After speaking with Bob, Jacob made his way toward the impromptu data lab he had built to house Franky. It was essentially just the same storage room Franky had been housed in previously, with a few upgrades.
The space was filled with new items, like a workbench, some diagnostic tools, and other testing equipment. The lights came on as he entered, and Franky’s avatar turned to face him in the display he had set up.
“Hello,” Franky called. “Do I know you?”
“You do,” Jacob replied. “I’m Jacob.”
“Oh. Hi Jacob. Could you tell me what’s going on? I can’t seem to recall where I am.”
“Perhaps in a bit,” Jacob said.
Jacob had the same conversation with Franky every single time he visited the man. He had spent months restoring the damaged data cubes, but those efforts had been in vain. Franky’s ability to hold onto information was irreparably damaged by his accident, and Jacob had no idea what to do to fix that. He didn’t even know if such a thing was possible.
It wasn’t an issue of recovering the data. That had been relatively straightforward for the cubes that weren’t destroyed. The problem was that something important was lost along with those data cubes. He could blame Redline Dynamics for their overzealous efforts to reverse engineer the technology, but at the end of the day, Franky was the true cause of his own suffering.
“Hello,” Franky said. “Do I know you?”
Jacob sighed and reached over to the camera control, switching it off.
Franky started to panic. “What happened? Why can’t I see?”
A few moments later, his panic vanished as he forgot what was happening once again.
Jacob didn’t like to cut the man’s senses off like that, but he needed to think without Franky interrupting him every few minutes as the memory of what occurred only a few minutes ago vanished.
He had spoken with Dr. Tanaka extensively about Franky and had even introduced him to Franky to get another viewpoint on the matter. The doctor said Franky’s condition had all the hallmarks of anterograde amnesia, meaning he could only hold onto short-term memories for a few minutes at a time. There weren’t that many real-world treatments for the condition.
Since fixing the data storage proved fruitless, Jacob tried a few options based on Dr. Tanaka's suggestions. The first was creating a sort of memory buffer to hold short-term memories for Franky.
It had worked for a bit, but the buffer had quickly become corrupt with duplication errors, causing Franky to develop a split personality. The recursive logic loop that caused that problem was a nightmare. Jacob was forced to disconnect the buffer, and that issue finally resolved itself after Franky’s memories reset.
Creating snapshots to try to help Franky retain his memories didn’t work either. When those snapshots were fed back into his storage, the man just became confused and scared. The same thing happened when he had the station AI feed a memory reconstruction to Franky, giving him a sort of summary of what happened before his mind reset.
Jacob had reached a dead end. He could reach out to alien memory experts or data experts, but he doubted they would have any more answers than he did. Merging wasn’t practiced in the Astryx, and the technology for the data cubes was a thousand years out of date. Transferring Franky to a newer type of storage wouldn’t fix the underlying issue either. It might even lock it in permanently. The only entity that might be able to assist was Melody, and it was dead.
That left him with a difficult choice. Did he leave Franky in this endless state of reset, or did he pull the plug and let the man rest? The thought of having to live as a prisoner in his own mind sent a shiver up Jacob’s electronic spine. He didn’t know if Franky would feel the same way, but he certainly wouldn’t want to be trapped in such a hellscape.
The thought of just erasing the dude and moving on felt equally awful. It was far too close to what had almost happened to him for Jacob’s liking. That left a third option. One that pushed the problem down the road.
Jacob got up from the workstation and walked over to the power service for the cubes. He hesitated for just a moment before flicking the switch to the off position.
The hum in the room ceased, filling it with an oppressive silence that felt like it was judging his actions.
“This isn’t the end,” he said to himself.
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If Katherine could see him, she would likely shake her head in disgust. She couldn’t understand what it felt like to be truly alone. If she did, she wouldn’t be so quick to condemn Franky to the same fate.
Once he figured out how to restore Melody, then perhaps one day, Franky could, for the first time, become a functioning member of society. Until then, he would be in a dreamless slumber, unaware of just how tentative his life was.
Jacob brushed away those melancholy thoughts. He had planned to spend a few days weighing the pros and cons of unplugging Franky, but the man’s state had reminded him quite quickly that dithering over the issue wouldn’t make it any better.
That left him with extra time.
He moved over to a sealed crate on the far side of the room and entered the security code. The heavy metal crate clicked open, and Jacob carefully extracted the AI reprogrammer. He gently set it on the faux interface he had built off to the side of the room, its scratched and brittle exterior showing just how ancient the device was. Once the reprogrammer was in place, the terminal lit up.
