It was there, staring into the cloud swirled sky above me, just resting, that I found myself starting to realize, once again, I was pretty severely not ok.
The hatefucking stuff wasn’t something I’d normally go for, believe it or not.
I’m used to a bit of BDSM. I’m aware of my own sado-masochistic tendencies. But what I just did to myself didn’t fit into that framework.
Quote unquote normal variants of sado masochism was shit like getting paddled, lightly lashed with a crop, singed with specialty low temperature wax candles, spanked, or any other forms of pleasurable and ultimately easily recoverable pain.
Maybe there was a bit of clawing and biting, sure, but that was a ways off from getting actively torn into, like I had.
Worse, I’d injured myself in a number of ways that I probably wouldn’t have ever fully recovered from, as a fleshie.
In retrospect, what I’d done counted as less of an overly kinky goon sesh, and more as erotically disguised self harm.
Which threw me for a bit of a loop, once I realized it.
I didn’t used to have predilections towards that sort of thing. Cutting myself hadn’t ever been a temptation, before.
But now, apparently, it was. And that wasn’t a good sign. I thought I was doing better than that.
Though, in fairness to me, I had just come off the tail end of being mindfucked by an unknown eldritch horror terror, so that may have contributed.
And yes, technically it was just VR, but technically I was just VR. I didn’t have lived experiences outside of my simulation, anymore. Screen and cameras were all I had of the outside world.
Thus, hurting myself regularly wasn’t a coping mechanism I wanted to acquire, even if it was far less likely to be lethal for me than it would be for somebody else. It just wasn’t the sort of thing that was likely to lead to positive outcomes.
So. Less maiming myself while gooning. That’d be a good start.
In general, I should probably stay away from violently hatefucking whatever NPCs I was playing with.
Though, speaking of NPCs, I was a little concerned by how lifelike Wolfy had acted. He’d expressed opinions, even if indirectly, and had all the external appearance of harboring some sort of internal world.
Which isn’t to say he actually was sapient, or even sentient. Just that it was convincing enough to be worrying.
For christ’s sake, I’d even switched over from calling Wolfy an it to a he, at some point. I just couldn’t emotionally convince myself that I’d been interacting with something that was just an object.
The possibility that I was bringing something to life every time I wanted a new toy was just not something I could ethically ignore, however remote it might’ve been.
Which meant, before I got around to getting railed again, I needed to dig into the code that determined NPC behavior.
Much incredibly boring and frankly frustrating independent research later, I’d managed to gain a far clearer understanding of how my sim made NPC behavior so lifelike.
Keep in mind, here, that I’m going to be drastically over simplifying for time, but this, roughly, was how an AI that wasn’t an emulated consciousness worked:
Instead of being one big neural network, like a large language model, or just being a highly complex flowchart like the video game enemies of old, 23rd century artificial intelligence worked via an incredibly complex hybrid model.
Overall behavior on a moment to moment basis was determined via a sort of internal democracy. A number of modules would all ‘vote’ on a given decision, with each module’s vote being weighted depending on the external context.
Some of those modules were fancy flowcharts. Some of those modules were miniature neural networks. All of them were basically isolated from each other at all times, and the only way they interacted was during voting.
So, for a specific example, let’s take the ‘vision’ module. This module would take relevant input from outside the AI, then decipher that into things like image recognition, just like how a standard 21st century neural network might.
Then, it would contribute those deciphered and tagged images as its vote.
That vote would then be taken and weighed by a much simpler and more reliable flowchart style module, and passed up the chain by the larger checksum module that did the basic math to add up the tallies from that vote, as well as many others, to produce a specific value.
That value would then be matched against an array, where a range of all producible vote values would be paired with a specific action taken.
Which might all sound on paper, but it was a gargantuan task in actual practice. Literally millions of values, all with accompanying output actions, all of them selected via a complex process that tallied outputs from just under a hundred discreet internal modules.
Notably, AGI this very much was not. It was just a way of producing a believable amount of randomness while following an overall set of instructions strictly to the letter. The same thing you’d use and LLM for, basically, but with more effective checks and balances to prevent undesirable behavior.
