30 days until deadlineStand guard over the base if possible
Very possible, but nobody is bothering you or the compound today.
Get your head back in the game Meshanblov! You're wasting valuable time that could reward you with a nigh unlimited research budget!
Name the alloy Meshanite
Continue researching Quantum brains and reactor
Blatantly taking credits for the work others did, just like Thomas Edison. No doubt you will be succesful and well respected among your peers.
Alright, quantum brain. Primary problem is to figure how to make use qubits properly for computing purposes. Actually that's not hard at all, it takes you fifty A4's scribbled full semi complex math and tiny drawings to see how simple it actually is. Hardest part is building important parts and somehow construct them in pattern that can simulate a brain.
Getting rid of excess heat of reactor is done, though frankly it is better if your soldier is never deployed on hot deserts. Cooler ambient heat makes it easier to transfer heat out and less prone for overheating. Having alternative way to employ heat would be great. Now then, neutron shielding. Those pesky things are difficult to deal with.
Research in progress:
Miniature fission reactor
Quantum brain
To be researched:
High density capacitors
EMP hardening
Modular design
Research done:
Armored exoskeleton structure
Artificial muscles
Digital brain copy
Electricity driven cells
Particle beam
Meshanite
Myomers
High capacity fuel cell
Test subjects expired: 19
Send a nice letter to whoever it is who invented this panacea stuff. Good to have depth perception again.
Hmm. It would appear that there are some things in the world that are not well understood. Try to analyze the pictures from the lab. Even if they're not mine, maybe they mean something.
Your missing arm has regenerated from last morning right under elbow, which is probably the reason you are feeling so famished. Hunger simply doesn't disappear, regardless how much you eat. So your "thank you" letter has slightly bitter tone and is covered in greasy fingerprints.
Maybe. Maybe you took some brain damage. Maybe experimental drugs were messing with your head. Your device should be easier to understand than these... scribbles about de Broglie hypothesis? All broken and incorrect of course, which does not suprise you at all. In fact it would be more suprising if they were correct. There even more formulas that seem to resemble some fundamental forces and unsolved mathematical problems, but none of them make any sense.
You skip all bloody handprints and move on anything that resembles something sane. Like writings, symbols and drawings. All texts are insane ramblings that don't follow any understandable train of thought. Perhaps if you were insane you could understand, but your currently extremely logic oriented brain does not. Symbols are fun ones. Eyes, a lot of eyes, illuminati, ankhs, some really weird shit arranged in circular patterns in a hallway, and twisted variations of known symbols.
Lastly, drawings. Drawings simply scream pain. Every single one depicts pain in some form or another, even mental pain described as a bloody painting so masterfully that you can almost feel it. Some are terrific in so horrible way they simply make you vomit involuntarily, which is annoying because now you need to eat even more.
So all in all, you have pictures of utter and complete lack of sanity. If there's a hidden gem (which you highly doubt), you are not seeing it. Not sure if you even want to.
Research in progress:
Analysis of insanity
To be researched:
Mind to machine interface - canine adaptation
Mind merging
Artificial muscles
Exoskeleton
Mind merging
Advanced medical procedures
Optical camouflage
Overclocked biology
Research done:
Stable weapon attachment point and remote aiming designator
Mind to machine interface
Dreamstream
Test subjects expired: 50 (100)
Other victims: 35
Neat. Start poring over the Terrible Glory design, matching the observed behaviors to capabilities built into the design itself.
Also see if I can cap the maximum mental sharing of the hive mind to leave some space for further commands. Redesign the chips appropriately.
Point to non-smoking crater as evidence of results as I procure a new lab.
Agent comes over, looks over the crater, makes few calls and says they'll get you a new lab tomorrow. Hopefully you don't mind traveling for 10 hours in a car. He's hiding it well, but he has the looks of a kid who found out where his christmas presents are hidden. Is it because you have produced something weaponizable, or because he just found out psychic powers are real, you can't tell.
