Being of Two Minds

by cosmofur

Death Takes a Nap

The child pony had just ordered the Doctor to do everything in its power to rescue his father. A major complication, since that was in conflict with his original instructions. Worse it was isolated, unable to contact anyone of authority for directions, a very unusual situation as the Doctor’s world was normally one hundred percent networked.

The Doctor considered its options. When trying to deal with something outside its experience, such as talking to a grieving pony child, the type of AI that was the Nano Cloud Doctor, had no more than ‘human level’ intelligence and less experience than an organic human or pony might, but in the Doctors core specialty it was truly a super-genius.

A person could with some training, might envision the layout of their own house and the streets and paths around their home, spin it in their mind and envision the layout and organization from angles and attitudes that their physical eyes had never been able to. A really skilled person could hold in their mind the entire road system of their local town or neighborhood something like perhaps one hundred to two hundred streets and intersections. Beyond that they would have to use more and more mental shortcuts, simplifications and leave out details. This was a physical limit of the intelligence of the organic brain, but the Doctor was not so limited. He could envision at once, not just a few hundred streets, but billions even trillions. The pathways and sub functions of a neural network with a hundred billion connections was as simple for the Doctor to see as a whole, as an organic person could navigate the familiar path from their bedroom to their front door with their eyes closed. It was a very specialized skill and wasn’t applicable with day to day life, but it was what the Doctor had been built for.

The nanit probes had already saturated Red Wood’s body and the Doctor now could see at once how all the neural connections were wired together. He could easily identify the neural clusters that handled the non intelligent functions, marking for repair and not replacement those parts of the Red Wood’s mind that handled things like simple balance, walking, vision pre-processing and object and edge detection, sound filtering and image prediction.

The parts of Red Wood’s mind that handled the sense of self, the internal dialog of thought and the personal bibliographic memories. The Doctor had no hesitation to label these parts of Red Wood’s brain, as his ‘soul’ using the word as a purely technical term that to the Doctor had no supernatural mystery about it.

It took its time, nearly forty five seconds to do all this indexing, now the Doctor reached the point of decision, its original mission orders were to overwrite these parts with the mind of a human, Subject ‘Parker’ that the Doctor had in its memory storage. A common procedure back on the Doctor’s world, that was usually done to blank undifferentiated cloned neural tissue as standard method of repairing physically damaged brains. But with Banyan’s childish instructions that was no longer the procedure the Doctor was being asked to do. With some hesitation, because the Doctor did not completely lack a sense of self preservation, it started to reprogram large numbers of its spare nanites to modify the glia cells, normally extra cells that did not participate in the neural networks, they started to expand and reconfigure, growing synapses and merging into the neural networks in ways that would never happen naturally. On the fly the Doctor had to invent new ways for the new neural clusters to interface, but this is the sort of ‘intelligence’ the Doctor was built for.

As the Doctor worked, more and more of his resources were being consumed,as each nanites internal energy pool would become exhausted, the Doctor would direct them to use their remaining power to exit from Red Wood’s body. The result the unicorn was gaining on outline on grass of dull weakened nanites. Individually they were still invisible but in numbers they started to resembled a fine crumble of dull glowing rusty dust.

Banyan watched all this, speechless and scared. Towards the beginning of the process he grew excited when he saw that his father’s body was breathing again, and he sensed the vibration of a beating heart as a flutter on Red Wood’s exposed throat. Not understanding that the real battle was taking place inside Red Wood’s skull, Banyan tried to call to his father again. The Doctor wasn’t easily distracted, but then the child kept kept poking Red Wood in the side, trying to wake his father.

The Doctor formed the face again and said in what its sound library said was a kindly voice, “I’m sorry, but I need to work, this is a very delicate procedure, can you please stand back and be quiet?”

Quickly Banyan trotted backwards, to give the Doctor room. For forty minutes, Banyan flicked pebbles at the ugly Inkanyamba’s body and waited. There wasn’t much visible change going on now, but steadily the Doctor grew fainter, there was less and less substance to the nano cloud that now barely floated over Red Wood’s body. After a long delay with nothing seeming to be happening, the Doctor motioned to Banyan, waving thin wisps of glowing nano cloud like limbs. It took several waves for Banyan to realize he was being called over.

The Doctor no longer had enough spare mass to form a face, so he compressed his mass into the outline of a circle and said to Banyan, “I’ve done all that I can, there will probably be complications, I wish I could help more, I’m beyond all my safety limits. The Subjects should awaken in a few minutes, please inform the Subject ‘Parker’ that I was not able to install all the normal implants and apps, I was only able to include a simple diary recorder and a copy of my own clinical observations. Please ask him to send the report back to our home as soon as he can, I do not believe I will be able to send the report myself. Sorry I no longer have sufficient energy to comuiaSTATIC…..”

With that, the last of the glowing cloud faded, a faint red dust covered the ground, just barely glowing like dying embers.

Banyan felt sad looking at the faint dust, but what choice did he have? He started crying again, not really understanding why, he just he felt bad for the Doctor. For a long time he just watched his father’s body breathing, uncertain what to do.

Then the rate of breathing started to pick up and Red Wood’s body started to thrash around. Banyan ran forward and flung his small body on his fathers, trying to pin him down, to try to stop the thrashing.

“Daddy!” Banyan yelled again and again, for the first time since the Doctor had told him to be quiet. That seemed to get through, Red Wood’s thrashing slowed and instead he fought to sit.

At first his attempts were a failure, like he was trying to bend his waist in a way no pony could bend. Then slowly he calmed down, and got on his haunches to sit naturally. He had kept his eyes closed, as if in great pain, but now blinking he opened them and looked around.

Banyan smiled at his father and jumped into his forelegs. “Daddy! You’re awake!”

“What!” Red Wood looked around confused, “Who are…”

Then even before Red Wood could finish his question, the cultists returned.