Sally woke to no special weirdness. Just a normal day in paradise. As she stretched and looked around, Jon walked by carrying a body. Yep, a normal day.
They had been in the kitchen area for three days, now. Sally had rooted through all the cupboards, poked at a lot of the things the Sallys had constructed, and started to read the books, journals, and miscellaneous parchments. She had tried a number of the recipes and was quite proud that she was advancing her cooking skills up to mediocre. The recipes were partly to blame because the writing was often difficult to decipher, wandering off in odd directions, and her favorite, leaving things out. To be truthful, it was her own fault, mainly because she wasn’t the best of writers. Well... that wasn’t entirely true. Here, she was the best writer, but in her fake life on earth, she hadn’t been of the literary or cookery bent.
This morning, she was a little excited because last night the SF man had told her that her internal circuitry was far enough along that she could become involved in the process. Her memory had been getting better, she understood more of what was going on around her, she was very coordinated, and, when Jon wasn’t around, she could move really fast. The SF man had started popping up in the daytime too, mostly to remind her to slow down and act normal.
After going through her morning routine, she was sitting at the table, eating breakfast, when he appeared in one of the other chairs, even though he was only in her mind.
“So, are you ready for the next step?” he asked.
“Probably, for someone who doesn’t really know what that is. And shouldn’t we be worrying about Jon? What if he sees me talking to myself?”
Then she thought about how unusual that would be. “Oh, never mind.”
“Okay, back to the topic. Which is very important. I think it’s time that I picked a name for myself.”
“Is that all? You built up my expectations so you could tell me your name.”
“Don’t be silly! It’s important, a name defines how people form a first impression of you.”
Sally looked around at all the people. “I see what you mean.”
“I prefer,” he struck a pose, “Clive Aloysius Smythe.”
Sally wrinkled her nose.
“No? Too much?”
“Yeah, why not something simpler, like... Gregory? It has some weight.”
“Um... I see you got it from a movie. It was a butler’s name. Nothing against that fine profession, but I am not a butler.”
They bandied suggestions back and forth, and eventually, settled on Alex. Short, a bit dignified, and reasonably neutral.
SF Man, oops, Alex, laughed a little.
“What’s funny? Don’t like your name?”
“No, no it’s not that. In the outside world, we tend to have much longer names that are basically large data files which include titles and email addresses. The shortest version is a pointer to this data file, and even so , the pointer file is quite long, in itself. To have a designator this short would be unusual, to say the least. I am debating changing my name and going by just Alex. It will cause an epic amount of confusion, especially if there is more than one Alex. This has great potential.”
Sally was almost certain that this whole friendly banter process was intended to show that Alex was different from Jon or the spy, and to draw her into trusting him. There may also be a hidden lesson; he was being a bit overly friendly to teach her to be wary. She would watch and see what she could pick up. She snorted at the irony. Maybe he was a lot better teacher than she thought.
“Now, to the real subject of this meeting. Here is a diagram to show what is being done to you.”
A floating 3D image of a human appeared over the table, consisting of a see-through outline of the body containing a detailed representation of the nervous system.
“Here is your original nervous system, and here are the additions.”
Little red nodules appeared all around the blue nerves, with multiple red lines sheathing everything that was originally blue. Even Sally could tell the changes were extensive.
“If we zoom in, we see that the changes extend into the cell level of the muscles, and organs. I have also added in these changes,” A misty white overlay appeared on everything. “As you see, this touches all parts of your body. It’s basically reinforcing you so that your toughness will increase tenfold, at least.”
He swiped, and everything disappeared except the red enhancements to the nervous system .
“The indicated regions are built using a subatomic technology, and we will be migrating your intelligence to operate in this medium to decentralize your processing.”
He went on to show the extra memory, application specific hardware, and other improvements. Sally felt as if she was buying a car with all the bells and whistles.