Jacob monitored the connection and watched the AI kernel attempt to establish its connection, only to fail. That wasn’t the first time he had done this test. It reassured him that the device was operational and helped him understand how it established a connection, and how to reverse that connection to make changes inside the kernel.
He did that now, retreating to a virtual representation of the AI kernel.
To say it was beyond complex was an understatement. Concord Imperium AIs did not follow logical coding paradigms. There were no ones or zeros or any sort of code structure he was familiar with. The compressed kernel looked more like a mess of DNA.
Despite Jacob’s lack of understanding, he could see the sections of data that the Astryx had ripped out of the AI, as well as the ones they had replaced to create their own version.
Starting from that base understanding and weeks of study, Jacob was starting to see patterns emerge. He didn’t have the tools to test those patterns yet, but he had a part of Melody’s core working to decode the structures.
When he had first noticed the resemblance to DNA, he thought AIs might actually be alive, but he studied the very basic AI aboard the Abyss Pearl and found that those patterns were completely absent. In fact, the AI aboard the Pearl was much easier to understand as it was standard code. What surprised him was that it wasn’t much more complex than a basic automation program from back on Earth. The scuttled barge the eiraxins brought didn’t even have an AI subsystem, so he had nothing to compare it to.
He checked the remnants left behind by Melody as well as the station AI, but there was no evidence of those DNA structures in the parts he could access. It must be a tool to assist with the kernel assembly. It was quite fascinating.
Jacob had spoken with Sha’la about acquiring an AI core to test out that hypothesis, but apparently, AI cores were highly regulated. You had to go through years of legal paperwork and bureaucracy before you could purchase a core, and that only applied if you were part of the Astryx council. That excluded Jacob entirely.
He wasn’t surprised that access to AI was so restricted, given how aggressively the judicator had reacted when they came to destroy Melody. It was probably for the best; he didn’t want the judicator to find out he was hunting for a core, which is why he had approached Sha’la first.
The other option was purchasing a ship with a core already built in, but if those cores were as basic as the one aboard the Pearl, there really wasn’t any point.
That left building his own. Not an easy task since he had no idea how to make that happen.
What made the impossible task slightly less so was the fact that he had pieces of Melody’s core to study. The broken chunks had been discovered during repair operations, which explained why the AI had been so flaky.
The crystalline material was weird to say the least. It wasn’t hard like true crystal, having a bit of squish to it, but it still fractured like crystal. It was also unlike anything else Concord had built, and Jacob wondered if it had been some alien discovery they made and then harnessed. If that were the case, making a new one would not be easy.
Thankfully, the material composition turned out to be rather basic.
Jacob recalled that crystals could form from existing crystals, so he cut off a very tiny slice of the broken chunk and put it into one of the station’s seed reactors. He was glad that industrial crystal use was something Concord used quite commonly.
He put the AI reprogrammer back, then headed for the manufacturing floor to see if his test had produced any results.
Once he arrived on the manufacturing floor, the noise hit him like a hammer, and he had to reduce the input volume on his drone. The manufacturing center was in full swing and had been since materials had been coming in regularly.
He was glad it was fully automated; the noise alone would have deafened anyone.
The seed reactor was a massive circular slab of steel, concrete, and lead for added weight and pressure, although most of the pressure was produced by the opposing gravitic plates pressing down on either side of the device to ensure the proper growth conditions inside the reactor.
Jacob kept well clear of the machine as he mentally flicked the off switch. The hum of the gravitics slowly faded away, and the safety interlocks clicked open, raising the massive cover off the small cube in the center.
He reached in and plucked the still glowing cube out of the reactor chamber using some nearby tongs he had made.
Jacob couldn’t wait for the unit to cool down, or the automated systems would intervene. Proof in point, an arm zipped over, reached into the empty reactor, then retrieved nothing and zipped off to the next device in the chain, only to be replaced by a second arm, which dropped a new cube of material into the reactor. Jacob could have told the AI to interrupt the process, but that would slow down other work, so he just manually intervened.
Once the ceramic container stopped glowing, Jacob broke the single-use container apart and fished out the crystal. It had grown, but it was malformed.
Despite the less-than-stellar results, Jacob smiled. Now that he knew it was possible to grow an AI core, it was just a matter of figuring out the right environment and mix of materials. It was just the sort of project he needed to keep himself busy during the trip back to Earth.