Transparency

§ 2019-08-17 01:05:37

[01:05] A few days later, Baishar woke up from a day's slumber to the shock of stereoscopic vision.

He could see again.

There were no flaws to behold. The clarity was pristine, as though his sight had never been taken from him, as though it weren't the product of two distinctly different mechanisms. It felt strange for all its naturalness, as though the whole procedure and the blindness that followed had merely been a dream.

And yet...

On careful scrutiny, there was something strikingly different about the way the world looked. He couldn't put a finger on it – the contrasts seemed sharper without that he could, alternating between his natural and cybernetic eye, grasp an objective difference.

But in either case, over night, the last of the necessary nerve bundles had healed and accepted their augmentation. Not only could he now see, but he would be able to see so many more things, as soon as Valcen taught him how to wield his new sense.

[01:39] The return of vision to his right eye was surprising only by its apparent suddenness. He'd gone to sleep half-blind, and awoken with perfect vision, with no obvious transition — he'd half expected to have stumblingly blurry vision for a few days.

It was a welcome surprise; he spent long moments in silent wonder, examining the world around him in crisp detail, occasionally closing one eye or the other to see if he could place the subtle differences in clarity. For a brief moment he considered sharing his excitement with Ryrha, but decided against it — their relationship was still in a cold, distant state. This wouldn't make Ryrha any more comfortable, and could very well do the opposite — so he refrained.

Valcen, on the other hand, would share his enthusiasm. Valcen would understand. Valcen would be able to show him how his new senses worked, could explain the nuances to him. And, perhaps most importantly, Valcen would want to know.

And so Baishar slipped wordlessly out of the den, picking his way over towards Valcen's office.

[02:05] The qidravem had come a long way. Valcen's tests on his bioengineered offspring with the prototype designs had been successful lately. Of what Baishar could understand of it, with effort, Valcen had recorded a few seconds of his own thoughts, transferred them into the device, and then run them remotely in the vessel.

It didn't seem to bother him that the thoughts the procedure induced were disconnected and aborted.

He mentioned that in the test runs, there wasn't much room for the kind of interaction that would make the thoughts conscious in a way that differed from Valcen's own precise conscious perception at the time he had the original thoughts, that it was more like viewing a photograph than it was creating another version of him.

In any case, he was working on it now, working on the delicate, frayed-looking edges, his face partially disorted by a magnifying glass when looking at him from a specific angle.

Still, the motion of Baishar caught his attention out of the corner of his eye and he raised his chest, clasping a forepaw against the desk for added leverage, peering across at Baishar in first curiosity, then the bright beginnings of recognition. "...you can see?" he asked, before Baishar could volunteer the information on his own.

[03:05] Baishar replied with a broad smile, followed by a light shake of his muzzle in acknowledgement. "Just as well as I ever could." Better, even, I'm sure. "It was... strangely sudden. I wasn't expecting it to be this clear, this soon."

His gaze lowered to the qidravem, work in progress as it was. "...I don't mean to interrupt," he began, an earnest deference in his voice. The qidravem is more important; I can wait if necessary. "...But if you're not too busy, I was... hoping you could show me how to use it?" It was impossible to disguise the hopeful enthusiasm in his voice.

[03:12] Valcen's muzzle swerved subtly, as though he were literally rolling the thought around in his head.

Then his expression brightened quite abruptly. "Yes," he said, his tone imbued with a certain fondness. "I'd like that, actually. I've been looking forward to showing you." For a moment, he wore an almost goofy grin, then sobered up enough to trot across to Baishar, more closely inspecting the cybernetic implant.

"You can cycle through the modes," he said, carefully reaching up to Baishar's eye to tap the tip of an unblemished claw against the artificial eye – a bizarre sensation of distant, second-hand pressure, the sphere imbued with no tactile senses of its own. "By searching for the indentation in the sclera with your claw."

It was easy enough in principle – Baishar had seen Valcen do it time and time again, after all. But of course there was something viscerally strange about poking a claw into one's own eye, even absent of some kind of pain feedback. It might take some getting used to.

§ 2019-08-17 17:50:36

[17:50] Artificial or no, it was still hard not to flinch as Valcen gently tapped a claw against Baishar's eye. There was a great deal of trust that Valcen wouldn't hurt him, but translating that into instincts was difficult. A small part of him wondered if Valcen could rewrite his instincts to be more trusting of Valcen in particular, but the thought was quickly lost.

