WARNING: The following story is made for fans of modular/natural body magic/detachment/etc. If you are not a member of that community, I strongly advise that you turn back now. Things will get freaky. As a (laughably-super-belated) Halloween story, it also contains guro and macabre elements. If you are easily grossed out, please turn back now.
"I can't help but feel I've created some discomfort." Said the dour ginger at the head of the table, his beady hazel eyes magnified behind thick round spectacles as they scanned his six silent guests. "If anyone would care to voice their concerns, I'd be happy to assuage them. We are, after all, scientists. We ought to be able to hold a rational discussion about my project."
"Ahem. YOUR Project, sweetie? Last time I checked, you didn't design the life support tanks, their suspension fluids, or the dura mater shelling process." Came the slightly distorted and fully passive aggressive voice of his wife, the LEDs in her life support tank making the clear liquid her brain floated in change from a bubbly bright bubblegum pink to a slightly angrier rose hue. All eyes that weren't already staring at the macabre centerpiece of the dining room table, the life support vessel with "Dr. Ophelia Cortes-O'Brien" stenciled into its thick steel base, shifted their attention to it at this outburst, unable to ignore the elephant in the room any longer.
"Sorry, dearie, OUR Project." Dr O'Brien corrected, bowing his head in conciliation even as he fought to keep his eyes from rolling. Turning his attention back to his guests, he asked "So, who here would like to voice what's on their mind? Surely my wife isn't the only one."
"Dr O'Brien, I-" Came the squeaky voice of a small, dark skinned man to the host's right, his voice dying as soon as the hosts' intense gaze snapped to him. He looked like a nervous schoolboy caught in the principle's office despite being at least ten years the host's senior, and after swallowing and scratching his smooth shaven cheek, the guest forced himself to continue "I don't mean to belittle your achievements. Why, just this morning I wouldn't have believed the technologies you've demonstrated could exist within our lifetimes! But, uh, er..."
"But?" Dr O'Brien impatiently asked.
"But you're goddamned insane." Came the reply, delivered not by the terrified man on O'Brien's right, but the smartly dressed woman of Southeast Asian features next to him.
"I was actually speaking to Dr Preacher, Dr Swami." Dr O'Brien said, turning his attention. "But I appreciate your input. Is it a clinical diagnosis, or a candid remark?"
"Both." She spat, squaring her slender shoulders and meeting his gaze. "Whatever your concerns for humanity's future, your proposed solutions and the deeds you've done are indicative of a deeply disturbed, delusional, and immoral mind. What you've done to your wife..."
Dr O'Brien scowled. "As we've established, my dear wife was not only a willing participant, but was instrumental in the creation of this process."
"Yeah! We're both the brains of this operation, even if only one of us looks the part!" Ophelia piped in, snickering at her own joke.
"Peachy." Came a new voice, this one belonging to the youngest and most Australian man in the room. "But that don't make me partial to this wackadoo scheme. Ripping out our brains 'n shoven'em into a supercomputer, just hoping we'll be able to hash out the world's woes at cyber-speed like glorified monkeys at typewriters... not happening. Yer right mad cunts for even thinking something so piss brained would solve anything. We could figure out how to fix everything ailing mankind tomorrow and the daft fascists running this world wouldn't abide a word of it. Politicos don't care about nothing but their own ability to stay in power. Er, no offense, Han."
The middle aged Chinese woman across from him rolled her eyes. "What the esteemed Dr Cooper is getting at is that politicians protect the perceived interest of their peoples. What is good for humanity as a collective may be detrimental to individual nations, making cooperation unfeasible."
Dr O'Brien sighed. "As I've explained, the first problem we'd tackle would be creating a clandestine network of funds, resources, and operatives to enact our solutions. With your diverse fields of expertise, the unfathomable speed of brain to brain communication, lack of bodily distractions and limitations like sleeping and eating, and the suite of hacking tools at our disposal, setting the foundation for this network shouldn't take more than a few weeks. Months, at worst. And from there-"
"You and your Mrs don't know much about cyber-security, do you?" Came a new naysayer, a larger one with masculine features and feminine fashion.
"No, but that's why you're here, Dr Springer. Your peerless knowledge of both physical and digital internet infrastructure should overcome any and all electronic obstacles." Dr O'Brien retorted.
