Fiction: Junkdrive
Title: Junkdrive
Author: brightly_lit
World: tricycleman
Rating: PG
Characters: Dieter, Angel Man, Sarah
Genre and Warnings: gen, depression, self-destructive tendencies, self-modification (mental modification), horrific concepts
Word Count: ~1,400
Summary: Dieter has never considered himself fully functional, never not been depressed or anxious, never been happy. He's never been how he wants to be, felt how he wants to feel. Fortunately, in New Detroit, there just might be a way to fix that.
This story references events in this (quite short) story, even if it's not a direct sequel.
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that I am INCREDIBLY FREAKIN' EXCITED ABOUT THIS CHALLENGE. It started yesterday and runs through next week--check out the awesome stories (and soon, art!, not to mention the glorious photos blackrabbit42 took and posted to promote the challenge) over at tricycleman!
Obviously the brain stem and the cerebrum were right out. So were the hippocampus and everything that had “thalamus” in it. It all came down to the amygdala. Of course.
The amygdala took up a shocking amount of the code of the human brain, for being such a small physical presence within it. Worse, much of it was either the beginning or end of some if/then statement, which originated or terminated in some other part of the brain.
On the plus side, from a programmer’s point of view, the vast majority of it was meaningless, lines of code floating there with no evident purpose, like descriptors or notes to oneself a programmer might leave so he didn’t lose his place or so he remembered what a particular bit of code was for, or the beginning of a process that went nowhere and wasn’t worth hunting down and deleting, because it didn’t adversely impact the way the program ran. In other words, useless.
“But beautiful,” his friend Angel said, when Dieter brought it up with him. He thought Angel Man would be the ideal person to ask what would happen if he coded over parts of his brain, since Angel was as far as he knew the first guy to try it, but Angel didn’t know. Angel Man hadn’t even known what he was writing over, hadn’t known what the consequence would be; he was just looking for rewritable space on the hard drive.
“But useless,” Dieter insisted, still asking even if there was no question mark.
Angel looked at it, looked up at the images of clouds he’d just coded into his ceiling. “How do you decide if it’s useless?” he asked sincerely.
It was Angel’s girlfriend Sarah who had feelings about Dieter’s plan. Angel didn’t really have feelings anymore. That was one of the things Dieter had always liked best about him, one of the things that first made them friends. He expected nothing. “Let me know when you’re gonna do it so you can come to your own wake beforehand,” she said scathingly.
“You sure are pissed, considering you love the guy who did it before me.”
The flare in her eyes when she glared at him, the pain ... that’s exactly the kind of thing he was going to erase, forever. “Yeah, Dieter. Don’t you think I oughta know?”
At least Angel Man took him to the old Lifehack building and showed him where they stored all the data. Lifehack had actually run a few experiments themselves on writing over human code, hidden deep within encrypted folders Dieter found embarrassingly easy to hack. He even found his old resumé on their backup drives, and their reasoning for declining to hire him: “too unstable.” Even they could tell.
There was no information on where they got their data, no descriptions of experiments or how they got around the hard-and-fast caveat that the only person who could write over one’s own code was oneself. Apparently they wrote over the code of the same few people over and over again, too, somehow restoring the code first back to its original state, which Dieter had been given to believe by every available source was impossible, in part because the only drive large enough to store a single human’s code was that person’s own body. You could hack into it, search through it on your phone, but the whole of it would take up every room on every floor of every skyscraper in a city that spanned miles.
The data was inconclusive, with unhelpfully compiled results, none of which actually got into whether the consequent person was functional or ... happy. Were they happy?
Dieter never had been. Some would say the life he’d lived before the Cataclysm--which truthfully seemed just another in a long line of cataclysms, such that it seemed predictable, expected, that the Cataclysm should befall him too--would make it inevitable, but Dieter was half-convinced he’d been born like this. He couldn’t remember ever looking at the world with joy or wonder, couldn’t remember ever feeling the way toddlers seemed to, seeing snow or airplanes or butterflies for the first time, couldn’t remember laughing with abandon, couldn’t remember a single moment without fear or self-doubt or a simple, overwhelming longing for it all finally to be over.
After years of ruminating on the problem in his logical way, he’d come to the conclusion Occam’s Razor insisted upon: he was broken. He came off the line flawed, damaged, scarcely functional. His dad would have been the man in the company who decided whether to try to fix that car or send it to the scrap heap. He’d always made clear which he would choose when it came to Dieter.
Sarah was being overdramatic, acting like he’d be dead. He wasn’t going to leap off a building, press a button, and hope for the best. He was going to do it right. He would inspect every bit of research available to him, compile all the data, analyze it carefully, and make the most conservative, rational decision. He wouldn’t be dead. He would be himself, just vastly improved. And a groundbreaker in self-modification. He might be on the verge of solving anxiety, depression, even all of human suffering. If nothing else, if he failed utterly, what was left of him would be useful data for his successor ... because there was certain to be one. There was no shortage of people who broke down before they even got to the highway.
