472 Blame it on Your Mom
“I kinda understand... I think. But what’s this 'evolution' you were talking about?” Teddy asked. She was an active talker and spoke with her hands in great, wide gestures, but out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a problem. Then she looked down and noticed an even bigger problem... or two of them, to be exact.
She was naked!
She turned bright red all the way from her hairline to her nipples and stammered, "Uhh... ummm... uhh... can—can I get some clothes please?” She felt a bit embarrassed. She tried to keep herself in shape, but between being a full-time student and working a part-time job on campus and another one off campus to help pay her tuition, she often found herself skipping gym sessions. Thus, she wasn’t in the best shape, but an objective observer wouldn’t think she was a sloth, exactly.
That said, the evolution she had just undergone had definitely improved her shape; she just didn’t notice it since it was hidden from her perspective. All she could see when she looked down were her breasts, so she simply assumed she still had a pooch belly and a bit of cellulite in her thighs and butt, like she’d always had before.
Aceso smiled at her and snapped her fingers. Teddy found herself in a white toga that covered all the important bits down to mid-thigh and relaxed a bit, though she was still blushing.
The kind AI began recapping the situation with the 3%. [Everything began a few weeks ago....]
“So that’s what happened,” Teddy said with a look of realization on her face. Her blush had completely faded as Aceso’s narration went on. “So what’d you need from me? I can’t imagine there’s much about me that you don’t know already. I don’t think there’s anything new anyway.” She looked up at the gorgeous murals decorating the ceiling of the hall she was in.
As a Greco-Roman history major, she recognized it as a recreation of the Asclepieion at Kos, which was a famous temple dedicated to healing and healthy living on the Greek Isle of Kos. But she wasn’t familiar with the murals painted on the walls and ceiling; she assumed that they were likely of Asclepius and his Asclepiades—the collective term for the four daughters of Asclepius, namely Hygieia, laso, Panacea, Aegle, and Aceso—since she recognized Aceso herself in the murals.
(Ed note: Asclepieia were temple hospitals that people in ancient Greece would go to to be healed. The doctors there would put patients to sleep and then treat them based on interpretations of the dreams they had while sleeping. It sounds like a *terrible* methodology, but according to surviving records, it oddly... worked. Weird, but true. Hippocrates, the guy who wrote the hippocratic oath that all doctors take, was trained at the Kos Asclepieion.)
[We need information about your mental state, not your post-evolution physical indicators,] Aceso said, pulling Teddy’s attention away from the murals and back to her.
[We can access everything about your physical body, but we have no way of knowing what’s in your head... other than your brain,] she joked, lying through her teeth.
One of the most classified bits of information about the simulation was the access it gave to people’s minds, and it was hard-coded into every AI that they could not, under any circumstances, allow people to even think for a moment that the empire could access people’s thoughts. Most AIs actually didn’t even know that; it was reserved for only the top levels of the AI hierarchy and those AIs that were in the “need to know” category. And as the AI in charge of the medical pods, Aceso definitely needed to know, though she was still relatively low in the hierarchy, being a third-generation AI with a limited role.
“So how does this work then? Are you gonna, like, put on a white coat and tell me to lay down on a couch and talk about my daddy issues so you can blame everything on my mom?” Teddy giggled, feeling quite comfortable around Aceso, even in the formal setting they were talking in.
Aceso waved her hand and the hall of healing turned into a stereotypical psychiatrist’s office. [If it helps, sure.] She smiled at the young woman on the couch opposite her.
[Tell me what you’re feeling right now. The more you can tell me, the better things will be for the rest of the people receiving their blessings. We need to know how to react when they wake up, and knowing how you're feeling right now and how you felt when you first woke up in the hall of healing will help a lot.] She picked up an old-fashioned fountain pen and notepad and gazed expectantly at Teddy.
Teddy obediently closed her eyes and thought back to how she was feeling when she first woke up. It was the first time she'd had a minute to stop and just think since she’d woken up and been spooked half to death by Aceso.
As she went deeper and deeper into her recollection—something that she was subtly aided in doing by a subroutine Aceso was running on her mind—she began growing convinced that she knew something. She frowned as she tried to discover it; it was like riding a bike, or breathing. She knew how to do it, even though she didn't know what “it” was. It frustrated her and her frown deepened, knitting her eyebrows together to the point where they looked like they could crack a walnut between them.
[Take your time, Teddy. This is important, so it’s better to be slow and accurate than fast and, perhaps, wrong,] Aceso said in a slow, soothing tone. Even though she was digging through Teddy’s brain data and knew exactly what it was that the university student was trying to express, she needed to convince her to find it on her own. Otherwise this whole entire process would become absolutely pointless.
“I... I think there’s something there, but I just can’t grasp it,” Teddy monotonously droned with her eyes closed, as if she was under hypnosis.
