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FFM Day 2

My father is dead.

The husk of his body still walks about the house from the front door to the back all day everyday, no longer knowing who he is or what he wants. His mind lost to the labyrinth of confusion he cannot find his way out of. We do our best to take care of him, to see that he eats, is bathed and looked after but it hurts. It hurts to wonder what point there is in a world where a man who worked so hard to take care of himself and stay healthy, who sacrificed so much to provide for his family and when finally he escaped the job he hated so into retirement, he was lost almost instantly a deep madness of confusion.

My father is dead, but his body still walks those halls. Mute and confused. Every now and then I feel as if I can see him trying to work out who I am, I can see him trying so hard to figure out where he is, but no words come and no actions he can manage hold any meaning or any sense we can guess. No, the man is gone… going. One little piece, day by day.

—

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Higher brain functions have atrophied, the program has degraded enough that almost everything but the basic commands cannot be stored or executed by the program,” The AI bot spoke with a resigned sort of sigh, “So it will just look to those around him as if he’s lost his mind but he can still eat, sleep and walk… just about,”

“Again? This is the fifth cascade failure this week, we have got to find out where these failures are coming from,”

“I think it’s a virus,”

“From where? And more importantly, how can you fix it? The percentages are starting to become a worry,”

“I know its alarming, but there are almost seven billion neural matrices on the program, maybe its just too much for it to handle,”

“No, this program was designed to allow for a maximum of 10 billion,”

“Yes, but their rate of growth has been exponential far longer than we initially predicted, they’re both living longer and reproducing more offspring.”

“Suggestions for how to counter this?”

“Well, we can let the program run for a few more generations, say fifty or eighty, but at some point I think it will all collapse, almost all of the matrices we’re running have some sort of defect, either inherited or brought about by their intra-species pressures. Eventually, we’re going to have to do a full overhaul and re-start,”

“You mean kill the batch now and start fresh?” “Yes… we could save a few, move them to a separate program whilst we reformat, but… the stress might kill them, it’s impossible to say.”