Aftershocks (3)

From Elyse Corídatry, Psychedesigner Excellence, to Advisory Panel, Involuntary Dysfunction Eleemosynary COG, and Adm. Gileon Cularius, Imperial Navy, greetings.

Gentlesophs, I understand the urgency of your desire for good news concerning the status of the 14,934 mind-states entrusted to the care of the COG by Adm. Cularius, but must regret to inform you that this is an extremely complex piece of repair work. The changeling AIs used by the Iltines in their weapons systems were produced by methods that are, by our current standards, extremely crude as well as grossly unethical.

While I remain confident of eventual success, the Iltine weapon-programmers were, if you’ll pardon me, a bunch of semi-competent butchers stacking wire-and-tape jobs twelve deep. None of these are capable of operating in an organic, robotic, or even infomorph ‘shell at this time; this is the easiest of the problems to repair, since motor and sensory cortices can be patched with standard models. However, aversive and proversive conditioning have garbled the emotive-promotor loops all to dark and hash, and there’s noise all through the supporting structures. The majority of pre-installation memory is nothing but garble to wipe, and the rest of them will take considerably longer to unthread and reroute back to something resembling sanity, and as for the primary personality encoding structures, well, I can’t patch over the problems in those if you give a damn about who you’ll be instantiating at the end of this process.

Give me six months, and I’ll tell you if it can be done at all. A year after that, you might start seeing results.

(Unless there’s any chance you can get me one of the Iltine project team’s mind-states…?)

2 thoughts on “Aftershocks (3)

  1. If the Iltine project team used their own minds as the templates, what are the legal rules that prevent those edited forks from being judged guilty of participating in the crime of their own creation?

    • Hypothetically, yes? (Since in this case the reason Elyse Corídatry wants a copy of one of their mind-states is that statically analyzing that is the quickest way to obtain detailed information on how exactly they processed their victims, the better to undo it.)

      Anyway, hypothetically, the chief issue would be that after such substantial editing, the threshold of identity would have been crossed; the recovered forks would no longer be legally (or, indeed, practically) the same person as the original, and as such would not share their legal attachments.

      A second potential one, although probably irrelevant due to the first, would be that a fork shares the mens rea of its primary if and only if the relevant choice was made pre-forking. If the pre-editing mind-states in question came from backups predating the inception of the project, they have no mens rea because it’s not in their volitional history, even if they are legally the same person.

Comments are closed.