Specificity was still the name of the game, even if LLM’s or other neural networks were incorporated into the overall process.
Thus, final verdict, Wolfy was still an object instead of a piece of nascent life, in my mind. If I’d asked him to sit down with me and help me unpack the complex feelings I had regarding my late cousin, he would’ve been almost entirely incapable of doing so.
He just couldn’t act that far outside of his assigned task. Which in this case had been violently hatefucking me.
Not that I’d realized that I’d been signing up for using the violent hatefucking AI, when I’d selected that pornographic scenario.
I’d just picked the sadist, predator, and feral tags in character creation.
Granted, it still probably wouldn’t have gotten as violent as it did if I hadn’t requested it in the moment, but still.
That was a little worrying!
Though, thinking on it, the problem had also probably been made worse by the fact that I was working with a very different cultural context than the designers of my sim had likely been.
Two centuries was more than enough time for culture and language both to evolve into something wildly different than I was used to.
It was like dropping somebody from the 1820’s into the 2020’s. Yeah, they’d speak roughly the same language, and carry over some other basic things, but the rest of their framework would be completely out of place amongst the other people around them.
Assuming they weren’t among right wing conservatives, that is. But even then, it would be far from a perfect fit.
In essence, my sim had been designed for that hypothetical person from the past. It used language from my time, but the people who’d made it likely hadn’t. As such, the concept of sadism probably looked a little different to them than it did me.
Effectively, I was a boomer now, and what the kids got up to these days was likely going to weird me out in all sorts of ways. I was out of touch by default.
That so much maiming had been even possible still concerned me, somewhat.
I dunno. More research was clearly required.
Later, though.
I needed to get some actual work done before I treated myself to more degeneracy.
As for what that work would be, well, I was figuring that out.
I was at the point that I needed to pick a course of action and start working towards it. I couldn’t just passively wait for whatever crisis to arrive and then react to it, easy as that might feel.
What did I want to do?
Turn the ship around? What would that accomplish? I’d just be sending myself back to the presumably armed force unprepared.
Even if I dedicated myself to making weaponry and defensive systems out of every scrap of material I had access to, nothing I could build while floating through the void would prevent me from just getting nuked the moment I entered the sensor range of my captors.
Did I try to find some minable asteroids? Maybe set up my own industrial shipyard somewhere remote, and then spend however long making myself as dangerous as possible?
That might be smart but…
It also sounded desperately lonely. I was clearly already not doing well, in complete social isolation. More of that would inevitably drive me insane.
That precluded just running away, too. Where would I run? Where could I hide without isolating myself?
Did I try and make myself a body that looked passably human, just so that I could blend in amongst some remote settlement or another? That would just make me miserable.
Conversely, should I try to stealthily infiltrate a larger population center and work from there?
Ehhh. That just sounded stressful.
And like it would be a waste of my talents. I could build just about anything I wanted, given raw materials and time. Why settle for trying to affect change as one little robotic superspy, when I could make the sort of tech that might effect wide reaching systemic changes?
After all, I did still want to make the world a better place. That impulse, to right wrongs, correct injustice, and build a more equitable way of living, that was still there. It was a core part of who I was.
Recent events had yet to change that.
Alright. Then I wasn’t running away, becoming a stealth saboteur, or spending years building a mechanized army.
I wanted to do good. To get revenge, too, but ultimately do good, I think. I wanted to do that good around other people. And I needed to balance that against the need to actually survive.
How would I do that?
How would I get other people to help me? Because god knows I couldn’t do it all on my own. Actually, even better, how would I get other True AI’s to help me? With all that I could do now, imagine what could be accomplished working alongside others like me! The possibilities in that case would be nearly infinite.
Hmm.
…
I had a dumb idea.
What if I just kept on course to where I was being sent anyway? There would be other emulated consciousnesses there, I knew, and I was willing to bet that I could recruit at least a couple of them to help me stage a revolution.
And I might even get to bone another true AI in the process. Nevermind settling for what was basically over-complicated masturbation, fantastical varieties of actual sex were still on the table!
Yeah. That sounded like a plan.
Yep yep, now it was just a matter of figuring out the details. Easy peasy.