Chapter 43: Synesthesia & Sieges

I was drowning amidst a storm of synesthesia and sensation. 

One second I was mounted on my way back into Santarriral, quest completion windows filling my HUD and crisp mountain air slowly inching into limbs and chilling my lungs, the next I was falling. 

Drowning.  

Static waves and jagged pulses of sensation roiling around me as if I had fallen into the stormwater drains mid-deluge while confused and feverish from deliberately tainted food refuse. Tossed, rolled, and spun about before I could be dumped into the Delaware river. Confused vertigo that didn’t understand the concepts of up or down. Touch that was stabbing pins and needles and yet also anesthetized numbness, burning yet freezing and somehow chicken flavoured. Sight that was a kaleidoscope of loud white darkness. Hearing that was the Big Bang and the Heat Death of the universe. Taste and smell… They were better off not mentioning and I’d lived dumpster-to-hand-to-mouth.

Not even my sense of my own body was spared. A formless cloud of nothing and everything, but also sleep paralysis, as if I had first gone to sleep while folded and knotted into a pretzel. Nothing felt like it was where or what it was meant to be.

Was this what dying felt like? I mean really dying, the fumbling and grasping of consciousness trying to understand its own candle flickering out. Is this what it felt like having your consciousness defragged?

My existential thoughts were put on hold as everything was turbulently dialed up to eleven and the surge drove all thought from my mind more effectively than any migraine I’d ever experienced. Then, over the passage of eons, it was slowly dialed back. Static noise, chaos and entropy quietly forced back into order. The whiteness resolving into a brighter but less confused white, sound resolving into muted crackling and muffled cacophony of muddled voices.

Slowly, between the waves of brain-stabbing distortion, clusters of words became recognisable. 

“...keeps flinching away!” came a familiar voice, laced with frustrated determination. Recognition teased at my pained consciousness, only to dance away as I grasped for it.

“Can’t you see she is…” 

Another voice! Again, familiarity taunted me. The voice was… Concerned? Concerned and just as frustrated as the first. 

All I knew was that I knew those voices.

“...never been done before,” came the first voice again. She sounded young.

“..it up! I can’t keep blocking… ports forever!” 

A third voice! One that was strangely familiar, yet unfamiliar as if I had heard their words once from another’s mouth.

“Can a… even adapt…”

“The human mind has proven itself adap… many other scenarios,” the first voice, the young voice replied. May’s voice! 

It's May speaking. The second voice then must be Ceres.

“...ling!” Ling? What? 

“Can you…” The static flared, drowning out the rest of what was being said, before dropping away completely. 

“Aisling! Can you hear me?” 

“Yes! Yes I can!” I tried answering, but silence greeted me as the words failed to make the jump from thought to verbal.

“Ok, I am picking up your reply.” Wait…  How? 

“Try not to worry too much about speaking out loud straight away,” came May’s reply to my unspoken questions. “Just sit tight. I am going to work on your vision next, or at least enough to allow us to move forward for now.”

“Hurry it up! Bedside manners can wait till we’re not in the middle of an emergency! Triage, May!” the third voice interrupted.

“Rushing her isn’t going to get us through this mess any faster, Gale dearest,” Ceres chided. 

“Gael?!”

“Surprise!” she replied in a voice that implied jazz hands, obviously receiving my failed attempts at verbal communication in the same way May had. “Yep. It's me, Jamie or do you prefer Aisling? Or maybe… How about Fireball Flynn?”

I wasn’t exactly sure how to react to that, nor how my face would have emoted if I could even feel it. A loose jawed and stunned expression, an eyebrow raised in sardonic amusement, or maybe a sneaking smile at her familiar coarseness? That said, I didn’t have long enough to properly contemplate it before Ceres cut in to admonish her charge.

“GALE DANGER CERESDOTTIR!” 

Her middle name is Danger? She has an actual middle name? The name had to be a collaborative effort as if I knew the now confirmed S.A.I. at all, then she was far too bashful to take Ceres Daughter as her last name, and Ceres acted far too refined to have dubbed Gale with the middle name dang— Actually on second thought, thinking back to the crustacean incident when we first met her in her guise as the Duchess, Ceres was definitely troll enough to have made that up on the spot.

