A trivial and boring pseudoscientific fantasy about the workings of the human psyche and AI in the clichéd image of a beautiful fairy. There is no reason to read this.
â1â
I sat in her chair, frozen. Large beads of cold sweat rolled down my bare skin beneath the fleece robe. I had been in her office for almost a day. For the last four hours, I desperately needed to use the bathroom. But I didn't leave to avoid running into Pavlik.
He was packing his things. He packed up the soldering station, the 3D printer, sorted through the boards, tool kits, and wires. Then he spent an incredibly long time rolling up his Visions of the Future posters from LRD. Folding clothes... Pavlik had taken the bags to the hallway an hour ago. And all this time, he was tinkering with his laptop at his desk in the living room. He always used an app, so I couldnât hear if he had already called a taxi. Now that only he remained in the large apartment turned into a workspace, I could hear every rustle, hiding behind the closed door.
It all began for me two years ago. She suddenly and vehemently re-entered my life.
She had long nurtured the idea of her startup and had been purposefully working towards it for many years. The initial concept was presented to everyone as perfectly clear and feasible. But through several transformations, she quickly reduced it to world domination. From that moment on, the project couldn't end in any other way.
Pavlik joined her a year and a half ago. The team of twelve had been operating for just over a year. More precisely, eleven, because the twelfth was me.
Throughout the year, we hardly left the studio. Here, we worked, slept, and went crazy.
The day before, Denisâour linguistâpacked his things and left. The others had done it last week.
Without her, we lost key competencies; we were helpless and toxic to each other.
For the project, she was more than the lead developer. For each of us, she was more than a leader. Now, she was two thousand kilometers away, in a psychiatric clinic in her hometown of Kyiv. And that was all we could do for her.
I knewâafter Pavlik closed the door behind him, my frustration and sense of catastrophe would become absolute.
Finally, he stepped into the hallway. The door to her office was right across. From the commotion, it seemed he had already put on his shoes and was pulling on his jacket. In the next moment, instead of the clank of a metal latch, I heard a short thud. He was knocking with the knuckles of his dry fingers on the locked office door.
I glanced at my murky reflection in the dark, turned-off monitors. Looking back at me was a stick-thin, sweaty freak with greasy hair sticking out in all directions. The linen fabric I had stretched over her huge desk while making it was all wet from the sweat running down my arm. It seemed to me that this cloth, like the entire office, stank of me awfully.
Pavlik knocked on the door once more. But evidently, he didn't expect me to open it, so he immediately started speaking in his soft voice with a lingering intonation:
TŃma⊠Iâve prepared a special version for you. Glasses and a block on the desk. Instructions in the telegram. â for a second he fell silent: â She asked before... â his voice trembled. A pause hung in the air. He quietly slapped his palm against the door: â youâll manage...
Then I heard a metallic clank, and he began carrying boxes to the elevator. Unexpectedly for myself, I got up, adjusted my robe, and opened the office door. Pavlik returned for another bag and stopped. He looked at my robe for half a minute, but then finally looked me in the eye, which he almost never did. And suddenly he approached and awkwardly hugged me.
At that moment, I didnât just want to disappear; I wanted to never have existed.
He left. And closed the door behind him. Silence overwhelmed me. In the empty, muted studio, my frustration and sense of disaster became absolute.
This lasted an eternity. Or maybe about an hour⊠I stumbled to the kitchen and took a pack of antipsychotics from the fridge. I swallowed three or four Chlorpromazine tablets at once. Then I just stood there, staring at her. Her full-length portrait had been painted on the kitchen wall with oil paints for the last three months by Dizo â our designer. The painting, of course, wasnât finished, as with everything he did. Numbness and frustration gave way to emptiness. I stumbled to the bed, laid my head on the pillow, and darkness consumed me.
***
When I woke up, it was dark outside. I didn't know how long I had slept. My mind was still blank. Dragging my feet, I stumbled into the hall. Memories of what had happened here slowly began to surface, one after another. There were no feelings. In the past year, I had never seen the hall empty. Five long tables stretched along the perimeter against two walls. Another four workstations were located in the center. We had all built them ourselves from plywood sheets and slats bought at the hardware store. Anyone could come in at any time, and there was always someone working here. I prepared all the meals for everyone. The others were too busy. I felt useless to the project because⊠I didn't know how to do anything. So, I took care of the household, trying not to get in the way and, over time, it seemed I learned to be just a shadow on the wall. We never ate together in the kitchen. Usually, everyone took their food and went to their workspace. I just made sure there was always food available. Everyone lived by their own schedule. One might go for breakfast, another just had lunch, and a third headed to sleep. Almost no one had a full twenty-four hours in a day. Now the worktables, once cluttered with monitors and computers, were almost empty. Only notebooks, papers, pencils, a few books, and wires leading from nowhere to nowhere remained on them.
