Chapter 1: Transition
I was a pretty normal kid, once upon a time.
I was a college senior majoring in mechanical engineering after switching majors twice from math to physics. I guess I kept moving from the abstract to the physical. I respect theory, I really do, but I figured out along the way that I need, as the civil engineers put it, concrete details. I liked going outside my major, though. Chemistry, history of engineering, some courses in electrical engineering, I was sort of a dilettante. Renaissance man, I would have put it, though I didn't actually do any of the art or humanities courses I would have needed to go for to really meet the title.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, tall, in okay shape but poor conditioning, I was happily on my way to graduating and going on to the big wide world of the modern economy. I had a nothing-serious-yet girlfriend. We'd met freshman year but hadn't been much more than friendly acquaintances up until we had a class together fall semester of senior year.
I was heading back to my apartment from a grocery run, walking on the sidewalk. Nothing major, just cereal, milk, bread, ramen, the basic essentials of life. I never saw it coming.
***
Pain. Unconsciousness.
Dark. Sounds. Familiar sounds. No meaning. Assess.
Eyes open. Lights. Faces with lights behind them. Recognition. Hospital.
Assumption: injury. Disorientation. Sounds identified as voices. No meaning. Assess.
Face looking down. Not familiar. Upraised finger. Understanding. Demonstrate awareness. Focus on finger, track visually.
Attempt to speak. Sounds emerging. Recognition: I cannot understand me.
Attempt to categorize situation. Darkness encroaching. Recognition: losing consciousness.
Dark.
Eyes open. Lights. Recognition: hospital room. Unable to sit. Noise. Attempt to turn head. Unable.
Movement. Form resolves. Recognition: nurse. Familiar sounds. No meaning. Assess.
Attempt to speak. Sounds emerging. Recognition: I cannot understand me.
Recognition: brain damage. Horror. Scream.
Nurse adjusts tubing leading into arm. Horror recedes. Light recedes.
Dark.
Eyes open. Lights. Recognition: hospital room. Unable to sit. Unable to move head.
Awareness of situation. Nurse present. Refrain from scream.
Familiar sounds. Slowed. Nurse is speaking. Repeating sounds. Concentrating.
"Gus?"
Recognition: name. Relief. Attempt reply.
"Gyuh."
Recognition: failure. Nurse speaks. Sounds do not resolve. Concentrate.
Recognition: solution. Attempt to remember word for concept required. Result: slow.
Attempt to remember muscle movements for component sounds. Initial hiss. Tongue against roof of mouth. Following sound, tongue against teeth. Rounded lips. Enough. Attempt.
"Sshhhlo."
Nurse stops. Attempt.
"Sshhhlo."
Nurse responds. Single word.
"Gus."
"Gyush."
"Pain?"
"Hnno."
Conversation ensues. Limits established. Communication slow. Concepts intact. Sound-meaning interface crippled. Attempt: writing.
Recognition: limit. Symbol processing damaged. Twin curve recognized. Sine wave or integral. Effort required to parse as abstract letter 'S' without function indication. Other symbols similarly distorted.
Conversation slow. Multiple surgeries required. Demand: understanding. Granted. Drunk driver. Brain damage. Bone fragments removed. Tissue damage. Survival presented low odds. Lucky.
Therapy initiates. Progress slow. Persistence. Improve sound-meaning interface slowly. Restore symbol library slowly.
Math intact. Knowledge intact. Communication remains slow. Recognition of formulae rapid. Able to calculate. Able to solve pattern puzzle. Know name, difficult to resolve formula integral-union-delta-zero-thousand-union into letters. Concentration. Puzzle solved before name parsed. Recognition: Sudoku.
Progress continues. Persistence. Physical injuries heal. Mental function slower. Leaving hospital.
Monitoring required. Assisted-living facility. Regular examinations. Frequent graphs of brain formulas. Able to walk, move.
Initial period limited to facility. Understanding. Passage of time. No deterioration. Trust increasing. Processing facility increasing.
Attempt: walk outside. Refused. Request. Solution: escort. Agreed.
Bright. Open. Loud. Unable to process sounds. Too fast. Walk anyhow. unfamiliar location. Suburban area. Woods near on one side. Street near on other side. Few cars. Able to walk around facility before return.
Further walks. Satisfactory progress. Attempt to visit store on street. Negative outcome. Unable to communicate. Clerk requires escort to intervene. Depression.
Solution: falsity. Proposal. Accepted. Shirt made: 'DEAF' on front and back. Worn. Store visit. Different clerk. Helpful. Able to calculate price of candy bar easily and translate into exchange of money. Glad. Numbers are mine still.
