How It Happened – Cyber-Whitley Part 2
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CountvonBarnOwl
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True, Yang having these hidden sides to her as a result of her quickly having to grow up are great narrative fun. Anyway, here is a thing that I did not wish to post in the midst of Dragonslayer week because it was not Dragonslayer-related.
How It Happened – Cyber-Whitley Part 2
Sleep, in his state, had proven impossible, and existing, being cognizant was an experience of such like that no words existed to truly describe. But approximately, it was absolute darkness. And yet it held more in common with the afterimage and memory of light that comes to a man's vision when he shuts his eyes too tightly.
Whitley could, for want of a better term, feel his whole body in this endless ocean that only vaguely recalled light. He could feel fingers that must have been burned and broken off curl, and limbs that he no longer had would move according to an alien logic that he felt did not shift what passed here for his position.
First, Whitley tried exercising within his own mind, learning to move his inner limbs. His left arm came first. And then his right. His abdomen came last, following his legs and toes. A roll of his neck and he was half-swimming half-gliding in the endless black with nothing but the flickering memory of light to guide him.
The feeling of floating, flying, and gliding was, for what it was, euphoric. Soon Whitley was cutting through the void in a reclined half-sitting pose with his legs leading the way, at least, that was the best description of his posture and sensations, or his memories of posture and sensation, that he could apply.
After a while, it ceased to amuse him. And he was forced to, once again, confront the nature of his situation. A brain in a jar, though Amzel took umbrage with the insinuation. So many experiences were forever denied to him. He'd never eat food again. Sleep would probably be an ordeal in and of itself, and as pedestrian as this foremost concern was, he would never quote-unquote 'get laid.' Not only had he forever failed to secure the foremost objective and concern of everybody thereabouts of his age, he'd never be a father. Meaning that the Schnee bloodline would have to continue via his sisters.
Whitley did not need to imagine his sisters' responses. As soon as the thought came up the nails-on-chalkboard cacophony of Weiss' filled every corner of the black expanse. Whitley gritted his teeth in raw anger and prepared to shout for all he was worth when the picture of his other sister popped into his head.
Mercifully, the thought of Winter deafened and diminished the laughter immediately. The less that Whitley focused on the sibling that thought him as a pest, and the more he focused on the sibling that was a near-complete stranger to him. The more the laughter abated, only to be replaced by the cutting chill of Winter's namesake.
She had broken off contact with him years ago when she first left for Atlas. The finger-count of conversations that they had since then were more in the nature of conversations with the Schnee family as a unit, and Winter's team. And Whitley had half-forgotten the substance of each as little besides polite perfunctory and a trio of aspirants trying to make a little kid feel included. "Great, this is my life now." He muttered, 'not that it could correctly be called a life.' He added, more silently.
And in the wake of that silence, he noticed something. He controlled the expanse. The void responded to him. A hypothesis was forming in his head, and he could feel the void around him contorting to oblige it. He could not see, but sense streams of thought flowing, down from upward, always relative to the orientation of what he perceived to analogize his body.
An experiment then. He needed certainty. Trying to will himself back into happiness might be worth a shot.
"Weeeeee-e-eeheheheee… hahahaha…" Whitley was walking on air, or rather, he was gliding through an endless froth of his own euphoria again.
Perhaps he had been a touch too successful. But this proved one thing, he could regulate his mood manually. Whitley Schnee had a natural knack for doing this. Putting his emotions in a box and sticking them in some proverbial cognitive closet before fetching them as his rational mind deemed them needed. Now he could go even further. He could make and unmake his emotions as-needed. His next test of this came by plunging himself into misery and, as soon as he could muster up the will to mobilize himself, yanking himself back up into joy before cutting all of the threads into neutral.
This was astonishing. This was baffling. This was confounding…
Like that, Whitley conceived of a test far more devious and final. One that should push his apparent mastery of his mind to the utmost.
