A trivial and boring pseudo-scientific fantasy about the work of the human mental apparatus and AI in the hackneyed image of a beautiful fairy. There is no reason to read this.
-1-
I sat in a daze in her chair. Under a fleece robe, large hailstones of cold sweat flowed down her naked body. I did not leave her office for almost a day. For the past four hours, I have been terribly wanting to go to the toilet. But I did not go out so as not to meet Pavlik.
He was packing his things. I packed a soldering station, a 3D printer, sorted out boards, tool kits and wiring. Then I rolled up my JPL Visions of the Future posters for an incredibly long time. Folding clothes… Pavlik dragged the bags into the corridor an hour ago. And all this time he was fiddling with the laptop at his desk in the hall. He always used the app, so I didn't hear if he had already called a cab. Now, when he was the only one left in the huge apartment turned into a working studio, I caught every rustle, hiding behind the closed door.
For me it all started two years ago. She reappeared in my life suddenly and violently.
She hatched the idea of her startup for a very long time and purposefully walked towards it for many years. The initial concept seemed to everyone to be extremely understandable and feasible. But through several transformations, she quickly reduced him to taking over the world. And from that moment on, the project could not end differently.
Pavlik joined her a year and a half ago. With a full complement of twelve people, the team operated for a little over a year. More precisely out of eleven, because the twelfth was me.
Throughout the year, we practically did not leave the studio. Here we worked, slept and went crazy.
The day before, Denis, our linguist, packed up his things and left. The rest did it last week.
Without it, we lost key competencies, were helpless and toxic to each other.
For the project, she was more than the main developer. And for each of us more than a leader. Now, she was two thousand kilometers away. In a psychiatric clinic, in his native Kyiv. And that's all we could do for her.
I knew that after Pavlik closed the door behind him, my frustration and sense of catastrophe would become absolute.
Finally, he went out into the corridor. Her office door was directly opposite. Judging by the fuss, he had already put on his boots and pulled on his jacket. The next moment, instead of the clang of a metal latch, I heard a short shot. He tapped the knuckles of his dry fingers on the closed office door.
I glanced at my blurry reflection in the dark, turned-off monitors. A sweat-slick, emaciated psycho with greasy hair sticking out in all directions was staring at me. The linen cloth I used to cover her huge table when I made it was soaked with sweat running down my arm. It seemed to me that this rag, like the whole office, disgustingly stinks of me.
Pavlik knocked on the door again. But, obviously, he didn’t expect me to open it, so he immediately spoke in his quiet voice with pulling intonations:
Tyoma... I've put together a special version for you. Glasses and block on the table. telegram instruction, He paused for a second: She asked before... his voice trembled. There was a pause. He slammed his hand lightly on the door. you can manage...
Then I heard an iron clang, and he began to carry the boxes to the elevator. Unexpectedly for myself, I got up, straightened my dressing gown and opened the office door. Pavlik returned for another trunk and froze. He looked at my dressing gown for half a minute, but then he nevertheless looked into my eyes, which he almost never did. And suddenly he came up and awkwardly hugged me.
In that moment, I didn't just want to disappear, I wanted to never exist.
He left. And closed the door behind him. The silence deafened me. In the empty, silent studio, my frustration and sense of disaster became absolute.
It lasted forever. Or maybe about an hour ... I made my way to the kitchen and took out a pack of antipsychotics from the refrigerator. I swallowed three or four tablets of Chlorprothixene at once. Then he just stood there and looked at her. Her full-length portrait has been painted with oil paints right on the kitchen wall for the last three months by Diso, our designer. The picture, of course, was never finished, like everything he did. Numbness and frustration gave way to emptiness. Went to bed. He laid his head on the pillow and blackness swallowed me.
***
When I woke up, it was dark outside the window. I didn't know how much I slept. My head was still empty. Dragging his feet, he wandered into the hall. Memories of what happened here slowly began to emerge one by one. There were no feelings. Over the past year, I have never seen the hall empty. Five long tables stretched around the perimeter along two walls. Another four workplaces were located in the center. We made everything here with our own hands from plywood panels and slats bought in a construction shop. You could enter here at any time and there was always someone working here. I cooked food for everyone. The rest were too busy. I was useless for the project due to the fact that ... I could not do anything. Therefore, he was engaged in housekeeping, trying not to get in the way, and it seems that over time he learned to be just a shadow on the wall. We never ate together in the kitchen. Usually everyone took his own food, and went with it to his workplace. I just made sure there was always a snack. Everyone lived according to their schedule. One could go to breakfast, the other had just had dinner, the third went to bed. Almost no one's day lasted twenty-four hours. Now the desktops, formerly cluttered with monitors and computers, were almost empty. Unless they were covered with notebooks, papers, pencils, a couple of books, and wires leading from nowhere to nowhere.
