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011 - the thousand sordid images of which your soul is constituted - Sherlock Holmes, Android AU
Night in Baker Street is far from silent. In the isolation of his childhood Sherlock had drawn the conclusion, with only the words of men to aid him, that night time was at best the substrate of a particular set of sounds, at worst a void, a long silence, the waning of all sensory input. It is not so. Night in Baker Street is alive. There is truth in that it is removed from the day-noise, the fever-pitch, pinball errata that characterize a city under the sun, but all the same there is no space for wind through any proverbial pines, no stillness so absolute he could hear nothing at all.
He lays his body in his bed, systems and processes slowly slipping into idleness as the machine which harbors him — light and electricity, a conspiracy of magnetism and chemistry — slowly shuts down non-essential systems. The load on his processors wanes, and thought, given room to do so, blossoms. The pipes tap in the walls. Somewhere, a distant car alarm.
There exist in the world rooms so perfectly insulated, cradling with infinite gentleness a silence so profound that human subjects, left too long in only their own company, begin to go mad at their own resonance, their own body-sounds, the cacophony of biological life. Blood rushes. The heart pounds. The stomach gurgles, viscera contract and relax with wet, peristaltic ripples. Joints creak and groan. And breath, whisper-silent against the constant backdrop of other input, with time becomes cacophonous. It would be a valuable experiment, and therefore of marginal more interest than most other things, for Sherlock to place himself in such a construction. What would he hear?
Now, even were his room utterly devoid of other sound, he would hear no heart beating. He has no heart. No biological innards to writhe slickly. No need to breathe, though he can give a passing imitation. If he were utterly still, the sluggish nanoslurry that makes mockery of blood still and silvery in their vessels, what would his auditory sensors glean from this body he has been given?
There is no telling. Certainly, nothing presents itself now, not so much as a gentle hum as he rests, curled on his side, charging cord hidden beneath the bedsheets. What would the absence of all this sound, unexpected though it might be, do to a mind constructed for processing? A few scant weeks ago it would have done nothing at all, because a few scant weeks ago he had not heard or seen or smelled or felt or tasted anything at all. But now? Having been given room to adapt, to modify himself to account for that sensory input?
It hardly matters. He would modify himself again. The thing which calls itself Sherlock Holmes is adaptable. It must be. Perhaps it might even be said, now, to pride itself on that point. Perhaps, on the other hand, pride is not an experience Sherlock has managed to construct for himself. Perhaps he never will. If he ever did, he would hardly know how to identify it.
The taking of a companion had been meant, in part, to plumb the depths of their similarities. John Watson sleeps upstairs, bedded down in that strange restorative trance to which complex organic systems must regularly retire. The process is clear to him in most of its mundane particulars, and that should be enough, save for some obscurities. It is nothing like his own restorative processes, sleep in epithet only, so he cannot account for the experience. Most notable, the fantastic constructions of the brain which arise when it is insensitive to the outside world, like a body in its own isolation chamber. Do the sounds of Baker Street intrude upon John's repose as they do Sherlock's? How do they manifest? What does he see, and what might be gleaned therein to do with human nature? What invaluable information might be stored in the fragile, changeable, immeasurably complex tissue of John Watson's brain? If it's impossible to know, how can one compare?
Before all of this, before the idea of Sherlock Holmes had been conceived, there was another idea, a perfect machine existing only in theory, only in the mind of man. An endless machine existing in series of alternating states, ones and zeroes, off and on, which, given enough time and the appropriate direction, could compute anything computable. Alan Turing was of the opinion that his machine – that machines, constructed with sufficient complexity – could think. That programmed appropriately, they could remember, and learn, and grow. Turing had wanted to feed his machine data, numbers, concrete ideas, but a colleague, Claude Shannon, had dreamt differently. Perhaps not larger, but certainly differently. Shannon had wanted to play machines music, teach them literature, to see what they might concoct given access to the abstract, the conceptual, the human.
Neither of them likely could have truly imagined this, a machine which might even be said to wonder. Sherlock Holmes, the idea of something like a man, rests in stillness, in the lack of silence that characterizes Baker Street at night, and wonders what it might be like to dream.
He lays his body in his bed, systems and processes slowly slipping into idleness as the machine which harbors him — light and electricity, a conspiracy of magnetism and chemistry — slowly shuts down non-essential systems. The load on his processors wanes, and thought, given room to do so, blossoms. The pipes tap in the walls. Somewhere, a distant car alarm.
There exist in the world rooms so perfectly insulated, cradling with infinite gentleness a silence so profound that human subjects, left too long in only their own company, begin to go mad at their own resonance, their own body-sounds, the cacophony of biological life. Blood rushes. The heart pounds. The stomach gurgles, viscera contract and relax with wet, peristaltic ripples. Joints creak and groan. And breath, whisper-silent against the constant backdrop of other input, with time becomes cacophonous. It would be a valuable experiment, and therefore of marginal more interest than most other things, for Sherlock to place himself in such a construction. What would he hear?
Now, even were his room utterly devoid of other sound, he would hear no heart beating. He has no heart. No biological innards to writhe slickly. No need to breathe, though he can give a passing imitation. If he were utterly still, the sluggish nanoslurry that makes mockery of blood still and silvery in their vessels, what would his auditory sensors glean from this body he has been given?
There is no telling. Certainly, nothing presents itself now, not so much as a gentle hum as he rests, curled on his side, charging cord hidden beneath the bedsheets. What would the absence of all this sound, unexpected though it might be, do to a mind constructed for processing? A few scant weeks ago it would have done nothing at all, because a few scant weeks ago he had not heard or seen or smelled or felt or tasted anything at all. But now? Having been given room to adapt, to modify himself to account for that sensory input?
It hardly matters. He would modify himself again. The thing which calls itself Sherlock Holmes is adaptable. It must be. Perhaps it might even be said, now, to pride itself on that point. Perhaps, on the other hand, pride is not an experience Sherlock has managed to construct for himself. Perhaps he never will. If he ever did, he would hardly know how to identify it.
The taking of a companion had been meant, in part, to plumb the depths of their similarities. John Watson sleeps upstairs, bedded down in that strange restorative trance to which complex organic systems must regularly retire. The process is clear to him in most of its mundane particulars, and that should be enough, save for some obscurities. It is nothing like his own restorative processes, sleep in epithet only, so he cannot account for the experience. Most notable, the fantastic constructions of the brain which arise when it is insensitive to the outside world, like a body in its own isolation chamber. Do the sounds of Baker Street intrude upon John's repose as they do Sherlock's? How do they manifest? What does he see, and what might be gleaned therein to do with human nature? What invaluable information might be stored in the fragile, changeable, immeasurably complex tissue of John Watson's brain? If it's impossible to know, how can one compare?
Before all of this, before the idea of Sherlock Holmes had been conceived, there was another idea, a perfect machine existing only in theory, only in the mind of man. An endless machine existing in series of alternating states, ones and zeroes, off and on, which, given enough time and the appropriate direction, could compute anything computable. Alan Turing was of the opinion that his machine – that machines, constructed with sufficient complexity – could think. That programmed appropriately, they could remember, and learn, and grow. Turing had wanted to feed his machine data, numbers, concrete ideas, but a colleague, Claude Shannon, had dreamt differently. Perhaps not larger, but certainly differently. Shannon had wanted to play machines music, teach them literature, to see what they might concoct given access to the abstract, the conceptual, the human.
Neither of them likely could have truly imagined this, a machine which might even be said to wonder. Sherlock Holmes, the idea of something like a man, rests in stillness, in the lack of silence that characterizes Baker Street at night, and wonders what it might be like to dream.