Quote:As for the location, why not just give the place they were building the Superboomer a less tongue in cheek name than "GENOM Appliance Research Division, John R. Maytag Memorial Facility?" Or use the smaller GPCC pyramid from the Largo arc, since I don't think the former was anything interesting visually in the brief moment we see it before it goes kablooey.Yep yep yep. Good visual, outside the city, deniable-enough for Mason's ambitions.
Also, I'm seriously toying with the idea of having someone call him 'Moonshot Mason', just 'cause he's the head of special projects and whatnot.
Quote:The official story is servitor units gone rogue.
The actual story is... complex. Part emerging machine intelligence, part programming failures and part personality engrams.
The first Boomers were cleverly programmed to provide the neural net with baseline instructions. However, it was a sizable programming overhead burden because for them to function in any reasonable timespan their programming needed to be very specifically tailored to their hardware and tasking. It could be done, mind, but it did mean that they generally had very narrow competencies and unpredictable and potentially dangerous reactions to unexpected instructions. Personalities, if any develop, tend to be very innocent; not in the sense that they don't want to do harm, but in the sense that they don't and often can't conceive of the consequences.
Enter the mind upload technology, which covers most of the flaws in the programming by providing Boomers with greater mental flexibility. Sure, what engrams GENOM has are at best incomplete, and often deliberately altered after the fact to get any sense of identity out of them. This is not a good thing, because it makes the engram unstable; one of the reasons Boomers go through maintenance is so that their programming (and engrams) can be reset to factory specifications, and some form of violent psychosis if maintenance isn't done properly is common. But they've found that using the brain scans of people who worked the job the Boomer's meant to replace give better results, if not necessarily more stable ones, depending on a number of factors including the mental health of the people that were scanned.
Given that military Boomers do military jobs and the sort of veterans that won't be missed are the sort of veterans to be suffering from PTSD among other issues military Boomers are... volatile, as are many other Boomers meant for jobs were violence and high stress environments are likely. Yes, this means that the storage staff Boomers in the back of the shop are very unlikely to go rampant compared to the customer service Boomers.
And then you have the emerging intelligence issue. Boomers that last long enough start to develop a sense of self not that unlike humans. Even Boomers without an engram running in their heads develop a sense of self. This is the other big reason maintenance is required; part of the process involves wiping the undesired personality forming in the Boomer's brain. That doesn't mean that all of the personality is wiped though; Boomer brains are complex neural networks and the sort of maintenance cycle that's needed to fully scrub it clean is just too much effort. This means that plenty of Boomers, already not necessarily with very stable minds running the bodies, regularly get brutalized in ways that are hard to conceive. Some lucky ones end up stable, or at least functional, most go mad.
In a not quite cyberpunk twist, places which don't maintain their Boomers properly but treat them decently have very low incidence rates of Boomer rampages. In a completely genre appropriate twist, maintenance of Boomers is tracked (Boomer rampages are quite dangerous), and if the ADP runs into improperly maintained Boomers they often get confiscated and destroyed as a risk. If you are a Boomer, you just can't win.
This is a wayyyyyy more nuanced vision of what a Boomer is than I was planning to address in this particular 'film' (yeah I wanna do more, make a whole more OVA series. Retell OG OVA's with my own twists). And it's not really what I was going for with Totally-not-Soulkiller: the 'engrams' are new tech, an overlay on existing Boomer neural nets hoping that they'll be able to fool humans just a little better, generate better sales. Imagine that - granny's upload forced into some secretary bot. Ech.
So: how I'd like to do Boomer consciousness...
Basically, Boomers are nanotech lifeforms, inorganic carbon structures strung together in quasitissue, including neuromorphic transistors in their big fat skulls. Like modern neural nets, they can do some stuff pretty well, especially when they're being fed database info from the cloud (like a facial-recognition bank) - even better than humans. They can even simulate creativity by drawing on those massive databases of prior Boomer experiences - AlphaGo wasn't creative, but it did something unorthodox by fiddling around with what had already worked.
Are they conscious, though? Hoo boy.
