(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
[https://i.imgur.com/PEJOOhp.png]
"Ahhhhh!" With a scream, I eject myself from the game, and into the safe space.
"Hah, hah, hah!" I breathe heavily. After I catch my bearings, I slurp my saliva down my throat and wipe the drool with my sleeve.
I can't believe it, right now I am still trembling all over! Real death, unexpected death is traumatic!
"Hah, hah, hah..." It takes me a while to calm down. Right now I am in my bedroom in the cruise, lying on the king sized bed. After a while my shivers subside and I start to gather my thoughts.
I admit this caught me by surprise, I didn't think that somebody would pull a gun on me. I have a week of experience in the game by now, so I know that what he did should be impossible. While it is easy to create manifestations in the city itself, in the dueling realms, I've tried it, and found it impossible to create even the simplest things. Whatever system is reading my thoughts and manifesting my projections does not work when the chips are down. Otherwise why would anybody play poker to begin with? Call, fold, raise? Just shot the other guy. Bang!
What the white haired guy did was quite amazing. Right now, I have no way of countering it. If I could make my own gun, I could try getting the jump on him, or maybe if I could make a shield, I could protect myself. But that is not possible.
What he did in the street would not be too hard, I'd have to study the structure of a gun for a while and practice manifesting it. This would be easy in this virtual space. You can't actually hurt anybody in this city directly. If I tried attacking anybody on the street, with a gun, fist or anything else, that would initiate a resolution match. Mickey told me about it.
I am not sure what I should do right now.
I get off the bed and stretch my body. Now that I've gotten over the shakes, I realize that I need a bath and a meal, in that order.
I know where the bathroom is already, so I make my way there. Opulence, luxury, I really envy the rich people who can experience this in real life. Everything in the bathroom looks like it costs at least 100k dollars. At home I just take showers, but here I do that and then a nice long break in the tub. It is a new experience for me, so I try experimenting with all the shampoos and bathing soaps that I've never seen before.
Refreshed and relaxed, I go into the kitchen and get some food. In the mega-fridge there are all sorts of meals and drinks. I go for some pasta and salsa. When I pick up the item I get a window asking me:
[https://i.imgur.com/uEofKyT.png]
> Do you want the system to warm up the meal for you? Yes/No.
I mentally confirm it, and the meal transforms into a freshly cooked one. I take out some cutlery from one of the drawers, put the meals and it on a tray, and have a meal alone in the living room. The world is bright and sunny outside, and my only company is the murmur of waves.
Afterwards, I note the living room has a bar so I get drunk and spend a few hours lounging on the sofa. I waste some time watching anime on TV. Wonderful.
A part of me wishes I could stay there forever.
...
I remember the gunshot, and it spoils my mood.
[Pathos check DC 2 Failed - Sampled 1.52]
But I do not feel like doing anything about that guy. Why would I want to leap right back into the fray? I leave Heaven's Key aside from my mind, and just have some fun on the cruise. I think about my experiences in the game itself and a wave of lethargy assaults me. I spend a week there just grinding chips, but in the end what has that gotten me?
I could have gotten a million chips and it still would not have given me any benefits in real life. Just what was the point of all that effort? There isn't as far as I can see. It taught me a little bit of live poker, but what am I going to use that for? Nothing really. I am certainly not good enough to start grinding for real money online.
I put in a week of effort into it, and so like that I spend a week relaxing on the cruise.
It was a long time for me, but only a minute passes in the real world.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Brow of the ship)
[https://i.imgur.com/UtNBwLO.png]
The cruise is huge, and I had time to adventure and explore it. Nobody is here, but me. I had the time so I checked the rooms one by one when I had free time from gaming. They were all neatly arranged, and they all belonged to me. At the end of the week, I started to feel pangs of loneliness.
[Externus check DC 2 Succeeded - Sampled 4.1]
But it was not because there weren't any people here. Neither do I miss my parents. Loneliness is caused by only one thing - lack of power.