While assistants are packing things and moving subjects you put your mind into uncovering secrets of terrible glory. Too bad the subject didn't survive. It would have been great to peek into their skull. Anyway, the module connects to visual cortex, which explains whole "light" thing. Partially at least. Very small portion actually. Hmm.
Hive minds... oh, the chips can transmit even more data so it isn't problem of capacity, more like hive mind reached its intented state. Subjects' behaviour mirrors this; when they actually decide to do something they do so in perfect unison. Mostly they simply sit and stare floor, though.
Research in progress:
Hivemind testing
Terrible Glory - Analysis
To be researched:
Research done:
Improved coordination
Improved cooperative bonding
Improved learning ability
Improved reaction times II
Terrible Glory
Hive mind
Major Technologies:
NERVOUS SYSTEM DESIGN AND UNDERSTANDING
Test subjects expired: 33
Other victims: 7
I have a butt-ton of power available. I could use magnetic fields to conter-act the mass.
That's true, you do have. Doesn't mean mass produced models will have.
Railguns operate with electromagnetic fields already, so using extra means only more power usage. Regardless you begin constructing something a man with powered exoskeleton can carry. Pair of rails carefully measured and bolted on place, surrounding it with shielding structure somewhat resembling a big ass gun. Now it needs connection to powersource, preferrably with cables as thick as you thighs are. And test fire. You don't build a big fucking gun without shooting it at least once.
Research in progress:
Rail-guns
To be researched:
Reverse chemical formulation
Improved exoskeleton
Improved training speeds
Intelligence increasing treatments
Research done:
Layered lighweight armor
Matter annihilation power plant
Test subjects expired: 6
You finally finish the damn batteries! They ended up a bit heavier than predicted, their capacities make it well worth of it. You make extra for your holodrone, load a animation of velociraptor size of large bear, hook it up into remote controller and have fun scaring people with it. You add tiny but loud speakers to play a good roar to maximize the fun. Haha, good times! Not satisfied with that you build second holodrone without mobility addon and use it as a display for your tablet.
Research in progress:
To be researched:
Dazzleball
Brain integrated chips - Improved reaction speed
Brain integrated chips - Imprinted knowledge
Killing emotions
Associate obedience with joy
Researched done:
Reaction time study
Optical camouflage
Mobile holoprojector
High density battery
Test subjects expired: 15
Oh man, two days in a row of unroductivity. Not good.
Finish up limited grey goo. Work on multibrain control systems
Last bits of Gray Goo Limited EditionTM design is completed without fanfare or the namesake scenario, which is a big win in your books. Using Collectors EditionTM version with even stricter ruleset proves it works nicely, but is not very picky about materials it uses, so the final blob of nanites is not very strong because of the wide array of materials used. It quite literally is what it eats, if limited to metals only. For best effect first generation of builders should be made of strongest materials available, which is the non-iron alloy you stole. ((Which was incidentally named as Meshanite, not that you would know, but sake of bookkeeping I'll use that name everywhere now.))
Multibrain control systems is not much of challenge for you. Or anyone for that matter. Once you have functional brain cases it is just matter of making communications possible between brains, designate one as prime brain with ability to take over any and all systems on demand. Communication without body is hard and simulating lungs, larynx, mouth, tongue and lips for sake of speech generation is simply waste of resources. That's why you build a system identifying intent and translating it through a signal buffer for other brains. Testing it ...is hard. I don't have any botted brains in my notes, but you probably should have one or two. Who are most likely going crazy from level 9001 sensory deprivation. Now to think about it, those brains in jars may also need a way to communicate with still fleshy people.
Window of opportunity for intrusion happens right on schedule. Good simple distraction and nobody is watching your direction. Entrance into the lab goes perfectly until you notice pair of lab assistants playing D&D under a table. You have been seen! You perform non-lethal take down with your buddies, gag the lab rats and tie them up. One manages to make noise before being introduced to but of your rifle, but it doesn't seem anyone noticed. Good. Mission can continue.