"While I certainly appreciate being buttered up, that wasn't my point." Dr Spinger said, buttering another roll and biting it in half in one motion. "Hacking into things isn't really the hard part; it's staying off the radar. If this operation ever developed to appreciable scale, any government worth its salt is gonna notice and send out the brute squad to kibosh it."
Ophelia's speakers let out a groan. "Look, long odds or not, don't you think saving the world is worth a try? Do you really wanna go down in history as yet more nobodies that did nothing while the world burned? Look, if this doesn't work? We'll still be legends! Immortalized in the hearts and minds of the hopeful! And also, y'know, literally immortal. With proper maintenance and power, anyway."
"Actually, I've been meaning to ask about the jar's power supply." Dr Preacher piped in, grabbing Ophelia's tank and pulling it closer, much to her giggling delight. "Keeping you alive must be energy intensive, and from what you've claimed about the central computer's capabilities, it'd have to be using at least as much electricity as a data center. Surely your home's not on the grid, this far out in the Styx, and I haven't seen any solar panels or wind turbines around. Is this estate hydroelectric, or-"
"ENOUGH!" Roared the last guest, slamming his palms against the table and launching to his feet. The towering, gaunt, and furious figure extended a misshapen finger at Dr Vaughn O'Brien. "You're monsters, you and your wife. I will have no part in this hideous farce."
Dr O'Brien looked around. "Does Dr Karloff speak for you all?"
One by one, each guest nodded in agreement and stood to take their leave with Dr Karloff.
Dr O'Brien took a sip of grape juice from his wine glass. "Unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. But tell me Dr Karloff, before you go; did you enjoy the bread?"
The crooked features of Dr Karloff's face twisted in confusion. "What?"
"You're the agriculturalist, no? The rolls were homemade, and used genetically perfected grain. Among other things. Did you enjoy it?" Asked Dr O'Brien, looking pointedly at his wife.
Dr Karloff's thick brow furrowed, then every muscle in his face wrenched taught with fury. With alarming speed he grabbed Dr O'Brien's lapel and raised a fist to splatter the host's teeth all over the hardwood. "What have you done?!"
"Oh, shucks, was that my queue? Sorry!" Ophelia chirped, just before her LEDs turned navy blue. As one the guests collapsed, eyes wide in shock as their bodies spasmed uncontrollably then went still.
Dr O'Brien sighed. "Jesus Christ, how did you forget the signal? You picked it! You know Karloff was accepted to university on a boxing scholarship, he could've taken my head off!"
"Are you sure I made that, this time?" She teased, her speakers mimicking a noise like she was sticking her tongue out. "Besides, what's wrong with losing your head?"
Dr O'Brien responded only with a huff. Looking over the half dozen unconscious scientists flopped around his dinner table, he added "Perhaps you're on to something, you know. I wouldn't be throwing my back out tonight if I didn't have one."
-
"Mwuuuh-uhhh?" The esteemed Dr Han Li-An burbled, eyelids fighting valiantly to part.
"Sweetie! We got a live one!" Ophelia cooed.
"Han?" Dr O'Brien guessed
"Yup! Told you we should've used rice instead of bread!" Ophelia playfully scolded.
"And I told you I didn't want to stereotype!" Dr O'Brien replied, barely audible over the sounds of some kind of drill or saw or other whirring machinery.
"Other cultures eat rice too! You know I make killer Mexican rice!" Dr Cortes-O'Brien replied.
"I don't think your body is half the chef you are." Dr O'Brien replied, shaking some kind of liquid off his hands. He said something else, though it was entirely drowned out by the roar of a vacuum.
Dr Han screwed her eyes shut, focused, and slowly reopened them. She wished she hadn't, as she found herself in the surgical suite where Dr O'Brien had detailed his technique for quickly and safely extricating Ophelia's brain from her skull. Li-An yelped as she caught sight of the once imposing body of Dr Karloff, now limply slumped in a plastic lawn chair before her with its uncapped and emptied head hung low and revealing a disturbingly clean interior. Only leather belts around his wrists and ankles kept his body from spilling to the floor, and looking down Dr Han saw that she was likewise bound to an identical chair, likely bought in bulk.
Dr Han thought about thrashing, twisting, and doing everything else in her power to break freak from the flimsy plastic chair, but couldn't compel her limbs to move. They hardly felt like hers, twitching unresponsively as she begged them to answer her. With a sinking feeling, Dr Han realized "You drugged us?!"