Pavlik's table stood in the corner, separated by two shelves filled from floor to ceiling with tools, equipment, various kits, boards, and wires. Now they were empty. He had cleaned everything up and even took out the trash can, which for the last three weeks had been overflowing with bottles of cola and gin, or was it not gin⊠In the center of the table was neatly laid out a complete set of equipment for launching our application. In the middle lay augmented reality glasses.
I looked at them indifferently and exhaled. My consciousness was still sluggish, but I recalled his words that he had put together some special version for me. I no longer understood what was happening with the project and at what stage it was.
I had no idea what to include or how to go about it. I had no desire either. I wanted to find my phone to see how much I had slept: just over half a day or about one and a half. It was nowhere to be found in the living room. It must have been lying somewhere in her office.
She worked in a separate room, which I had remodeled into her office. A large table with multi-tiered shelves filled with books, prints of her work, and stacks of notes from many years occupied most of the space. In the center was a dual-monitor setup, with a massive black CPU on the right that really looked like a monster. I spent almost three days tinkering with this table. I wanted to build something unique for her. She truly liked that dark, wood-stained table with a semi-circular cutout wrapped in linen. She was supposed to work alone. Entering her space was strictly prohibited. She slept right there on a narrow couch. However, lately, she hadnât been sleeping more than four to five hours, and her days lasted about forty hours or something like that, spent working. One time, when I was asleep, she called my phone and asked me to open the door from the outside with a screwdriver and take her to the bathroom. She had sat debugging the neural network in her chair for more than eighteen hours, with her legs twisted beneath her. As a result of her poor circulation, they had gone numb to the point where she couldnât feel them at all.
I slowly scanned the office. The phone was nowhere to be found. I walked around the apartment, but to no avail. The question 'What to do?' began to thud louder in my head. Through the emptiness of emotions, horror was surfacing, and a tremor was building in my chest.
I remembered Pavlik's words: 'You can do it.' But I clearly understood that I wouldnât manage it. I had never managed anything, and now I didnât have a single chance of doing so.
The search for the phone took another hour or so. The stream of thoughts in my head accelerated, feelings and emotions seemed to thaw and began to slowly fill my mind. I continued to sit and look at the pile of equipment with glasses in the center, even though the phone was already showing over twenty percent battery charge. Now I was not in a hurry to turn it on because I was afraid. Afraid to be connected, afraid of messages in messengers, afraid of having to take any action.
I was still dazed from the neuroleptics, but my thinking was more or less functioning. The horror of the situation was that I understood perfectly: for me, this story was already over. I knew in advance that I would let her down, that I wouldnât cope, and helplessly failing one stage after another, I would return to the starting position. Over time, the emotions would fade, I would once again seal myself in my shell and lead the miserable life of a hikikomori that I had lived for many years until it suddenly knocked on my door.
Tears rolled down my cheeks. âWhat a worthless piece of garbage I am.â Loaded with messages, the phone immediately bombarded me with a tsunami of notifications. I turned off the sound and went online: âchlorpromazine lethal dose.â It gave me an instant answer: â2-4 grams.â I didnât even have close to that much. I burst into tears even more: âWhat a worthless piece of garbage I am.â
Initially, her concept included a bot psychologist available 24/7. In addition to the main expert function, the system included special features for people suffering from bipolar, anxiety, schizotypal, and some other affective and thought disorders, helping them track and correct negative changes in their mental state. In the first version, the analysis was conducted only based on the tone and nature of speech, the user's activity on the smartphone, and the biomechanical parameters from the data of the accelerometer in the smartphone, smartwatch, and headphones. Accordingly, the required equipment for this included a smartphone, a wireless headset, and a smartwatch.
But that was at the beginning. Now I faced a mountain of equipment and a whole bunch of wires with connectors that were supposed to connect or charge all these battery and computing units, augmented reality glasses, bracelets, watches, and headsets. I opened Telegram: âJust follow the steps as written and don't rush. I've attached images for all descriptions.â
I tried to scroll down the instructions, but it seemed endless.
All the tears had been shed, and the hysteria had eased a bit. Now I desperately craved salvation. I didn't believe in God. My only hope was a pile of electronics and raw code that hadn't even properly gone through alpha testing. I couldn't even articulate what salvation should look like or consist of. I just picked up the heaviest box, which was the power supply, and started reading the instructions written by Pavlik.
to be continued...
Source: habr.com