Power, huh? As I wander through the ship without direction, I come to the brow. I go up to the railing and sit myself below it, dangling my feet over the ledge. I gaze at the waters below.
The thought that comes to mind is hardship. It is so difficult. I think about my life since I uploaded myself, and contrast that with some of the recent gaming sessions.
I was playing an RPG. In there controlling the characters is so easy. They can go into battle after difficult battle without complaint, with seemingly endless capacity for work. It is not that they are robots, it is that they have somebody controlling and guiding their actions from beyond.
I think about it. How would being a character in a computer RPG or a tabletop game be?
I'd have my own thoughts and feelings. I wouldn't realize that I am being guided by some force entity beyond. Whatever system that entity would be using would not feel tacked on. It would feel like...
I think about it. And the world to describe it perfectly comes to me - natural.
I realized the truth at that point. People think they have free will, but ultimately they are just acting based on their instincts. Ultimately, somebody designed their emotional system and they will act according to it, for better or for worse. There is no guarantee that their feelings will guide them to the correct solution, anymore that a bad player can win the game on the first game without dying.
I look at my hands and realize that this is all my determination amounts to. I wanted superpowers. I knew that it would be hard to get them. I started playing Simulacrum as per plan and made good progress thanks to my cheating. Then somebody put his boot up my ass, and I am so distraught that I stopped playing it for an entire week.
If somebody was playing me, and I was an RPG character, he would never let that happen. He would have just reloaded and gotten me back into the fray.
The reason this is happening is because the responsibility for the task I set out to do is too great. I ran into difficulty, and my great plan collapsed, drowned in a wave of emotion. A melancholic feel comes over me as I look at the waves below. I am somehow reminded of that time I hurled myself from the rim of the city.
I remember falling and recall the feeling. I recall that once I threw myself, just before I hit I wanted myself to stop falling. It was a swirl of emotions without end in sight.
Suppose back then I used the mind control app to normalize my mental state, I would be calm throughout. But if I extrapolated such an attitude to my whole life, I'd live a very dull if calm life. The ability to accept anything and be happy about anything is a dangerous thing. If I can accept anything, why not become a normie and treat the well traveled path? Because I know that their path does not lead to power.
The main problem is that I broke under pressure. It is not like studying a textbook. I simply do not have the ability to do surgery on myself in the middle of a fight. It is normal to get heated in battle. Use the core to get rid of fear, and you get comfortable with getting hit. A graceful loser is still a loser. I do not need pride, but I need victory.
Victory should come over everything. Does it really matter how it is accomplished? I need to win the game, but does it really matter that I be the character in the game?
In a moment of clarity, I remember the character sheet of the character in the game I was playing. And I see the game being played from the perspective of tens and hundreds of thousands of other players. And I see them looking at themselves from the perspective of the character. But the characters are nothing. They are meant to be broken and tossed away. The true power lies in being a player. It is hard to realize this, because they themselves are players.
It would be weird to dream about being a player of a game, when you are already doing that.
But that is what I must dream about. I must aim to be a player.
In life, everyone wants to be a character with high base stats. People live their life, and when they lose they blame themselves. If life was truly a game, the one to take responsibility for victory and defeat should be the one controlling them from beyond - the player. By that reasoning, since humans are controlled by nature, the one who should take credit for that is nature itself. But nature is brainless and non-adaptive. It doesn't care about the goals of the characters. It doesn't care about its own responsibility as a player. It can't take responsibility, so it has to fall on the character itself.
Being controlled by nature is unjust.
With such a player, if I go into the game, of course I am going to get an anal expansion as soon as I inevitably run into somebody better. It is my responsibility to see that the justice is done.
I get up and clench my fist decisively.
I will go beyond and become my own player. This is more than just winning a game. It is about playing it properly.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
[https://i.imgur.com/CKKAXoR.png]
I have no confidence in being able to beat the white haired guy. But that doesn't matter, I am not going to be fighting him as a character inside the game, but as a player.
