Brief summary of the second year of life of the OgIT experimental subject.
Mirror neurons seem to work really well in him. He speaks flawlessly for a two-year-old sapiens, his caregivers are even scared to hear him speak so perfectly. But there is a problem … he can use the tongue well, but sometimes he limits himself to doing it only to repeat our sentences when he hears them. Sometimes he doesn’t speak to communicate something, he just mimics us.
He probably still doesn’t fully understand the meaning of language or why we make these sounds, but he’s slowly learning that sapiens do not communicate through pheromones but through the voice, and he’s now trying to imitate them.
He has already understood the meaning of some words. The first he seems to have fully understood was the word “hunger”, and it doesn’t surprise me. He says it over and over and knows exactly what it means. The other words he learned are all related to the world of food: “eat”, “lunch”, “dinner”, “hunt”, “again”, “another”, “more” … then he started to understand words more generic, such as “again”, “why”, “okay”, “you”, “me” and so on. He also recognizes his own name now, and calls the senior caregiver by her name.
To speed up his vocabulary understanding process I decided to let him listen to many dialogues between adults during the course of the day, this should have helped him understand the meanings of many of the words he already knows.
I also made sure to tell my assistants not to confuse his ability to speak correctly with his level of understanding of the world. A couple of them tried to teach him to count or to read, but with very poor results.
Anyway, his mental development does not interest me now, I am more interested in the physical one. The creature knows how to use his body excellently, already at the beginning of the year he could climb and do somersaults without too much effort, so we decided to start immediately with his physical training.
We kept him in motion for months, and every time he stopped we punished him with a small electric discharge. The creature adapts very quickly to physical pain however; at first the electric shocks bothered him a lot but now he doesn’t even feel them, and we have already increased the voltage beyond the recommended limits.
Since the electric shocks were no longer usable I thought we should find another way to punish him in case of disobedience or failure, but I was advised the opposite instead: reward him every time he behaved as requested, which was to give him food every time he did good.
Following this advice I discovered a very special thing … if kept under constant nutrition the creature is able to keep himself in motion for a seemingly endless amount of time. He never gets tired. His muscles never get tired. It seems he doesn’t even use oxygen as an engine …
I definitely have to do more tests on this.
For now I can only say that the creature ran for 25 days without ever taking a break, not even for a second. He never sweated or ran out of breath while running, and the only times he showed signs of letting up were when we didn’t give him his food ration in time, but as long as he eats he can run at a constant speed without ever slowing down, just like a robot.
I understood several things in this second year of breeding. First of all, his body accepts all forms of nutrition, from organic to inorganic. The creature can ingest and digest both stones and meat, but due to the lack of a developed dentition we feed him mainly through liquids and soft materials.
His body uses food in several ways. The most obvious use is energy. Just as a steam train uses coal to move faster, the creature’s body uses food to keep itself active and strong.
As already mentioned, if he eats a lot he can avoid sleeping, but I don’t know if this is good or bad because we don’t know if the lack of sleep can cause problems in the future.
For now his diet is quite contained, so we make him sleep regularly. During sleep we use dreams as an additional form of training, just as we do for other sapiens. However, if he behaves badly during the day, instead of training him we torture him for the duration of his sleep. Nightmares are a great punishment system for when it doesn’t act as we would like.
While awake the creature is always hungry, whether he eats so much that he doesn’t sleep or that he eats so little that he sleeps most of the time, so I suspect that in reality he doesn’t really feel the sense of “hunger” … I believe he’s simply programmed to devour anything he can put in his mouth.
Even today he continues to want to eat the fingers of the caregivers, and when they take him in their arms he puts their clothes in his mouth and if he can even their hair. One of the caregiver said that he was chewing her ear once, and I pointed out to her that she must be careful because when he will have teeth that will no longer be a good experience.
We absolutely need to find a way to make him understand that he doesn’t have to eat everything.
Continuing to talk about nourishment, the creature’s body uses food for other things and not just for energy. I have noticed how the inorganic material, especially minerals, is used to enlarge bones or replace the micro-fibers of the latter. He also likes plastic, rubber and wood, but he doesn’t seem interested in eating things like grass, sand, dirt or paper.
Despite his unorthodox diet, the creature grows similar to an homo sapiens. The volume of his body is identical to that of a sapiens of his own age, but is considerably heavier.
The extra weight is due to the infra-skeleton. His body does not have a common endoskeleton or exoskeleton, nor an organic muscular system. His muscles are also his bones, but they are not made of organic material, which is what makes him very heavy. Thanks to the micro-fiber system, however, he is not affected by it.
The fact that the muscles are also the bones does not seem to weigh on his movements, the perceived weight is almost equal to zero for him, and this leads him to release a strength far superior to that of any sapiens because not only his body weighs more, but it’s also faster.
It should be emphasized that neither agility, reactivity, elasticity and maneuverability are affected by this system.
Just our equipment is affected by the infra-skeleton, such as syringes that do not go beyond the skin. Furthermore, he cannot swim. Luckily he can breathe underwater … somehow.
I already mentioned that the creature can feed on metals too, right? We have noticed that many of the metals we gave him were used to replace some parts of the infra-skeleton, and it is for this reason that it has such a high specific weight.
I believe that if his diet were to include a greater intake of metals, his entire skeletal system would become metallic within a few months. This would burden him even more, but it would be a weight that he would not feel and therefore a sort of “strengthening”.
I prefer not to do it for now. I want to avoid health problems that I would neither understand nor cure.
Changing the subject, I ran some tests related to his pain resistance, and in doing so I noticed something very fascinating. When the electricity had stopped working on him we all believed the reason for this was because his resistance to electric shocks had increased, but it turns out that his body is now covered by a thin and soft layer of rubber.
This is due to the fact that over time we have fed him with both plastic and rubber to see its effects on the body, and apparently rubber has been used to defend the body from future electric shocks.
The thing is very interesting, it means that his body can evolve not only according to what he eats but also according to what he needs, because the plastic he ingested has not been used at all, it has always been eliminated. But rubber, considering the electric discharges, was used to defend the body.
Fascinating.
Pain tests have also been done regarding its resistance to extreme temperatures, and we have noticed that although the epidermis tends to suffer from it, neither heat nor cold excessively damages his infraskeleton, which is why the creature does not tend to shiver from the cold nor to sweat from the heat.
By increasing the temperatures too much we would risk to permanently damaging his body however, and this is something we are not interested in doing for now, so these tests have been temporarily suspended.
Perhaps they will be resumed in the future.