Despite of few close calls you make it to main researcher's laptop. Squadie installs C4 charge on underside of table it sits on. Next target is the fuel. You don't have any real details about it, but you figure finding any set of chemists equipment or tanks combined with warning sings of explosives and corrosives is a good sign. You don't find any tanks that matches the description, but only one small carefully secured vial. Eh, good enough, you suppose. Another charge installed.
Those were probably most important bits, but might as well take care of all other manufacturing equipment and compact production lines. When they have no data and no devices they'll have hard time to catch up. Squadies locate suitable targets and install enough explosives to blow them up for good. At this point you notice sudden lack of patrols. It is usually a bad sign, so you take it as your signal to move on to the exit strategy.
Quick and quiet trip through very empty hallways and rooms tells you that something has gone wrong. Either the tied up pencil necks were found or something else is going on here. Your exit point is same as entrance, and for your relief you find the bondage party intact. So it was something else after all. Good! Now, situation update. Careful peeks out of window reveals that patrols have disappeared and column of cars is exiting the facility grounds. Huh, that makes things easier. Out of the window and into forest!
"Out of the window" part goes as planned, but "into forest" part does not. A hail of fire erupts from the treeline. A bunch of bullets scrape your legs, tearing mostly skin. Pain is tolerable enough for you to analyze the situation in a flash. They are shooting your legs. They want you alive. Squadie 1 takes similar superficial if painful wounds. Squadie 2 instad have both kneecaps exploded. He's down and badly wounded. Damn, getting your friend killed wasn't part of the plan. You should have known to fall back after noticing increased security. Now it's matter of either surrendering and hoping they get him medical attention quickly enough or attempting daring escape and leaving him behind, hoping it was worth it.
Nah, there's no cover anywhere, no hope of escape. You drop your weapon and surrender. How do you plead?
Research in progress:
Nanobot functions: Corrosion resistance
To be researched:
Robotic body
Nanobot production: Extended raw materials
Armor
Distributed neural networks
Research done:
Nerve interface
Brain in a jar
Meshanite
Myomers
Highly volatile fuel
Robotic body
Multibrain control systems
Major Technologies:
Nanomachines
Test subjects expired: 19
Damn it. Maybe I should deal with this other distraction before I delve back into fleshcraft. It'll give my mind some time to rest.
I try to figure out what's up with the gorilla arm guy. I give him treatment if I think there's an easy way to help, but I do not invest much of my time into healing him. After all, I can probably learn a lot from an autopsy.
And that'll have to be enough of a break. I'm too anxious to complete this. I dive back into fleshcraft. If the samples I requested have arrived, I study them and devise experiments based on what I learn. If I don't have the samples, I continue my current line of experiments trying to get people to grow extra bits more precisely.
Importance of figuring out what's going on with gorillaman increases suddenly because your volunteering soldier falls ill, showing same symptoms. You can probably get another soldier to work with if he dies, but in first day your agent made it clear you should avoid deaths of employees. Actually the fact that renegadelobster got ill helps you to narrow down probable cause considerably, because only thing common between him and gorillaman is the regenerative healing treatment. Which reminds you that yesterday you sent two doses of it to the very valuable company employee. This is kinda bad.
Let's see, gorillaman received his dose seven days ago and renegadelobster 5 days ago, so symptoms appear consistantly five days after injection. Two points of data doesn't make it very reliable estimate, but that's all you have. And that means you have four days to come up with an counter agent before you inadvertently cause big losses for the company. As much as they are willing to invest into you, that probably goes to the borderline if you are worth of it. So! Work!
You take many samples from the gorilla man, your soldier and the other multibodied test subject who also received a dose and start studying them. It becomes obvious that gorillaman is good as dead. Cancer has spread on almost all cells in his body and is effectively killing him. Probably won't last more than 20 hours, if even that. No traces of cause. Which means renegadelobster has only one day left before his death is basically guaranteed, assuming cancer progresses at same rate. Damn.