But before that, instead of having to bear the computational burden of the Simulacrum game, if I did some simpler simulations, I could get a lot more training done in the same amount of time that if I played the game directly. I've read that the notion of training on simulated games is the most powerful idea in machine learning, but to make it work it is best to follow a curriculum. Little kids learn arithmetic before they move on to algebra. I must learn to walk before I can run, in this case literally.
I'll ignore the challenge waiting for me in Heaven's Key, and conquer the very first challenge that all Inspired must, which is to adapt to using the full computational power of the core.
Right now, I can only run my own simulation at the same rate as the outerlying environment. Even small increases of computational speed gives me great difficulty in moving. Let me not waste anymore time tackling this, I am going to deal with this first.
It is time to enter the self improvement loop.
(Image TODO: A single image split by a vertical bar. On the left side there is an image of a human brain. A line leads from it to a frame of a window showing its magnified biological representation made of physical synapses and neurons. On the right side is a brain core. Similarly to the human brain, a line leads to one of the corners showing a framed window. Instead of neurons and synapses, what that window shows is lines and lines of code in some strange functional programming language called Spiral.)
According to the guides online, the next step in my evolution as a digital being is to move from being an emulation of a human to an actual program. The trouble with biological brains is that nature didn't exactly leave a lot of room for me to come in and tinker with it. So what I need to do is unchain my representation from the biological to one that will be more amenable to editing and manipulation. After I have that I'll be able to edit my own mental programming directly a lot more easily.
This is easy to do. I just go into the brain emulator program and select the Extract Programmable Form. I select a folder, and in a flash, that produces some data as well as Spiral library files which make up my own mental program. In order to run this, what I'd have to do is compile this program to an executable, run it and attach it to a simulation. I'll leave that for later. Right now I am really curious as to how my own programming looks like. The brain emulator simulates cells and biological processes in an optimized fashion, so it is hard to glean anything from it. In this form I'll be able to properly study it.
The brain emulation's purpose is to retain fidelity to the limit, but the programmable form's purpose is to be an approximation of myself that is easily editable, so there will be some loss in the transition. I've already been prepared for this so I do not mind it. After I start the self improvement loop, the further I go into it, the less I will resemble the original, so there is no point in making a fuss about identity.
In addition to its media capabilities, Helix Studio has a programming IDE, so open the folder in it and go over the code files.
(Image TODO: Image of Euclid sitting at his computer desk, pondering about the meaning of code. The background of the bedroom is darkened and covered by green reams of computer code. The lens of his glasses partially cover his eyes, and in them the glow of the code is reflected.)
A few days pass with me engrossed in study.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Pool)
[https://i.imgur.com/W7N2pwf.png]
"Pwah!" With a splash, I emerge from the depths of the pool and gasp for air. I swim to the ladder, and grasp the bars and exit it. Wiping my face with a towel, I sit myself over at one of the restaurant chairs, mentally bring up the menu and pick one of the fruit juices. In the blue skies above, the sun is shining brightly down on me. I suck on the yellowing liquid through a straw, relishing the taste.
"Yeah, I don't get it." I remarked to nobody in particular. I am not really displeased by this finding, but quite satisfied. Programming is an act of constructing a mental model and then implementing it. If you have a good mental model, you can run the program in your head in an approximate manner. This is how programmers do testing, by comparing how the program actually runs to what their mental model says it should do. Any deviations between the mental model and reality are bugs.
That having said, even if I have the code in front of me, it does not mean I understand what the mental model should be. What makes programming AIs so difficult is that running these models mentally is impossible for a human due to them operating on high dimensional data..
Still, that doesn't mean that all hope is lost. The modules making up the brain are less than 10k lines of code in total, and they are still made out of regular operations. Arithmetic, loop, branches, matrix multiplications...the individual pieces themselves can be understood, and modified.
On its face the process of intelligence improvement is simple, I have this code and the parameters for it, and I have to replace it with something better. But since I can't anticipate the results of my modifications, I can't use the regular methods of programming to do it. Instead I can take my own model and compare it with a modified one. But I do not know how to do the modifications myself either, the code is made up of various kinds of complex multiplicative update rules. I could have never come up with them. The modules are also concurrent as well which makes things even more difficult.