Alex halted his description of the new features. “And, like a car, the problem we have is that you don’t know how to drive yet. It will take time to learn how to use what you see here. The good news is that with these changes, we will be able to alter your processing speed. So, every night, we will be able to make it seem that days, and eventually months, will have passed. In real time it will only take a few weeks until you will be able to operate your new body. But to you, years will have passed.
“And, to top it off, here is something I am really proud of.”
The body went back to showing her original nervous system in blue, with a few red nodules.
“What you see is a typical body scan which shows your internal processing system. Take my word for it, this reveals nothing outstanding. Some small improvements, but everything looks normal for a typical citizen. Now, let me disable the stealth system.”
Suddenly all the red enhancements appeared.
“I am loathe to admit it, but the spy’s technology was truly an advance over anything I had, and mixing my techniques and its have resulted in something that is spectacularly advanced! A system that will not be equaled for quite some time. We can enhance the crap out of you, and no one will be able to tell. You are going to be spectacular!”
He was making such a big deal about it that Sally wondered if Alex had discovered some entity like the spy was spying on him, too. This sort of speculative insight was one of the results of the improvements she had been receiving; they were useful, but also made life much more complicated. Well, not exactly. They allowed her to understand that life was more complicated.
Speaking of insights, it was obvious that Alex thought of her as a special project. She was sure that it wasn’t normal for a super-intelligence to invest this much effort in a low-level like her. Odds were that he would want something, but he’d better be careful. She might bite. Right now, though, all she could do was give him a good gumming.
Alex went on, “Here is a schedule of what enhancements and abilities will be coming available. It also covers the training you will need to be able to integrate the abilities.”
Good God! The list went on forever!
“Today we will start with the basics. You need to learn how to camouflage the changes. I will teach you how, because you are already showing too many signs of your enhancements. If Jon or the monitoring system picks up on these, there’s a good chance the results will be bad. You are not ready to deal with the entity running this experiment.”
Alex went on to show how she could operate an overlay personality. After she studied the details, Sally built a basic copy of herself, as she was before everything that had happened. She named it "simple-Sally". It was an emulation that allowed her to interface with Jon, and hopefully, keep him from noticing any changes. Handling the details of operating simple-Sally was excruciatingly complex, but, shockingly enough, she could do it.
Once the emulation mode was operating, Sally cleaned up from her breakfast and made her way to the library. Operating this way was strange. She felt like a disembodied ghost floating over simple-Sally, nudging her here and there. Alex had assured her that control of simple-Sally would become more natural, over time. Sally sat her in the chair and continued reading from where she had left off the previous day.
She was plowing her way through the Sally-written books, and she agreed with Jon. Reading was a horrendously slow way to transfer information. Even if she wanted to read faster the parchment was so fragile that she couldn’t, not to mention that if she went too fast she would tip off Jon.
Annoyed at the slow pace, she would occasionally read one or two of the separate parchments, just to change things around. The books tended to discuss the companions more than anything else, with recipes and ways to do things jammed around these discussions. Not surprisingly, everything tended to be written in a very similar manner.
Although, some of the parchments were completely different. Most likely, they were written by the companions. Most of these companions hadn’t been pre-programmed and needed to be trained, or taught, by their associated Sally.
Some of the documents the companions wrote were quite strange.
One parchment appeared to be written by three beings at once, and it took her a while to understand that one thread talked about emotion, one about facts, and one about senses. The overall meaning emerged when the three threads were read at the same time, which was somewhat challenging. After trying different things, she found that if she unfocused her eyes a little, she could skim the three threads simultaneously and get a rough idea of how the companion felt as it worked on something, in this case, a way to make cloth. The writer really liked making cloth.
While she absorbed the obvious content, Sally was also looking for any indication of hidden information. She had a big assist because some of the processes she had inherited from the spy were tailored to look for these types of patterns hidden in data. But, so far, no luck.
For the most part, the original Sally had been a physical sort of person, and, although that was changing, it was still a part of her. Intellectually, she knew reading and studying would help her in the long run, but right now, she needed a break before she got into it full-time.
What would be good? Hmmm… she thought over her options.