Pavlik's desk stood in a corner, fenced off by two racks lined from floor to ceiling with tools, equipment, miscellaneous kits, circuit boards, and wires. Now they were empty. He cleaned up after himself and even took out the wastebasket, which in the last three weeks kept sticking out cola and gin bottles or it wasn’t gin… A complete set of equipment to run our application was neatly laid out in the center of the table. In the middle were augmented reality goggles.
I looked at them indifferently and sighed. Consciousness was still inhibited, but I remembered his words that he had collected some special version for me. What was going on with the project and at what stage it was, I did not understand for a long time.
What and how to include, I had no idea. Wishes too. I wanted to find my phone to see how much sleep I had: a little more than half a day, or about one and a half. He was nowhere in the hall. It must have been lying around somewhere in her office.
She herself worked in a separate room, which I converted into an office for her. Most of the space was occupied by a table with tiered shelves, cluttered with books, printouts of her work, and stacks of sheets of notes from many years. In the center were two monitors, to the right of which was a hefty black system unit that really seemed like a monster. I fiddled with this table for almost three days. I wanted to build something unusual for her. And she really liked this stained wooden table with a semicircular cutout, covered with linen. She had to work alone. It was strictly forbidden to enter. Slept right there on a narrow sofa. However, she had recently slept no more than four or five hours, and her day lasted about forty or something like that, which she spent at work. Once, when I was sleeping, she called me on the phone and asked me to open the door from the outside with a screwdriver and take it to the bathroom. She spent more than eighteen hours debugging the neural network in her chair, tucking her legs under her. And because of impaired blood circulation, they became numb so that they were not felt at all.
I slowly looked around the office. There was no telephone anywhere. I walked around the apartment, but to no avail. The question began to knock more and more distinctly in my head: “What to do?”. Horror seeped through the void of emotion and a trembling in his chest grew.
I remembered the words of Pavlik: "You can handle it." But I clearly understood that I could not cope. I never coped and, moreover, I didn’t have a single chance to cope now.
The search for the phone took another hour or an hour and a half. The flow of thoughts in my head accelerated, feelings and emotions seemed to thaw and slowly began to fill my head. I continued to sit and look at all this mountain of equipment with glasses in the center, although the phone already showed more than twenty percent battery. Now I was in no hurry to turn it on, because I was afraid. I was afraid to be in touch, I was afraid of messages in messengers, I was afraid of the need to take any action.
I was still stunned by the neuroleptics, but my thinking was already more or less functioning. The whole horror of the situation was that I perfectly understood: for me, this story is already over. I knew in advance that I would let her down, that I would not cope, and having helplessly failed one stage after another, I would return to the starting position. In time, the emotions will fade, I'll shut myself up in my shell again and lead the dreary life of a hikikomori that I led for many years until one day she knocked on my door.
Tears rolled down her cheeks. "What a jerk I am." Booting up, the phone immediately brought down an avalanche of signals on me. I turned off the sound and went to the search engine: "chlorprothixene lethal dose." He gave the answer instantly: “2-4 grams”. I didn't have that close. I burst into tears even more: “What a nonentity I am.”
Initially, her concept had a psychologist bot 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 thinking disorders, helping them to track and correct negative changes in the work of the psyche. In the first version, the analysis was carried out only in terms of the timbre and nature of speech, user activity in the smartphone, and biomechanical parameters according to the accelerometer data in the smartphone itself, watches, and headphones. From the equipment for this, respectively, a smartphone, a wireless headset and a smart watch were required.
But that was in the beginning. Now in front of me lay a mountain of equipment and a whole bunch of wires with plugs that were supposed to connect or charge all these battery and computing units, augmented reality glasses, bracelets, watches and headsets. I went to the telegram: “Just do step by step what is written and take your time. I have attached pictures for all descriptions.”
I tried to scroll down the instructions, but it seemed to be endless.
All the tears were shed and the hysteria let me go a little. Now I was desperate for salvation. I didn't believe in God. My only hope was a pile of electronics and raw code that hadn't even been properly alpha tested. I could not even then formulate exactly what salvation should be and what it should consist of. I just took the heaviest box, which was the power supply, and began to read the instructions written by Pavlik.
to be continued…
Source: habr.com