Renegadelobsters samples are more eyeopening. You find traces of panacea pathogen destroying viruses but not a single living sample of the actual virus. Panacea is that good. Ironically it actually hinders your work. What a pain. Now siamese triplets sample provides you the answer. A mutated form of your designer "healing" virus seems to be multiplying and boosting division rates across all cells it gets in. It is in process of steadily mutating more dangerous form, but is not yet designated as a problem by panacea. Only good thing about this is that it doesn't appear spreading outside of host organism. That would have been very bad.
This means fixing your regeneration virus is easy. Stopping existing viruses is not. Or, well, you could create more paranoid version of panacea, especially tailored against this one. That's your key to ensure your continued funding, so you focus on that. Progess it painfully slow because you need to adjust panacea V2 to very fine point of identifying troublesome series of mutations in the virus without making it go equally berserk.
You very carefully ignore the matter with soldier. You could probably make another modified virus to rever changes made by previous one, but that could simply cause cascading series more fatal and troubling diseases. You shove the idea out of your mind for now. Funding is more important than replaceable soldiers.
Research in progress:
Rapid healing, counter agent
To be researched:
Fleshcraft
New nerve pathways
Research done:
Targeted hyper cancer
Inline DNA manipulation
Artificial Siamese Twins
Monster maker
!!Rapid healing!!
Extra bodypart attachments
Panacea - Immune system replacer
Major Technologies:
?
Test subjects expired: 34
Be deep in mad-sciencing.
((this is spoken as if in person, in reply to the statement about being expected to be a "mad" scientist, and the reason for the attention that building a large mainframe would gather))
That is an interesting thought. But super-soldiers are hard to completely conceal, wars have a tendency to catch the public eye. What if there was a super-soldier that had none of the stigma of mad-scientist research? What if the public, upon inevitably finding out about it, had no reason to raise their torches and pitchforks?
With the last bit of the bionic body research now proceeding by itself, it's time for the final major component - the intelligence. And it is here that we run into an interesting conundrum.Organic brains are incredibly effective at thinking, at reasoning. They're also, if you're willing to discard your morals, fairly easy to come by. But when you really think about it, the entire human body exists and functions primarily to keep that human brain working. Vitamins, nutrients, microelements and sugars, hormones, electrolytes, the human brain consumes an incredible variety of resources. And it is still very sensitive to impacts, and hard to protect.
On top of it all, trying to fit an organic brain, and all of its assistant infrastructure, into a body already strapped for internal space, is a rather tough proposition.
When this project started out, I had an inkling of an idea for a replacement.
Synthetic Intelligence.
Not artificial. Not a computer program running exotic hardware, molded to the needs of the author. But synthetic, one that grows and arranges itself according to stimuli - stimuli we can precisely control.
The project scope is large. There are several key directions, several key steps:
- Bionic Brain Matter - an organic brain will not do, but some replacement will be required. A neuron-like crystalline structure, that could be grown and branch out like organic brain matter, but more resistant and compact.
- Consciousness Simulation Engine - until there is a brain that the synthetic consciousness could be molded into, it will have to grow inside a simulated environment, a dedicated supercomputing mainframe that will allow it to be rapidly prototyped, developed in such a way as to allow early faults with the technologies involved to be recognized and corrected.
- Mind-Machine Interface - the synthetic intelligence won't be able to grow unless it's supplied with knowledge, with experiences. An organic consciousness grows by experiencing the world - for a synthetic one, the experiences of, say, one well-trained and highly skilled volunteer, would be sufficient, but he has to be able to "talk" to it at a fast enough pace to enable its growth.