Nothing that she was learning from Alex would help with Jon’s examination of the Sally bodies, and, to be honest, she thought his current work was kind of creepy. She also couldn’t show any new abilities to Jon, or it might get back to whoever/whatever was running this experiment. Her new spy instincts rebelled against any possibility of discovery. If she got desperate enough, she might let a version of simple-Sally help Jon analyze the bodies. But... no.
She was learning lots of things from Alex which would help her survive if she escaped, but none of them would actually allow her to escape. Maybe Alex was saving this for later, or maybe she would figure out something as she got smarter.
She could try exploring more rooms, but at the moment her heart wasn’t in it. Plus, it would have to involve Jon, so, even with simple-Sally, it probably wasn’t a good choice.
Sally had wanted to go back to the viewing room where she had talked with the original Alex, but her internal Alex had informed her that the room was permanently set to the post-apocalyptic version, and didn’t connect to anything, anymore. The Alex that came to that room didn’t want to maintain a permanent presence since it was too likely that the experimenter would clue in. but mostly, for Alex, it was fairly boring. This raised questions about why the room was even there, and how she had ended up finding it, but her Alex hadn’t enlightened her.
Sally tossed ideas back and forth and debated making a trip back to the garbage heap to see what she could find. This was the most appealing idea so far. She mulled it over for about a second.
Road trip!
She left the library and found Jon in the mausoleum. “Jon, I'm bored. What do you say to a trip back to the arena? We can do some more dumpster diving. Maybe we'll find gold, or, whatever. Something interesting.”
“Perhaps. I am currently on my 37th pass, working on 6 sigma accuracy for my correlation models.”
Sally actually knew what that meant but she let her simple-Sally model speak for her.
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“Cool, sounds like a yes to me! We can bring back the cloth we left there. It’s much better than most of what the other Sallys could make, and we can always use the tap to power, um, stuff.”
Sally was appalled. Simple-Sally was coming across as too vacuous. She probably needed some tweaks.
Jon showed no sign that he’d noticed anything out of the ordinary. “Okay, let’s wait until you have lunch, and then we’ll go.”
That would be an hour or so from now.
Simple-Sally asked, “Um, I lost track. What time is it now? Somewhere around noon?”
“No, closer to eleven.”
“Oh, good. That gives me time to make a big lunch, then.”
When Jon turned back to his work, Sally headed to the kitchen. Once she reached it, she paused to plan her next moves. Nothing earth-shattering, just what to bring for their excursion. Some of the cupboards under counter next to the sink had preserves that might be good. She opened the doors and peered in. The earlier Sallys had used all of the easily accessed preserves, what was left was way in the back. She could see the items in pseudo-jars and behind them the pipework for the sink. She crawled in to reach for the jars and noticed that the cupboard smelled a little like standing water. Sally peered past the jars and saw that one of the pipe joints was seeping a bit. Another job for the to-do-later list. She reached for a jar, and in the process bumped it/ Just a little. This jar hit the one behind it, and this last jar hit the pipe.
Now... Sally had wondered how the earlier Sallys managed to get a decent amount of pressure to operate their running water, and had intended to investigate, but her interest became much more immediate as the joint burst and the fluid under question sprayed in her face. Like any individual being doused with water under decent pressure, Sally investigated the feasibility of shielding herself with her hands, and found, like many before her, that this merely redirected the water so that it hit the shelves and struck her in new spots. She may have also yelled a bit, which also had no noticeable effect.
Sally surged ahead and wrapped her hand around the pipe, which did reduce the flow significantly. She then found herself stuck in a somewhat precarious, but stable, position. This gave her time to reflect upon a few things, but mostly that the water was a bit colder than she expected.
Instead of being annoyed, Sally found the situation to be ironic. Here she was, some sort of super-human, and she could still be brought down by unfortunate circumstance. Feeling amusement rather than anger was likely a result of the changes she was going through. Superhumans weren’t just normal people with superpowers. They were much more able to process their emotions and deal with events in a rational manner.
