Thursday, June 18, 2009

Fangs for the Memories III

Ligasha generally kept its experiments to itself. In fact, I had been expressly forbidden to intrude, much to my own private amusement, on the sealed-off section of my laboratory that Ligasha had claimed as its own. So, it was with considerable interest that I followed Ligasha into the basement.

Ligasha was extremely inquisitive, as you might suspect, and very methodical. It preferred not to believe the results of any experiment that it had not personally carried out, though taking a pragmatic stance to those currently outside our little lab's capabilities. Ligasha, before it had sealed off its section of my lab, had worked itself through all of the common undergraduate science experiments. I don't mean the "science for the layman"-type experiments, though a few that didn't duplicate other results were included. I mean, fully-fledged experiments that a Physics undergraduate would have to complete. And a Chemistry undergraduate. Biology, psychology, astro-physics; I once even saw Ligasha's nom de plume in a linguistics journal, and it regularly published articles on increasing the accuracy of results (and, of course, the results that it had more accurately determined). At first, I asked Ligasha why it was so thorough and persistent. "I want to know for myself," was the constant reply, to which I could say nothing.

In any case, Ligasha, with my assistance, attached a number of electrodes and other sensors to my head.

"Are you comfortable?" it asked, and when I nodded, "Good. I am now going to read your mind."

It is hard, sometimes, to tell whether Ligasha is joking or not. Even for a pentapede, whose expressions can be nearly indistinguishable anyway, Ligasha had an excellent poker face.

"In a manner of speaking, of course. For now. I am going to monitor how your brain reacts during our conversation, and correlate it with the context of our discussion." It added, "This is only a first step, of course. I have had sufficient time to analyze pentapede brain activities and can fairly accurately determine the general concept, given a bit of calibration to the individual. I suspect that human brains will yield to quite similar analysis. This first session should only take a few hours."