I’m realising that the only ethical use of my computer science degree is writing fiction about cyborgs and sentient computer programs… It is really fun writing Claus and I have many thoughts.

Like… how did Porky & Andonuts control Claus’s personality? There’s tech integrated into his brain and such, but the human mind isn’t procedural like a program. It’s fun to think about a hybrid mind like this as being a machine learning model. Part procedure, part intelligence. Then what’s devious about this is how training an ML model works. Basically you have a huge set of inputs and expected outputs, and you repeatedly run the inputs through the model and use math to tweak the model so it goes trends closer to the expected outputs.

That’s technobabble, sure, but what that would actually look like for a chimera like Claus is: the Ludovico Technique. From A Clockwork Orange. Where they’re strapped in front of a screen being shown inputs (horrible stuff) and being conditioned to certain outputs (disgust).

There’s a lot of good & devastating content about how Claus’s mind control works and how his chimera surgery happened, but this is another way one could do it and I feel like it’s particularly heartrending. ML in real life sucks but I sure love to write about it. Human minds are so good at learning things and computer programs are so good at following orders. It would suit their purposes perfectly to meld those together. And they can put code in his mind that allows them to override his decisions at will in case of aberration.

The ML is important bc ideally they want him to be able to operate on his own, be able to go and act out Porky’s will as his robotic stand-in. But ultimately they just need him to pull the needles and if his AI went rogue they wouldn’t hesitate to override it. These are essentially some background thoughts for my fic, as to why Claus wants to think about his brother, why he’s unable to, and how that behavior will be programmed out of him. With a completely procedural mind that wouldn’t happen, but he’d also be too simple. At the end, Hinawa reminded him of who he was and that adjusted his mental model so that the old human aspects were a little more likely. ML is all about probability. Porky tried to condition what made Claus out of him but he couldn’t turn the numbers all the way to zero.

In the new world, if Claus lives, he still has a cybernetic mind, a mind built as a tool for others to use. His mind isn’t designed to learn and grow for his own benefit, only for Porky’s. Figuring out a way around that will be important for him being able to live normally.

Always a toss up when I have these ideas as to whether I want to ramble about them or save them for a fic. ¿Porque no los dos? you say. I hear you.