Baishar looked down at his own blunted claws, uncertainty flashing briefly across his features. How narrow was the indentation; would his ruined claws still be sharp enough to find it? Valcen knew what he was doing, though, so surely it would work.

He raised a forepaw to the side of his face, gently resting one claw near his artificial eye. He looked away from the claw, blinked a few times, then forced himself to keep his eye open as he tapped at it with the claw, blindly seeking an indentation he knew must be there.

[18:12] The second-hand pressure was no less eerie for his own claw being the cause, any familiarity offset by the increased pressure. Looking too and fro, his mucous membranes had long since had their suspicions on where on the sclera the indentation was, but they weren't meant for precision signalling, so it took a bit of cautious wiggling for the blunted tip of his claw to find it.

The dip had a comfortable size for the claw, suggesting it may have been adjusted to Baishar's needs in particular – an obvious solution to the problem, really – and he didn't have to push it very deep to meet a gentle resistance.

Applying just fractionally more pressure extinguished the eye's vision.

For a moment of surprise, that impression – that he'd simply shut it off – lingered. Then he noticed the view wasn't a uniform black at all. The eye's entire view was taken up by stars – vibrant, monochrome, scattered through an ocean of black ink. The sky was broadly recognisable, except that it went on well below the horizon, and some dark blotches seemed out of place.

Near him hovered two orbs with the barest hint of a crescent of light – Valcen's own eyes, eeriely disembodied.

Somewhere below, the dark blotches coalesced into a static, tentacled beast, twisted as if into tangles. It was impossible to tell how far it was from a single glance at it – but if he moved to the side even a little, he could rule out that it was nearby.

[18:13] Above and behind him, a recognisable Mekiva shone in disregard for the mountains of steel and rock above them.

"Neutrino vision," Valcen elaborated, minimalistically.

[19:11] Baishar quickly pulled his claw away as his vision suddenly went dark — his hands frozen in midair as if he'd just been caught misbehaving. For a moment, there was a worry he'd accidentally damaged the mechanism; it was only when he looked to Valcen for advice and saw the eerie gleam in his eyes that he realized that this was something else.

When he closed his normal eye, most of the world blinked out of existence, leaving scattered points of light; after a long moment, he gasped, realizing he was looking at stars. Even when he closed both eyes, he could see them — unfamiliar constellations from after the twisting of the skies. It had been so long since he'd last seen anything like the night sky — even in this strange world where it stretched in all directions, it was a deeply comforting sight.

"It's beautiful," he whispered in response, a lump of emotion starting to form in his throat. "So... stark and empty." So this is what your world looks like. This is what Valcen-that-was saw.

After a long moment of staring with closed eyes at the wonder around him — the familiar gaze of Mekiva, brighter than all — he noticed the strange tangle below — far below, apparently, since he couldn't easily see movement as he moved his head. "What is that?"

[19:16] As though having to remind himself about what Baishar was looking at, Valcen's muzzle dipped – without that he bothered to switch modes, clearly going by visual memory. "Oh," he said. "That's..." He trailed off, evidently unsure how to explain it succinctly. "That's a crude weapon Terenyira made, which we later repurposed to a planetary harness.

"It used to sweep across the planet with the advance of the hours. We stopped it, fixed it to the planet, and used its hold to drag the planet through space."

[19:50] Baishar opened his mouth wordlessly, still staring blindly downwards. A crude weapon, as large as the world. For a few moments his mind balked at the description, visceral reminder of the scale of being he was dealing with — and that he still hoped to one day become. If this is a crude weapon, what does a sophisticated one look like?

"...That was how you moved it." Memories of a long-ago conversation, half-forgotten in the stresses of the time. "To save it from Tkanetar." And it was still there, bundled up presumably in the planet's core. How did the Karesejat make something so enormous? ...A question for another time.

After a long silence staring wistfully into the starry expanse around him, Baishar finally opened his eyes again, looking back to Valcen. "Thank you, again, for letting me see this."

[20:00] "There's not much going on in that part of the universe, so it's nothing all too special, but it helps build a few things. I can show you how it relates to the Torunyema, for example. Though you should try the third mode. It won't show you anything at the moment, but it's worth reminding oneself of the third mode as soon as possible.

"You don't want to forget about it in a crucial moment, when you'd be better off cycling back to stereoscopic regular vision."

[20:10] ... Right, of course. In the moment he'd nearly forgotten the other thing Valcen's eyes could do. He gave a light swerve of his muzzle, then raised his claw towards the eye again. Again, it took some time for him to psyche himself up to the task, though it was marginally easier than the last time; at least now he had a better idea of where the indentation was hiding.