"Well, eh, technically, uh, nah." Dr O'Brien answered. "It was actually nanobots latching to your central nervous system and delivered a paralyzing shock at my wife's command. If you'll recall, nanobot integration is the first and most crucial step of the procedure, as you wouldn't be able to interface with the machine, communicate with each other, or even survive the extraction without the nanobots modifying your biochemistry and creating a stable cerebro-network link." He explained. "The nanobots were baked into the dinner rolls, but you hardly ate any, so we'll have to perform an additional injection to top you off."
Han hissed as she took a needle to the neck, not expecting it to come so quickly. "Sorry! I promise that's the only part of this that'll hurt. Your pain receptors should be shutting down any second now!" Ophelia said, right as a shambling mass of pallid flesh stumbled into Dr Han's view. It was the body that had once been Dr Ophelia Cortes-O'Brien, reduced to a glorified zombie with a collection of computer components haphazardly jammed into her emptied skull and spilling out over the rim like an overloaded Halloween bucket. And as if that sight weren't unsettling enough,
"You're naked?!" Dr O'Brien demanded, shielding his eyes.
"Oh, shucks, sorry! You know the AI pilot's a bit rough. Dress probably caught on something and my body just ditched the clothes to get free." She casually explained. Taking on a slightly affronted tone, she went on "Why are you acting like there's a horror movie going on, darling? It's still my body, you know? As fine as ever!"
Her body crashed face first into a wobbly shelf crammed to bursting with surgical implements, sending a heavy duty circular saw tumbling from the top shelf. In an improbably unfortunate series of events, the body threw its head back to look up and assess the threat right as the falling saw's trigger was pulled by another protruding instrument, the whirring saw effortlessly carving through Ophelia's neck and sending her circuitry stuffed head crashing to the ground while her body jolted upright and froze stiff. Not a drop of blood was spilled, only electric sparks and a few spurts of a shimmering clear liquid as the decapitated body stumbled back a few steps, windmilling its arms for balance, then fell spread eagle to the floor.
"Uh, almost as fine as ever." Ophelia corrected, her jar going pale and her synthesized voice perfectly implying a cringe as she watched her former head flop around on the floor like a fish out of water, propelled by its dumbly flapping jaw as its eyes bugged out. "Are you sure it's a good idea to convert the rest of their bodies into drones? We kind of suck at making AI. One of these dumb-asses blundering around may be enough trouble."
"We'll need all the hands we can get; I can't be tending the machine 24/7." Dr O'Brien said, picking up his wife's head and disconnecting one of the more prominent wires of her CPU. The face went slack, and he gave it a quick peck on the cheek before tossing it onto a cluttered workbench. With a groan and a grumble, he dragged the still twitching body across the grimy floor and shoved the tangled heap of limbs and curves under the same workbench, grabbing a wad of rags and shoving them into its throat to staunch the flow of mystery fluid. "I'll fix that tomorrow, while I'm converting the others. For now, let's finish up with Han so I can go to bed."
"Vaughn, please, don't do this! I know how you feel, watching everything go to shit while nobody does anything, b-umph!" Dr Han started, until a leather ball gag was pulled over her head and shoved into her mouth. She tried to spit the gag out without thinking about whose dried spit she could now taste, but she could do little more than gnash at it and stare pleadingly at her captor.
"Sorry to interrupt, but I'm already far past the point of no return. I'm sure your speech would be lovely, but I don't intend to waste everyone's time." Dr O'Brien explained, grabbing a much smaller and more precise saw off the shelf and giving it a few whirs before approaching the thrashing Dr Han. "Dearie, could you hold her still, please?"
"You got it!" Dr Ophelia said, her tank flashing between white and yellow a few times before Dr Han went stock straight. "Should I knock her out again, too?"
"Uh..." Dr O'Brien wondered, scratching his neatly trimmed beard. "No. Maybe watching the operation will give her some sense of closure. Or PTSD. Either way, it'll provide useful data. If we ever expand our think-tank, it'll help to know how best to ease people into it."
