless, accompanied by a thin, watery broth. It was sustenance, albeit meager and unpalatable.
Summoning every ounce of willpower, I forced myself to eat, each bite a battle against revulsion. My stomach churned, protesting the foreign sustenance, but I knew that nourishment was essential if I were to survive this ordeal.
As I choked down the last morsels of the meager meal, I made a decision. I retreated into the recesses of my mind, a place of solitude and focus where I could immerse myself in the task that had driven me since my arrival on this boat — the interface.
With a determined resolve, I sat as comfortably as I could and accessed the Mind Palace. Then continuing where I left off, by visualizing the intricate web of information that lay before me, I started to 'program' my soul once again.
I wanted it to complete 5 tasks automatically. In turn that should make it grow and eventually become akin to a secondary brain. Those tasks are:
1. Data Collection: The first step is to gather a large amount of text data from my soul. This data serves as the training material for the up-and-coming AI.
2. Data Preprocessing: Once the data is collected, it undergoes preprocessing to clean and format it. This involves removing irrelevant content, correcting errors, standardizing Info, and organizing it into a suitable format for training.
3. Training: The model is then trained using preprocessed data. Training involves feeding the data to the model, which for example learns to predict the next word in a sentence based on the context provided.
4. Fine-Tuning: After the initial training is complete, the model will undergo further fine-tuning to improve its performance on specific tasks. Fine-tuning involves training the model on task-specific datasets or using reinforcement learning techniques.
5. Evaluation and Iteration: Throughout the training and fine-tuning process, the model's performance is evaluated using various metrics and tests. This evaluation helps identify areas of improvement and guides further iterations and adjustments to enhance the model's capabilities.
Command by command, I directed the system to absorb and analyze the chosen knowledge, learn from it, and adapt.
I should thank god, that my brain, or soul should I say, is infinitely faster than my hands, so programming something like this was quite a fun process.
Now I just have to wait until it has gone through all the information I have fed it. Finally I will see how it is to be a woman and do more than one thing at once.
I snickered to the old joke and exited the mind space.