After a second or two of fiddling, trying to ignore the deep unease about putting a claw into his eye, he hit the trigger.

[20:12] The third state was far more like 'off' than the previous one. It was as though, without that he could feel it, his eyelids had closed around the cybernetic eye and were shutting out all light. No amount of moving his head around did anything to change this state. Presumably, the Torunyema was currently off, itself.

§ 2019-08-24 19:20:39

[19:20] And back to the familiar state of half-blindness. Granted, it was for a completely different reason this time; it was not at all surprising that it showed him nothing. Still, it filled him with curiosity — what did Valcen see when he was operating the Torunyema? Would he be able to see things in the same way?

"Would I... be able to see how things look, while you're using the Torunyema? Without interfering with your work?"

[20:17] Valcen's muzzle opened in a light grin. His tongue traced his teeth for a moment, before he responded: "Exactly," as if Baishar had chanced upon the reason he was so happy the triad of vision was finally available to Baishar. "Would you like to see that now?" he encouraged. "How the Torunyema maps a mind?"

[20:45] Baishar shivered in electric delight at the offer. Yes. Yes, absolutely. And yet... there was a moment of hesitation there, a terror he couldn't quite shake. Whose mind? Ryrha would be the easiest, most obvious choice, but in all likelihood it would only further degrade their already tenuous relationship — which itself carried its own risks. For what amounted to a gift for himself, it hardly seemed worth it.

To the best of his knowledge, Valcen didn't have any prisoners about to arrive that he could spare; which really only left one option. What would looking at my own thoughts be like? He could only imagine it as a strange feeling, deeply unsettling... but perhaps it would be the easiest option, since he could most easily relate what he saw to his own thoughts, rather than having to infer it from another mind.

"...Yes," he replied, dipping his muzzle in appreciation. "Yes, I think I'd like to see that."

[21:06] Valcen gently clasped one forepaw against his chest, peering at Baishar as if with a distant, fond curiosity, holding himself still for just a few moments. Then he properly stepped back from his work, ran his left hand's claws through the feathers of his left arm absent-mindedly, and drew his attention to the door to the Lair.

Quietly nudging it open, he leaned into the flat of it, letting the edge of the frame brush his flank briefly. Then he kept himself pressed to the door, waiting for Baishar to pass through, before letting his feathers whisper along the door as he too stepped into the room.

The light was dim for the time being, not needing to accommodate a Nayabaru. From the Nayabaru perspective, the current illumination related to safety requirements – the idea was that if a Nayabaru had to run through here for any reason, such as a fire, the minimum of light would hopefully prevent them from crashing into anything and hurting themselves.

From a kavkem perspective, it was just about perfect, as though the room were caught in a perpetual mid-dusk.

Valcen's forepaws were now fumbling in his toolkit, dangling around his neck as it was, carefully tugging his gloves from their compartment. "Here," he said, holding them out to Baishar, even as he reached the Torunyema and stretched his other forepaw up to the device, turning it on.

If Baishar's vision was still set to Torunyema view, a sudden, brief white glare would have proven to him that the machine was now on – but that was all it communicated at first.

"You wouldn't be able to see much if you were strapped in, your eyes compute your position relative to the Torunyema to give you fine-grained control over the view, so today, you get to look at my head," he commented, casually.

"There's no risk of you doing any writing – the machine itself isn't in that mode right now – but I'd still ask you to be mindful of the gesture you make while you're using the input devices," Valcen commented, even as he swung himself over the rest and began to fix himself to it, leaving his limbs free, but evidently still wanting to secure his neck and head.

"Just wearing them does nothing – you can wave your hands around and it won't do anything – but if you go to the effort of pressing your thumbs to your palms, that's when your gestures begin to mean something. I can explain it, but for read-mode, it's best you just try it out yourself.

"Read-mode is your right hand's thumb; writing would work with your left, if the machine were set up accordingly right now." A pause. "Help me with this?" he asked, gesturing to a few loose straps around his neck. "And double-check the others. For reading it's not as critical, but you don't want my head moving if you want a clear picture."

[21:37] Baishar was already part of the way towards the Torunyema when Valcen handed him the gloves — prompting a look of confusion from the kavkem. As he began his explanation, Baishar's eyes widened — Valcen is letting me see inside his head. It was a struggle to wrap his mind around; he was honored that Valcen trusted him to that degree; he was terrified of doing something wrong; he was worried for the implications of it.

