Chapter 12 Part A

  One, two….breathe… one, two…breathe. I’m using small dumbbell weights to push against while on my back to build up my arm and hand strength. This isn’t the only exercise I’ve been trying to do today. I’ve gone through all kinds of stuff.

  It’s also the next morning since meeting with Barbara yesterday. I had been dead set on finalizing the deal st night until all the sudden four different android archetypes and a myriad of different customization options had become avaible. Then there was just too much too choose from all at once, and even if I had wanted to go further Barbara had picked up on my uncertainty.

  Plus having to work out on paper how to manage the cost.

  I’m also trying to get used to holding up weight and not just hold move them back and forth as I exercise while thinking about my problems. OK, release the pressure. I feel like I’ve got veins in my head that want to burst.

  This is tough. Pushing against the resistance, its tough doing everything I can. Sometimes I feel like I wonder if I am going to ever recover.

  I’m trying to get back on my feet. I can stand up but not for very long and my body feels so heavy, it’s like I’ve got heavy weights strapped to every piece of my body; even my head and neck feel heavy to support. The self help physical therapy trainer through video feed is an android interactive recording program however as it goes through all kinds of different exercises for the back, hands, arms, and legs. It’s also got a 3D interactive ser analyzer tracking if my movements are wrong or right with the video synch and makes bleeping negative sounds when I’m not doing it right. Then it highlights the areas I’m hitting at.

  It’s hitting the red help button light often because sometimes I just can’t handle the full range of motion that it’s asking for. But this is the best I can do.

  I am sure I’ll get my legs back, and get on my feet. I’ve got feeling below my knees. I’ve slowly tried to develop that muscle and I’m getting control back. I made my knees twitch yesterday too. It’s happening slowly. I’m trying to try to get up for a period of time and take a few steps with the robotic spine reinforcement caging and short hand canes, while trying to slowly put my weight on my legs instead of with my hands. No matter where the weight is, it’s tough work.

  I was thinking right now about my options as I did my exercises.

  Barbara’s left a couple of voice messages on my voice mail this morning hoping to meet up soon and sounding very cheerful but still not unthinking at the same time. But I need to do a study of things before I call her back. I want to know what I need for me, before she puts me in the direction of too much bling and attraction.

  With that many choices…how do I narrow it down?

  I’d seen all those models in the brochures and information on the net. It was impressive. And very cool.

  Carinol, Carin, Asca, and Liga… those were the 4 types.

  Of course the st type was so expensive even the rich had trouble getting it.

  How correct was the information was the information she had given me? I needed to form a base comparison to it, and check things out. She might also be telling the truth but also not see things like a human would even if she did feed me live up to date information. It would be interesting to see how much deviation there would be between what she told me and how it ended up in cold hard truth too.

  I don’t think she would lie. But androids don’t see it the same as we do. A smart person would also ‘interpret’ the data differently also.

  I did check out the models and their consumer reports agonizingly slow while my heavy body was working against me. Since this is equivalent to buying a human compaion I’m sure it will work. The graph for the different traits and scoring that she’d projected and given to me did seem to be accurate and without any deviation. Further different comments seemed to say things that fell in line with that as well.

  But was this everything? Did I overlook anything? What if I missed something simple and crucial?

  I wasn’t doing this to waste my time. My hope was… if I searched every grain of detail I’d be able to create an EXPLOIT situation. That’s how I’d make my gains.

  There were a lot of questions I had too. For example, even if the Asca was the military base model type, why was it so much cheaper? I kept having a fear that it might have been dumped from its military contract because of a defect of some kind, since military wouldn’t have dumped it without something else in its pce right? But in theory, military or self defense capacity should be worth more, not less.

  Also if it couldn’t blend in I didn’t relish the idea of someone beling me as a weirdo that liked androids. I also wanted the android to be able to pass as a human for its own comfort and peace also. I think if they can’t blend in they don’t feel good about it, however that works in their systems. And if it couldn’t blend in and was working what was the likelihood that it would get mobbed and destroyed?

  The Carilon was a lot more cost and had more features but was the second oldest model. That seemed odd, but as I researched things, the Carilon was so popur that it had received the most upgrades in many areas and had a long development of testing along with those upgrade option updates. That popurity came from performance. And that was why it was still perceived to be a good model and why its ratings had been boosted so high. The long and thorough testing from having the most usage was a big plus that I couldn’t ignore. In the past it was easy to see in various computer and car archetypes how a lot of problems could end up leaving the factory and not get discovered until long after damage was already occurred or occurring in some form or another.