- Knowledge Database - a simpler task but no less important, the consciousness will also require answers to simple questions that the volunteer's mind may not have. The concepts of language, the meanings of words and phrases, questions such as "what is a fist" that might stupefy a human mind but have simple answers to a computer. To that end, the entirety of various online dictionaries and knowledge repositories has to be compiled into one database, ready for quick access.
The simulated consciousness model, once it's active, must be kept running 24/7, at maximum load, and it must not be exposed to accidental network traffic, packet loss, or other dangers of the wide open net. Even latency should be kept to a minimum, to ensure that there is no corruption anywhere in the data. It's almost literally brain surgery - it needs a sterile environment.
Once the necessary steps are made, the synthetic consciousness could be grown from the simulated model, and it would (hopefully) retain the unique skills acquired by the volunteer providing the experiences. It would, in effect, become a synthetic clone of their personality. And once the model is made, and the hardware platform is available, mass production can take place, unhindered by even the slightest pangs of moral quandary - even if every one of the soldiers is sentient, every one of them is still a volunteer, and the Company need not bother itself with covering up any ongoing disappearing-person cases, while still making all the profit expected from the project.
Does that explanation convey the proposition fully enough?-------------------
In actual activity terms, begin working on the mind-machine interface and the software for the consciousness simulator (advanced neural-nets, the platform for accessing external data, various basic functions a-la "how to ask a question?" so that data can be accessed and processed, etc). The assistants should, hopefully, begin assembly of the dedicated mainframe.
Well, before dealing with that there's an event that takes your attention first. On middle of night.
A security person wakes you up. He whispers you to grab most important things quickly and follow him out. Armed individuals have entered the complex and appear to be planting explosives around. The most important thing is of course your socks and the removable drive containing all your research data. He escorts you out into car where a lot of other employees are being routed to. Once everyone is on board, minus test subjects, the column of cars start up and drive out. Minutes later you can hear firefight starting and lasting for seven seconds.
Car column doesn't stop, but rather keeps going further away. You are informed that group of assailants have been captured and security is sweeping premises to detect possible stragglers and wait for bomb squad to disarm explosives. Eventually cars stop on road side and wait for permission to return. That comes a hour later, a time you use to formulate reponse for your agent. Infiltrators are taken somewhere else for interrogation.
...
Interesting proposition. However any artificial intelligence employed military forces will be met with fear and rejection until general populace has been acclimated for it, no matter how it was archieved. Furthermore, this transparent approach you are promoting undeniably brings attention to the company and company espionage. It will inevitably increase risk of their other projects becoming into light, which is be counter productive. Granted, he recognizes few potential peace time applications for inorganic synthetic intelligence. Space exploration for example.
He will bring the matter to his superiours. In meantime, after seeing what other science contractors are doing, he holds all faith that you can design and build far better supercomputer than they can ever provide.
...
Man Machine Interface, henceforth abbreviated as MMI, especially if intented not only manipulation but also communication and transfer of very abstract concepts, is not easy one to make. It is effectively a mind reader. Intentions, you think, are easy to capture. Dedicated chips for few key points should do the trick. But rest of it? Oh boy, what a fun project.
Consciousness Simulation Engine is too something rather interesting. Supercomputer could run it, but supercomputers are not idiot proof, and unexpected loss of power means loss and corruption of data. And the man is kinda right. You could build customized hardware for the simulator, next generation supercomputer and be sure that power losses will not cause problems. Especially because current supercomputers generate lot of heat and require considerable amount of power. Both points which you could relatively easily address with custom hardware.
You start typing code for the engine, starting with high level functions that are not hardware specific in case you have to build your own supercomputer.
Research in progress:
Wear protection - outsourced
Man Machine Interface
Consciousness Simulation Engine
Research to do:
Bionic Brain Matter
Wetware AI
Research completed:
Structural skeleton
Myomers
Muscle layout
Cooling
Molecular simulation
High capacity fuel cell
Author
Topic: Roll to create a supersoldier! Bloody air resistance (Read 139071 times)