Without further adieu or any of the preparations normally preceding surgery, Dr O'Brien fired up the saw and carefully dug its screaming teeth into Dr Han's forehead. As she'd been promised, she indeed felt no pain as the saw carved through her flesh and bone. It hardly even bled; only a few dribbling lines of blood and cerebrospinal fluid running down her skin and hair as Vaughn carved a steady line around her skull with practiced precision. In spite of everything, Dr Han couldn't help but be a little annoyed that her beautiful, dark, luxuriously straightened hair was now cascading down her shoulders and piling into her lap as the mad doctor hacked through it without a second thought.
"There. Just a little off the top." Dr O'Brien teased, holding out the saw expectantly. A few moments passed before he turned and spotted his wife's headless body and motionless head, reminding him that he was down an assistant. "Ah, right." He said, returning to the shelf and setting the saw down himself, in an entirely different spot. "Now, if you'll recall our video presentation, the next phase is separating your dura mater from the meninges and hardening the dura into a protective live-wax coating using the... uh, I suppose we haven't a name for this process, yet."
"The Ophelia Procedure!" Ophelia called.
"Well, I suppose you DID come up with this part." O'Brien replied, clearly not into the name. "If we ever patent this, we'll circle back to the names." He grabbed a device like an over-sized laser pointer and pressed it to the seam in Han's forehead, where with a click O'Brien's glasses reflected a brilliant green glare. He rotated the device around the seam carefully, and in sequence Han's left eye and then her right went a little fuzzy, then sound became tinny and distant on her right then her left, and time itself seemed to shift materially but indescribably. Everything felt 'off', like the world was now being dictated in great detail To Li-An but she wasn't experiencing it firsthand.
"You may feel a little disoriented right now." Dr O'Brien explained, setting the laser tool aside. "Now that your dura mater has been converted, it's not only separated itself from the surrounding tissues and skull, but has closed off around your optical nerves and cochlea, severing them. The nanobots are still transmitting the signals, but of course they aren't quite the same as organic nerves. Now, the only thing your brain is attached to is your spinal chord. Which is what allows me to safely do this."
With a noise between a cartoonish pop and a horror movie squelch, Dr O'Brien effortlessly lifted the top of Dr Han's skull off, showing it off to the furious victim before playfully plopping it onto Ophelia's tank with a flippant "Care for a new wig, dearie?"
The brain giggled, her water blushing pink, though she did try to be professional and say "If you're trying to avoid giving her PTSD, this might not be helping."
He shrugged. "I just want her to see it's no big deal. It's just body parts. Irrelevant, compared to the mind. Speaking of, the next phase of this operation, as you should know if you were paying attention to our video presentation, is the separation of the spinal column and extraction of the brain."
A nervous chuckle tried to squeeze past the gag in Dr Han's mouth. While the first three steps of her mutilation involved an army of microscopic robots, a precision bone saw, and a laser device beyond her comprehension, it was quite the whiplash to see Dr O'Brien approaching now with an old shop-vac still covered in sawdust and a curved woodworking knife with a chipped handle bearing a $7.99 price sticker from a second hand store. Seeing her incredulity, Dr O'Brien meekly told her "Money doesn't grow on trees, you know. We save where we can."
Ignoring Dr Han's eye roll, Dr O'Brien slid the knife between the side of her skull and her brain, the laterally curved blade following the contour of her skull and skimming along the side of her brain with a strangely ticklish sensation. From deep within her subconscious, Li-An Han remembered her middle school science teacher telling the class that the brain had no nerve endings at all, while explaining how brain freezes worked and why they were a misnomer. In direct defiance of old Mr Han (no relation), she distinctly felt the knife skimming along the outer folds of her brain, clear as someone touching her arm. Whatever the lasers and nanobots had done, it had given her new sensations even as her old senses were failing her.
Dr Han's eyes went wide as saucers, then fell into an unnaturally neutral expression as the knife painlessly but jarringly cut her brain from her spine. While she could, in a sense, still feel her body, it was tingling and numb like every piece had simultaneously fallen asleep. For all practical purposes, her brain was already all that remained of her.
Dr O'Brien carefully extricated the knife, then grabbed the shop vac's extra-wide nozzle and placed it over her open skull. "Don't worry, the reinforced dura-mater will keep your brain in one piece, and the vacuum's reservoir is filled with the same preservative fluid Ophelia's in. Everything will go black once your brain leaves the range of the nanobots in your body, but when you wake up you'll be hooked up to the central computer with all your colleagues, and we can get started on saving the world."
