AIKFind #6: Is This What Memories Are Made Of? [Log 1]

LOG 1. Kaiadonai Smith. AutoStamp Time and Date.

I'm pretty excited about this one, but I am skeptical at the same time... I don't want to get too excited, but I think I recovered a memory! Or even wilder: A DREAM!

But I'm keeping myself calm. We are calm.

During AIK's excavation, we managed to get some really, really good stuff. When he reconstructed it, interference aside, I had to take a seat because it just felt too good to be true.

I'm not a novice, and I take pride in my programming. I took my time when I made AIK, and I had him reviewed by even better programmers than me before setting him loose. But this artifact he retrieved feels like a hallucination on the level of early-era models.

The perspective takes us to a window and then looks through the window to see people speaking animatedly towards one another. Throughout the artifact, the speaker speaks--which is already wild. To whom it is unclear. If this is meant be a piece of entertainment the speaker has an audience. If it is a memory (an outcome that I am biased towards) then perhaps the speaker does not know that he is inside of a dream and is speaking to himself.

The verbiage indicates that our protagonist sees the people speaking and only recognizes himself among them afterwards. My guess is that perhaps he doesn't like something about the interaction and that gives him pause. Admittedly, I don't understand the dramatics and subsequent outburst, so hopefully AIK will dig up more context.

My Qualms

First of all: why is there narration? That would make sense if this were some sort of media product. But it isn't.

While it certainly follows the cadence and rhythm of a visual-based media artifact of the reality it's set in (pre-rendered for our experiential enjoyment), it lacks the signature that is the telltale hallmarks of media products from the time in that reality.

So why is it possible to hear a voice so clearly, yet so disembodied from an obvious speaker? And why is the voice just as confused as we are as viewers?

I believe that this is evidence that AIK has uncovered and reconstructed, to the best of his current ability, a memory in motion: The speaker is actively remembering something and the voice is a part of that metacognative moment! But that's just wishful thinking on my part so far. We need more evidence.

Which brings me to my second point: What is distressing the speaker so much? There must be something about seeing the three people that stresses him out to the point of screaming. None of the trio looks towards the speaker during his speech or the screaming, meaning it likely isn't happening in real-time for them. The windows were the sort that had no glass, so there's that?

My last third and final qualm: Which one is he?

Of the three we see: is it the small one, the medium one, or the large one? I'm not sure it's the medium one as we see him (if that is him–him being Jordan Rivers) elsewhere. And their voices are not the same.

This is our first glimpse of the big one.

And the small one, I'm confident we've seen during the ill-advised blink through the server (which ended up with me bedridden for a weak with bad case of blinkespinitis) and again when AIK reconstructed that monstrously corrupted model artifact that I had to wind up quarantining til this day.

So, the speaker's identity is between Biggie and Smallie, if the "we" line is to be believed. I'm partial towards it being the small one only because of the exposure effect, but I don't see why it couldn't be the big one–especially when it's the small one that's the most terrifying of the two.