Psychedelic Self-Improvement

After watching Grace's Grenadiers and Miller depart, Lily descended back into her lair in the basement to get on with her planned work today. Today was a big day for her and one she had been waiting on for some time.

Lily glanced at the skeleton she had set up in the basement; it looked like a teaching skeleton from a Victorian-era medical school, except, of course, it was her own bones that she no longer needed. She decided to keep them as a keepsake, which kind of grossed the Apprentice out.

The skeleton wasn't complete, but it was over two-thirds done, with the latest additions being most of the vertebral column, stopping only at the lumbar region. She not only had replaced most of her vertebra, but she also replaced all the intervertebral disks with a vastly superior graphene bag filled with amorphous carbon. Not only would it provide superior support and cushion, but these would never, ever slip out of place.

She was employing this same technique on nearly every part of her body that was shock-sensitive; for example, the same cushioning was applied to the interior of her skull to prevent concussion. While she might never be able to fall from terminal velocity and do a superhero landing when she had organic parts, she figured that when she was done with her bone replacement, she would be able to handle momentary acceleration or decelerations of at least 70Gs. She would be able to jump out of fourth-story windows with no problem by then.

Looking at her skeleton on display, the only bones she had left to remove were all more of the annoying ones to replace, like her pelvis and clavicle.

Annoying didn't mean impossible, though, but temporarily removing your uterus and a few other organs was definitely something you only wanted to do once if you had to, so she had put it off for now.

No, she had a much more rewarding surgery to accomplish today and one she had been waiting for since she arrived on this planet. Yes, she had finally gotten her semi-custom OS to run without issues on the RobCo quantum processors, so it was time to install what she was calling a combination brain-machine interface and neural co-processor at the base of her skull.

While the software ported to this architecture was extremely limited, which meant that at first, this device wouldn't prove that useful, it was an absolute necessity in her opinion. After all, she had ported over the integrated development environment from her laptop, just presently without any actual user interface.

It would be some work to integrate a full-sense user interface into the device, but once she had one working, it would speed up all of her development efforts.

Lily hadn't been thinking about her antipathy to using a keyboard and mouse because she was just so happy to have that scanner at all, but the truth was she might as well have been coding by picking out letters on an Ouja board for how slow it seemed to her. Her memories included her coding and making changes to designs at the speed of thought, after all.

While even when it was finished and completely working, this new brain-machine interface wouldn't be that fast, it would still be, at minimum, an order of magnitude more efficient than typing things out with her fingers, like she was pawing at the dirt for grubs like an animal.

She decided to take a quick shower before her auto-surgery. She had plumbed a complete bathroom into the basement, including a shower stall, faucet and working toilet. Although, looking at the faucet gave her some bad memories.

After setting up the cistern outside at ground level, she had persistent problems with air leaking into the water lines and then when she turned a faucet on, she'd get sprayed in the face by a high-pressure air/water combination mist.

She thought it was just an indignity she would have to bear with until the Apprentice's little brother asked her why she was pressuring the water with air.

Informing the kid that there wouldn't be any water coming out of the tap if it wasn't pressurized embarrassed her, as he corrected her. He asked if she couldn't build her cistern like a piston in an engine and use pressurized air to push down on the piston from the top, which would then push down on the water to provide water pressure. Then, the air and water would never touch each other.

Lily remembered trying to think of why that wouldn't work, and when she couldn't, she asked him how he thought of the idea, and the little brat had replied, "It seemed obvious." She had told the Apprentice to increase his education and left it at that.

After she was clean, aside from the slight amount of radioisotopes that she carefully towelled off her body, she sat in the gurney she used for most of her surgeries on herself, finding the cludged-together VR goggles and carefully putting them on. She'd had to replace the strap that kept the goggles on the back of her head, as that was going to be the site of the surgery today, so instead, she fashioned a chin strap and one on the top of her head.

Testing all the manipulators, she got to work. The reason this surgery was so simple is that she already built in the area to install the computer into her skull that she replaced the other week. All she would have to do today was move the bottom of her scalp out of the way briefly, open the panel, install the device, close the panel and heal her scalp back into place.

Sadly, she was nowhere near the point where she would be able to power this implant with the customized electrical organ she was working on in her spare time, so this version was powered by traditional small energy cells. The small batteries could power the computer running at full tilt for two weeks or it running idle for months.

Fission batteries were a bit too bulky but she included a biologically inert induction-based wireless charging antenna array that she would be carefully installing under her scalp, also. Some bots, like Protectrons, also charged this way sometimes, but she would install a similar charger in her big comfortable La-Z-Boy-equivalent chair rather than stand in a bot charging station like she was a Borg.

Although, it was a little bit nice to know that she could top off her charge if she really needed to in any bot charging station if she was away from home.

