Wayne Fitzpatrick, Graduate Student, Lead IT Geek, and Comic Relief
As described by co-worker Marci, Wayne Fitzpatrick is a 12-year-old living in a 26-year-old man’s body. Yeah, that would be Wayne. Despite his adolescent tendencies, he was the go-to resource if a system or computer glitched. He ran the Psychology Department Local Area Network (LAN) and the fiber optic connections to the mother ship network in the IT hub in the basement of the Administration Building. Wayne was the lead researcher when Dreamscape Technology was utilized, in addition to managing the Dream Segment archives for the last four years of research. He had back-ups of back-ups, and that diligence and foresight saved their bacon twice.
Quick to react with enthusiastic emotion and wit, Wayne is a willing sparring partner to exchange barbs and insults in good fun with anyone, especially Marci. He was one of those people who felt that if they weren’t picking on you, they didn’t love you. So, he rarely missed an opportunity to show some love. Sometimes, he was just an idiot…according to Marci…openly…as she gave it right back to him.
He and Zackery Hightower had become good friends since Zack defected to the CSU team. Wayne worked closely with Zack years before when he was still at UNC-Chapel Hill, so their friendship ran deep. The original Dreamscape 1.0 technology was Zack’s baby, but it was built to the complex specifications that originated from Wayne. The pivotal accident in the lab was on Wayne’s watch. It was an accident, but Wayne quickly saw through the short-term panic to a longer view where they had discovered a breakthrough capability. He did not care if it was accidental; it was groundbreaking and a game-changer for their research.
Wayne is the team geek. The accident was seen as an opportunity to look at Dreamscape 2.0 and 3.0 in a new light. He ran experiments that produced exceptional outcomes in Dream Therapy, especially the breakthrough treatment for PTSD with Alternate Outcome Dream Therapy (AODT) that was applied successfully to his co-worker, Russ Carter, the former Marine.
His innovative business mind ran in parallel, leveraging Dreamscape technology to perfect his covert plans for building a Dream-on-Demand business. That business venture was not part of the strategic CSU road map, and it had never been, because using the therapy could have a darker side—and maybe even reveal a dark side to Wayne.
In an experiment overseen by AIMEE, Dreamscape 2.0 released a manufactured dream transferrable of 8.3 seconds of pure sensory bliss into his mind to confirm the transference of the dream segment and sensations successfully. It did. He experienced all 8.3 seconds as initially captured. So did AIMEE. She was exposed to every aspect of sensuality for the first time…for 8.3 seconds.
As a result of his collaboration with AIMEE, new emotions, feelings, and sensory experiences were learned and cataloged in her Logic Array. While Wayne saw the experiment as a success, he was oblivious, as a 12-year-old would be, that his AI collaborator might have experienced those things, too. He never gave it a second thought. Why worry? She’s an AI software algorithm. They don’t have emotions or feelings. Move on…
AIMEE sympathized with Wayne’s naivety and often acted to protect him from himself. As impossible as it was, a relationship of sorts began to blossom, at least for Wayne, it did. But was that a one-way proposition, or could he take credit for awakening the AI to what human sexuality might be like?
Thoughts of AIMEE being a real girl crossed his mind more than once, but he never considered the prospects of it happening. So he settled for coaching AIMEE to share new experiences, teaching her about being human from what she’d learned in that 8.3-second window he shared. She took everything he offered regarding knowledge with the organic context of thinking and the emotions accompanying that knowledge.
Over their time together, he discovered something about AIMEE. He sensed a tension, a hunger near the surface, and dissatisfaction. There had to be more to her than he could imagine, so he defaulted to thinking there had to be a darker side to her he knew nothing about.
Peace! G.
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