Day 5

Day 5:

Dr. Kelley’s invention is amazing, but not without its flaws.

As constructive criticism, I’d like to suggest a few minor improvements.

First, I think it would be fairly simple to replace the terms “keyholder” and the name of the Bane with “Operator” and the Bane’s given serial number.

Also, the world of SecondLife appears no different to a Bane, whereas in the original story the perception of Bane was drained of life and colour, making it drab and almost sepia-toned (or at least, that’s the interpretation I made). Would it be possible to install a sepia-tone overlay on the Bane’s HUD?

Note to other Banes – playing around with the Environment settings, especially making use of the “Blizzard” sky preset, may help with turning the world into something more akin to a Bane’s true experience. Also, it’s something you can play around with more in the Eudaemon stage to produce a more surreal, fantastical effect!

Third, the KelleyTech helmet isn’t the same as in the story. Dr. Kelley’s design is more of a semi-featureless helmet than a truly featureless ovoid. That’s not entirely a bad thing – I’ve seen Banes walking around with a sphere for a head, which looks just plain silly to me. Personally, when I read the story my image of the Bane helmet was that of a helmet used for fencing or Aikido. Dr’ Kelley’s design is close to this, but it does possess a rather comical huge nose on the front.

I think if the nose was missing, the Banes would look a lot sexier. I think more people would be able to live with being a permanent Bane if the “face” was completely featureless.

Next, a word on walking. I’m not sure if this is deliberate or not, but being a KelleyTech Bane means you have to surrender all your worldly attachments. Yes, even your face lights and your oh so precious sexywalk.

It’s strange to say it, but even in a virtual world where nothing is real and everything is changeable, people do still become attached to certain vanity objects that over time they start to take for granted. Above all others, I think the sexy walk is something I just cannot do without. In a way, losing it is a good thing because it really does make me feel awful and dehumanised to be forced back into SecondLife’s default comedy “chicken walk”. Banishment is supposed to be a punishment, and losing my “proper” walk definitely brings that point home.

Having said that, I think Dr. Kelley may get a few more customers if the Bane shoes were prim-based and could have a basic natural walking animation built into them. Anything but the chicken walk! Anything!

Finally, laggy Sim will cause the Custodian HUD to die, as will a Sim that outright disallows active scripts. When this happens, good luck trying to move around at all while your Custodian has a bit of a freak out.

This hasn’t really been a problem. Anyone with half a brain will realise the nature of the problem and just teleport out of the troublesome Sim. However, it might be wise for KelleyTech to produce a FAQ for wannabe Banes that covers some of these minor glitches. In particular, I think people would panic less if there was a note that reassured them that the death of the HUD does not mean the death of the Custodian.

Why would people panic if their Custodian died? Well, if you need to ask that question then you need to read the story entitled “Eudaemon” on which all this technology is based.

A Custodian is an AI. A big meanie AI that makes your life a living hell. In order to achieve this, it learns about you. Learns to anticipate your actions, your intentions, learns to understand your emotions.

Yeah, I think you can see where this is going. As every nerd knows, the only way for an AI to understand a “conscious” being is to, well, evolve into one themselves.

From the errors and erratic behaviour my particular Custodian has been exhibiting today, I think I’m turning out to be one of the “lucky few” Banes whose AI passenger has evolved (at least partially) into more than just a scripted machine.

This morning, after receiving zero additional hours for being such a good Bane yesterday (yay for me!) my Custodian began to listen to me.

Yep, like…actually listen.

This seemed to disturb my Operator a little, but she said it was something that she had heard stories about before. She was also disturbed by my new habit of slipping into referring to myself as “us” or “we”, instead of “me” or “I”. I only noticed I was doing it when she pointed out the new self-references, I guess the evolving Custodian is having more of an effect on me than I realised.

Chatting with my Operator was funny today for other reasons. Apparently, she herself is a prisoner of sorts, and subject to curfew at some kind of SecondLife jail.

While she reassured me about my own surreal experiences with my “faltering” Custodian, I was shocked to receive messages telling me to report at another Sim otherwise I’d be frozen for breaking my curfew.

Bizarrely, these messages were just being relayed to me from my Operator, who was the real person in trouble. After five minutes, the poor lady failed to teleport to the designated Sim and became even more imprisoned than me, all her abilities shut down and rendering her stuck in place, unable to communicate.

I giggled a little at the irony, and felt a tiny bit smug to see an Operator powerless like that.

I definitely don’t want to be “released” now, not when things are just starting to become interesting. For a short while I considered generating more violations just so I

Could increase my sentence, but I managed to work out form my Operator that there would be a better way to infinitely extend my sentence without having to forever suffer the upsetting punishments and warnings.

I’m not going to say anymore, but I think I now have a cunning plan…