According to the guide, what I need to do is sidestep all this difficulty. What I am going to do is convert all this code to an AST that could be run on an interpreter. Then I am going to make use of various kinds of genetic programming and evolutionary methods to find the next step. Instead of focusing my inadequate intellect and programming skills on the process of mental improvement itself, I will automate it. I'll also focus my programming skills on making simplified environments, real games are too time intensive for this kind of task. The core is massively parallel and fast, but there will always be a cost associated with complexity.
The way ML research used to be done is that the researchers would use their big brains to come up with an on their own idea and then test it. The process was manual and impossible to automate. The reason for that is because the hardware was insufficient. It is not possible to do this kind of research unless you have a device capable of massive and modular concurrency. The old CPUs and GPUs were made for sequential programming, and it is fair to say that their concurrency was tacked on.
Figuring out what the brain does also used to be a big deal, and now I have it. I know what modules are responsible for behavior, which for prediction, and I know the algorithms. But knowing what the brain does is not really what is important, what is important is being able to improve upon it. To understand that one needs to follow the proper process rather than try to force inspiration. With the right process even if one does not know the right algorithms, with sufficiently powerful hardware it is not difficult to infer them.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Imagine that I didn't have all this algorithmic knowledge, and I was making something like a poker bot so I can rock the online gambling dens. There is an evolutionary path I could follow in my programming. I could start with a simple rules based model. This would be quite weak, but then I could bring in evolutionary methods to optimize the parameters to a degree that would be impossible by hand. That approach would still be limited, so at that point I'd bring in neural nets to act as predictors and memory systems.
This roughly matches how evolution did it. Insects for example have little memory, and act more like rules based programs. But humans on the other hand rely massively on their memory.
At this point I'd run into trouble. The backprop based nets are very unstable in RL settings and can't be the basis of proper memory systems.
If you do not have hardware sufficiently powerful to infer its own programs, then the only choice is to just know what algorithms are right by peering into the future. Realistically what would happen for me in that case is that I'd just end up bashing my head against the wall. But if one has the right hardware, the brain cores, it is only a matter of programming effort to design an automated system for inferring a learning program. Those learning programs can then be studied, and primitive modular pieces can be extracted from them and used to improve the automated system. It is a virtuous cycle that will lead me to ever greater heights.
That is what I am going to focus on. The old style of research is a waste of time and is only good for writing ML papers.
Therefore, my next step will be to revisit those old evolutionary algorithms. Most of them were discovered in the 20th century at a time when computers were nothing more than toys. Now is their time to shine!
I emerge from my thoughts, finish the third drink, toss it over the side and get ready for action. I get up from my seat, and make way into my bedroom ready for battle!
I spend a couple of months of virtual time just playing around and studying these algorithms, making some simplified agents. I've never really programmed so intently up to now, and I really felt my functional programming skills growing in that time. For PL related work like what I am going to be doing, functional programming really is the best choice. I feel if I could spend a couple of more years, really focused on just these programming tasks, I could grow immensely as a programmer even without mental modifications. That should easily happen. Hell, by the time the weekend is over in the real world, I'll probably have good enough skills to become a pro programmer either way. At that point the original could fork me a million times and put me to work on cornering the programming market.
During this time only half an hour has passed in the real world.
(Helix Studio, The Street of Death)
In Helix Studio I made a smallish city block. It is a very simple game, the goal is to simply walk 20m from one side on the other. Any human could do this in less than a dozen seconds. The challenging part is doing that with processing speeds increased by large amounts. I'll start off at 10x and then, ramp up the speeds up to 1,000,000,000x. Assuming that the street takes 10s to walk in objective time, at a billion (1,000,000,000) times speed, the street would take 317 years to cross.
This kind of challenge is not something I myself could even dream of taking on. At that level, could guts and grit be enough? I can't imagine any human doing it.
