March 20, Pod Room, Evening

QA Process for World Destroyer: Sub-Program, Nightly Backup

He and Nanami have been practicing “parallel play” recently. 

Ultimate Child-Caregiver and Ultimate Psychologist and a multitude of other talents tell him that parallel play is a subsection of Parten’s six stages of play in child development and doesn’t accurately reflect their reality, but Nanami terms it such and Hinata is trying to relearn when convenient lies are socially appropriate. Ultimate Conversationalist informs him clarifying the term with Nanami wouldn’t be incorrect either, but he thinks Hinata-Hajime-from-before wouldn’t have done so, and therefore he should at least attempt following this decision branch.

It isn’t that he’s attempting to imitate the past one-to-one, either. Rather, it’s easier for him to categorize his decisions as either modeled from Hinata-Hajime-from-before or Kamukura-Izuru-from-before. Rule-based models can be tricky to categorize quickly sometimes, as the mental decision tree he’s built for this cognitive process gets rather complex. At the same time, it isn’t as if he can stop categorizing when he has a brain built like a supercomputer. Again, it’s simpler to simply let himself run through the process, then perform actions after Hinata’s determined what he should do.

Although, he supposes that’s what a regular person does, too— it’s what ‘thinking before you speak’ means. In this manner, he’s really not special.

But in general, he does enjoy “parallel play”. These days, his mind runs like an intricate Rube-Goldberg machine. One single external stimulus might trigger a dozen different thought processes, all occurring simultaneously. He was made to think in parallel. It’s incredibly dull to have to think so intently on singular, simple tasks, and he likes that Nanami gives him yet another point of stimulus to multitask with.

Today, Nanami has her 3DS open while he finishes typing out a report for Future Foundation. Her expression from the monitor is focused downward towards her console. Yet still, she’s able to speak up as she maneuvers her game, “Hinata-kun, isn’t it time for dinner? You shouldn’t skip meals.”

“I’ll need a couple more minutes to wrap this up,” Hinata replies, looking up at her. His fingers don’t stop moving. “Nanami, I’ve been thinking…”

“Yeah?”

"There's an American epistolary written in the twentieth century," he begins slowly, and only after Nanami nods encouragingly. "It's about a man with a learning impediment that participates in an experiment to increase his overall intelligence."

"That's a very on the nose allegory for you."

"Yes," he agrees, since it is.

"What happens next?"

"Initial trials are a success. The man rapidly becomes smarter each passing day. Within a few months he's possibly the smartest man on earth."

"'Initial' results?"

"Yes," he agrees again. "The success of the experiment is temporary. As more time passes, the effects fade and he slowly loses the intelligence and developed personality he gained. By the end, he has returned to his initial state."

"I see."

"His quality of life drastically improves in the initial stages of the experiment. With an average intellect, he’s finally able to converse with others as an equal and understand the society around him. He can experience a complexity of emotion that eluded him in his original state. But by the time he’s reached the apex of his acuity, he finds himself peerless. The people around him can no longer recognize him as the person he once was. All the emotions and personality he had learned to process turn against him, and he finds himself as alone as he was in the beginning."

"He had found a sense of 'self', but others could no longer understand him," Nanami summarizes inquisitively, and Hinata nods.

"Yeah, that's right. Like most stories, there are a multitude of ideas this story is trying to convey. I've been thinking a lot about how it portrays the value of a person."

"Value?"

"When the main character is intellectually challenged, society rejects him because he has no value," Hinata says. "When he is too intelligent, he rejects society because its imperfections are too clear to him. Even though he remains the same person through the narrative, the value he has to society and his relationship to it constantly fluctuates. Nanami, do you know what the observer effect is?"

Nanami is not bothered by the non-sequitur. "Yeah, it was in Steins;Gate. It's the effect a third party, or observer, might have on an experiment… or something?"

"Pretty much. In another rough allegory, the main character is the experiment. Society is the observer. The character constantly adapts in response to the people around him and his perceived view. Or as John Donne once said... sorry, I'm getting off track. What I meant to say was, the main character's relative value to society is dependent not on his personhood, which is static, but his fluctuating intelligence."

Nanami is silent for a moment, then flips her 3DS closed again. She looks up at him through the screen. "Do you feel like you aren't valued without your intelligence?" She asks gently.