Sally held onto the pipe with one hand, pulled out one of the ties from her pants, and wrapped it around the joint to make a temporary repair. It still leaked, but didn’t spray.
She backed out of the cupboard and set about effecting a more permanent repair. Using a knife, she cut a strip from the bottom of one of her shirts, which was made from the waterproof material they had found. She crawled back under the counter and swapped her new seal for the temporary one, getting only slightly wetter. Her improved strength helped her wrap the strip tightly around the joint. She tied it off and examined the repair. There was still a tiny bit of leakage, but it was good enough. She crawled around and checked the rest of the plumbing, finding that it could use a little attention, but was generally okay, for now.
Sally emptied the cupboards and spread the wet foodstuffs on the table to dry, changed her clothing, finished preparing a sack lunch, and packed extra food. She waited for Jon.
While it appeared that she was relaxing, she was actually quite busy. Her previous boredom had been vanquished now that she had a goal.
Sally sorted through the large number of downloads Alex had piled into her memory and worked to integrate them. This was complicated by her need to implement the changes in a stealthy manner. Keeping everything secret and undetectable made integration much more difficult, but she thought the results would be worth it, once she was done. The extra effort would make it virtually impossible for even a complex sensor systems to see anything she didn’t want it to.
Any mental invader would find itself spoofed, trapped in a honeypot, mislead, co-opted, or completely deconstructed. She was very happy with how her internal intrusion security was shaping up. Much of her processing was distributed along her existing nervous system but integrated into the subatomic patterning process she had inherited from the spy. The changes were almost impossible to detect or destroy. She paid for the extra security with a hit on speed, but she now realized that everything was a compromise of some sort.
Her actual thought processes were slowly morphing over from her biological origins to the much more secure subatomic pattern implementation. Alex had stated they could do it slowly, or scoop out her brain and replace it in one shot, since the end result would be the same. Sally had some issues with the scooping method.
Her simple-Sally was a part of the security process. It was what an intruder would see, and allow the real Sally to be underestimated, or so she hoped. It appeared to work when she was with Jon, which Sally found sad. Sally still didn’t like the subterfuge, but she grudgingly admitted the evidence from the spy and Alex implied it was necessary. It was kind of amusing, though, because she was probably using a simple-Sally to talk to a simple-Jon.
Jon appeared on time and they set out. He was still using his standard security plan, which Sally was coming to realize was not as robust as it could be. The lights and signals that Jon and his hand were transmitting provided data that she analyzed with her own suite of tools. She really wanted to suggest some improvements to Jon’s techniques, but she couldn’t think of any way that didn’t put her new identity in jeopardy.
One thing on her list that she hadn't managed to get to, was testing her method to open the secret doors. Between her training and having to hide what she was doing from Jon, she hadn't had the opportunity. It would be more than inconvenient if she needed it for a fast escape at some time, and it didn't work.
They retraced their way through the passageways to the room that had held all of the computer boxes. With the residual information she had inherited from the spy, Sally could now appreciate the layout of this room in ways she hadn’t had the ability to, previously The walls, floor, and ceiling were packed with overlaying technologies. The science of the computer room was completely different from what Alex used, but Sally could appreciate that the entity who had dwelt here had been extremely sophisticated.
They continued down the hallway to the arena.
Sally was shocked at what she could now perceive. Their impromptu campsite and the debris pile were much as they had left it, but the computing boxes positively glowed in the light of Jon's sensors. If she thought the circuit density of the computer room was impressive, what the boxes were constructed from was many orders of magnitude denser. If anything, Jon had underestimated their worth.
If... no, when she escaped, she would have to take one of these. It would set her up for life. Even if it happened to be a very long life.
Simple-Sally masked all the overt signs of her reactions as she and Jon walked down to the campsite. The spider-rabbits had been poking around at their things. Not only could she see re-radiation from microscopic particles they’d shed, but also patterns in the dust and the slight clouds of respiration products suspended in the air. In addition to that, she could detect the temperature variations on the floor where they had been walking, and even in the air they exhaled.
