Tuesday, April 8, 2014

An Eye for an Eye

Previous
It turns out that losing use of my eyes wasn't all that bad. Sure, they were my two primary visual centers, but I could always use some satellite to see the world around me. With a little help from GPS, I was able to get home without a hitch (well, I did ram some geese at hypersonic speed, but I wasn't hurt by that).
I landed on the roof, hardly damaging anything. I took a second to sync up with my mansion security. There. In a few seconds I could have  hundred camera's for eyes.
YEOOCH! The human brain is wired for two eyes. Never forget that. Unless... Could I soup up my visual processing centers? With the help of an AI, I could probably process hundreds of sources.
I doubt it. The human brain isn't wired that way, you know.
We can multitask.
No, you can't. You can flip back and forth between tasks with great inefficiency.

I can walk and talk at the same time, and it doesn't even place a significant drain on my mental resources.
I'm so impressed. But the fact remains that serious multitasking is the job of computers, not people.
That's an arbitrary distinction.
But I knew he was right. If I don't trust myself to make significant alterations to my hand, how can I make serious alterations to my brain?
Okay. How long will it take to rebuild my eyes?
Depends how much we want to improve them.

I'm fine with the enhancements we had before. Entire visual spectrum.
We might as well add in polarization.
I'm not sure how my brain would interpret that but we could try. I assume we'd base it off those bird who can detect how light is polarized.
Sure.
We worked on my new eyes for some time. I was the big idea guy, Noetron was reasearch, Neurotron was handling assembly and logistics.
We hammered out a design and Neurotron began implementing it. Meanwhile, I got myself some eye-patches.
I know what you're thinking, and no, labcoat and  eye-patches is not the next big thing in supervillain fashion design.
I'm just saying it's a possibility.
A possibility if I want people to think I'm an idiot.
If you don't want people thinking that, you have an uphill battle.
Shut up.
I thought about how Vector had been able to get the drop on me. Going forward, I should certainly  have a program to keep tabs on prominent superheroes.
It also occurred to me I suffered from a certain lack of ranged weaponry. Maybe if I beefed up my wings a little bit?
There isn't enough material for that. The designs you're proposing would require at least half a kilogram of magnetic monopoles that we don't have.
We could make more.
You disassembled your big particle accelerator.
I was thinking we could create a lot of little particle accelerators. All of those fusion nodes that power us could be redesigned to create new material using excess power.
What followed was another storm of technological design. The kind you see in movies about scientists, where the look at cool 3-D models of stuff on their hologram projectors and say 'Eureka' a lot.
Just kidding! What followed was three hours of me staring at a blank sheet of paper trying to find a way to make microscopic particle accelerators out of magnetic monopoles. What I came up with operated at 0.4% efficiency, meaning that it would take about 350 years to get those new wings. I told Neurotron to go for it until I came up with something better.

Unfortunately, Cognis wasn't content to let me repair myself in peace. Instead, he decided to GChat me.
I know what you're thinking. And yes, while I do have holographic communicator, I don't go around giving my address to creep like Professor Cognis. But for some reason Google had automatically decided we were friends after I held the U.N. building hostage, and I'd never gotten around to blocking him.
"Three people injured, two more dead."
"Excuse me?"
"When you destroyed that facility. Two people were killed. Their names were Calvin Xu and Arnold Jacobson."
"Why are you telling me this?"
Cognis switched to video chat, overriding existing protocols and projecting himself onto my screen. I had the computer monitor hooked into my brain, so I could see it despite my blindness. I considered terminating the connection. "I'm telling you this because I want you to know what you did. Calvin had three children, a wife, a sister, and one surviving parent. Arnold-"
"I don't care!"
"Why don't you care?"
"There are billions of Calvin Xu's in the world. I can't get too hung up if I accidentally break a few."
Immediately after I said that, I realized that was the sort of thing puritans like Cognis would consider 'depraved', 'horrifying,' or 'disgusting'. Oh well. I can't pander to him any more than I can pander to Arnold Jacobson.
"Did it even occur to you to call me," the Professor spat. "I would have told Vector to let you go. These people didn't even need to die."
"I had the situation under control."
"You murdered two people! Two human lives flushed away. People like you."
"There are no people like me."
It seems he conceded that point. "People like Rosa, then."
"Don't you mention her, you-" I stopped. He was making me angry. That was his game. He would make me angry and I'd use flawed logic and he'd jump on it, and in the end I might end up believing him. I couldn't let him harsh my mellow. I needed to change the subject. "And if I had called you, Mephistopheles might have found out. It would have been that much harder to convince him to join the fight against Dr. Demented. Billions could have died as a result."
"That doesn't make it right."
"But it does make it justified."
"I don't think you really believe that justification. I think you were too proud to ask me for help."
With a frown on my face, I blocked him from my Google Hangout.
That didn't stop him. He projected his big concerned face on my monitor anyways.
"So? Is that it? Is that the reason for your entire career as a murderer and criminal? Because you want to oppose me? I've long suspected that but-"
"Don't try to psychoanalyze me! I am more intelligent than any human in the history of-"
"No, you're not. You're just an arrogant genius who, instead of helping out the human race, has decided to kill innocent people."
"I do science! I represent the greatest accomplishments of the human race, the pinnacle of all sentient life."
"And yet you killed two people rather than ask for my help."

1 comment:

  1. first block - where the (they) look at
    second block - to creep (creeps) like Cognis

    ReplyDelete