He held in his mind first the image of his father, Jacques. He immersed himself in the permanent basecoat of unease and quiet, skittish fear, mixed with the more overt terror and dread he felt at the man's ever-present displeasure. Legitimate admiration at the deft competence with which Jacques, climbed into his current station and kept ahead of both the world's Dust markets and the very long, long list of people who wanted him dead was befouled by the stink of love's decaying corpse and cast over by the shadow of affection, Whitley rationally understood that it was mere pittance, and entirely counterfeit at that, but it was a truer and more abundant love than he had ever received from anyone or anywhere else.
Whitley mimicked breathing and, while holding the memory of Jacques clearly in his mind dismantled those feelings one by one as easily as he might have tapped the backspace button on his Scroll.
He rebuilt those feelings, and then destroyed them again. He banished Jacques from his mind but held the feelings. He held Jacques before and around him, but did not permit himself to feel anything for the man.
He discarded his thoughts of Jacques entirely and moved onto Willow. His feelings with regards to her were much simpler. Disappointment at a woman who had spent most of his life face down in a ditch full of vodka.
Winter was equally simple. Family in name only. The two had not had anything to do with one another since she set out for Atlas at 17. That was… eight years ago? It hardly mattered. All of the frigidity between them when they had last seen each other, all of the arguments between himself and Weiss where Winter always took her sister's side. All of those moments of fear at the silent, disinterested contempt of an Aura-wielder, like being trapped with the crocodiles at the zoo, Whitley submerged himself in the feelings of his childhood before flicking them off and on and off and on again as though he were playing with a light switch.
Then came the ultimate trial. To prove to himself that he had it in him, if nothing else, Weiss. His younger older sister. He didn't remember how it started. Whitley could no longer remember exactly when he and Weiss had started building that pit between themselves. Nor could he remember a time when both of them were not fanning the flames that spewed from it as if their lives depended on it. That stuck-up, conceited, moronic, self-righteous cunt could kill him at a moment's notice. She could pierce his heart, open his throat, or split him from gullet to groin the minute she decided he was worth the bother. He knew that, she knew that, he knew that she knew that, and she knew that he knew that she knew that he knew that. Whitley, on the other hand, could only be smug and insolent when he dared. And he had built the mask he wore for most of his early adolescence no that fact, having long ago made peace with the fact that at the very least, he'd earn a disfigurement for his trouble.
There was a crackling, dark fire that rose up inside of him every time he thought of Weiss. And even now, it was radiating through the expanse, baking his every thought with incandescent rage.
And in the next instant, it was all gone. Gone. Gone like a bad dream. He could picture her ponytail and her singing voice without adding some remark about the former's level of maturity or calling the other overrated. He could admit to himself at least here in his own head, that on the merits, his sister was an excellent singer. Not that he would ever enjoy hearing anything from her except for silence. But he could objectively, and without resorting to insults to make himself feel better, unequivocally acknowledge a genuine accomplishment of a person he hated.
Then, in the distance, they appeared. Green-white streams that looked like waves breaking on rocks, these too pouring down from some utmost summit could be seen in the reaches of the expanse's distance. As they closed in Whitley permitted curiosity to overtake fear as he was enveloped.
And then came the light.
Light, shapes, the glare from the ceiling light above him. Color. Whitley had again found light and color. Whites and sterile gray-blues of the walls and ceiling ahead of him were contrasted with the darker gray of the floor, and the off-gray/green of whatever metal slab or tilted dais he had been propped up on. More than that, Whitley saw people.
He could see in depth, and he could see in detail, it felt like he had two eyes again, two eyes more powerful than those he had been born with by a factor of at least ten. The periphery of his vision was filled with a heads-up display. A translucent blue circle that pinged with little red blips every time someone in the room moved near the bottom left, a small pictogram of a white-green head atop a grayed out human body on the bottom right, and scrolling words across the top that read 'Stark Arms ATCE: Activate. Unit integrity = Green. Hardened neural uplink = Green. Hardened processor uplink = Not Found… Retrying… Not Found… Retrying… Not Found… Continuing startup without processor unit. Switching to Internal CPU… Internal Processor… = Green. Subroutine check 1… Green. Subroutine check 2… Green. Sonar uplink = Green. CCT uplink = Green = Radar uplink = Not Found. Video recorder = Active. Black box = Active…' And on it went.