He even put together a bunch of potential recodes, writing only over the lines that obviously had no real purpose and leaving the rest exactly as they had been, showing Angel what he had done, since Angel was the one person in existence who had the ability to somehow envisage what the result would be. The trick was getting it out of him in useful and comprehensible descriptors, but obviously, based on this miraculous ability he’d accidentally given himself due to his own rewrite, despite his many lacks and faults, even Angel had been improved by his kamikaze coding. Sometimes Dieter wondered if anyone would be, if any change to the human code was sure to be an improvement.
“Bland,” Angel said of his first attempt.
“Catastrophic,” he said of his second. Uh-oh. Dieter junked that one.
Angel cocked his head at the third. “Not quite right.”
“Twisted and beautiful,” he said of his fourth. Another one for the reject pile. Angel had a perverse concept of beauty, and if even he thought it was twisted ....
Angel stared a long time at the fifth, and Dieter’s hopes began to rise, when Angel Man said, “Coarse and useless.”
Dieter took his phone back where they stood together in the park and looked at the code. He’d worked really hard on this one. It had felt like art. “How do you decide if it’s useless?”
“Because it would be useless to me.”
“But what if it’s just the way I want it?”
Angel shrugged. “Still useless.”
Dieter got mad. Angel was turning out to be as impossible to please as his dad. “Who are you to say?”
“Who are you?” Angel Man countered.
“It’s my code to overwrite if I want to.”
“You’re a child scrawling over the Sistine Chapel ceiling. You don’t understand the code well enough to write it, much less overwrite it. You’re about to ruin one of my favorite works of art.”
“Then code a new one.”
Angel stared blankly at him for a long few moments as if contemplating taking him up on it, turned away as if Dieter wasn’t there, walked a few steps, and took flight.
Who was Angel Man to say these things to him? Dieter was the best goddamn programmer in this part of the city and everyone knew it. Maybe Angel was just jealous that Dieter had managed to create code to overwrite the same part of himself Angel had, and he’d done it better and more gracefully in every way. “Child scrawling over the Sistine Chapel ceiling” .... Maybe he was a child, but at worst he was scrawling over graffiti on the overpass.
He compiled the best parts of his third and fifth attempts, and when he caught Angel wandering through the Water Market, he proudly handed his phone over to him.
Angel looked at it expressionlessly for a long few minutes, then simply handed it back.
“Well?” Dieter demanded. “What do you think?”
“I’ll miss you,” was all the angel said.
Author: brightly_lit
World: tricycleman
Rating: PG
Characters: Dieter, Angel Man, Sarah
Genre and Warnings: gen, depression, self-destructive tendencies, self-modification (mental modification), horrific concepts
Word Count: ~1,400
Summary: Dieter has never considered himself fully functional, never not been depressed or anxious, never been happy. He's never been how he wants to be, felt how he wants to feel. Fortunately, in New Detroit, there just might be a way to fix that.
This story references events in this (quite short) story, even if it's not a direct sequel.
It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that I am INCREDIBLY FREAKIN' EXCITED ABOUT THIS CHALLENGE. It started yesterday and runs through next week--check out the awesome stories (and soon, art!, not to mention the glorious photos blackrabbit42 took and posted to promote the challenge) over at tricycleman!
Obviously the brain stem and the cerebrum were right out. So were the hippocampus and everything that had “thalamus” in it. It all came down to the amygdala. Of course.
The amygdala took up a shocking amount of the code of the human brain, for being such a small physical presence within it. Worse, much of it was either the beginning or end of some if/then statement, which originated or terminated in some other part of the brain.
On the plus side, from a programmer’s point of view, the vast majority of it was meaningless, lines of code floating there with no evident purpose, like descriptors or notes to oneself a programmer might leave so he didn’t lose his place or so he remembered what a particular bit of code was for, or the beginning of a process that went nowhere and wasn’t worth hunting down and deleting, because it didn’t adversely impact the way the program ran. In other words, useless.
“But beautiful,” his friend Angel said, when Dieter brought it up with him. He thought Angel Man would be the ideal person to ask what would happen if he coded over parts of his brain, since Angel was as far as he knew the first guy to try it, but Angel didn’t know. Angel Man hadn’t even known what he was writing over, hadn’t known what the consequence would be; he was just looking for rewritable space on the hard drive.
“But useless,” Dieter insisted, still asking even if there was no question mark.
Angel looked at it, looked up at the images of clouds he’d just coded into his ceiling. “How do you decide if it’s useless?” he asked sincerely.
It was Angel’s girlfriend Sarah who had feelings about Dieter’s plan. Angel didn’t really have feelings anymore. That was one of the things Dieter had always liked best about him, one of the things that first made them friends. He expected nothing. “Let me know when you’re gonna do it so you can come to your own wake beforehand,” she said scathingly.
“You sure are pissed, considering you love the guy who did it before me.”
