Local 15.8.16, 3:07
Just caught wind of some interesting new tech, so I'll make a research journal.
Local technology uses slimes as heavy duty processing, which is quite interesting. Usually I would be very against mortals playing around with Gamma, but slimes are so both normalized and weak that it almost doesn't matter.
However, lately there's been rumours of slime processing cores being used to mimic higher brain functioning of mortals. This isn't pure "making a slime into a man"; while carefully selected slimes can go to a high animalistic level of intelligence, this isn't quite enough to handle a copy without using energy intensive Delta extensions - extensions very few mortals ever even caught wind of, in my travels. Instead, their tiny brains are forced to capture the behavior of a human. Brings to mind the philosophical zombie concept.
Here's the things that I actually wonder about, just to mark off for later research.
What kind of a slime core are they using? Most cores are mundane; however, the basic and often looked-down-upon green cores have enough "fair" magic, and a couple rarer colors are psionic enough to evolve the necessary extensions by themselves.
Slime cores are extremely adaptable and two-way compatible with gamma. Is it possible to make one handle an avatar? Even if it turns it into more of a controllable shoggoth?
Local 19.8.16, 4:16
Quick and dirty experiments show that making a normal sized slime into an avatar takes even less than expected. It’s extremely easy, to the point where a slime that tries to mimic a dea lifeform can spontaneously start channeling them.
The first question might have to wait for public prototypes, although i have managed to run some “simulations”, and slimes can, under certain circumstances, evolve an external Delta processing core - though, due to their elemental makeup and serious amount of “what the actual hell” in the design, it would not be in any way analogous to an Alpha being evolving one.
Local 8.3.17, 3:28
Their experiments seem to be going in a circle. You would think they’d catch wind of the fact that their slimes are unstable because they’re unbalanced, considering balance is something dea don’t even try to hide as an important part of a mortal.
My own experiments are going well. I’ve managed to create a small avatar of the Veil, using slime and porcelain and piano wire. It even manages to repair itself using natural silicon and aluminum oxides. It has powers similar to my own, likely using slime’s natural mimicry; it’s also very friendly, surprisingly so for essentially a chunk of raw Essence. However, it doesn’t seem like it has any capacity for learning beyond basic reflexes and re-mimicking every time it wakes up, likely a side effect of running it on such weak hardware.
Local 12.3.17, 5:10
After running some experiments, i don’t think that the lack of learning capacity is to blame on the power of hardware. Rather, the computational cells themselves inside slime don’t have any storage whatsoever - all data is stored in the links between them. Considering that it’s possible to make an intelligence on a three-digit number of cells, if they each have sufficient storage and basic calculation capabilities (see my research paper on second level intelligences, available at the University library #3, Phl. 12)? Looks like they’d need to teach slimes to remember. I wonder how long that will take.
Local 13.1.19, 4:02
Sure took them a while.
Using electronic memory cells and letting slimes mimic them is an interesting concept; it would certainly work, and it would let someone rewrite their memories using basic Spark manipulation techniques. Marking it up for testing.
Local 3.3.19, 6:23
Yes! I’ve done it!
After a couple false starts, i’ve managed to make the avatar mimic the FET NAND of the storage card in my phone, allowing each computational cell of the core to store a couple megabytes. This seems to elevate its intelligence from a particularly cuddly butterfly to a rat; it also massively increased its energy requirements - it was entirely running on a passive Veil scoop, and now it requires actual food to live. I’ve had to give it a quick and dirty core access hatch, that i think i’m going to just turn into a mouth.
