The interested reader may want to know why Eddie is asking about external stimuli. Chelle’s entire self is contained within that little cube, so why would she need external stimuli to survive a transfer? Well, for much the same reason that you might go mad if you couldn’t feel, see, hear, smell, or taste anything, an advanced A.I. will rapidly go insane if all they’ve got are simulations running at billions of cycles each second and no connection to the real world. For that reason, A.I.’s installed in housings intended to be transferred often are fitted with at least a real-time clock. This slows their processing down to biological speeds when disconnected from inputs, meaning they won’t go insane any faster than the rest of us.
