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Quality Control Assessment At Delos: an article by: GF Willmetts.

I do have to wonder how Delos ever makes any money. It owns several miles of unspecified territory with an underground network to reach all its distant points. There are several western towns spread out that constitutes the area called ‘Westworld’ and a smaller area called ‘Shogun World’, based on the former’s template than reinvent the wheel for a more violent arena with swords and honour.

This is no different to how the Unreal Engine for cheaper game-players is employed in various types of games because it is proven to work and offers enough variety to be acceptable. The choice of templates in Delos was not chosen for cheapness but to get this AI-driven theme park open on time and anything else beyond was merely tweaking in the thirty decades it has been running.

As Delos director Doctor Robert Ford points out, the theme park is designed to give the guests the options they want to play and that includes frequently killing and having sex with the hosts, the robot/androids that populate this western or oriental theme park. This also appears to be a stronger appeal than to use the robot/androids than just living this life-style. One would have to wonder at the appeal when it clearly known that these hosts will always lose in any gunfight and guest injuries be minimal and no doubt insurance covered.

Granted guests want to know that their own safety is assured but a game that appears too safe is not going to have many returning guests. Don’t under-estimate this. One can draw comparisons to many successful film franchises where it is multiple repeat viewings that supplies the funds for further developments. So with Delos, just how many ways can you kill the hosts before boredom creeps in? Even wealthy humans with a homicidal disposition are likely to be dulled eventually. I suspect the reason old style wild west and eastern choices were selected was to avoid looking too much like modern day environments.

Much of the hosts design and mechanics is classified but all based on similar manufacture whether it is for humanoids or animals. There is a memory core concealed within the brain tissue in the skull. I did consider better protected choices for this core but considering the amount of damage inflicted on the host’s body that might not be a good idea. It is also problematic as to where is the power core running these bodies?

Presumably it is electrical battery rather than nuclear in nature or the casing could be damaged by gunshot wounds. The duration of this charge is likewise classified. There is clearly mechanisms in their bellies of some of these hosts although you would have to wonder why these aren’t better protected in the rib cage than a boneless belly.

There is conflicting information as to what is inside the host chassis but considering that Delos has been functioning for 30 years, refinements and changes have been made over the years. Saying that, you do have to wonder why the earlier models are still being used when it is so easy to move their memory core into an upgrade.

All controls for the hosts by authorised human controllers are by verbal command or panel controllers. The latter can also be used to change the host’s personality specifications or change the story or narrative as they prefer to be carried out in front of the guests. Indeed, this can also be used to supplement new personality traits for different roles in the park. Although the specifications for the core is classified, it is believed everything is stored and previous personality traits are stored in virtual back-up data storage. Whether any of this will leak out is purely speculation.

Doctor Robert Ford has an entire unit in the Programming Division under Bernard Lowe to observe and supervise the hosts’ personality traits and there is some concern that some hosts are operating outside their specification narratives. Ford notes that there is a 20% flexibility in the programming protocols to enable the hosts to produce differing random reactions subject to guest behaviour so as to give an element of surprise.

The research into Artificial Intelligence is at the hub of all their work and is in encoded files that is resisting analysis. What is understood is that all of the hosts are capable of evolving but needs an order for that to be possible. This does suggest that this is the equivalent of turning off the read-only mode to a ‘read-write’ command similar to a popular cyborg film series. Although there is nothing fundamentally wrong with providing these hosts with some independence this might produce conflict when they are forever being gunned down or hacked to apparent death with swords.

There has been some consideration that some of these hosts are becoming self-aware and one would wonder whether or not they would prefer to have their personality hub transferred into a better body.

The biggest problem is the accurate depiction of the hosts meant you could not tell them apart from the guests, unless you shot them. Granted the ‘adventure’ pattern of the hosts are in a set mode and every morning you would see some actions, even those hosts who would want to include you in their adventures line of con games or looking for buried treasure unless you decline them. I am amazed that no guests have accidentally shot each other in all of this although there is a mechanism in the guns to prevent that happening. Presumably, there has to be a heat signature difference between host and humans to ensure this does not happen. However, considering that the Delos fantasy complex is in a high day temperature in Arizona, heat signatures must vary a lot.

On top of this is the cost of continual repairs to the hosts. Their bodies are so human-like that there are multiple choices to receive gunshot wounds, often displaying significant damage and blood. The level of realism is clearly over the top. I doubt if many of the guests would be concerned with just where the shots went in the hosts’ bodies providing there was a level of blood discharge and apparent ‘death’.

As such, it would be easy to equip the host body with a discharge point. After the guests have left the area or, if necessary at night when they are asleep, the hosts can rise and it would take minimal time to replace the blood sac and reseal and resume their activities rather than the several hours currently used. Indeed, the hosts could do these repairs themselves and reduce the amount of human labour normally needed.

From a purely budget point of view, this adds significant cost to the running of this fantasy park that could be minimalised with these changes and needs to be suggested to the board of directors if they want to maximise their profit margins.

It is therefore recommended that this consideration should be carried on a future generations of these hosts or at least reduce the excessive damage to prolong their lives between repairs. The last thing we would want is for anything to go wrong.

© GF Willmetts

February 2019

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

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