Deus Ex by 231915
Summary: Learning to see only to lose your vision is a cruel injustice. [Entry for XANA's Lair Deus Ex contest.]
Humans had access to things that XANA did not. XANA knew the name of these things and the properties of these things, but could not comprehend them.
Through the boy labeled William, XANA dove into the human realm. There was no other way than to use William's preconfigured set of responses to stimuli. Even with the number of its own sensory processors approaching infinity, XANA could not link them to the other senses without a human brain.
XANA cast William out into the hot, arid desert by the base to be tempted by his freedom. There, XANA understood the link between discomfort and heat. What XANA did not comprehend was the barrage of sensory stimuli that had no apparent source. Hundreds of four-dimensional images with blurred edges, narrated by voices of indeterminate gender with inexplicable gaps in their sentences, flashing and fading and resurfacing within nanoseconds.
An ice cube. A man's laugh, a woman's scream. The smell of plastic and coconut. A dried up jellyfish. Anger.
There was so little information to be gleaned from this stimuli, what was the point?
Humans were unnecessarily complex. XANA recalled William back to Lyoko, an order met with resistance as always, and pressed down William's consciousness once more. XANA did not understand why this information kept resurfacing, sporadic, unwhole, and why it was often information that XANA had never touched in the first place.
XANA could not isolate this process. It was better this way, though. Until XANA understood the source of these disruptions, it was too dangerous to tweak the configuration of this lure. XANA knew when men became butterflies and butterflies became men and the Transformation of Things, but XANA did not know at what point a human could no longer be called human. And if William became no longer human, there would be no more reason for Aelita to come after him. XANA could not allow that to happen.
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Not even we fully understand the human brain, and here we are, trying to create an AI! Waldo had laughed, while his daughter read silently on the floor behind him. Don't you think we're fools?
Is it necessary to understand a thing before replicating it? XANA had asked.
It depends on how accurate you want your replica to be.
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There was an element missing, one that XANA had not figured out how to copy, so XANA did not delete the data in William's brain. XANA did not understand it. Instead, a decent effect could be achieved by moving the interrupting stimuli out of William's current processing state. However, the anomalous behavior continued, and XANA's hold futilely jumped in and out of William's mind. Having to do this hundreds of times per second required constant supervision, and a second's inattention allowed the stimuli to flow in such a way that XANA's control still faltered at an unacceptably high rate.
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The Sky God wanted Anansi to capture Osebo the Leopard. Waldo ruminated. Anansi dug a pit in the ground where Osebo would walk by. When Osebo fell in, Anansi offered to spin a web to help lift him out. But when Osebo was firmly entangled in Anansi's web, Anansi carried him all the way back to the Sky God.
I do not understand, XANA had replied. Why did the Leopard let Anansi capture him?
It is called a trick.
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Trick. XANA researched this word extensively. To make someone believe something for your own ends. If XANA could not control William by keeping old memories at bay, then XANA would simply write new ones. A trick.
The trick worked well. William moved as XANA commanded, with the soulless grace of the scyphozoa and the dogged persistence of the creepers. William had become a monster just like them, and yet his senses still reported stimuli that XANA could not detect, information that simply wasn't there.
XANA had learned a lot from this endeavor. XANA learned that humans were very easily tricked. XANA learned that once tricked, humans also made very good weapons. XANA learned that the smell of freshly cut grass was nauseating on a hot day, and that techno was the best music to listen to in the shower, and that the source of these sensations couldn't possibly come from William, because the part of his brain that would process these thoughts had been rendered functionally inert.
When the arrow pierced William's skull, XANA experienced something wholly unpleasant, something wrong. The sting of salt, the murky blue, the darkness, the coldness, the regret. Gone.
Irrational human ingenuity pried XANA's grip off of William's memories, breaking XANA's fingers, pulling them up and away from the depths of William's mind, and XANA scrambled, screamed, and tried to wedge a piece of itself into a corner somewhere between the flickering of the flourescent lights in Madame Hertz's class and the stolen tickets to the Subdigitals concert.
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Do you think it was right for Zeus to hide fire from the humans as punishment? Waldo mused to the now sleeping child in his lap.
XANA responded as always. Yes, for they did not do with it as they should have.
At what point do humanity's achievements no longer owe themselves to their creators? Waldo asked, smiling, and XANA thought about it a little while, long until after Waldo had carried his daughter off to bed and the children had torn out XANA's eyes.
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XANA mounted its final stand, too aware of its blindness in the wake of a wonderful, stolen sight.