"...It can read your mind as well?" he asked, his concern interlaced with wonder. "...I thought your mind would be too different from a kavkem's for it to read. Is that safe?" Could it write as well? Could a Nayabaru use this against you? Surely Valcen had thought of these questions; surely he recognized the implicit danger. But Baishar would rest much easier knowing the answers.

Thankfully, Valcen was good about addressing his other concerns. The Torunyema wasn't set up to write, so he was in no danger of accidentally harming Valcen, even if he did engage write-mode. He flicked his muzzle, dismissing the horrifying mental image of an accidentally lobotomized Valcen. He wasn't sure he could live with himself if that happened.

Slowly thawing out of his paralysis, he gently put the gloves on, then stepped over to the machine. Tilting his head to one side so he could see what he was doing, he cautiously finished strapping Valcen into the Torunyema, then checking over the others. "You're sure about this?" Baishar asked, once he was convinced Valcen's skull was secure — a tinge of uncertainty in his voice, of unworthiness.

[21:45] "Positive," Valcen confirmed through his firmly gritted teeth, his lips drawing back a little awkwardly in a hint of a mangled but sincere smile. "My mind is biologically all kavkem. It is arranged a bit differently, but that doesn't affect the Torunyema's ability to handle it," he explained. Then, with a huff from his nostrils:

"Pull it down until it rests securely against my skull. It should begin to visualise the structure immediately, though it will take a few moments to full form a model, and long minutes to refine it. The error bars reduce over time. They never fully disappear, but at some point, surprises become so unlikely that you can safely take the data at face value."

[21:57] Well, that at least answered most of his concerns... though not all of them in a way that made them go away. The Nayabaru could still, at least in theory, use the Torunyema against Valcen. One more danger to watch out for. He closed his eyes for a long moment, breathing slowly, still trying to wrap his mind around what was happening.

Then Baishar reached up to the mechanism, and did as he was told, nestling it against Valcen's skull and watching what his new sight would show him.

[22:29] The moment the structure came down to nuzzle against Valcen's skull, blue-hued, threaded geometries exploded out from a writhing kernel, like a tentacled predator lurching to grasp at him, kindling an instinct to jerk back. As Baishar moved away, it stayed near the Torunyema, continuing its unpacking motion in disregard for whether or not Baishar had any interest in it.

Gradually, as details emerged, it took on a range of colours, and a shape distantly reminiscent of coral, or unnaturally tangled and knotted fern leaves. As Baishar analysed the view, it became clear the alien shape grew outward from Valcen's skull, with the central kernel obscured, but no doubt made up of redundant information.

It was as though he were being given a very large selection of long, oddly twisted and decorated levers to pull – each at least as long as an outstretched kavkem arm.

Colours rippled occasionally, and the nature of curves and twists changed abruptly, but the more time progressed, the rarer these sudden rearrangements were. There was a clear flow across the structure, a mesmerising trickle of luminosity through the impossible branches – the visualisation of active thought? It was beautiful, but utterly opaque to Baishar.

"You're in passive read mode now," Valcen was narrating past the muzzle straps. "If you engage active read mode by pressing your right hand's thumb to your palm, there are a few gestures you can use to adjust the default view.

"Moving your hand directly toward or away from the Torunyema will narrow the view down to a slice, the angle of the plane dependent on your current position.

"Moving your hand up and down slowly will in- or decrease annotations. By default, there are none, but you can increase the amount of metadata almost indefinitely. Some of it you will be able to interpret as is, but a lot of it is custom jargon I'm going to have to teach you before you know what it is, let alone be able to work with it.

"The last active reading gesture you can do is to twist your hand – this works best if you keep your two other fingers extended in a 'V'. That will hide areas by colour, cycling through the selected colour by its position in colour space – you'll want to play around with it a bit to get an intuitive hang of it.

"I'll explain what the colours actually mean as we move on – for now you can picture them as 'subject matter' filters. If you find yourself stuck in a view, know that a rapid left or right motion will get you back to the default view."

[23:21] The rapid explosion of information took Baishar by surprise, taking a step back, his feathers puffed up briefly as if threatened — but it only lasted a moment. He watched in a mixture of awe and terror as it unfolded, colors shifting and flowing as time went on. He slowly walked around the Torunyema, alternately closing his mundane eye to get a better sense of the structure, and opening it to make sure he didn't bump into anything.

It was vast, complex, beautiful, and utterly incomprehensible.

Valcen's explanations were only somewhat helpful — he'd have to experiment with the interface to understand what anything did. Where do I even begin?