Passage of time. Months. Communication improvement slows. Able to process writing with time and effort. Insist on communicating with college. Agreement: graduation on completion of course exams. Time limits waived.
Intense difficulty. Persistence. Force recognition of symbols as non-formulae. Calculation sections simple. Success.
Graduation. Recognition: brain damage. Emotional damage. Failure to perceive appropriate response in me. Recognition: faces cheering. Realization: family. Recognition: family visited during recovery.
Recognition: Lack of emotional connection.
Passage of time. Assisted living remains. Walks permitted unescorted.
Hobby: design. Bridges, buildings, vehicles. Tensile strength calculations, frictive forces. Physics. Math. Results.
Hobby: engineering. Recognition: unable to function independently. Study difficult. Persistence.
Walking. Path through woods. Grown familiar over time.
Unfamiliar turn in path. Unfamiliarity increases. Unable to process. Numbers are present. Numbers are better. Understanding of numbers is present. Unable to process anything but numbers. There are no words.
Null set. Missing. Unable to access.
Pain. Manipulate numbers. Further pain. Manipulate again. Pressure.
Emergence.
Dark.
Pressure against side. Pain. Eyes open. Black and white lines resolve. Recognition. Animal. Specific word unavailable. Familiar sounds. Unable to connect sounds to animal. Pain continues.
Dark.
No pain. Eyes open. Recognition: hospital room. Recognition: inaccurate scale. Approximation: half-size. Recognition: animal. In hat. White hat, red plus. Symbol recognized: medical indication. Medical animal. Familiar sounds from medical animal. Attempt to sit. Success. Medical animal moves. Pressure against chest. Accept pressure. Return to lying down. Await doctor.
Animal enters. Oddity: protrusion from head. Oddity: bright coloration. Oddity: object around neck. Recognition: stethoscope. Doctor animal does not process. Words unavailable. Familiar sounds from both animals.
Recognition: brain damage. Hallucinations initiated. Probability of death high. Emotional damage: unable to care.
Logical process: unable to influence me outside hallucination. Operate within hallucination. Relax.
Departure of doctor animal. Medical animal departs. Medical animal enters with tray. Salad. Fork. Water. Hunger recognized. Eating. Medical animal departs with tray.
Passage of time. Person enters with medical animal and doctor animal. Unfamiliar. Hair is bronze. Attempts communication. Unable to process. Raise hand. Symbol. Stop. Indicate shirt with 'DEAF' false symbol. Speak slowly.
"Gus. Brain damage."
Communication. "Lero."
Symbol not recognized. Assumption: name. "Where?"
Response slow. "Hospital."
Further data required. "Hospital where?"
Response slower. "Ponyville."
No recognition. Correction: tangential recognition. Pony. Specific animal is pony. Medical pony and doctor pony classified. Unable to process further.
Doctor pony and Lero communicate. Unable to keep up. Increased volume from doctor pony. Steady volume from Lero. Doctor pony volume decreases. Lero wraps arms around doctor pony, speaks with low volume. Head protrusion on doctor pony emits light.
Dark.
***
I woke up feeling better than I had in... months, at least. It could have been over a year. I could have lost a lot more time than that. I was in a hospital room, the same one (as far as I could tell) where that unicorn doctor and that stranger named Lero had...
I realized I was thinking in complete sentences. I realized I'd thought the word 'unicorn' and attached it to the word 'doctor.'
Either I was going even further into mental breakdown to the point I couldn't recognize my own deficiency anymore, or I was developing a whole new set of symptoms, or something simply impossible had happened. Fortunately, I'd had that situation come up in a philosophy course one time. The subject of one class was Socrates' allegory of the cave. Long story short, I had decided back then that in the event you find yourself in a situation where your perceptions are known to be unreliable but consistent and no external information is available, the only rational course of action is to simultaneously remain aware of your own instability while operating as best you can within the context presented to you.
Insisting that you must be mad and everything is impossible? Fine, but work with what you have anyhow. Reject everything as meaningless if it lacks the quality of objective reality? That way lies solipsism.
So, I was, to the best of my own ability to judge, thinking clearly and with access to my full vocabulary, and I was in the care of a doctor unicorn and a nurse pony, and there was another human somehow involved.
If I'm mad, at least I'm interesting. So why aren't I feeling happy?
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THANK YOU for proving me wrong. I made the assertion(and partially retracted it) several times in Leroverse conversations that you can't write Xeno without...concentrating on certain objectives. You, in the course of a single chapter, mostly stream-of-thought(and brain-damaged, at that) have shown me that there is hope.
Thumbs up and faved. If you mess this up, I am hiring Fluttershy to Stare at you.