"Don't worry, once you're all hooked up in the machine, I'll be there to get you all acclimatized. It may take some getting used to, but trust me, losing your mind is a lot nicer than it sounds! I'm sure we'll be one big happy family before you know it!" Ophelia cheered, flashing sickeningly cheerful shades of green and yellow.
Li-An Han no longer had the capacity to even move her facial muscles into a frown. All she could do was take in the last sensations of her physical body as Dr O'Brien flipped the switch and sucked her brain out. The world vanished like she'd entered the tunnel of a roller coaster, the sensation heightened by the feeling of her brain bouncing down the ribbed walls of the plastic hose of the shop-vac before splashing down into the surprisingly viscous liquid that would keep her indefinitely suspended. A moment later, Dr Han felt herself bump into something inside the pool of liquid, something equally soft and spongy as herself. She remembered the empty skull of Dr Karloff, and realized that she wasn't alone in here. In a bit of poetic foreshadowing, she'd be sharing this tank with her colleagues before they were all hooked up to Vaughn and Ophelia's accursed supercomputer. And as she bounced off and drifted away from Dr Karloff's brain, all Li-An could think of was her son, Jun. Would she ever see him again? What would he think became of his mother? Where would he... wait, hadn't she seen a story strikingly similar to Dr O'Brien's brain scheme in one of Jun's stupid video games?
-
OPHELIA- Hiya! Me again! How's everyone feeling?
COOPER- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA [Character limit reached]
SWAMI- Same.
SPRINGER- Honestly? Kinda peaceful. No back pain, no dysphoria, just... I dunno, me? Like, purest me. My thoughts.
OPHELIA- Yaas, slay!
KARLOFF- Ophelia, mark my words, I will find a way to kill you and your husband. Slowly, painfully, and justifiably.
PREACHER- No sight. No sound. No sensation. Hollow voices affixed with meaningless titles echo in the recesses of my mind. Has it been 10 nanoseconds, or 10 thousand years? There's no knowing, nor anything to be gained knowing.
HAN- Do you play a lot of video games? Does Vaughn?
COOPER- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA [Character limit reached]
COOPER- [Temporarily muted by admin]
OPHELIA- Terrific! Seems most of you are getting used to things already! As you might've guessed, I'll be running most of the day to day operations inside the machine while my hubby takes care of the more "big picture" parts of saving the world outside!
OPHELIA- Trust me, what we're doing here is bigger than any of us, and one day, one sooner than you're expecting, you'll be proud of what we've done!
KARLOFF- I'll be proud when I've killed you both from the confines of this prison.
PREACHER- How many days have passed? How long have we been imprisoned in this machine? There's no time in here! Everything is, was, will be, as one!
OPHELIA- Great question! Yes, things can be a little disorienting inside the machine, particularly in chat. Brain to brain communication is all but instantaneous, with only a slight delay to transcribe the messages for coherent record keeping. Reading and...
OPHELIA- then dictating a 100 page report of "War and Peace" would take the same amount of time as saying and reading "Hi." The time dilation is less extreme, variable, and adjustable outside chat and solo reflection, and once you've proven appropriately...
OPHELIA- cooperative, I'll allow you to manually adjust your own perception of time where possible. Of course, it won't always be possible or even practical, since the outside world still operates at one speed. No point perceiving 10,000,000 years passing...
OPHELIA- while you wait 10 minutes for someone to email you back.
PREACHER- ...So how long have we been in here? Feels like I was stewing in the dark for months.
OPHELIA- In this chatroom? A few nanoseconds. In the machine? 12ish hours, depending on the order you were integrated. Calibrations took a bit longer than expected, but now your minds are linked to the cameras and microphone systems. How'd you like to take a...
OPHELIA- peak?
[CAM-00: ACTIVE. FEED T1,T2,T3,T4,T5,T6,T7]
Seeing through a camera was nothing like watching a video. Watching a video involved flawed eyes absorbing and imperfect optic nerves transmitting information that needed to be interpreted and extrapolated by a mind with its own peculiarities. Having a video feed shoved directly into the brain, bypassing the eyes entirely and overruling the natural interpretation of subjective perception to deliver an entirely factual view of what was being captured, was alien. They saw the precise color pigments and pixel counts of the bags under Dr Vaughn O'Brien's eyes as he groggily eyed his coffee mug, and the exact shape of the fleck of dust on the camera lens which partially obfuscated the work bench, where Karloff's naked body was cracked open and being crammed full of cybernetic components by the dull eyed and animated bodies of Dr Swami and Dr Preacher. These bodies, while at least clothed in the same outfits they'd been wearing to dinner, were no less unnerving for their open topped heads stuffed with inscrutable but precisely captured and cataloged electronics.
