Local 2.7.16, 21:39

Subject: Miniature Slime
Cultivation Status: Idea
Progress: None

Technology is amazing. We've been able to create miniature automatons out of a huge variety of materials! These range from simplistic slimes that can perform a task all the way up to a full golem that works autonomously. We even have these new things called robots that can perform a lot of calculations and come to a conclusion faster than anyone would expect.

It's been possible to animate a lot of objects using a slime core for a long time now. All you need is to train the slime a bit, feed it something potent, covertly take out the core, put it in a new body, convince it that it went to sleep and woke up different, and carry on. This has... some varying effects and depends on the type of slime you're working with.

Lately I've been working on making slimes smaller and smaller. I currently have a drawer of 200 marble sized cores of varying colors. When a core gets smaller, it generally loses potency and intelligence. Specifically each of the cores experiences the world on a smaller scale, and slimes appear to have a genetic disposition for a larger environment.

Smaller slimes can be completely purged of their genetic memory by immersing the core in gray gel, boiling the lot, and removing the core. When this happens, the slime has no memories whatsover. This functions as something like a blank slate, and they have been observed re-learning the same kind of skills over generations and seem to catch up to their larger counterparts around twenty cycles in. The initial loss amount is very high and the overall yield is around 1/1000.

There are methods to mitigate this involving a specially designed and maintained gray slime pool that compresses cores instead of expanding them, but this process requires a large amount of heat, a frost thrower, an active weaver involved in the forming process, and somehow this imprints the weaver's thought process into the new core. The lack of a blank slate is interesting, as slimes are already bent towards copying anything they eat.

Some of the chips that go into robots are small enough that they could fit inside my pinky. Some pet golems have been performing as desk jockeys for some time now. A colleague has a bonsai habit, and another grows small mushrooms in a jar. With a bit of time and some training, I wonder...

Can we make a slime think it's a human?

Local 5.1.19, 23:00

Subject: Miniature Slime
Cultivation Status: Breakthrough
Progress: Segment

Finally! I finally understand what was missing after all this time. It wasn't the type of core we tried to use, no matter how it was processed. It wasn't the person involved, no matter how much they trained the slime. It wasn't their impression of the slime, nor was it something that we could see or touch or hear. It wasn't even the physical side of reality that we interact with every day and the source of these abominations.

It wasn't the obvious either. These creatures are already some kind of soul matter. Attaching the spirit of anything will eventually manifest inside the core as essence, raw and unfiltered, retyped to the core itself. This functions a lot more like digestion than their standard absorption and redistribution of matter.

It wasn't even the strange function of being able to toss a slime out into a storm and have it be full of flow essence, tossing it near magma to end up coated in breath, or anything like that... no, what we needed was distinctly not a touch of a shadow from the veil or a tinge of light in the sky. These things are some kind of proto-dream, cooked up with a heaping helping of raw life, stuffed into a flow state, and given a warped form that made them physical.

We can't just approach them from one perspective. These creatures are flawed beyond understanding on a level that I can't even figure out. It's like I'm looking at some god's snot dream that eventually turns into a giant mass that eats everything because it's empty, not because it's hungry. Eventually it stops being empty, but it never really becomes full.

We also can't approach them like you would a person. People grow, they learn, they love. They have a permanent part of themselves that moves from body to body. While this is also true of slimes, the core tends to run on instinct a lot more than anything else. At best they can mimic, and a creature mimicking a person will eventually run out of things to mimic and revert back to their base behavior.

Slimes are missing two things: Imagination, and memories.

Memories are fairly easy to fix. These new chips can hold lots of memory, and the creatures are very good at copying anything in front of them. They don't seem to have any problems with apparent memories for a short period of time, but longer than a couple minutes and the patterns need to be ingrained into their core through scars or other trauma. A variety of other objects can be used for that. In fact, slimes are so adapatable that if we could fit a chip in a core somehow and make that slime propogate, it wouldn't need the chip anymore.

Imagination is a much harder problem. I'll have to give that some thought.