  So… having the most upgrades is a representation of it being a strong model. (Although some would mistaken that as the weakest to have a lot of upgrades.) In simple terms you don’t spend a lot on upgrades for garbage though. And after skimming through the upgrades list, a lot of them are utility and not ‘fix it’ tickets.

  I did look at the runner up German model. Nicknamed the Panzer IV, it was in some ways simir to a mix of the Asca and the Carilon, but with a lower stealth rating and MUCH lower A.I. rating...like much, much lower. It had a more primitive android brain it seemed and didn’t blend in at all. It had a good appearance but just couldn’t respond well in human conversation worth a penny. The previous versions of the Panzer I, II, and III weren’t doing as well in the market. Their Panzer IV hadn’t been on the market long enough to have a good baseline. The I and II models had already been pulled off store shelves for not selling and the III and IV both seemed to be behind Mellifera in development,...by a long shot.

  Bad AI and ‘human stealth’ was kind of a deal breaker though. There’s no point to an android if you can’t get it to be a companion.

  Another perceived fw was the German models didn’t have bio skin like the Mellifera series did. It was a purely synthetic compound that simuted skin in appearance and feel while it did it’s best to match it but wasn’t a synthetic bio product; rather it was entirely technological and had some types of pstics involved too and I was distrustful of how pstics aged.

  That was kind of a downer. If this was going to work I wanted to actually buy a real artificial soul and not just a machine. Blending in as a human was very important.

  How close would I come to that?

  After doing some more research I found a few interesting research papers done at some of the tech universities and in schorly magazines. They basically used coded wording that few could understand. But if you had enough education you could decode a lot of the research papers. Schorly journals that only people in math and science read.

  And in that research, those journals, I found that one of the things that made Mellifera different than the other companies was the investment and research done in the st twenty plus years into meshing biological synthetic systems with technological systems. This was stunning if you think about it. I wish I’d studied more of this sooner. Basically after people realized that they could make synthetic blood, they began research on using stem cells to clone organs and create other types of synthetic organs. The biotech flourished over the years and at some point, someone was able to create synthetic neurons, though they were initially extremely expensive to make. Research into nerve interaction technology was the key. After that, the st pieces left to work out to make an android workable that was every bit as good as a humans were…

  Wait… androids use cloning technology…?

  This changes everything. If some of their parts are actually cloned organs… just how human are they?!

  That also made more sense on why they didn’t want to talk about how they worked. Some people might cause trouble over stuff like that.

  And that’s where the trail went cold. It seemed there was government censure over how much was allowed to the public without jeopardizing the monopoly. I suspected there was a whole mountain of things to look up after that, which I wished I could see, but didn’t currently. In fact, the one clue that hinted at cloning technology was a paper that was published quite a long time ago before they began censoring the information as good as they do now.

  However, I’m guessing from the bits and pieces of clues that I’ve found in different link in sites that they figured out how to make not only synthetic nerves, but also a synethetic synapse interaction system of some form or another, and other nerve connections from finger tip to the base of the brain. They also have some cloned organs in there. Then they would have had to figure out how to connect a CPU android brain with synthetic nerves, and some kind of adapter between a cloned human brain to receive the nerve feelings, impulses, and so on. It had some ethical issues and maybe that’s why not many of the crucial parts of the work were done anywhere in our country. Then they would have had to figure out how the android cpu, the cloned human brain, and the adapter would work together.

  This is very odd to comprehend.

  It made the most sense in this direction for how they’ve built them. There didn’t seem to be another way to make it work. The base of the argument was, if you can create synthetic electro neurons for a bot, then why can’t you create all of the rest of it from tip to brain and connect a cpu brain to a biologically cloned brain? But were they cloning the brain or figuring out how to ‘download’ sensory programming into a mechanical CPU? The biological brain parts seemed to be necessary for a computer cpu to interpret what feeling ‘tasted’ like.

  That is… if its actually a CPU and not a real brain? Or Cloned brain? A cloned brain of an existing human seemed viable to; provided you didn’t clone a serial killer or a psychopath.

  That was the only thing that I wasn’t sure about, but it had to be one of those directions. And it was already proven that we had cloned bio-skin on the Mellifera androids out there now on Carinol, Carin, Asca, and Liga models; bio-skin meaning technology made and farmed machined skin made of the same stuff that human skin was made of, except without blemishes and put into a very organized structure that was undeviating in nature. And not only that, all of it with synthetic nerve sensors to boot which sent signals to the brain.