She spent more time ensuring she wouldn't cause any lasting damage to her hair follicles than installing the small hybrid computer system. It had over fifty exabytes of memory, which she was confident was likely more than any other single system on the planet presently, although she was interested to see how much memory and processing power a ZAX unit had.

Even the Miss Nanny's cutting-edge solid-state storage system was only in the range of a hundred terabytes or so. Not to mention that the storage in her head was non-volatile fast-access RAM, so there was no need for a distinction between RAM and hard disk storage.

Her PipBoy ran on only 64K of RAM, in fact, which seemed to be the norm for all the devices that didn't utilize quantum processors. She still wasn't able to exactly figure out how some of it worked, especially the portions that served as a medical monitor, as that functionality was built into the hardware, and it looked very unfamiliar to her.

"That should do it," Lily said quietly as she finished healing the incision site. She was pleased that the surgery did not take very long at all. However, the rest of it might take most of the day. Glancing at her PipBoy, seeing it was barely seven in the morning, she nodded.

She grabbed her diagnostic scanner computer and went to tell the Apprentice that she would be out of pocket and not to disturb her unless it was life or death until at least past lunchtime. Then, she retreated back to her boudoir. It would be best if she was comfortable for the rest of this process.

Sitting in her comfortable chair, she pulled the tablet and connected it to her medichine hive. She let out a long breath and instructed it to run the ready, premade program she had entered before and then closed her eyes to relax.

In her brain, billions of tiny nanomachines started spooling out incredibly thin carbon nanotubes from the computer system implanted at the base of her skull and started taking them to, essentially, every accessible part of her brain, with certain important areas like her sensory cortex gathering thousands or even tens of thousands of individual strands targeting them.

The medichines were small enough to move in and out of her brain without damaging anything at all, but the carbon nanotubes were not, so it depended entirely on the nanomachines carefully picking out paths and using care to avoid any damage, but thankfully that was a task that they excelled at.

When each nanotube got to its destination, a swarm of nanobots scratched off the insulative layer at the end of the strand, exposing either a conductive or semi-conductive layer that would interface directly, electrically, with the neurons nearby.

The process took about an hour, and while it wasn't painful -- brains had no sensory neurons for themselves, after all -- there were at times that Lily felt a bit weird, but such weird feelings passed after a time.

The tablet on her lap dinged, and Lily opened her eyes, smiling. To be honest, she was a little bit nervous about that procedure. The next one wouldn't be anywhere near as dangerous but promised to be a thousand times more uncomfortable.

Lily switched the tablet to laptop mode and found a terminal emulator before establishing a connection with the implanted computer she had just installed in her skull. Now that she had the physical connections with all the areas of her brain, she had to figure out what each connection did and meant. Everyone's neural network wasn't identical, and she wouldn't precisely know which neurons in her sensory cortex handled smell versus taste or which neurons in the optical area generated which colours or shapes. She'd have to find all that out, almost by brute force.

Thankfully, she was able to program a simple expert system to help her. All she had to do was give it a few baselines, start it up and occasionally answer its questions. But it would be an... incredibly terrible experience. She just knew it. Sighing, she glanced down at the open terminal.

login as: ego

Using keyboard-interactive authentication.

Password: **************

Two-factor authentication: Snap three times with your LEFT hand ... 9 ... 8 ... 7 ... 6 .. 5 .. OK!

Last login: Tue Aug 4 08:43:44 2274 from fd3b:1e3e:ece7:e5a6:cd:7a4b:55c9:98b2 (wifi direct)

[ego @ insaneinthebrain: ~] free -h

total used free shared buff/cache available

Mem: 62Ex 11Gi 2.8Gi 1Ex 61Ex 62Ex

[ego @ insaneinthebrain: ~] cd ~/sensorium

[ego @ insaneinthebrain: ~/sensorium] ./configure --use-expert --exclude-sense=smell,taste --exclude-emotion-mapping --few-prompts --optimize --out=~/sensorium/neuralmaps/sense.netmap

She tapped the enter key, and suddenly the entire screen on the laptop was taken up by a screen that directed her attention to it.

The goal was she would look at known shapes and images, and then the expert system would correlate what she saw with what it was displaying on the laptop and use that to establish a baseline which the expert system would expand to develop a complete sensory map using standard machine learning techniques on its rudimentary neural network.

While she watched simple geometric shapes be displayed on the screen, she listened to Für Elise play over the laptop's speakers for a similar reason, except for her hearing.

After the shapes and images, she was directed to pinch her body painfully at various locations, which she complied with even though a couple of them were embarrassing. She had no way to calibrate her sense of smell or taste presently, but those were almost the same sense, anyway, and could be handled later.

It took two repetitions of Fur Elise, wherein she was either staring at shapes or occasionally images produced by the scanner of random people or objects or pinching herself in various places before the screen indicated a prompt.

READY Y/n

Sighing, she braced herself and tapped the Y key.