Everything, in fact, was unnervingly defined, the details almost too numerous and sharp to bear.
KARLOFF- What the fuck are you doing to me?!
OPHELIA- Well Vaughn can't keep the machine running on his own, and he needed me on the inside to keep order, so we're turning your bodies into automated workers. Don't worry, we're not going anything kinky with them! They're purely labor drones!
PREACHER- So, slaves?
OPHELIA- They're not sentient!
SWAMI- How does that make anything better?
OPHELIA- They're inanimate objects! We aren't abusing real people!
PREACHER- So we're free to leave?
OPHELIA- NO! I mean, uh, whatever, moving on, let's watch the video feed in real time, get you acclimatized to time dilations.
The brains had no stomachs to lurch. All life sustaining nutrients, oxygen, and the chemicals required to produce emotional responses, were absorbed from the life sustaining fluid they were suspended in and distributed directly into their brains via the nanobots. That said, the brains experienced the same emotional response as a lurching stomach as the world shifted from a functional still frame to real time. The brains watched the moving collection of pixels representing Dr O'Brien pick up the representation of his mug and sip. He glanced at the machine, and scrambled to set down his mug and swallow when he noticed a light change from mostly #d2d830 to mostly #eb1420. His mouth moved, but a deafening silence persisted. A silence before known only to those born deaf, for whom even the ambient noise of breath and the subtle but constant pulse of blood through the inner ears was alien. It was true silence.
OPHELIA- Right, lets get the mics on.
"-ope you've had a pleasant morning, all things considering. Darling?" Came the hollow voice of the mad doctor, his translated and synthesized tones sounding more machine now than man.
"Yes dear?" Echoed Ophelia, her voice both inside and outside the machine.
"How's everyone doing?" He asked, feigning concern for their well being.
"Some better than others, but generally above expectations! Only Doctor Cooper is still overwhelmed with existential terror, the rest are producing coherent thought!" She reported.
"I see. Do you think it'd help if they could see themselves? Get some closure that this is the way things will be. How is Dr Han handling this compared to the others?" He asked.
"Well, we can kind of see the drones from here working on Karloff. It's caused some controversy, if I'm being honest." She reported. "As for Li-An, she's been awfully quiet. I'll give her access to the mic, see if she wants to say anything."
Li-An Han didn't feel something in a tactile sense, but had a sense of something happening, like a memory of something she'd never experienced. She tried to wrap her head, so to speak, around how she used to talk, what she did with her throat, lungs, tongue, and lips, to make noises. She had no way of doing any of that now, but she tried anyway. "Miuhringpuneughflx?- Erom?" Echoed in the microphones, from a speaker located just below the camera's point of view. "Aryo?" she tried again, "Elho?" she tried "Hell Oh." she tried "Hello." she succeeded.
"Good morning, Dr Han. The speech synthesizer seems to be working well. There was some concern if your voices would be as accurate as Ophelia's, given the much more limited sound sampling the AI had to work with." Dr Vaughn O'Brien reported, a smug smirk stretching his beard back.
"I donasf..." she stopped and thought about taking a deep breath, the speakers replicating the sound of a huff with a most uncanny twinge. "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." She said, slowly, focusing on every syllable as it passed from thought to digital approximation. "We fair four fire for far fowl... No, this sounds nothing like me." She answered, coldly.
"It sounds exactly like you." Dr O'Brien insisted. "It just doesn't sound how you perceived you sounded. Everyone hears their own voice differently when they are speaking, but when they hear it played back to them, it sounds entirely alien. You are no longer hearing your own voice from your perspective, but your own voice objectively."
"I hate it." Li-An said, the edges of her alien voice trembling.
"Most people hate properly hearing their own voice, but you get used to it with exposure." He replied.
"I don't think any amount of exposure will make me stop hating your voice." She said.
Vaughn chuckled dryly, removing his glasses and rubbing absolutely nothing from them. "Heh, I'm glad the extraction hasn't damaged your reasoning. It's rational for you to hate me. But, like I've always said, this too shall pass."