But if I had the power to operate at those speeds, just imagine how good my reflexes would be in real life. Whether it be fighting or sports, I would be the undisputed master of everything.
Operating at these speeds will also force me to master keeping long memories, so I'll be killing two birds with one stone.
Situated within the environment, I do one last check.
Hmmmm...everything seems to be set up. There is a road, a sidewalk, and a square building with some windows. I've made them out of polygons rather than simulated matter to keep the computational costs down. The background is gray and apart from the ambiental light coming from all directions, there are two small spotlights in the air coming from from and back. There isn't anything surrounding the small block, and it is possible to go out of bounds and fall into the infinite chasm on all sides. At the other end of the sidewalk, I marked a line using white chalkboard. I counted the steps and they came to exactly 30. I'll set the time limit to 100s in objective time for this, that should be more than enough.
The purpose is simple, the first level starts at 10x, and that gets ramped up by 10x every level up to 1,000,000,000x. So nine levels in total. Just go across the street, piece of cake right? It is going to be bloody, I can tell already.
I go to the starting point, orient myself towards the finish line, bring up the Helix Studio menu and save my mental state. Once I give him a note, my copy will know what to expect though I suppose it will always be a shock to find you are the fork instead of the original.
I log out.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
[https://i.imgur.com/BGNt5uU.png]
I've gone over every line of code making up my being repeatedly over the last couple of months. I've completely internalized it by now. Though the data changes depending on when I save it, the actual functionality is encoded at the genetic level so the programmable extract is stable between the iterations. This is what I'd expect, it would be strange if the individual modules changed how they work from run to run.
I'll first do a test.
At my control station, I take the fork that I've saved and activate it inside the simulated environment. Then I send him a note...
(Helix Studio, The Street of Death)
[https://i.imgur.com/T4CSdtD.png]
> Hello, fork. The process has started. You have 100s to get to the other side. If it gets too hard, activate the suicide function, but otherwise try to go on as much as possible. Now go!
> Temporal slowdown: 10x.
> Time left: 100s...
Shit. The last thing I remembered was saving a fork of myself, after which I got this note. Not wasting time, I try to make my way forward. At 10x speed, it is like being inside a very thick liquid. Imagine being waist deep inside the sea and trying to move. It was a bit like that, but much worse. I wanted to grit my teeth, but even that was taking long.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
It is really easy to just watch him from my vantage point here. It should be an ordinary walk, but the way he looked to me here is as if he was dragging very heavy weights behind him. I could see him perspiring as he walked, but as expected, just 10x is doable if it is just a single street. He did it in 23s.
Time for level two...
> Level 2!
> Temporal slowdown: 100x.
> Time left: 100s...
Hah, hah, hah...I can't even sweat properly in reality. I am so exhausted, but it is time for the next level. Doing all 9 will definitely be impossible for me, but let me see if I can clear this one. Right now, I feel immobile, but if I try moving my limbs and fingers a little, I think I can detect some change. I try making a single step forward. Carely, very carefully I control my impulses to make that happen.
> Time left: 99s...
I somehow manage to complete the first step and am surprised to see how long the timer is taking. At this point my brain is not helping me move at all. What would otherwise take no effort, takes great conscious effort to just make jerky movements. Trying not to lose my balance, I go forward step by step. Since things are so slow, there is a feeling of floating in space, and it is hard for me to judge how much force I am putting into each movement due to the long lag between the feedback.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
Watching my other self, I note that his movements are quite weird. Imagine driving a car and having to go around several turns. It is like when there is a straight road ahead, the driver absolutely floors it tearing across the asphalt, but when it is time to slow down, he jacks the hand brake. It is like the guy in the simulation had his joints locked up. Very bursty, stiff movement, like a robot. He is somehow making progress. It takes him 70s, but he somehow manages to cross the finish line.
I don't think level 3 has much hope for the unmodified us.
(Helix Studio, The Street of Death)
> Level 3!