Hinata gives her just a glimmer of a smile, but it fades as quickly as it appears. "Who knows? If we're following the allegory though, I've already reached the point where I reject society and retreat to become a hermit and only speak to my true friends. I think Jabberwock Island is about as close as that gets."

Nanami hums thoughtfully. “I don’t really think you’ve rejected society, though.”

“No such thing as a perfect allegory, I guess. Maybe we ought to call it a metaphor.” Hinata shifts ever-so-slightly in his seat. “You know what the funny thing is?”

“What is it?”

“No matter what stage of intelligence he’s at, no matter how much he is valued or devalued, in a lot of ways the main character never questions his right to personhood,” Hinata speaks contemplatively. “He never questions his right to happiness. He never thinks, ‘I don’t deserve something because of my relative level of intelligence.’ He never wonders if he has the right to exist. Admittedly, it wasn’t as if he had done anything wrong, and by the end he probably lacks the mental acuity to even wonder such a thing. 

“But still… I think I might envy that about him.”

Following the development of the AI software required to “psycho-dive” and retrieve the remainder of Neo-World Program participants, supplementary programs will be introduced to support World Destroyer outside of its base utility.

Conservation of resources and security compliance of the World Destroyer program will require nightly backups to the Future Foundation cloud server. 

This— admittedly inefficient— solution ensures that all Jabberwock Island activity remains monitored by the Foundation while maintaining limited scope and interaction between the two parties. 

Attempting automatic sync of the two systems through a secure network would require complete overhaul of outdated Jabberwock Island software for compatibility with Future Foundation servers.

Complexity is of no issue but in the interest of time, the nightly backup program has been completed. The next phase will now proceed: generating test cases to ensure program viability.

World Destroyer file generation - at 20:00 JST, program should begin generating a file recording all World Destroyer actions and data timestamped between 20:00 JST of the previous day and 19:59 of the current day.

• Expected: World Destroyer file should generate successfully.

Subject file generation: at 20:00 JST, program should begin generating individual files recording all data collected from each subject timestamped 20:00 JST of the previous day and 19:59 of the current day.

• Expected: 10 files should be generated successfully and named by subject accordingly.

World Destroyer file integrity: program should rerun despairMonitor() method while generating the World Destroyer file and list any true instances.

• Expected: Each point in World Destroyer file should be marked T/F accordingly.

Subject files integrity: program should rerun despairMonitor() method while generating the World Destroyer file and list any true instances.

• Expected: Each point in Subject files should be marked T/F accordingly.

Instances of despairMonitor() returning true: program should call alterAlert() method.

• Expected: any instances of viral detection should alert Alter Ego, who will subsequently halt any World Destroyer actions and await further instruction from Hajime Hinata.
• Note: Hajime Hinata will proceed with wiping all data within local servers. The most recent full system save uploaded to Future Foundation cloud will be used to recover any lost data. Please refer to the report on the program for the weekly system save for details.

Instances of despairMonitor() returning false: program should proceed with data encryption.

• Expected: Program proceeds with file encryption without self-termination.

Other instances of World Destroyer file generation failure: program will call alterAlert() method and terminate process.

• Expected: Alter Ego should begin troubleshooting file generation failure after receiving alert. Nightly backup program will be manually resumed once all issues are determined and resolved.

Other instances of Subject files generation failure: program will call alterAlert() method and terminate process.

• Expected: Alter Ego should terminate all World Destroyer processes on affected Subject(s) and immediately alert Hinata Hajime. If the issue is deemed minor and not an indication of waning Subject condition, nightly backup program will be manually resumed once all issues are determined and resolved.
• Note: in the event of extreme data corruption with Subject file, Future Foundation will adhere to prior agreements and provide further equipment upon request, within reason.

Data encryption: upon successful generation of all 11 files, program will encrypt all files. 

• Expected: All 11 files should be successfully encrypted.

Data encryption failure: program should call alertAlter() method and terminate encryption process.

• Expected: Alter Ego should begin troubleshooting file encryption failure after receiving alert. Nightly backup program will be manually resumed once all issues are determined and resolved.

Server upload: program should upload all 11 backup files to Future Foundation’s FTP server.

• Expected: Future Foundation should receive 11 files successfully.