"Come up with that line all by yourself, did you?" Han asked rhetorically.
Replacing his glasses and rolling his eyes, Vaughn replied "As a matter of fact, I-FUCK!" as he glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of his drones. The drones seemed as adept at precision surgery as Ophelia's proved to be at basic walking, the one made from Dr Swami's body now holding its fingerless left hand up to its face to assess the damage, wiggling its lonely thumb stupidly. Meanwhile, Dr Preacher's drone set aside his power saw and picked up the long, limp, severed cock that had once belonged to Dr Karloff. It gathered the dejected penis up along with Swami's four fingers and tossed them into a bright yellow sandcastle bucket marked 'medical waste' in sharpie, right as the video feed cut abruptly to black. Or, rather, to nothingness, as even the concept of the color black vanished.
OPHELIA- Technical difficulties. We'll check back on the cameras later. Maybe in a few hours. For now, how about we take some time to learn about web browsing?
KARLOFF- I WILL FUCKING TEAR YOU APART! I WILL TEAR YOU APART AND I WILL BURN YOU TO ASH AND CINDER! DO YOU HEAR ME I WILL FUCKING FUCK YOU UP!
KARLOFF- [Temporarily muted by admin]
OPHELIA- Let's give him a little time to cool off.
COOPER- [Unmuted]
COOPER- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA [Character limit reached]
COOPER- [Temporarily muted by admin]
OPHELIA- OK so that's still a thing. Tell you what, if anyone wants to take a few minutes to be alone and collect their thoughts, I can disconnect you from group chat. Otherwise, I can walk you through some internet basics. No worries, there's no rush. Our...
OPHELIA- perception of time here is a lot less strenuous than in the material world.
PREACHER- Don't put me in the dark. I don't want to go back to that... silence.
SWAMI- Right off. They came right off. That was my hand. Those were mine. My wedding ring. My mother's. Popped right off. right off. My ring. My fingers. My fings. My hand. My hand. My hand. Mine. It mine. My mine.
SWAMI- [temporarily muted by admin]
SPRINGER- Yeah, I'm chill. Curious to see how the world wide web looks beamed right into my thoughts. Like something straight out of sci-fi!
HAN- I think that's where these idiots got all their bright ideas. Too many stupid movies and comics and video games. Turned their brains to mush before they started ripping them out.
OPHELIA- Alright, guess who's getting a time out to think about their attitude?
HAN- [temporarily muted by admin]
SPRINGER- Damn, dropping like flies out here. Guess it's just me and Preacher, then?
OPHELIA- I guess. But it's okay, they won't be too far behind. Relatively speaking, that is. Like I said, the time dilation online is a lot less extreme than in chats, even when pumping the breaks as hard as they can pump. So by the time we're done with the...
OPHELIA- introductory pleasantries, I'll have put them through a good few hours of solitary. Maybe days, if they seem particularly agitated.
SPRINGER- How'll you be able to tell? Just popping them back out every few seconds?
OPHELIA- Of course not! I can monitor everyone's private thoughts in here. They are all recorded, remember? I can just peek at what they're thinking and see if they should be let out.
SPRINGER- I think that's insanely creepy.
PREACHER- So not only are we bodiless thoughts, but now our thoughts aren't even our own?
OPHELIA- Vaughn and I just need to make sure that no thoughts are lost! Every little daydream could hold the secret to humanity's salvation, particularly when you're blowing through them so fast! With the speed we're thinking right now, we can imagine things...
OPHELIA- that would take mortals more than their mortal lifetime!
PREACHER- Mortals? Really? You're calling them... you do hear how insane you sound, don't you?
SPRINGER- You've been a brain in a jar for how long and you couldn't come up with a better excuse than that? You guys totally just want to spy on us. Make sure we aren't plotting anything.
OPHELIA- Well I guess you can just ponder those thoughts for a little while, alone. See you in... let's just say 5 seconds. I'll figure out later how long I want those 5 seconds to last.
SPRINGER- Oh come on don't be like that, I just want everyone to be upfront!
SPRINGER- [temporarily muted by admin]
PREACHER- NOT THE DARK, PLEASE!
PREACHER- [temporarily muted by admin]
OPHELIA- Smartasses. Heh. Smart no-asses. God Vaughn owes me big time for dealing with this shit. Wanted to save the world so bad coulda volunteered for jar duty his damned self. His stupid idea...