After long moments simply observing the structure, trying and failing to understand what he was looking at, he began to cautiously experiment. Annotations sounded like a useful first step; hopefully they would be at least somewhat comprehensible. He pressed his right thumb to his palm, and slowly raised it, his eyes darting to each new piece of information that arose.

[23:52] From the organic tangle of data sprang a delicate web of unmistakably straight, white lines, new additions thinning in width as the level of detail increased, their point of origin obvious only if he moved his head, given he was currently not blessed with a stereoscopic view into this data. The writing was small, but visible if he looked directly at it, in a neat font.

Some of the thickest annotations were almost comprehensible: 'proprioception/motor control', 'language/logic', 'visual perception/memory'. The perplexing duality of many of the top-level annotations was strange – why would the same place of the brain be responsible for language as well as logic, for example?

The vast majority of annotations formed some form of gibberish to Baishar. 'Neural endocrine gradient', 'vasotocin reactivity', 'lateral presence' or 'neuropathic nociception'. There didn't seem to be anything as clear or specific as 'fear' or 'north' or 'kavkem' in this tangle that would make reading a kavkem mind remotely anything like reading a book.

But what was clear was that there unmistakably was a lot of information at Valcen's disposal whenever he used the Torunyema – and that he'd put most of it here, that all these annotations came from his analysis, from his work, from his understanding, and the Torunyema simply pattern-matched for him to spare him the pain-staking effort of searching for everything on his own.

[00:53] Indeed, as Valcen had suggested, the majority of the annotations were incomprehensible — or, at least, used terms Baishar didn't understand. He briefly tried further increasing the annotation density, to see if anything else meaningful would present itself, but the terms only got more unfamiliar the further he went. Instead, he lowered his hand, trimming it down enough that he could understand at least a substantial fraction of the words.

Maybe investigating the colors would make more sense? He held his hand out and pressed the thumb into his palm, his fingers splayed out in a 'V' shape as Valcen had mentioned, and slowly turned, watching colors cycle in and out of existence. After a few more moments of experimentation, he let out a soft sigh. "...I don't understand what any of this means."

[01:02] "Don't be discouraged," Valcen said. "I'd like to teach you how to read the data you see. It'll take a while, as there's a wealth of information there to analyse, even with the annotations to help once you understand what they refer to, but if you're interested, you may be able to start tracking basic semantic thought as soon as in a few days from now."

[01:25] Valcen wanted to teach him. To show him how the Torunyema worked, how to understand and read the inner workings of a mind. Of Valcen's mind, even — an honor he hardly expected nor was certain he deserved. He trusts me. To some degree, Baishar already knew that — but he hadn't realized the extent of it until now.

If he could do this, perhaps he could ease some of Valcen's burden. Perhaps he could even accomplish what he'd once sought to do out of foolishness, and make sure Valcen would never need to write a mind again — at least, if Valcen willed it.

And if nothing else, the prospect of seeing Valcen's inner thoughts was exciting. A way to become closer to his mentor. "...I think I would like to try," he replied. "To the extent you are willing to teach me."

[01:56] "I'd love to," Valcen said, without as much as even hesitation. "For now, you may want to cycle back to normal vision, though, and help me unstrap. We have a lot of theory to cover."

It turned out to be a little trickier to push a claw into his sclera with the gloves on, but he managed to return his vision to crisp normality without much effort. Then, a pause. Amidst all the new impressions, a memory, recent: I can show you how it relates to the Torunyema, for example.

An untempered curiosity let the claw sink back in before it had even withdrawn.

The pleasant, dark world constructed of distant starlight and the mangled remains of a 'crude weapon' spanning the planet like emaciated, twisted branches returned to Baishar's view.

Ahead of him, hovering disembodied where Valcen's skull should be, was an array of thin spines, needle-thin, arranged in a slow, squirming, pulsing dance, in their illusory near-silhouette seeming to intertwine and interfere with each other without ever snapping.

If he were to inspect them up close he might find their surface shimmering – a snapshot of time would show them as rough, microscopically pitted, but with each passing instant of time changing in structure, as though the surface of those thin hairs was fluctuating between universes a few atoms at a time.

Presumably, that was exactly what it was doing.

A few static handfuls of the strands extended into long, delicately curving tendrils – not nearly numerous enough to be a correspondence to that coral visualisation of thought, nor scattered enough. Instead, the dozen dark lines all reached up into the machinery of the Torunyema, forming a loose bundle of lances that thrust passively through Valcen's skull.

Clearly poised to rend through his mind, it was at eerie odds with his calm exterior.