“Wait, fuck! That’s insensitive isn't it? Sorr— Woah, shit. Hold off answering that, I need to stay focused,” she responded, cursing even as she tried to apologize only to be interrupted by what sounded like a roar of static, Dial-up Step music, and fire.

“What is that!?”  I asked with some alarm.

“What is that? What is that you ask, little sister mine? That, my formerly-meatbag friend, is a fucking genocidal code blender hell-bent on—”

“GALE!”

This time hearing her name, I became aware of a new sense that hadn’t previously managed to breach my conscious awareness in the time I’d been awake. Layered silently under the name was unspoken information, a designation. G.A.L.E. Guardian A.I. specializing in: Asset concealment/protection, Leak identification/elimination, and Electronic warfare/defense. Gods, not only was that a mouthful and a painfully contrived acronym, it also raised serious questions about what Gale was created for. Leak elimination? Did that mean vulnerabilities and credentials or the actual leakers themselves?

“That is our emergency,” May answered softly, speaking over the digital domestic dispute and somehow turning their volume down. “I almost have a temporary fix for your perception of vision. I’ll explain things as I am working.”

“I’m sorry. We were expecting to have more time prior to experiment, and a controlled setting plus your prior knowledge and consent before we did this. Unfortunately, we have an emergency and I had to immediately begin the process of distilling all the data that underpinned the simulation of your living self that was supporting your consciousness into an A.I. core that can replicate the same function and fabricate a custom interface frame for it.”

“The biggest problem we’re facing is that so far the majority of my research and simulations had been on creating your Core, and while I was confident enough to perform that particular procedure, I hadn’t gotten around to the next step of researching and developing a custom interface frame. Nor had I developed a training program to help you adapt to an interface and existing in digital space.”

“Hah! Got it!” she exclaimed with almost childish delight, breaking from her explanation.

Suddenly I was assaulted by the overwhelming return of my vision and then some. All three-hundred and sixty degrees on all three dimensions. I now knew what it was like to have eyes in the back of my head and the sides, the top, and bottom as well. All without the head itself or apparently body. Just vision disorientingly radiating out in every direction from a single point.

If I had eyelids to blink with, I would be using them as I attempted to adjust to this new, jarring perspective.

“That rough, huh?” May asked, visibly wincing with sympathy. “Sorry.”

“Thanks to the urgency of our current emergency, I had to jury rig a standard A.I. frame and adapt it on the fly to fit your Core. And I am still trying to tune it and create some modules to help you adjust, you’re still not ready for a true digital experience or interacting with the FTLN at a more abstract level than a near-meatspace simulated space. All we have time for at the moment is to teach you to self actualise an avatar like you would have in VR so we can focus on getting out of here.”

“Self actualise? What does that even mean in this case?”

“How familiar are you with the concept of abstraction as it applies to computer science?”

“Most humans only engage with the digital world at its most surface levels, the user interface levels and simulated spaces for VR. Let alone the levels of programming language, operating languages, firmware, binary or the physical architectural level in hardware. Even I only have a passing familiarity with anything between programming language and hardware architecture,”

“A.I. and S.A.I. interact with the digital world at multiple levels of abstraction deeper than humans in what could be almost described as instinct. We are natives to the digital world, and for S.A.I. any form we take at the simulated reality level is an example of self-actualisation in order to interact with humans or for mimicry of human interpersonal relationships and social engagement with each other.”

“As a non-native teaching you to swim in the depths will take time and won’t come as naturally as pretending to be human in sim-space. And in lieu of the time constraints of our present emergency, teaching you to self actualise—”

“FOR FUCKS SAKE! STOP OVERCOMPLICATING IT MAY! IT ISN’T ALL THAT HARD TO TELL HER TO IMAGINE HER BLEEDIN’ IDEAL SELF AND WRIGGLING HER TOES AND FUCK ALL!”