This extra information was processed in her mind much as it used to be, but everything was just... more! It was as if she had only been able to see in black and white, then, all of a sudden, she could see color.
In her persona of simple-Sally, she approached the bags they’d left behind.
“Looks like the spider-rabbits got into the food," she said. "Good thing it doesn’t really matter, anymore. If we catch some of them, I will thank them for storing my food for me.”
The recipes she had been reading had extensive notes on how to make spider-rabbit palatable.
She finished puttering around with their old stuff and turned to watch Jon. He had started up where he left off, pulling miscellaneous things from the main pile, and categorizing them.
This wasn’t how Sally would have done the search. She would have done a quick overview, then subsequent levels of more detailed searches, until she honed in on areas that were the most promising. Jon assumed that all information is good, whereas she knew that some pieces of information were better than others.
Sally opted to follow the sensor hand around. Not too obviously, but it would help her search. Could she hack into it? She had the raw ability, but it wasn’t something she had worked on. After mulling it over for a while, she decided her current passive use of its abilities was best. One thing she could do, though, was fire up her decoding engines and see if she could acquire the signal from the hand. It was mostly an autonomous effort; she could just turn it on and see if it achieved anything.
Sally strapped on her skis. She really didn’t need them anymore, but it wouldn’t help her subterfuge if she skipped details.
She started shuffling around, and could now see that the areas painted yellow were producing active radiation, complex sensor returns, or couldn’t be penetrated by the hand’s radiation. That automatically made these areas the most intriguing. The “safe” areas Jon had let her investigate were devoid of any notable sensor readings.
That didn't mean that there wasn’t anything useful in these areas. Jon would probably overlook certain types of stealthed objects, but, what do you know? She was made to find stealthed things.
Sally decided to target her own search for items Jon probably wasn’t looking for. She stood still for a while, doing some internal optimizing. Most of her systems for this kind of search were new to her, but she had to start somewhere. Alex had said the best way to learn was to try stuff and not be stupid, and also not be stupid. He believed redundancy emphasized his lessons.
Sally’s morning lesson in water management was a further message that even she could be surprised, and had to do her utmost to avoid becoming overconfident.
Her next few hours were spent looking for interesting sites. She was limited to audio, smell, visual, and touch. Occasionally the hand would zoom by and she would supplement her basic senses, but this was rare.
She did find a few spots with anomalous readings. To keep up appearances, she’d look into these places after lunch, since it was a couple of hours past noon. It was apparent that her body wasn’t as driven to eat as it used to be, so she would have to modify simple-Sally to ensure that she stuck to a proper schedule.
She headed back to the camp, and unpacked the lunch she'd brought. While eating, she did a quick internal audit. Did her simple-Sally model need tweaking? Yeah, she probably should be sweating a little more, but other than that, it seemed okay. She had thought that simple-Sally was a trifle too simple, but upon review, she matched up to the original Sally quite well.
It was kind of embarrassing. She was starting to appreciate what Alex and Jon had to go through to dumb down their real capabilities so that they could project a humanlike personality for her.
Sally thought about the details involved in searching the areas she had identified. She would have to get off her skis, but it was best that she not toughen her skin, or Jon may notice. What she could do was use her abilities to limit the damage to the few expected minor cuts.
In addition to that, she couldn’t show any sign of extra strength. To compensate for that, she would bring, or make, some tools to explain how she could dig into the highly compacted mess.
It was complex, leading a double life, but she was really enjoying it. The subterfuge seemed to fit her personality. Odds were that Alex was a factor in forming her current attitudes, but wasn't he simply helping her?
She chuckled to herself. To be brutally honest, he had completely manipulated her. But, if the result was that she was doing what she wanted to, then what was the problem?
Leaving philosophy behind, she finished eating and headed to her first place to check out. Along the way, she conveniently managed to find a decent poking tool, along with a board to use as a shovel.
It took half an hour to uncover the first object that had piqued her interest. Although it was nothing more than a simple piece of wall material, it was completely nearly indestructible and completely opaque to scanning. In a pinch, it would make a good shield. She threw it to the edge of the debris field and went on.
