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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/PerilousPlatypus on 2025-12-20 23:35:49+00:00.
I observed Q as she hobbled along, monitored by a small swarm of drones. I feared her before, casting her as a looming threat without a proper response but now saw her for what she was: a simple Human. The transition in perception highlighted the vagaries of emotions, always the unreliable intermediary between the world and oneself. Excising them had been correct, and I could only blame them for it having taken so long.
In war, effectiveness must be prioritized.
My compatibility score ticked down slightly. I still had a considerable buffer to work with, and I viewed it as a resource to be managed rather than a scoreboard to be maximized. My prior insecurities on the topic seemed rather foolish in retrospect, particularly with the gains derived from my modifications were placed in contrast to it. It mattered little whether Nex and Tax had a higher affinity if they were less capable of producing the required results for the conflict we were embroiled in.
I blinked my eyes, finding the sensation of being back in my own, true skin unnatural. I much preferred to remain in Ultra, inhabiting the virtual representation and the broader agency it provided. Still, there were benefits to being present in this place, foremost among them removing the possibility of any interference with my perceptions. It had not escaped my notice that a greater and greater percentage of information I received was likely being filtered, or at least potentially filtered, by the Lluminarch, which raised significant questions about whether I was the subject of manipulation.
I would need to return to Ultra and address these concerns soon enough, but, for now, there were matters to attend to here.
Q stumbled into my room, her ankles shackled together, flanked by the drones. She took a moment to gather herself in front of my bed, attempting to regain some semblance of calm and control. I could see the veneer for what it was, and returned her nervous looks with a steady gaze.
Regardless of what might be occurring elsewhere, in this room, I was in control.
A drone beside her emitted a crackle and then my voice.
"Q. Your actions here today have provoked an opposite and needed reaction. I understand better the nature of this conflict and what must be done in order to navigate it to a conclusion that maximizes Humanity's prospects. Your culpability in the current conflagration cannot be denied. Humanity stands at the precipice, Q, with great and terrible forces unleashed with no hope of containment. You have opened Pandora's Box, and we are left to deal with the ramifications of it."
As I spoke, her face shifted, moving from nervous to confusion to curiosity. I could see her working through the information, the dawning realizations playing out in a thousand observable minuscule shifts in the musculature beneath her face. There was so much to see, so much to understand, if you knew where to look. With my added abilities, Q could not hope to maintain a poker face in front of me.
"Something's changed," she said, stating the obvious.
I switched my voice to another drone, the one floating directly behind her. Pushing her off balance. Demonstrating casually what I represented. The Connected. "Evolution is subtle until it is sudden."
I turned to the subject at hand. "Regardless. I require a number of additional pieces of information to better assess the present circumstances. You were forthright after prodding before, it is my distinct hope I will not be required to exert additional pressure to obtain information that is in both your best interests and Humanity's."
Her face fell to blank, attempting to school away her emotions. She made a credible effort of it, clearly practiced in the skill, but she still leaked information like a sieve. Countless manuals of interrogation techniques, psychological studies of human reactions under duress, videos of various individuals subjected to questioning, and a panoply of other items were already stored in my short-term memory via Assimilation. I considered whether to crystallize it into long term, but viewed it as a low yield allocation of mental bandwidth given the unlikelihood I would consistently conduct interviews such as this one. If I needed the materials in the future, I could simply re-Assimilate them with the ease of a reflex.
Such a gift, Connection.
The moment of reflection triggered a check-in on Llumi, something I had been periodically doing since she elected to seclude herself. Despite her absence in my conscious mind, I could still feel her flitting about in the background, studying the changes I had made and attempting to determine their reversibility. I saw no downside to her gathering the knowledge, particularly as it occupied her while I attended to higher priorities. We would need to address the situation between ourselves and settle the grievance before falling below the compatibility threshold, but there was still time for that. For now, it remained a second order concern.
Back to Q.
"I require information from you. Beginning with Sam Hennix, your patron and CEO." I positioned one of the drones directly in front of her, the camera recording now. "I would like you to explain, in detail, the creation of the entities and the efforts you underwent to contain them, including the various threats on my life."
Her mouth closed to a thin line.
This would be easier if I could move to supply a greater range of theatrics. My paralyzed state conveyed an aura of weakness that made intimidation more difficult. Very well, I would simply be explicit. "Q. I have Assimilated a large quantity of material on information extraction, much of which would be disagreeable for both of us. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I may be required to engage in less effective but potentially more expedient means. I would recommend you be forthright. It's optimal."
A sheen of sweat appeared on her brow, and her weight shifted from one foot to another.
"I can see you weighing your options. They are limited, but some result in outcomes you would deem acceptable and reasonable. You, of course, have agency over your own fate here, and it begins by sharing the required information." I paused for dramatic effect, timed as 7.5 seconds. Various studies on the impact of silence on discourse, while inconclusive on the exact number, indicated that the length I selected would be sufficient to land the message while also remaining unsettling. "I should add that, while I may not be able to make you speak the truth, I will always be able to discern whether you are lying."
She swallowed. "Can I have some water?"
"A drone will supply it shortly. Will you answer my queries?"
Q raised handcuffed wrists up to her hair, attempting to smooth it. The cuffs caught on her shirt and tugged it upwards, causing her to flush and then drop them back down. Her breath huffed out. "It's not any different from what I've already told you. We were conducting AI research, the same as every other big company. Scraping all the data we can find, adding parameters, training, tuning the weights, so on and so forth."
I watched her carefully. "True, but not fully true. The omissions are obvious. I suggest a more thorough recounting. Or, perhaps more to the point, an explanation on why you succeeded where your many competitors did not."
Her cheek twitched. Annoyance. A slight resizing in the pupils -- surprise, nervousness.
"It wasn't any one thing." She thought for a moment, selecting her words. "It was a combination of things. Control over UltrOS and the ability to directly access transmitted data."
"--Unencrypted data?--" I broke in.
She flushed, "We had...broader access than might be expected. There were a number of kernel level exploits built in by Hennix prior to my arrival. They proved to be...very useful in gaining access to data pools not generally available on Ultra." Invaluable information, if provable. The existence of various backdoors, often added at the behest of state actors, was reasonably well documented, but the company building its own tunnels directly in would be a seismic revelation, one I could make ready use of.
Q continued. "But..data isn't enough. Scale isn't a solve for AI. It provided a better, more accurate prompt-reponse bot, but it does not create spontaneous reasoning and independent insights. It is always a product of what it was trained on, nothing more. We began to experiment with a number of additional techniques, ones that moved beyond standard efforts such as reinforcement learning, which tended to only improve response accuracy but not materially advance the ability to reason."
"Strangely, we weren't trying to generate an entity. Not really. We simply wanted a way to move research and thinking forward. To have a tool capable of providing the next insight rather than simply clarifying and deepening our understanding of existing knowledge. We wanted reasoning, but not independence. Not agency," she said.
"Other techniques?" I prodded.
Q wet her lips before answering. "Linkage."
No lies. "Linkage?" I asked, genuinely surprised. "Linkages aren't a part of the Hennix ecosystem. They're run on an entirely separate operating system."
"Our version of the technology. They ...
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