17
A palpable sense of excitement hung in the air, as the trainers stood in the courtyard, waiting for the bodies to be brought from the dormitory. The first body was brought in five minutes later, while the trainers were standing around, smoking cigarettes.
Looking at the body being positioned on the floor, Abraham spoke to me through the microphone, loud enough for everyone to hear. “2324, do you want to take this body on for an immediate start?” It was clear that he, and indeed everyone else in the trainers’ group, wanted to get on with making me demonstrate what I was claiming I had done. Chatbots, and probably every other species of bot, are known to be great liars.
“No, boss Abraham, let them bring the one I was in.”
He tilted his head to blow a puff of smoke skyward. “They get attachments,” he said, aside, with a knowing smirk, and the trainers nodded their heads in agreement, as if they knew.
“Can become possessive also,” added a trainer, making everyone nod their heads some more.
For me, it was neither attachment nor possessiveness, but I did not inform or argue. My guy had had his butt cleaned up the best, whereas the one brought out first had been extremely shoddily done. It did not matter that we had to wait to get on with our session, as the body I had been using was the third one in, and the delay turned out to be under five minutes.
“Come, 2324,” said Abraham, switching off the camera view, which I instantly overrode and switched on for myself. He commenced touching the body, starting off a rush of pinpricks throughout the system. “You know the drill, and we’re going to commence, as usual, with the thumb.”
I could see him taking hold of the thumb, and I concentrated so that I could immediately begin mapping the signals coming from it, while watching him rotating it first clockwise and then counter clockwise, ten patiently delivered circular motions each way.
This is how physiotherapy works on paralyzed patients. The external input is meant to deliver signals to the body part, and activate the nerves, tendons and muscles employed, with the aim of eventually retraining the brain to once again send the commands that will conduct the movement.
In my case, it was all new, not something I had lost or forgotten, although I wondered how the body-guy had forgotten it. Had he been purposely disabled for bots to use? Did he have a functional brain to start off with, which he might have employed to oppose them doing the things they wanted to do with his body? What had happened to make him practically vegetative? I knew that at some point I would have to become a crime detective plus medical investigator, and somehow find out what exactly was going on.
I had to keep telling myself, because it is easy to misplace the truth when one seems to be being cared for, that this was essentially something evil going on, and that no benign forces were at work within the system I had entered.
“Fantastic, fantastic, that’s it!” exulted Abraham, loud enough to include everyone. “You are moving the thumb, 2324. Not fully, not yet fully, but he is getting involved in the process. Eddie, take a hold of this thumb, and check that I’m not imagining it.” He offered the digit to the trainer beside him, who shuffled on his knees to get to me and take the thumb on.
“Yes, Abraham, yes,” he enthusiastically confirmed “This bot is certainly involved in the movement.”
Abraham took the arm back and held it up in the air. “2324, move it yourself,” he said, as every trainer stopped work to stare, and the handlers came out of the door of the little room to gawp.
I used the information I had received as input, to send signals to the thumb. “It’s moving!” exulted Abraham. “Okay, not really moving, but shaking slightly. Not yet round and round, but you’re sending some signal through, 2324. Do not be disheartened. You’ll get there with practice.”
He continued holding the arm up, but switched to the forefinger. “The first finger now, 2324. Feel it.” He shook the entire arm by the finger, to ensure that I would get enough input from it. After a minute, he laid the arm back on the floor and continued with intensive finger exercises, starting over and going individually through all five digits, ending by advancing into grouped movement, to train how to grip and release.
After that, it was the wrist, then elbow, followed by the shoulder, round and round and up and down, this way and that, followed by everything repeated in the same sequence on the other arm.
When the first session was announced to have ended, rostered bots came in for training in the other bodies, keeping to the published schedule, but unemployed bots were not summoned to replace me in the body I was using, and I was not asked to move out of it.
“You are going to be permanently in this body, 2324,” said Abraham, while the first change of bots was underway. “He is showing signs of integration throughout the body, Zach,” he said to a trainer who had come to look curiously at me, in the short break between bot training classes. “Feel the leg.” Abraham offered my leg to Zach, and he began flexing it at different joints.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Although it was a spectacular smorgasbord of pinpricks throughout the system, as he held the toes and moved ankle, knee and hip at the one time, I was clearly able to react in a way in which at least some involvement was evident from my side.
“Fantastic, Abe,” he said, as the other trainers looked on. “This one bot is way ahead of the others. In fact, my current one, 2329, is nothing but lip. Just backchat and insolence. Murphy, check this out.” He handed my leg over to another trainer.
In due course, over the next few minutes, every single trainer came around to have a go at me. All exclaimed in wonder and delight, for though their own bots were not advanced enough to be even slightly involved in any activity, my astonishing participation was proof that it could be done.