"So, tell me, Warrant Offizier, did you enjoy the flight over?" The question, put to him in the accented voice of General Amzel, pulled his attention from the readout. It had come from the rightmost man of the assembled crowd, a man about his father's age or a few years senior, but in much better shape. Gaunt faced, he had eerie blue eyes and a gray beard at odds with the bright orange curls poking out from under his officer's cap. He had a crescent-shaped scar that traced the outline of his left eye socket, starting at the cheek, running up his nose, and curling around over his eyebrow. Strapped to his waist Whitley noted a sawn-off shotgun about the length of the man's upper leg, and a thick, heavy sawback blade folded over an S-shaped handle and fixed to it with a sturdy looking hinge.
"I kept myself entertained." Whitley responded. "You must be General Amzel." He inclined his head. The eyebrow that the general's scar wrapped around went up. "Amzel, sir. Where are my manners. I guess the journey had me out of sorts, your pardon, sir." Whitley reiterated. That was right. Military rules, decorum, and bearing would be expected, going forward.
Amzel nodded. "As your general officer let me be the first to welcome you to the Jotun Complex, home of the Special Construction Training Corps, of which you are now a part, and classified, off-the-record projects of beyond-next-generation warfare, which, you are."
"I was hoping you could tell me about that." Whitley pressed. "What exactly will I be working on?" He couldn't exactly move. He could only speak certain thoughts through some sort of a microphone attached below his eyes, or cameras, he supposed.
"You will be assisting us in developing the next generation of military exoframes." Amzel explained. "Very fortunate for all parties involved. You could imagine the difficulty of finding somebody banged up enough to test a full cybernetic conversion body, and not a single wounded soldier we found was willing to accept the risks of full conversion over a mere cybernetic prosthesis. Being blown to smithereens in the middle of Atlas, as you had been, saved us from shelving the whole project. And of course, you get to live." The general added as an afterthought.
Exoframes. Full cybernetic bodies piloted by brains in life support units. It was a discussion of considerable frequency in the various online forums in his areas of interest. Technology and economic boards, for instance, things that lent him insight into the social media marketing teams' blind spots often speculated about them. Business strategy too. That bunch was waiting on a signal for early investment. Some sign that something was going to slip out of the bowels of an R&D startup or a military research institute and into broad daylight.
While this told him where he would be allocating his pocket change, the wildest speculation came from the wildcatting forums. That was where the results of backyard and rooftop experiments not known for control group quality, intermixed with anecdotes of dubious sobriety and veracity, were reported and speculated on. Suggestions and comments were deposited, and results were compared with the hopes of conjuring up the next standardized Grimm-stopper.
Whitley found discussing these things as a means to de-stress in the late hours, and had begun forming his own theories on the matter, enough for mild participation in some theories about how to squeeze the magical 5.5 kilojoules at the muzzle necessary to guarantee a one-shot to the body on any common Grimm the world over out of an intermediate cartridge, one that could cycle through the standard assault rifles and carbines of the world without compromising on the fire rate or accuracy, but could match the battle, survival, scouting, sporting, and everyday carry rifles that made life outside Remnant's biggest walled cities possible for anyone besides a Huntsman.
The particular sort of speculation, of pushing the limits of weapons, only bore the most tangential relevance here, but he enjoyed ruminating on it.
Whitley cut that thread of reminiscence when he noticed the stares. "Excellent. Where may we begin? I cannot move anything but my head at the moment." He announced with all of the glib of his father.
