What It's Like Being a Vampire

Chapter One Hundred: If There Was An Assistant

Xiang Kun opened an English medical-textbook PDF file on his computer with a side-flip motion and read for half an hour. He verified that both his memory and reading speed had improved significantly after his mutation, although the directed mutation training hadn’t quite reached its threshold.

However, he didn’t finish the book. Instead, he closed it and opened the Vampire Mutation Model he had coded himself to adjust parameters and the model’s orientation.

In the past two weeks, he had read countless medical and biological-related books. On one hand, it was to help him acquire some fundamental knowledge so he could better understand the different patterns and details of his physical mutation process and trace its origins. On the other hand, it was also to improve his memory, reading speed, and logical thinking abilities, so that he could more efficiently capture necessary knowledge and resolve encountered problems in the future.

But each discipline becomes more and more specialized as you get further into it. It becomes more difficult to understand and involves many specific research directions, projects, and case studies.

Many of these things cannot be fully understood by simply reading books, reviewing documents, and gathering information online. They require lots of practical operations, experiments, and observations. Although he didn’t need to completely master all of these subjects, his personality dictated that once he immersed himself in a subject, he would easily get lost in exhaustive and unnecessary pursuits.

Even though he knew he could further improve his brain’s abilities through this method of extreme reading, he was getting tired of this way of learning. It wasn’t in sync with his rhythm.

Back in high school and college, his reasons for studying usually fell into one of these categories:

To prepare for exams; 2. Personal interests; 3. Because he was already there…

However, after graduation and entering the workforce, his learning became very purposeful. For example, he learned Python after graduating from school for the purpose of data analysis and Al, which suited the programming language well. He had an idea of what he wanted to use it for in the future.

So, every time he finished learning something, he would inevitably want to see if he could apply it somewhere. He had never considered mastering all the related knowledge, even though his reading speed and memory far exceeded ordinary people now. He also didn’t believe he could accomplish that in a short period nor deem it necessary to do so.

When it comes to storing knowledge, the human brain can never outperform a computer. When needed, just call upon it.

Xiang Kun couldn’t help but think that it would be great to have a few assistants to help him fill in the gaps, help him review relevant materials, organize helpful information and details he should pay attention to. Also, they could discuss and analyse the bodily mutation situation with him. Additionally, they could help him arrange the fresh blood needed for his meals, plan the training and experimentations needed for every Blood-drinking Period. Plus, they could perform anticipation and statistics on the results, and they could chat and play games during the downtime…

Xiang Kun slapped his forehead to interrupt his daydreaming. For this to become a reality, he was afraid he would have to give himself up to the government.

However, thinking about assistants and partners, he happened to recall a survey/vote post from a reasonably popular technical forum:

“Who is your ideal assistant?”

There were many options like:

“A middle-aged uncle with half-white hair who has rich social experience and can help you handle all kinds of interpersonal relationships and trifling matters.”

“A well-built aunty who excels in various housework, can cook excellent dishes, can make dishes from various cuisines, can make different dishes every day for a month.”

“A taciturn lad with a Mediterranean-style haircut who is good at different technologies and extremely skilled at BUGFIXING.”

“A humorous older brother who always wears a long coat and looks like Guo Degang and can make you laugh in thirty seconds no matter when.”

There were more than a dozen options, and you could only vote for one, not multiple ones.

The top two were:

“A cute girl in a white maid outfit who is cute, has a sweet voice, and can act cute but doesn’t know anything else.”

“A lady in a black professional suit who is gorgeous, hot-bodied, but cold and likes to command.”

For this result, the forum’s limited female members could only comment with four words:

“Haha, men.”

Most men are visually-driven creatures, including programmers. The result of the vote was, therefore, unsurprising.

Xiang Kun even speculated that the person who initiated the vote did it intentionally to reveal the true nature of male programmers.

Of course, Xiang Kun himself voted for the second option…

However, among the numerous choices, apart from the top two hormonal voting results, the third one wasn’t far behind and more accurately represented the real wishes of programmers:

“A Al which doesn’t have a physical form but can grow according to your needs.

It assists you in accomplishing various tasks, entertainment, interaction.”

Xiang Kun suddenly realized that it would be nearly impossible for him to find an assistant or partner that he could trust and who also had enough capability to provide assistance.

However, if it’s an Al assistant, then there’s no need to worry about trust issues. The kind of assistance and abilities that this Al assistant can provide depend on Xiang Kun’s capabilities.

Al is almost the most popular concept in this internet and mobile network era. Today’s Al is increasingly specialized and mature, and it no longer has the once mysterious and high-end feel. Various physical or virtual products unavoidably come into contact with Al.

Xiang Kun’s previous company and the work he was responsible for were involved in related fields.

So, he knew that making an tailor-made for his current situation, monitor, and gives statistics on his various data. Then it would combine his prior vampire mutation model and the web crawler already deployed to the cloud server, and constantly enhance the model, meanwhile, it would make relevant suggestions and “guidance” for him, and it shouldn’t be too difficult.

Then he started writing his PRD(Product Requirement Document). Since it was for his own reference, many details and format stuff could be omitted. He quickly came up with an initial idea.

However, what he didn’t expect was that with the progression of time, this PRD became larger and larger and hardly bore any resemblance to the initial draft…

He initially thought that text input and output would be enough for this Al assistant but then thought; it’s just him all this time. It’s quite lonely. Since it’s an assistant, it should at least be able to “speak” and support voice recognition for a “chat”. After all, the technology is already available, and it’s not difficult to implement…

Then he thought, since it’s already an “assistant”, just focusing on the Vampire Mutation Model feels wasteful. It should at least be able to help find songs, look up recipes, search maps, tell jokes. It’s not hard to do…

Then he thought, as an Al assistant of a vampire, having only these functions seems a bit too “idle”. If it’s just for finding songs, looking up recipes, telling jokes, he might as well just pick up his phone and call out for Little Al…

Dividing line—

To thank Lazy Sound for becoming my first ever chief reader since I started writing, I will post an additional three chapters today and write as many as possible.

Thanks to our new helm, Remaining Ashes from the Fire, and thanks to readers Zhuge Dadao, Dawn Jinqing, Tangshan Andy Lau for the donations.

Plus, a quick advertisement for the reader group that a reader helped me set up: 901323137. It’s a place to shoot the breeze, chat and share book recommendations when you’re free..