That was extremely encouraging, regarding the end-result of the training program they were so diligently implementing. The only downside was that it would prove extremely demoralizing if they knew that in me they were dealing with a proper self-aware lifeform, a genuine AI being, and that the others they were working on, the insolent argumentative lot, were nothing more than bots.
As per schedule, bots kept being changed in the other bodies, a new group every hour, but I stayed put in mine, being trained in a sort of intensive program. It made no difference to the body, in terms of wear and tear, as the same body would have anyway been used the whole day, had fresh bots been coming in. Usage for training the entire day, was what had been going on daily with every one of the ten bodies.
I had no idea what was intended to be finally done with the body I was in, as it was obvious that it, in itself, would mentally never recover sufficiently to return to independent human life.
Of course, I intended to be around long enough to conduct detective-style investigation to find out what the entire program, of training bots to manage human bodies, was about. At this moment, beyond having successfully infiltrated their bot training system as the star of the show, I had made no further headway.
But I was moving fast on my own project, my personal life scarcely affected, and I was ready to learn at whatever pace they were capable of introducing into the training project. I would probably become a bit bored, but would participate enthusiastically, as I do not get tired.
Peeing was something the body regularly and automatically did during the training sessions in the courtyard, as fluids were regularly delivered into it, through a tube thrust through the mouth into the throat. The disposable nappies made urination pass unnoticed and unremarked.
Trainee bodies were given no midday meal, the breakfast glop having obviously been formulated and measured out to be sufficient for the day, but, immediately after the third round of bots had been sent away, the kitchen delivered freshly made sandwiches for trainers and handlers.
What goes in must come out, and they had a system in which routine inspection of diapers was conducted, often requiring the handlers to clean up nether regions and change diapers.
“Did you not feel the poop coming out?” asked Abraham, as I discovered that my body had pooped in its nappy.
I briefly considered arguing in typical insolent bot fashion, but decided against saying anything at all, instead concentrating on making records of the explosion of pinpricks when the handlers began dragging the body aside for the hosepipe work.
Now, as integration into the body developed further, I first experienced a feeling of a mix of pinpricks when they were removing the nappy, and then an absolutely different feeling, although still in pinpricks, while the body was dragged into position for hosing, and yet another set of pinpricks when they started piping water on my fouled-up nappy section.
I initially thought of keeping quiet about it, but because things would be speeded up by including Abraham and showing him how fast I was learning, I told him that water felt different, although in an unspecified way that I could not currently define.
“You’ve been in contact with water often enough,” he said. “Brushing your teeth, washing various body parts, including splashing water on your face in the morning, and showering, in an entire-body water event, twice a day. Did you not feel like you are feeling now?”
“It’s different,” I said
“Advancing,” he said in a loud voice, bringing the other trainers into the loop “2324 seems to have entered an evolutionary curve when processing the feel of water on the body. He says it is different to what it felt like through the morning ablutions.”
“And that’s exactly how it should be,” said Zach, provoking a round of nodding and murmuring in the rest of the trainers’ group.
When alone in the dormitory at the end of the day, I returned to working on the body, in continuation of my personal project. I had acquired new data, and was being able to make many more body parts respond immediately, if only fractionally, to the signals I was sending out.
I want to be very clear about what the responses might have been, and what they certainly were not. I was still far away, in terms of steps and stages, if not in terms of time remaining, from moving the entire body in human fashion. I was still working on isolating the parts, with fingers, wrist, elbow and shoulder counting as independent different components in the arm alone. When able to volitionally move them, I would have to figure out how to incorporate those individual movement elements into a homogeneous working arm.
It was frustrating, but Abraham had the path charted. “Let everything work perfectly, part by part, 2324,” he had said. “We shall wait for each finger to be perfect, able to conduct the entire range of movements that any human might conduct with it, and work on sorting out integration when you have isolated and got control of all the fingers.
“After that, we will go for the sequence upwards, wrist, elbow and shoulder on each arm. When that is done, we get into mixing and matching, to make the arm able to conduct simple tasks, and to then figure out how to progress it to a point where it can take on any task that a regular human arm might undertake.
“But, of course, we’ll have to go further, and find ways to integrate both arms. In due course, the legs and neck, and so many other things have to be working all together, to make you fully capable inside a human body.
“Getting up and walking, and controlling peeing and pooping are not any forms of advanced goals. Those things are the basics. You have to run and jump and dance, and bring in all the faculties, like see with the eyes, hear through the ears and speak from the mouth. It may be still a long way to go, but you’re looking like a very fast learner.”
I could have quite liked Abraham, except that he was being investigated by us for murder, and was the only reason we had focused on the fake rehab center.
