Puzzles

October 21 2134

"Training time." Mac sighs as he opens my door.

"Didn't even knock? Rude." I flash a smile at him. He ignores it.

"Come on, Rachel's waiting." He grumbles, turning to start back down the hall.

"Aw, c'mon, talk to me! I never get to leave my room, what's been going on?"

"Nothing that concerns you." He says through gritted teeth. 

"Hey, I just want to stay up to date on news. Is that too much to ask?"

"Don't you have the entire internet in your brain?" He spits, "Can't you just look up some news outlet?"

"I would if I had connection here." I reply, which is half true. Most of the facility is an internet deadzone, but I also want to talk to someone. I want these people to get that I'm a person, however I can. If that means nagging them into believing me, so be it. 

"I know where all of the dead zones are, 72. This isn't one of them. You can look at the news yourself."

"Really?" I question, unconvinced. "How long have you even been working here?"

"Long enough to know where the internet dead zones are."

"How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"Pull up the internet." He glares at me. "Because you're not gonna trick me into taking out my phone."

"I am shocked that you assume I'd try to trick you!" I say, dramatically bringing my hand to rest over my heart. He rolls his eyes and returns his focus forward. 

After a few moments of silence I decide to listen to some music. Since HomoTech decided to start making clones before the technology caught up, particularly in the reconstruction of the brain, there are major flaws. To counteract this, they decided to supplement the parts of the brain they couldn't replicate with a computer called a Cortex, which, among keeping me alive and letting me think, also gives me access to the internet. But there are still flaws, like the fact that I have to manually save my memory every couple hours, though I could probably figure out how to autosave it. The worst downside, though, is that my hearing's a lot more sensitive, so I can't listen to any loud or synthesized music, which sucks since I'm a fan of heavy bass and drums. But at least I have old music. Music from the early-to-mid 20th century has a lot of big sound, but it's all muted and fuzzy because of the recording equipment, so it's safe for me to listen to. 

I put my music on shuffle and "Blue Moon" by Frank Sinatra comes on. I bounce as I walk to the rhythmic brass bopping along with Sinatra's smooth voice.

"Blue moon, you saw me standing alone," I sing along to myself, "without a love in my heart, without a dream of my own."

We eventually make it to the pretty much the other side of the facility, where the training rooms are. I'm not sure what happened to architecture and building layout in the past 80 years, but nothing about the design of this facility makes sense to me. Everything important is super far apart, and none of the department placements seem to have any rhyme or reason to them. Unless that's intentional, which would still be weird.

The training rooms are a fair size, maybe 30 feet wide and deep, and 15 feet tall. The walls and ceiling are all an off white-ish gray and the floor is slightly darker. Every surface is slightly springy, but I couldn't tell you why. I imagine there used to be some sort of physical training in here, but now it's mostly mental training. I had a very brief training session in self defence, enough to hold a fight with an unarmed person, but not enough to overpower anyone in case I "went batshit and decided to rebel," as Mac put it.

Today we have a table and two chairs set up. Most of my training courses are focused on plain negotiation, but I had a couple on sabotage a week or two ago. Because they decided to replicate the memories of the person they cloned me from, a famous negotiator named Matthew Anston - who the guys at HomoTech tend to refer to as The Original - who tried to single-handedly de-escalate global tensions leading up to the third World War in 2050, I've been catching on pretty quickly. Most of the training is a formality,  to make sure they didn't accidentally get rid of any information when they cloned His brain. But some things He was never trained in, or was morally opposed to doing. 

Today there's a puzzle out. It's one of those with the 4 rings and the 3 posts where you have to move all of the rings to another post without putting any ring on top of one smaller than it. Rachel is seated in one of the chairs, and after a moment of me standing by the door she gestures for me to sit down.

I stride over to the table and take the open seat. "So, you want me to do a puzzle?"

"That is correct." She replies calmly. "Are you familiar with this puzzle?"

"Yeah, it's not too hard." I answer nonchalantly. "Matt used to have to do these all the time to test his problem solving and comprehension."

"Care to do it for us now?" She inquires, gesturing to the puzzle. I give her a small nod and get to work. Smallest to peg 2, 2nd to peg 3, smallest on top of that, 3rd to peg 2, smallest back to peg 1, 2nd to peg 2, smallest to peg 2, biggest to peg 3, smallest to peg 1 again, 2nd to peg 3, smallest to peg 2, 2nd to peg 1, smallest back to peg 1, 3rd to peg 3, smallest to peg 2, 2nd to peg 3, smallest to peg 3.

"Done." I smile. Rachel nods.

"Good." She says. "Now, onto the next one."

We sit there for an hour, Rachel giving me puzzle after puzzle to complete. It's not much more than busy work for me, even without help from the Cortex. Most of the puzzles are the sort you have to deconstruct by pushing in tiles or pulling out certain sections, and I get through about ten of them before Rachel gives a firm nod, and says "That's all for today."

Great. A trek to the other side of the facility for an hour of playing with puzzles.

"That's it?" I ask her, annoyance creeping into my voice. "Does this even have anything to do with my so-called 'training' you have me doing?"

"It's testing your cognitive function." She replies simply. "We need to make sure that there aren't any issues with your capacity to understand, analyze, and retain information."

"If you're so uncertain about the technology, you could've just… I don't know, waited to start this project?"

"Starting this project despite our… limited…. Knowledge of some components of the human brain, was in the best interests of the company. Though the more time I spend with you the more I regret agreeing to that decision, given the drastic changes in personality our shortcomings have caused."

"Gee, thanks." I grumble. "Nice to know my creation was a regrettable decision."

"Mac, could you just take him back already?" She sighs tiredly. "I don't have enough energy for this."

"Come on." Mac says to me, turning to leave. I growl a little under my breath as I follow him back out into the hall. 

"What's her problem?" I ask myself, almost too quiet to hear. 

"She wasn't trained to do this," Mac responds. How did he hear me? "When she signed up we didn't think we'd have actual sentient people for years to come. But here you are, a pain in our collective asses."

I nod a little, and the pair of us silently agree not to talk for the rest of the way back.