The flare in her eyes when she glared at him, the pain ... that’s exactly the kind of thing he was going to erase, forever. “Yeah, Dieter. Don’t you think I oughta know?”
At least Angel Man took him to the old Lifehack building and showed him where they stored all the data. Lifehack had actually run a few experiments themselves on writing over human code, hidden deep within encrypted folders Dieter found embarrassingly easy to hack. He even found his old resumé on their backup drives, and their reasoning for declining to hire him: “too unstable.” Even they could tell.
There was no information on where they got their data, no descriptions of experiments or how they got around the hard-and-fast caveat that the only person who could write over one’s own code was oneself. Apparently they wrote over the code of the same few people over and over again, too, somehow restoring the code first back to its original state, which Dieter had been given to believe by every available source was impossible, in part because the only drive large enough to store a single human’s code was that person’s own body. You could hack into it, search through it on your phone, but the whole of it would take up every room on every floor of every skyscraper in a city that spanned miles.
The data was inconclusive, with unhelpfully compiled results, none of which actually got into whether the consequent person was functional or ... happy. Were they happy?
Dieter never had been. Some would say the life he’d lived before the Cataclysm--which truthfully seemed just another in a long line of cataclysms, such that it seemed predictable, expected, that the Cataclysm should befall him too--would make it inevitable, but Dieter was half-convinced he’d been born like this. He couldn’t remember ever looking at the world with joy or wonder, couldn’t remember ever feeling the way toddlers seemed to, seeing snow or airplanes or butterflies for the first time, couldn’t remember laughing with abandon, couldn’t remember a single moment without fear or self-doubt or a simple, overwhelming longing for it all finally to be over.
After years of ruminating on the problem in his logical way, he’d come to the conclusion Occam’s Razor insisted upon: he was broken. He came off the line flawed, damaged, scarcely functional. His dad would have been the man in the company who decided whether to try to fix that car or send it to the scrap heap. He’d always made clear which he would choose when it came to Dieter.
Sarah was being overdramatic, acting like he’d be dead. He wasn’t going to leap off a building, press a button, and hope for the best. He was going to do it right. He would inspect every bit of research available to him, compile all the data, analyze it carefully, and make the most conservative, rational decision. He wouldn’t be dead. He would be himself, just vastly improved. And a groundbreaker in self-modification. He might be on the verge of solving anxiety, depression, even all of human suffering. If nothing else, if he failed utterly, what was left of him would be useful data for his successor ... because there was certain to be one. There was no shortage of people who broke down before they even got to the highway.
He even put together a bunch of potential recodes, writing only over the lines that obviously had no real purpose and leaving the rest exactly as they had been, showing Angel what he had done, since Angel was the one person in existence who had the ability to somehow envisage what the result would be. The trick was getting it out of him in useful and comprehensible descriptors, but obviously, based on this miraculous ability he’d accidentally given himself due to his own rewrite, despite his many lacks and faults, even Angel had been improved by his kamikaze coding. Sometimes Dieter wondered if anyone would be, if any change to the human code was sure to be an improvement.
“Bland,” Angel said of his first attempt.
“Catastrophic,” he said of his second. Uh-oh. Dieter junked that one.
Angel cocked his head at the third. “Not quite right.”
“Twisted and beautiful,” he said of his fourth. Another one for the reject pile. Angel had a perverse concept of beauty, and if even he thought it was twisted ....
Angel stared a long time at the fifth, and Dieter’s hopes began to rise, when Angel Man said, “Coarse and useless.”
Dieter took his phone back where they stood together in the park and looked at the code. He’d worked really hard on this one. It had felt like art. “How do you decide if it’s useless?”
“Because it would be useless to me.”
“But what if it’s just the way I want it?”
Angel shrugged. “Still useless.”
Dieter got mad. Angel was turning out to be as impossible to please as his dad. “Who are you to say?”
“Who are you?” Angel Man countered.
“It’s my code to overwrite if I want to.”
“You’re a child scrawling over the Sistine Chapel ceiling. You don’t understand the code well enough to write it, much less overwrite it. You’re about to ruin one of my favorite works of art.”
“Then code a new one.”
Angel stared blankly at him for a long few moments as if contemplating taking him up on it, turned away as if Dieter wasn’t there, walked a few steps, and took flight.
Who was Angel Man to say these things to him? Dieter was the best goddamn programmer in this part of the city and everyone knew it. Maybe Angel was just jealous that Dieter had managed to create code to overwrite the same part of himself Angel had, and he’d done it better and more gracefully in every way. “Child scrawling over the Sistine Chapel ceiling” .... Maybe he was a child, but at worst he was scrawling over graffiti on the overpass.
He compiled the best parts of his third and fifth attempts, and when he caught Angel wandering through the Water Market, he proudly handed his phone over to him.
Angel looked at it expressionlessly for a long few minutes, then simply handed it back.
“Well?” Dieter demanded. “What do you think?”
“I’ll miss you,” was all the angel said.