I'll wait for another chapter before i say whether or not i like this
This is really interesting, I've never seen a story presented from the perspective of someone brain damaged before- in a way, it reminds me of the segments of "Flowers for Algernon" where Charlie is writing with limited mental function, but it's still very distinct because there's not a lack of overall capabilities, rather specific limits imposed that are successfully recognized and attempted to be coped with- admittedly, with limited success, but still ingenuity.
I do wonder what happened with his transition to Equestria, though.
Turns out he's really just a butterfly that thinks he's a brain-damaged human.
Very good. Loving it so far. I almost cried when it got to the part where he saw his family and thought "Recognition: Lack of emotional connection."
Interesting. I will require more to see if I like it.
denver.mylittlefacewhen.com/media/f/img/mlfw1126_my-little-pony-friendship-is-magic-brony-im-with-twilight-on-this-one.gif
Like and fav earned!
It should be interesting if Gus is able to determine whether the Ponyverse has differing laws of physics. The fact that the magic of Equestria doesn't work perfectly on Lero suggests that is the case but we'll have to see what time and experimentation proves.
Off to a good start.Will be watching to see where this goes.
Well, nothing if not interesting.
Would have expected the fractured speech to be more symbolic and less linguistic, though.
2832509
Maybe this is the closest we can come to understanding his thoughts.
Awesome... Please run with this and keep up the great writing.
2832730
(?)≈ {[(Knowledge)∆] < (Wellness)} ~ {(Math) ≥ (language)}
(Result) = (relevancy) ≥ 0
2833256
Oh, that's probably what he was actually thinking, but a hell of alot harder to read. What we saw was probably translated for our benefit while keeping it as close to the original as possible.
Very nice! I feel like I'm listening to Mordin Solus. Will keep tuning in!
Are YOU into engineering, Spinel?
Oh thank god his brain damage was fixed too, I dislike. If entire book. Writtenly Chopily. Break Computer. Realise computer lost. Be sad.
Get my point? Me no likey mental failurely!
You have my interest.
Yay! More Xeno. Can't wait until an engineer tangles with magic.
2833337
Master of Science in Engineering, yes. I leave my specific field up for speculation, but it was not mechanical engineering (so I will be consulting reference materials as needed for specific formulae outside my field). I enjoyed my physics classes and plan to do some to-me interesting explorations of various properties of Equestria and, based on what the show has demonstrated, how those properties differ from Earth. Along with exploring Gus' remaining damage, the effects it has on him, and how it affects his relationships with others.
2832509
He's not thinking in formulae; he's actually thinking in quales, sensory impressions and concepts. He has to work in abstracts because he can't create the symbols needed for normal thought. He can experience recognition of things without being able to name them. It's a form of aphasia induced by his traumatic brain injury. Think of it like watching a TV channel in a completely foreign language; you may not know a word they're speaking, but you may be able to follow the story to some degree based on the actions of the characters.
2835270
If so:
The problem is that you didn't parse concepts, had patchy spacing and didn't separate scenes. There were plenty of one-liners up there that should have been their own scenes, and would have been just by pressing the Enter key a few times:
And then add concept parsing:
Besides, with him being largely unable to communicate meaningfully, but being able to understand numbers and maths effortlessly, I was thinking to something much more along the concept of him having become bottled-in, rather than aphasic. I found it particularly telling that he could still place a few "I"s and a few verbs here and there. Furthermore, it was also telling for him to be unable to understand Roman letter symbols, but be able to understand Arabic numeral symbols: symbols are symbols. It would have been much more believable if he had been unable to understand symbols altogether, but had begun remembering significant mathematical geometries and had begun drawing them, which would have eventually led to the shrinks calling a mathematician or a computer language expert, whom would have then taught him how to count on non-symbolic Mayan numerals, which would have then have him blazing through Sudokus and eventually tensor analysis, as long as somebody would have first replaced the Arabic numerals with dots, and his calculator with a Mayan abacus.
Don't sweat on it, though. I'm into Hard SF, and your chops are well within tolerance for Soft SF: nothing but a plot justification for him having been in a bad position before him having been healed by magic. You will likely need to get harder before you try to sell some writing to a SF magazine, though.
2835839
I'll just put it that I significantly disagree with you on what constitutes 'readable' in terms of representing non-verbal thought, that he's not turning into a human supercomputer (let alone starting to think in pseudocode), and that very different areas of the brain handle mathematics and linguistics.
2836496
And where is handled mathematical language? Regardless of how the internal processing is conducted, the interface is the same.
When the symbolic database is unreadable, the entire database is unreadable, simply because all of it is text on paper, regardless of context.
