Page 33. Something.
Next update will probably be delayed, since I’m off to Flame Con in Brooklyn this weekend, but twice-weekly updates will resume when I get back. Thanks for understanding!
O Human Star
by Blue Delliquanti
MORE OF BLUE’S STUFF
Page 33. Something.
Next update will probably be delayed, since I’m off to Flame Con in Brooklyn this weekend, but twice-weekly updates will resume when I get back. Thanks for understanding!
Kids these days.
Jesus. I know this is basically Sulla’s birth and infancy we’re looking at here, but in the broader scale… god, that’s grisly and horrifying. How could Brendan ever possibly move on and heal?
I think Sulla *became* his way of (trying to) move on and heal.
I don’t really know why but this reminds me of a scenario. A pregnant woman losing her husband in a crash and the newborn being a constant reminder of her loss.
Are the server names from the kabbalah? Like “Ayin.Lamed.Mem is a powerful amulet that will protect against anxiety, temper tantrums, Attention Deficit Disorder, bad habits, bad temper, anorexia, uncertainty, panic and nervousness. It also helps clear negative energies and focus on constructive thinking.”
Curious. Letters L and M in hebrew. (Might be wrong). A golem?
They’ve been using the Hebrew alphabet to label most of their models so far. “Aleph”, “Beth”, “Gimel” are all Hebrew letters. So “Lamed” and “Mem” probably are too, though I don’t know the Hebrew alphabet that far along.
Let’s see what I can remember from my semi-religious Jewish upbringing. (I have no idea how to spell the pronunciations of half of these in English, but…)
Aleph, bet/vet, gimel, daled, hay, vav, zayin, chet, tet, yud, kaph, chaph, lamed, mem, nun, samech, ayin, pei/fei, tsadik, kuf, reish, shin/sin, taph
There are at least two Hebrew ‘alphabet song’ melodies I learned from the TV in the early 1990s. One was on Sesame Street and the other was on Barney. LOL.
Makes me think of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s made a person, but the shell doesn’t show what’s inside. Same mad genius of not stopping to think whether he should and what it means.
I don’t think he ever did move on.
I agree! I wonder how much he considers Sulla to be a person rather than a creation. He treats her with affection and kindness, but there’s so much baggage surrounding her creation. Then again, I wonder if it’s because he tried to recreate Al in her that he decided to raise her more like a child than a project.
I imagine it took a number of years before his creation became a person, that ‘flaws’ became quirks to appreciate not errors to tinker with and fix.
The same length of time any parent takes to see their creation as a person (hint, children are creations of the parent, for some parents this happens around the time the creation starts rebelling and no longer ‘controlable’ that they realize ‘oh right this is an indepdent being’)
I hope he hasn’t told Sulla about the circumstances of her birth because I would not want to know I started off as somebody’s mad science robonecromancy project
Looks like Brendan got procedural memory, but not episodic? If so, then maybe Sulla grew out of those memories coming together to form an identity.
Oh my.
Gimel’s name makes sense ! I just got it !
So brilliant.
Ok, my guess? This copy of Al (which will go on to form Sulla) IS actually the full copy, but cannot properly express that. But Brendan goes on to get the copy to assist in finishing the emulators, and it manages to encode the processes needed to eventually recreate Al into the new series of emulators. In effect, all subsequent robots have a little bit of Al in there, programmed to try to recreate him. This is why Brendan can’t solve the mystery of who built neo-Al… It was the robots themselves, following their earliest directives (I assume robots run the production lines)… The previous copies that’ve shown up at Brendan’s are failed attempts.
I dunno, communication skills don’t seem that much worse that meat!Al’s
This just made me totally crack up. Astute.