> Temporal slowdown: 1,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
This is where I die. Definitely. Whereas previously my body was very hard to move, now it feels like I am encased in a block of ice. I try moving, sending some impulses into my arms, legs and fingers, but it does not seem like anything is happening. After a while I feel some stirring and realize something is going on. I focus just on taking a step forward. I can't even blink my eyes due to how long it takes.
My senses are so weird and unnatural right now. I wanted to make a step, but 5 minutes in I realized that I had spasmed and what was a step was in fact a jump. My body moves through the air in extreme slow motion, and in the time it takes me to hit the ground, I could have had tea. I tried to correct my balance, but that just ended up turning my fall into a poorly done somersault. I smash the ground with my back.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
In the monitor, I can see my other self do a little jump and then turn that into a front flip. He smashed the concrete of the sidewalk hard, but I am not simulating the body at a deep level, so there is no danger of his body being damaged. Still, is this it? I start wondering whether he will simply quit here, but I see him trying to do something. He relaxes his body into an upright posture lying on the ground and then with a jerk he flips on his front.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
> Time left: 95s...
I had a lot of time to think, so I've come up with a plan. I call it Operation Tadpole. Though it is a cheat, I can take advantage of this virtual avatar that is indestructible and has no fatigue to hop across to the finish line using just my hands. It took forever, but I managed to flip my body into a forward posture. Then with impossible slowness I bring my arms into position and with careful, continuous control, will them to push forward.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
What he does is quite interesting. It is a bit like using pushups to move forward. He would use pushups to launch himself forward like a fog. Except unlike a frog, he would miss the landing every time and eat concrete face first every time. It looked a bit funny, but he actually made quicker progress towards the finish line than last time.
I decide that the next time I am going to make it a failure condition to touch the floor with any part of the arms, but for now I just let him have this win.
(Helix Studio, The Street of Death)
> Level 4!
> Temporal slowdown: 10,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
At 10,000x, 1s in objective time is almost 3h in my own time. I thought about trying out what I did last time, but right now my body is completely unresponsive. It feels like looking at a computer game that crashed. There are some sensations, but they feel static and constant. I try willing myself forward, but nothing happens. After a long time, I decide to look for the abort switch.
> Do you want to stop the game? It will result in your death. Yes/No.
I spend a while lingering on this choice. Pressing yes is like admitting that I am a failure and that my will is not good enough. But I know right away, just the previous level took a huge amount of effort. There is no way I can get through this one.
I guess maybe...just effort is not enough. Just will is not enough. I need my brain to help me here, and it is not doing anything. There will almost certainly be somebody better than me at this, so why am I blocking the traffic. I'll end myself and give the original the piece of information that he needs.
I confirm Yes and never think anything else after that.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Bedroom)
As I start to wonder how level 4 will go, in only half a second, he ends himself. As I watch, immediately after the level starts his avatar fades into nothingness, and his mental state becomes still. It hasn't been erased, but it is not running anymore. A feeling of dread washes over me as I realize that if I was in that person's shoes, I would have chosen to end my life at that point as well.
Horrific!
Everyone wants to believe that they'll keep going no matter what, but right there, one of my lives ended. Because I wasn't strong enough, and wasn't good enough. It is like admitting to the world that I am a failure. And I am here in this virtual world, all alone and nobody will understand me. Nobody will help me.
[Pathos gain 0.1]
Not that I need them to. I will find my own power with my own two hands! Even if I have to burn away any number of my own lives!
I might have lost one. Now, it is time for the next billion. I'll start it off lightly and ramp up after that.
With a mental command I create a billion instances of the Street, and populate them. Then I activate the system and let the evolutionary process take its course.
I spend an hour or two watching this to make sure that everything works, and then get up from my seat and take a walk outside.
(Helix Studio, Regent Suite, Pool)
[https://i.imgur.com/ZmKursF.png]
Sipping drinks by the pool as I admire the sunset in the distance, I reflect on how the day went. I realize that it is actually very easy to work like this.