Is like a scanned image of a document: a computer with the appropriate software could then parse the image as 'text', but if say, it cannot access the database for 'Japanese', 'Swahili' or 'Occidental Cursive Handwriting', it will not be able to extract information from the text. Now, due to our way of education, we learn to communicate mathematics through mathematical language, which we learn simultaneously to writing our own language, thus becoming a single set of symbols.
And I do not believe that he was becoming a supercomputer. Quite the contrary: he was making use of a damaged version of the same supercomputer that every human being is born with.
Anyway, is like I already said: {[(Knowledge)∆] < (Wellness)} if [(Math) ≥ (language)]. That plot segment is in the past now, thus (relevancy) ≥ 0.
2836874
Actually, mathematics is handled by a different area of the brain. I didn't bring it up, but in some cases a difficulty with language processing can be ameliorated by using a different part of the brain - by singing. there are cases of people who could not speak normally, but learned to add some tonalities to trick their brain into using the healthy part to process sound.
But, yes, he is mostly over that part now.
Ah, I see what you did here. And coming from a science background myself i can comprehend this a little easier that I thought. It's true, the human brain functions like a very sophisticated computer. However, unlike our digital counterparts our own brains can't be repair easily if at all.
In the event of brain damage, the brain does some pretty interesting things. In some cases, the links and pathways to the areas that need access are simply bypassed. In the event bypasses are unable to form, new areas are allocated to serve as new location for the stimuli.
Okay, that went on for longer than I thought it would but it is fascinating. The moment I saw the words "drunk driver," my heart sunk. All in all, well done. I hope I get to read more of this story.
2837116
Besides, the effects of brain injury on brain function are as predictable as permuting dice tosses.
I'll say it once again: Whatever.
This is incredebly interesting, and the concrete joke was not unnoticed
, this has gotten my attention greatly. I shall commence read.
2835270
troll.me/images/joseph-ducreux/my-nigga.jpg
Electronic Engenering, heading to get a Masters at Automatization.
Because there's no Mechatronics in my country.
What kind of job do you have, I have seen most jobs one can end in with a nice degree and masters at something, but haven't meet a Masters in Engeneering. Where have you ended up?.
And if you don't feel like answering, it's fine. Now I notice how weird this actually is.
This is going to be good.
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In Equestria's case, with the nation being more steampunk, this would be more appropriate:
i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/534/282/35c.jpg
Either way: GO SCIENCE!!!
And I'm wondering about one thing: What would he build in a cave, with a box of scraps?
For the first half of the chapter I was like
..... thankfully that changed to 
at the end.
A VERY interesting way to start a story, and introduce a character, to be certain!
I very much liked it, (once I understood what was happening, lol) and I applaud the creativity.
Also, good story. :)
I admit, at first, I kept reading this as "No meaning. Asses." Like Gus thought the hospital workers were being intentionally incomprehensible and resented them for it. Then I saw that fourth "s" and everything started to make sense again.
I love the way the narration shifts. I've thankfully never experienced brain damage like this, but it's a compelling way to portray it. Under the circumstances, I'd probably scream too...
I don't normally comment before hitting the current end of a story, but I wanted to give kudos where they were due. Now to keep reading!
2835839 "Symbols are symbols," as you say, is wrong.
As a reader of all sorts of sci fi and fantasy and realistic fiction, And having had TWO family members suffer brain damage of one sort or another, I can assure you that language and math are completely seperate and that symbols are not symbols, in the way you were lazily throwing it about.
Reminded me a little of the beginning of the first Thomas Covenant book. As I disliked that book sufficiently to not finish it (and to rag on Donaldson whenever he comes up in conversation), hopefully that's not actually a major influence....
Holy crap. That's some deep stuff, here. The sudoku thing was very clever, especially as way of showing how his brain only connected symbols to math. And later on you very accurately continue that with the "plus" on the nurse's hat.
Seems they fixed the language connection, but not the emotional one
2837116
Sooo......our MC is Aryan? Hilter would be so proud!
Terrible racist jokes aside, he should totally meet/be freinds with Aryanne at some point; I'd die laughing at the sheer absurdity of the situation.
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That was actually from Plato.
I had to look it up again to be sure, but I was sure I remembered having to read it in High School.
Socrates was the one who liked to ask leading questions or give vague directions and let students figure things out for themselves.
Wait! Holy crap, Celestia is Socrates!
Question. Is this guy a computer program or what? That seems like something I'd add into my game to make debugging easier. I'd do something like this.
if(Dialogue2 == false){ console.log("Error: Lines 40-47, Dialogue function") }- this basical just checks if the Dialogue is not working. If not it will print out a message in the console.I mean it's not hard to toss in a console log every now and again in my code. Although this is a game and not a robot. So no sensors to get any physical data. But anyway you get the point. Barebones information needed to find/fix the error.
tequila sunset, is you?