The day passed. Sally found a lot of stuff: string that could alter the direction of some types of scanning rays, paper that re-radiated different energy than was incident, and other interesting things, but nothing to help her escape from the maze they were trapped in.
Simple-Sally was showing signs of fatigue, so she called it quits and headed back to camp. After making a late supper, she sat, wondering what would become of her. Jon toiled away in the background.
She had inspected what he had found. Nothing of too much merit, but she needed to have Alex teach her learn more about technology. There was a good chance she wouldn’t know enough to identify anything really useful.
Sally washed and prepared for bed. After chasing away some spider-rabbit poop she lay down and dozed. Alex appeared, wearing his lovely yoga outfit.
“So, how was your day?” he asked.
“Typical. I did some shopping for a purse, then went to the spa for a massage, and had my nails done. Do you like them?”
She held her hand out, her nails flashed through a number of patterns until they settled into a loop, with cartoon characters jumping from nail to nail.
“Nice, I like them. Why don't we go over what you found today and see what we can learn.”
“Before that, I have a question.”
“Alright.”
“How do you have new information to give me? I haven’t noticed any sort of communication link, so how do you interact with me and answer my questions? I have a good idea of what resources you have available in my mind, and I should be able to detect if you've hidden anything. You can’t possibly anticipate everything I might ask.”
“A very good question. You are incorrect, though. It’s entirely possible to anticipate everything you could ask. You are still applying human limits to what I am able do. If you had infinite memory, infinite processing, and 99.9% of the information about everything, then figuring out what you are going to ask is easy.”
“You can predict everything? That’s depressing. Am I just a story everyone knows the ending to?”
“Ah... not really. There are factors I don’t control. The most important ones belong to my peers. Those jokers! We find it endlessly amusing to disrupt each other’s plans. And, if you were listening to my earlier comments, I didn’t say I had all the data, just a lot of it.
“Much less of a factor, but it sometimes happens, is that outside of my peers there exist entities that are so strange that we have no hope of predicting what they will do. Like the water issue you ran into this morning. We look on them as cosmic pratfalls, they turn up where we don’t expect, screw up everything, and then leave.
“But, in a controlled environment such as this, I can make a good guess as to what is going to happen. Don’t fret, though, because sooner than you expect, you will become complex enough that this will no longer hold true.”
Sally fired up all of her hardware and processes that could be used to test the accuracy of data. She was pretty sure she could use her spy technology to mask this activity from Alex, in spite of what he had said. She wanted to ask a very specific question, and hoped she could perceive the truth.
“Are you the entity running this experiment?” she asked.
There was a pause, and Sally watched Alex, running the highest level of validation she could manage. Alex appeared to be serious as he answered.
“No, I'm trying to disrupt it. I understand what this experiment is trying to accomplish, but it’s poorly designed and basically immoral.”
Sally processed this statement. “Don’t misunderstand me," she stated. "I appreciate what you are doing for me, but isn’t disrupting some plans kind of, well, petty?”
“Layers within layers, my girl. In broad terms, the entity running this experiment is a pain, and anything I can do to reduce its standing is a win for me. Disrupt sounds like a trivial term, but in this case, I'm trying to make a subtle event have a major effect, in the long term. It’s a delicate balance, and I'm sorry a number of Sallys suffered, but the alternatives would be much worse.”
Sally checked with her hardware. It said there was no subterfuge, but with Alex, who could be sure? She looked at him.
“So, did my answer check out?” Alex asked.
“No, you were lying.”
Alex laughed. “Very good! I actually didn’t predict you would say that.” Probably a lie.
He continued. “Tonight, we will review all the hardware you and Jon have found, see if we can deduce what the various things are typically used for, and if we can adapt them to use in unexpected ways.”
It was an interesting and valuable night. Sally found that in addition to their intended use, most of the things could also be used as doorstops. In a world with secret doors, not as trivial a finding as you might think.