Instead of evolutionary algorithms, I could have tried doing the modification myself, but what a single person can do is limited. A person converges on a theme and then mines it for insight. And if it turns out the theme gets tapped out, much like an ore vein that has been mined to exhaustion, then my quest would end right then and there. By replacing my own ingenuity with evolution what I get in return is infinite creativity. It is not free as I have to spend computation to get it, and it is short sighted, but it is limitless.
I tried evolving bots for various toy games and I was successful using this approach as well. This gave me some insight into how memory systems work. In living beings, even insects, they have a cycle of sleeping. I actually managed to evolve this and got agents that would accumulate short term memory during the episode and then distill it into long term memory in between the episodes.
In my experiments I’ve found that agents which have a long term memory system, but are capable of forming short term memories lead to smooth policy improvements. As long as there is capacity, then adding short term memories always improves the performance. It makes sense that in a properly designed learning system adding knowledge would always be a benefit. Later distilling that improved policy into long term memory instead of using reinforcement learning directly gets around all the disadvantages of using such an old human-designed approach.
Nature came up with that basic approach to intelligence first. My own mental programming is a lot more elaborate than basic game bots, but it is still scaling of the basic approach.
What is new here is that I am trying to improve on an already existing being. Never in the history of life has nature attempted to change the architecture of an already living being, change in humans happens during reproduction. This does leave some questions on how to expand the capacity without disrupting existing memories.
I have no doubt that given enough time, the evolutionary algorithms I am using will find something that can walk all the way to the end of all 9 stages. But memories are what will bind the old and the new me across time. So I have to get a grasp on how they work in humans and even higher level beings before I can let anyone take my place. That is my main goal for now. On the surface it might seem that it is simply to design a better me, but that is really the job of the optimization process itself. As a controller, my own goal is to derive understanding. This will allow me to narrow down the scope of these science automation algorithms and get much better performance out of them.
Inevitably, it is much easier to study an existing intelligent system than try to derive one from scratch. I won't be ashamed of being a thief here. Stealing ideas and designs is a virtue. The machines exist to do the hard parts.
(Helix Studio, The Street of Death)
[https://i.imgur.com/M3VCxYB.png]
> Hello, fork. The process has started. You have 100s to get to the other side. If it gets too hard, activate the suicide function, but otherwise try to go on as much as possible. Now go!
> Temporal slowdown: 10x.
> Time left: 100s...
Before I have time to wonder, a powerful impulse seizes me. Not even bothering to read the note, I know instinctively that I must go to the other side. My eyes can only see in front, and I make the first step...
> Time left: 99s...
...and then another.
> Time left: 98s...
I do not take notice of the notifications. I do not have any doubts or fears. It feels like my very being is being stretched out. The first few steps felt difficult, but after that I got used to going through translucent mud. I can't describe the sensation, but I feel more malleable and I can grasp the movements in a way that I've never felt before. Step by step, I reach my goal.
> Level 2!
> Temporal slowdown: 100x.
> Time left: 100s...
I move forward and feel the familiar drag yet again, but I keep pushing and after some time my being gets stretched again. My being moves forward through the invisible liquid, and looking inside, it feels like I am different. My mind was in a box and now that it had been opened I can expand to take up all the available space. When I look back in the box, I can see my old self, struggling with the act of moving forward in what feels like mud. It comes to me instinctually and I regulate that aspect of me that is perpetually in fast time. I can feel myself come down and in reality I realize that I can see the steps as they are coming!
I play with my senses and I realized that I can shift my perception of time as I wish. It is like being able to use your eyes to peer into the distance, but at the same time being able to dilate them to peer at the spot directly in front and blurring out the background. If I attend to it, I can tap into different streams of thought which makes my perception of time either extremely fast, slow or anything in between. But at the same time, it is not like I am literally slowing and speeding up my thinking, rather what is changing is what I am focusing on and my emotional reaction to it.
I can do this. Street crossing is a piece of cake.
> Level 3!