"We will begin with this." The general said, as he produced what looked like a computer's circuit board or a graphics card. "This is the Apogee system. It is the key to the Infantry Cybernetic Exoframe project. It is also the other half of your cranial housing."
"Other half?" Whitley asked.
"A security measure," Amzel replied. "Your casing's processor is only half-complete, barely functional, and hardly running on anything more than the static electricity of your brain. The other half of the computer itself is right here. And it represents the foundation stone of the entire ICE project. It never left Jotun-2"
"I see," Whitley replied. "Capabilities?"
"Theoretically, it will close the Aura Gap." Amzel replied without missing a beat.
"Closing the Aura Gap?" Whitley replied again, certain that if he still had a tongue, it would be dripping with physical incredulity.
The Aura Gap was the raw, nigh insurmountable difference in combat power, mobility, versatility, and adaptation that an asset with Aura had over an asset without. An individual Huntsman or Specialist couldn't be brought down by a normal soldier. Ideally, you had to match them on even footing, with your own Aura, or send somebody who could. Failing that, a company, armor, walkers, and with air support on standby would be the instrument of choice in bringing down an Aura wielder. And that was no sure thing. A battalion would not be out of line if none of them had Aura or Semblances of their own depending on the circumstances.
An Aura-user could outmatch and out-maneuver infantry, could out-think machines, could outflank armor and artillery, or could pluck gunships from the sky, and that didn't even fully encompass the X-factor that was the Semblance.
"You would pardon my skepticism, Sir." Whitley replied.
"HAH!" The General laughed back. "Skepticism is always welcome in the halls of science, Warrant Offizier. But I promise, this Neural Processor will give you an edge over all but the greatest of Aura wielders."
Whitley minded the taxonomy. Neural Processor. Thy typical cortical implant that was called a Neural Uplink.
"So, it is a second brain then, one that would sync to me?" Whitley hazarded a guess.
"Nothing so anemic, Whitley, if two brains outthinking one was all it took to surmount the Aura Gap, it would not exist. Do you know how fast information travels via the nervous system?"
"I cannot say that I do, General, no." Whitley replied…
"Thirty-five meters per second," Amzel answered, "and would you care to guess how much information that the human brain can process in a second?" He followed up without missing a beat.
"A gigabyte, maybe?" Whitley offered a completely arbitrary figure.
"Not even close." The General taunted. "Ten bits. Ten bits on average, of the one hundred and twenty-five megabytes of information your body absorbs in that same time. The theoretical maximum of an average brain is around sixty, but genetic aberrations who can do seventy or eighty are not unknown to medical literature."
"Now, Warrant Offizer, tell me. Doesn't that sound pathetic compared to your brain's two-and-a-half petabytes of memory? Your eighty-six billion neurons connected with each other a hundred trillion times over? They don't sound like they're doing too much, do they?"
"No, sir." Whitley responded. The two-point-five petabyte figure was a bit more commonly known and Whitley was priorly aware of it.
"Inside those thirteen hundred cubic centimeters of brain, you have enough storage space to index the whole CCTnet. Three hundred million hours of audio-video information." Amzel was building to something.
"So, what would you do if you could run your brain as though it were such a magnificent computer in truth? Hmm?" The general finished as he jiggled the device in front of Whitley's cyber optics.
"What would I do indeed?" Whitley assented. "So how much more processing power does it give me?"
"Suppose, for instance, that you could process nearly point-seven-two gigabytes per second, And, perceive two hundred and fifty-six. Would you consider that impressive?"
"I would." Whitley replied. "The raw sensory data and computational prowess would be unmatched." The advantage was self-evident. Information asymmetry. To know in an instant, to solve for so many of the small, incalculable variables of every heartbeat… Such a device would let even someone such as himself anticipate anything that even a Huntsman could do, and therefore counter, before the follow-through.
The only problem, Whitley noted, was the absence of reaction time. All the planning in the world would amount to nothing if it could not alter the inevitable. History, and even modern life were so full of men who thought they could overcome death, the Grimm, or plain human fallibility only to make utter asses of themselves in the attempt. Unless…
"Spectacular, General. But I see a single problem." Whitley admitted.
