[Nick's strange mood shifts as Hancock answers, that encouragement worked a treat. Nick's trepidation turns to fondness like easing into a warm bath. He stares for another beat or so and, reluctantly, turns back to the screen. One tap of his skeletal hand on the window loads their final destination on this mystery tour. The CPU housing vanishes entirely around them and, once again, VR sends Hancock in headfirst, immersing him (both of them) into the memory as though it were happening in right then.
This time, when the world cuts back in, there's a ramp. The initial flashbulb of being is followed by sensation building, like blood rushing back through numb limbs. Those pathways are well worn at this point, there's a sense of body, of presence in space, of someone occupying it. It's not the fearful partial existence of a synth on a rack.
Nick has no idea how long transpired between his time in the lab and this installation, but it was significant enough that DiMa had decided they had to escape. Nick had considered asking him to fill in anything he could, but he never had, and probably never would. Even if DiMa still had those ancient memories collecting dust somewhere, it doesn't seem like something that he really wants to know.
This system loads him in like the VR system they're currently occupying. There's a hook against his central programming, at the base of his skull, and it tangles his processes with these. For Hancock it'd be just to the side of how stepping into a memory pod feels. The synth in the memory isn't being put into the world so much as the world is being put in him, but it parses out about the same. That beheamoth of data that hung over them before, that loomed over the vast abyssal vacuum of nothingness, seems smaller now. It isn't, but the nothing around it isn't as dark, as absolute as it was at the beginging.
That's a side effect of digital storage and deletion. It isn't so much removing what's there as it is writing over it. The files don't always match in size, in bit-depth, so there are splinters left over in the wake of a wipe, half-remembered fragments of data, of templates, of sensory records without context or meaning. They clutter the blank nothingness like a swath of distant, glimmering stars. Insubstantial but comforting.
They persist so he knows that he existed, that he exists now.
This template loads into him almost like a dream. It fits the hollow spaces between the fragments, slots into place comfortably, and settles. He's pulled into it then and, briefly, the world exists in stereo. One feed is an office where he's talking (rather: where Nick is talking) to a professor who's seated behind a polished wooden desk. The scene has a faded, watercolor quality to it, like the party and the rest of Nick's internal spaces. The data's edges overflow and smear, capturing the concept of the time with clumsy, analog methods.
It's a bit like looking at developed film against a lamp--accurate but strange, removed, and probably not how it was intended to be viewed.
While he watches himself, he also is himself. What would qualify as an out of body experience from the other direction is the default here. There is a sense, though, that this particular instance is more separated than is entirely normal.
Still, he sits with the professor while he watches himself sit with the professor, and the sound is somehow coming from both. It's muffled terribly in first person but overlayed with crisp, recorded tape in the third. It's a jarring way to exist, on four layers at once, but it's the closest to being alive that he's known so far. He grasps at all of the layers, leaning in and hopes that one clips through him and sticks.
Nick the current is seeing this in that four part stereo, just like Hancock, but with his own cognition on top. It gives him vertigo, dealing with this many layers, but it's important to feel this one out. They wouldn't be here otherwise.
In the office, Nick the former is making stilted small-talk with the dean of medical technologies at MIT. The trappings of the Institute, the bones of it, are all here but Nick's memory doesn't grasp them so his--that is ViMa's--memory fills the blanks with bursts of jagged definition. Nick the former sounds, looks, and in a muted way, feels terrible, on edge, bereft.
That small aspect is a known variable, it strikes a chord inside him, and has a resonance that falls in line with the rudimentary consciousness that they call ViMa.]
no subject
This time, when the world cuts back in, there's a ramp. The initial flashbulb of being is followed by sensation building, like blood rushing back through numb limbs. Those pathways are well worn at this point, there's a sense of body, of presence in space, of someone occupying it. It's not the fearful partial existence of a synth on a rack.
Nick has no idea how long transpired between his time in the lab and this installation, but it was significant enough that DiMa had decided they had to escape. Nick had considered asking him to fill in anything he could, but he never had, and probably never would. Even if DiMa still had those ancient memories collecting dust somewhere, it doesn't seem like something that he really wants to know.
This system loads him in like the VR system they're currently occupying. There's a hook against his central programming, at the base of his skull, and it tangles his processes with these. For Hancock it'd be just to the side of how stepping into a memory pod feels. The synth in the memory isn't being put into the world so much as the world is being put in him, but it parses out about the same. That beheamoth of data that hung over them before, that loomed over the vast abyssal vacuum of nothingness, seems smaller now. It isn't, but the nothing around it isn't as dark, as absolute as it was at the beginging.
That's a side effect of digital storage and deletion. It isn't so much removing what's there as it is writing over it. The files don't always match in size, in bit-depth, so there are splinters left over in the wake of a wipe, half-remembered fragments of data, of templates, of sensory records without context or meaning. They clutter the blank nothingness like a swath of distant, glimmering stars. Insubstantial but comforting.
They persist so he knows that he existed, that he exists now.
This template loads into him almost like a dream. It fits the hollow spaces between the fragments, slots into place comfortably, and settles. He's pulled into it then and, briefly, the world exists in stereo. One feed is an office where he's talking (rather: where Nick is talking) to a professor who's seated behind a polished wooden desk. The scene has a faded, watercolor quality to it, like the party and the rest of Nick's internal spaces. The data's edges overflow and smear, capturing the concept of the time with clumsy, analog methods.
It's a bit like looking at developed film against a lamp--accurate but strange, removed, and probably not how it was intended to be viewed.
While he watches himself, he also is himself. What would qualify as an out of body experience from the other direction is the default here. There is a sense, though, that this particular instance is more separated than is entirely normal.
Still, he sits with the professor while he watches himself sit with the professor, and the sound is somehow coming from both. It's muffled terribly in first person but overlayed with crisp, recorded tape in the third. It's a jarring way to exist, on four layers at once, but it's the closest to being alive that he's known so far. He grasps at all of the layers, leaning in and hopes that one clips through him and sticks.
Nick the current is seeing this in that four part stereo, just like Hancock, but with his own cognition on top. It gives him vertigo, dealing with this many layers, but it's important to feel this one out. They wouldn't be here otherwise.
In the office, Nick the former is making stilted small-talk with the dean of medical technologies at MIT. The trappings of the Institute, the bones of it, are all here but Nick's memory doesn't grasp them so his--that is ViMa's--memory fills the blanks with bursts of jagged definition. Nick the former sounds, looks, and in a muted way, feels terrible, on edge, bereft.
That small aspect is a known variable, it strikes a chord inside him, and has a resonance that falls in line with the rudimentary consciousness that they call ViMa.]