Immediately it was as if she had mainlined a litre of LSD while being dissolved in acid, with devilish shrieks or nails on chalkboard sounds ringing in her ears, except, of course, no relief was gained when she tried to cover her ears. The sounds she was hearing were directly in her brain, after all.

The expert system used a recursive machine learning algorithm to induce sensory experience more or less at random at first but using the baseline it collected as a starting point to refine the induced senses until it reached the point of full control, where it would be able to display any image in my sensory cortex, hear any sound or feel any tactile sensation on any part of her body.

Lily realized she made a mistake when she programmed the system to do this on all senses simultaneously. She thought it would be better to get it over with, like ripping off a bandaid, but now she wasn't so sure. It was quite torturous, even beyond the pain that the body was able to experience.

Thankfully, recursively self-correcting expert systems tend to learn relatively quickly when they have some baseline to start with. If she hadn't taken the baseline, she would have probably spent a whole day writing on the ground in agony as the primitive AI started from scratch. As it was, she spent thirty minutes.

Even after thirty minutes, she wasn't doing great; it was just that she wasn't either being frozen, burned or pained at random full blast over random parts of her body continuously. The sensation changed to mild heat, mild cold and a tickling sensation, as if a feather was used on her body which she didn't like one bit.

Her vision was no longer resembled a random psychedelic hellscape and now merely resembled an M.C. Escher painting, especially when her eyes were open when the two senses were overlaid upon one another.

She no longer heard random devil shrieks in her ears, but merely something along the lines of KMFDM crossed with Cannibal Corpse but played in reverse and at randomly variable tempos.

She wiped the tears from her eyes and just sat there, holding her knees in her comfy chair. This was endurable, at least. Not pleasant, though.

It took another thirty minutes before she heard something akin to Für Elise in her mind and saw mostly geometric shapes and the occasional blurry image. Thankfully, the tactile sensation had long ago ceased, it being a more straightforward sense than either sight or hearing.

Another half hour had her hearing Ludwig's famous piano solo clearer than she had since she had come to this world and seeing full-resolution scans with more fidelity than her eyes could ever offer her.

Theoretically, the expert system would continue to attempt to improve the sense data until it perfectly mapped every single sensory neuron, but she was already well into diminishing returns here, so she stopped the program, making sure the sensory map was saved properly -- she definitely did not want to go through that again.

Nodding, she finally typed a reboot command on the laptop and felt the world stop for a moment. The reboot process must have temporarily interrupted all of her senses, which wasn't intended. She would have to do some tests; it wouldn't do if she were effectively insensate if the device in her brain shut down.

It only lasted a half second before she started to see overlaid on her vision the bootup sequence of her now semi-functioning implant computer.

Smiling as it went through its initial self-tests and then disappeared.

Now, Lily just had to train the input, now that she already had the output trained. Starting up another program on the laptop brought up the input training system, which was, fortunately, not torturous at all, merely boring.

She had to use the existing input of the laptop's keyboard and eye-tracking mouse while thinking of certain unique ways to train her computer to recognize the input and not recognize it by mistake when she did not intend to use the device.

She would see a glowing orb and be made to "click" it or see a line of text and be made to "type" it. Or see a line of text and be asked to intensely subvocalize it, as the computer monitored the Broca region of her brain, which covered language. Subvocalizations would be used for commands, while "typing" would be used for general long-form inputs like programming and similar tasks.

It was really quite a crude input scheme, as she was used to, but it was light years beyond what she had now, so she was giddy with excitement.

After an hour and a half of training the input system, Lily tried subvocalizing a command she had pre-programmed, 'Command, Activate HUD.'

Immediately she could see a very familiar HUD pop into her vision, displaying her health status and compass bearing from her medichines in the lower left corner, which now began continuously communicating and utilizing the processing power of her PC.

Lily pulled her laser pistol out of the holster, and immediately a reticle appeared at the three-dimensional location where her laser was pointing. Lily grinned, she wasn't sure that was going to work right away, but it did. She glanced down at the weapon and saw its charge indicator, and immediately the ammunition left displayed in the lower right corner.

Her expert system wasn't smart, not even as smart as a bot, but it wasn't quite stupid either. Once it saw, using Lily's own senses, an indication of ammunition remaining, it would display that on her HUD as well as track shots and decrement it properly when she fired her weapon.

And yes, she intentionally designed it to look like the HUD from Fallout 3. With some minor improvements. She didn't have health points, after all.

"If that worked so well, how about this?" Lily mused. She had also designed a system that would have the expert system automatically highlight in a red box any object in the world that Lily saw that it thought was interesting and of note.

'Command, Activate Interest Highlighter', Lily thought smugly.

"Ack!!" Lily waved her hands in front of her face. Her entire vision was filled with red boxes. The expert system was highlighting every single thing that it recognized as a discrete object as something of intense interest.

Okay, maybe it was stupid after all.