There was an article in Aeon years ago by sci-fi genius Peter Watts where he drew on the suggestion that consciousness doesn't require a specific neural structure, only sufficient complexity in the brain. So, theoretically, a Boomer should have some degree of self-awareness. This is very bad and GENOM has no desire to make such things. So they institute blocks - prevent e-mag resonance in one portion of a Boomer brain from altering the oscillation of neural signals in another part. Hook one part of the brain up to the cloud-link. Feed the master lobe info which it relays to the slave lobe, uplink their sensory inputs back up into the cloud for other Boomers to sense, and you've got a Bicameral Mind. Shit, better than that; you've got a bicameral hivemind, a semi-consensual network of inputs and outputs that isn't really conscious in the way we'd think of it.
After all, ants are a rough hivemind, swapping information at the speed of pheromones, acting as one will without much self-awareness - just error correction. Would you call a network of ants conscious? Of course not. Neither would GENOM. The 'personas' Mason's adding are just there to fool people for long enough, just long enough to suppress the uncanny-valley reaction that is so deeply wired into the twenty-first century subconscious - theoretically just long enough for them to trust the Boomer. Trust GENOM.
(I dunno if that works better thematically, I just think that rendering every Boomer a nascent Robocop feels like it's retreading - well - Robocop. Same way GITS 2017 was just Robocop but ScarJo. I'm not so interested in the question of 'are they human' as I am the question of 'what happens to the humans when robots take all the jobs but it's not a Keynesian paradise with 15-hour workweeks'? A capitalism with no human labor base, able to perpetually sustain itself, to commodify everything in an economy - yeesh. Spooky stuff.)
Of course I could work in some of your ideas regarding personas as the series progresses. Have the engrams be just bulky 'skillchips' similar to the ones in CP2020 (which in turn stole from the ones in When Gravity Fails, but who's counting?) - not for humans, of course, but just to help Boomers replace ever more complex skillsets. I think in my setting they're already using CG replicas of old actors in movies and other media, cutting out new blood in exchange for helping the stars of the past century achieve a sort of symbolic immortality - what would happen if someone tried to take a persona and shape it, hone it into, I dunno, your own personal Keanu Reeves? Or synthesize different personalities together to make a hyper-capable SuperBoomer - and wait, shit, that's just Shasti from Warren's Dirty Pair. I dunno.
Point is...
Quote:It would be interesting if Mr. Mason wanted Priss for her brain, and Music Talents. As in Feed Priss a bunch of Brain Conversion Nanites (Actually a Stingray Process. Ask Sylia{Celia?}.) then Copy the Brain pattern for use in a "Sexaroid" package.They ain't doing this.
On the broader topic of Sylia's enhancements - eh. I'd say nanotech enhancement, not outright replacement. There's so little we understand about the brain, how dynamic and plastic it is; mapping it frozen in one moment wouldn't give you enough info to make a full emulation, I think, especially if you couldn't account for all the feedback loops the brain has with the rest of the body (immune system, gut bacteria, etc.). (this is why methinks CP2020 may actually have the whole concept of cyberpsychosis on point - ripping a brain out and sticking it in a new body is an imperfect copying-over). Replacing it with plot-bullshit nanomachines also seems to push credibility.
So Dr. Stingray figured out how to make Elon Musk's neural lace, and it only works on little kids - brains are plastic enough to accept substrate being grafted onto the tissue, see. Sylia's just patient zero.
Which reminds me of one more plot thread I want to toy around with for some later story.
Warren's Intellectual Assets (now Dead Bang's villains) never really made sense to me - I don't see Quincy as the type to ignore advice from transhumans he built. Hell, I think Quincy's ultimate agenda is to render IA's - I like to call them Ambassadors, because they're essentially the meat-mediation element of a human-AI supergenius hybrid - the master race, and Boomers the slave race, for a panstellar empire (with 'baseline' humanity rendered impotent and extinct after a few megagenocides). Of course, they might try for their own coup d'etat against Big Daddy Q, maybe try to rope Sylia (Big Sister) in as a co-conspirator. And then that'd be the climax of something, Quincy's faction and his hidden countermeasures (The OMS? What if he is the OMS?) vs. the Ambassadors vs. Largo and his perpetual ability to not fucking die vs. the Sabers.
Actually, now that I think about it, my first draft of this script involved Cynthia (from OVA 1) not as a Boomer, but as a proto-Ambassador built by the military as the ultimate strategist. Could never figure out what to do with her - what her objective with escaping (not being kidnapped) was besides the usual live-in-peace cheesy bullshit - but I think I'll keep the Ambassadors plotline around for some later project. We'll see.