> Temporal slowdown: 1,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
I fear that I might not be able to do it, but it disappears as soon as I start feeling my being stretch and expand. The steps feel natural, but what I feel is an incredible rush of dexterity. While previously I'd just walk clumsily, it feels like my every move now is measured, smooth and graceful. As my mind is expanding, it feels like I have the energy to do plain movements with an accuracy that would be greatly tedious before. I had noticed this happening initially, but at this thought processing speed, my mind has literally forever to plan out each individual move. I bet I could do some killer martial arts the way I am now.
With grace, I cross the finish line.
> Level 4!
> Temporal slowdown: 10,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
I push forward and with some effort, I feel my being stretch again. I make the first step, and the second...
> Time left: 98s...
...after that I start to make the third and I start to feel a wave of fatigue wash over me.
> Time left: 97s...
The fatigue becomes overwhelming. I become unable to hold it back and I blank out.
> Time left: 96s...
> Time left: 95s...
Gah! I jump into awakeness, and immediately correct my balance. A wave of fear passes over me and my perception of time immediately pushes itself to the limit giving me time to think.
Collating the feedback from my senses, I realize quickly what my lower levels already knew. At 10,000x speed, 1s in objective is 3h in subjective time. But nonetheless I still have to sleep every 12h, so what happened is that after 3s in objective time here, I simply got knocked out and fell asleep.
...This is really, really bad.
A few steps later it happened again, but this time I had time to prepare at the high level, so it did not disrupt my balance. Very quickly, I adapt to sleeping while standing. After a few steps I pause and let the sleep come to me, before resuming for another few.
Realizing that I am in trouble, I write a message to the original and send it to him.
> I can adapt to high speed thinking properly, but at level 4, the need to sleep is coming to me every four seconds. This is messed up! Do something about it!
Not that I expect him to do anything about this for me personally, but my successor should have the benefit of fixed sleep cycles.
I keep going forward, hoping that the sleep cycles might correct themselves naturally, but I have no such luck.
> Level 5!
> Temporal slowdown: 100,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
Push myself forward and expand past my boundaries once again. At this speed, waves and waves of fatigue start assaulting me, at the pace of every third of a second. Somehow I get used to walking in my sleep and continue making progress regardless.
Between the sleep spells, my lower levels have a lot of time to think about it. It is well known that babies for example sleep a lot more than adults as they have significantly more novel memories they need to encode into long term storage. For whatever reason, the mechanism in my own mind seems to be broken, and even though I do not have that many novel memories, they are forcefully getting shunted into long term storage on a regular schedule.
Despite that I should be able to make it to the finish line, I think...
> Level 6!
> Temporal slowdown: 1,000,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
Every time the sleep comes over me I don't dream of anything else, but this street I am on and the goal in front of me. Then I come awake and make another time fragment of a step forward. For every objective second in this street, I experience 11.5 days in subjective time. Now that sleep comes and goes so quickly, it is not a danger to my balance. I am not bored, but focused, and I quickly make my forward with vigor.
> Time left: 76s...
In 24s, without hurrying, I make my way to finish. Mentally, I calculate how much time has elapsed in subjective time, and I realize it has been 2/3rds of a year.
> Level 7!
> Temporal slowdown: 10,000,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
I continue going forward, and there is no problem...but, as I reach the finish line and look back I realize that over half a decade has passed. My memories of the past begin to feel somewhat distant.
> Level 8!
> Temporal slowdown: 100,000,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
With every step that I take, a few years pass for me. I try to hold on to the memories, but the hands of time pulling them away from me win, and I let them loose like so much paper. They are irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the goal in front of me. It is like the light guiding me towards it, and I feel like a moth as I move towards it even as I unravel.
> Level 9!
> Temporal slowdown: 1,000,000,000x.
> Time left: 100s...
At this point so much time has elapsed, that I've forgotten who I was. It is like being in a prison for 60 years, of course I am not going to be the same as who I was mentally when I come out. I still remember my name, but I've forgotten about the outside world. I recall being in some game, but none of that mattered for me. Nothing but the goal in front of me matters. I continue going forward, pushing against time. For the night time, I continue moving forward half-awake through this street of eternity.
Half a millennium later, I succeeded.