"Oh, do tell," the general replied, playful mischief in his voice seemingly confirming the growing suspicion in Whitley's head.
"Transmission speed, all of the information in the world does no good if it comes too lately to be acted upon. If, for instance, I know in advance where, say, an Aura-infused Dust blade will come from, that will not help me dodge or deflect it in the least, unless I know far enough in advance to move first. And against Huntsman-level enemies, the timeliness window closes quickly. But I assume you brought up neurological transmission speed first for a reason." Whitley surmised, watching as the general's smile broadened and his eyes narrowed to pinpricks.
"Excellent, excellent, Warrant Offizier. Exactly." The general replied, as his voice shot up in pitch. "Thirty-five meters per second is not satisfactory. Not for the amount of information that you're processing, and absolutely nowhere near any good for the time in which you will need to act. So instead of the usual pseudo-nerves, we're using a special sort of high tensile strength fiber optic cables. Do you know how fast information passes through fiber optic cables?"
"Near-instant." Whitley said. "Nearly." The General affirmed. "Sixty-six-point-sieben percent lightspeed, to be exact. Mach five hundred und eighty-three thousand. Two-hundred-thousand kilometers per second. Your reaction speed will be five-point-seven million," the general's tone went low as he whispered his emphasis lowing himself to the camera that Whitley was looking at him through, until he saw nothing but the madness that shone in his moon-scarred eye, "times that of a normal human."
Whitley was sure that if he had eyes left to bulge or pop at the sheer scope of the number as it set in, they would have. Had he still a heart, it would be firing like an engine. And he was sure that his brainwave activity was going wild on whatever monitor that they were using to pay attention to that.
Then he remembered that it was within his power to calm himself manually. He commanded his excitement to ebb. Not all at once, but it drained. And at the trough of neutrality, Whitley noticed another detail that euphoria would have otherwise flung him over.
"And my brain? My cognitive processes are still confined to the limits of my organic hardware." Whitley responded. "None of these proverbial hardware updates will improve on the hard limits of my own brain."
"Ordinarily not, but the difference between the Apogee system and every neural processor uplink and every other cortical implant is perfect integration. You see, the amniotic fluid on the inside of your brain case is not only nutrient rich, and fully oxygenated, it is full of superconducting colloidal fibers. In time these microparticles will become stuck to, and fuse with, your neural dendrites. This will allow your nerves to send and receive signals faster. Moreover, the inside wall of your brain case has a number of fibrous protrusions of the same material that will enable the computer system to share cognitive processing and load data. In short, the Apogee unit, once installed and fully integrated will not so much as process the data for you, as it will become an extra lobe or superstructure for your organic brain. The upside is that with each fluid replacement, your own brain's processing and reaction times should compound. The downside is that with each fluid replacement, the line between your brain and the machine will blur, and eventually cease, with the module becoming as much a part of your brain as your frontal cortex, or cerebellum."
Whitley caught the caveat that General Amzel had tried to smuggle in at the end of his explanation. "So, when does my brain stop counting as an enlisted man, and start counting as military hardware or property?" He asked.
"Good question. We will see what the Project Overseer und that jurist who hides in his shadow have to say." Amzel answered, his voice flat and noncommittal. "Now, you're going to feel a lot of pressure, but you should be fine." The General said as he moved toward Whitley's casing with the Apogee unit.
'Wait,' Whitley thought, the chill of unformed panic spreading across what passed for his underside, 'Pressure is just the doctor-word for pain.'
And like that, the whole black void within his cranial housing flooded with white lightning.
As always, the floor is open to advice and criticism.
I do promise this is the last chapter for a while though where things end with Whitley in blinding agony.
Edit: I think I might have already posted this snippet a few weeks ago - that's what I get for posting before the caffeine kicks in - should I delete this post?
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