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wrote out some explanation for the other main characters in my sentient vehicle story, Benjamin and Kwadwo

BENJAMIN--

Growing up in Côte d'Ivoire, he became obsessed with vehicles and mechanics from a young age, fascinated by how they worked. Often times, he would sneak off at night to observe other people's cars close up, especially if they were very expensive or fancy.

Observing them with nobody else around, he began to notice something-- it seemed like some cars would do things of their own volition, turning on their engines and headlights, or moving their wheels about without anyone controlling them. Whenever he said something, it was always brushed off as a kid's active imagination. However, he became umovingly convinced that cars possessed sentience, yet had no way of showing it in a way that humans could understand.

As he grew up, he moved to Ghana for better opportunity and went into engineering. He spent a lot of time finding cars in scrap yards and taking them apart to learn how they worked, alongside speaking to local mechanics. Then, he experimented with attempting to give them ways to express their sentience in a way understandable to him-- hooking them up to radios or computers, trying to set up a language of morse code they could both understand and speak in, etc. Eventually, one day he came across a vintage, very beat up car that was close to being scraped for parts.

Hooking it up to a radio, he found that it was giving off transmissions in a very specific pattern that suggested the structure of a language. After much trial and error, he found a way to communicate with it, and found that it could comprehend human language. After being woken up, the car said his name was Kwadwo, given to him by his previous owners who had moved and hadn't been able to take him with them.

Benjamin, ecstatic with the fact that he had been right all along, used Kwadwo as a specimen, learning from him all the inner workings of sentient vehicles (how to communicate, how they came about, how they viewed the world around them.) He eventually learned how to purposefully instill a vehicle with sentience, rather than it being random chance. After many years, he got together a team of other researchers and engineers and used this knowledge as a basis to create Cassandra.

KWADWO--

The "grand-engine" of sorts to Cassandra. He was created in Ghana and bought by a couple, who he lived peacefully with for two decades before they moved and were unable to take him with them. Too old and beat up for anybody to want to buy him again, he was placed in a scrap-yard, where he slept dormant and forgotten for years before Benjamin found him.

The conciousness of vehicles is different from humans'. They have no vision, relying on sound through the vibrations they feel through their wheels or the air. To communicate, they create infrasound (very low frequency sound waves) with their engines that have encoded messages within them, and they can either be sent out as a general message to anyone receiving, or targeted towards someone specific. (Think posting on a forum vs. direct messaging someone.) This method of speech creates a vast, extended network between all vehicles in a certain area.

It is all nonsense to humans, and cars were often chalked up as being annoyances with very noisy infared sound that interfered with radio signals and had to be worked around. The only way Benjamin recognized language in it was through the structure/pattern itself, not any actual translation of it. Kwadwo can understand (and choppily speak) human language because he became conscious very early into being built, in the same way that young children pick up language easily.

Their world is almost entirely comprised of sending and receiving these signals, spending their entire lives deep in their own minds. Their physical forms are viewed as nothing more than vessels for their minds, and they barely pay attention to the physical world. The only thing they might take note of is a change of terrain or their parts moving by themselves (when they are being driven by humans). Many vehicles notice the sounds of humans and can differentiate them from the rest of the world; some are interested in these beings, most aren't. Kwadwo happened to be very close with his humans, finding their constant presence to be reassuring and comforting.

He was the first sentient vehicle revealed to the public by Benjamin. Though at first people were incredulous and convinced he was a trick, as they began to realize he actually was sentient, he paved the way for the recognition of the sentience of many other vehicles. His existence led to the enforcement of tests on all newly created vehicles to figure out whether they had sentience or not, and if they did, to treat them humanely.

Vehicle sentience is a bit of a gamble-- sometimes it will happen, sometimes it will not. Vehicles can gain sentience at any stage in their lives: while they're in development, after they've been built, or in some rare cases much later on in their lifetime. There has been a push for a strict divide between sentient and non-sentient vehicles, but this has spawned some problems, given how spontaneously sentience can manifest. The sentient ones are given apparatuses to express themselves in ways easy for humans to read, like giving them eyes, voiceboxes, faces (features either physical or on a digital screen), or monitors to type words into.

The biggest concern about sentient vehicles is the ethics surrounding them; for centuries, people have believed vehicles were inanimate, and have treated them as such. How many cars have been crashed, scrapped, treated harshly, under the pretense that they weren't aware of anything? What steps should be taken now, how should this newly discovered mind be integrated into society? Many people turn to Kwadwo himself for the answers; wouldn't he know best?

In reality, Kwadwo has no idea how to respond. He's disgruntled by all the controversy, having spent all his life as a family car with little to no conflict, and stumbles through the odd new life he's been thrown into without really understanding what's happening. He doesn't like all the experiments Benjamin does on him, but is too-mild mannered to retaliate, and reasons that he's helping his other vehicles be properly understood by their creators.

#kwadwo #benjamin #cassandra #life on the horizon

Shatta Wale claps back at Kwadwo Sheldon for rejecting his help after flooding ordeal | Nsemkeka

Shatta Wale claps back at Kwadwo Sheldon for rejecting his help after flooding ordeal | Nsemkeka Ghanaian dancehall star Shatta Wale and popular YouTuber Kwadwo Sheldon are once again at odds, following a heated online exchange that erupted after Shatta Wale extended support to Sheldon in the wake of a flooding incident. On Sunday, 18 May 2025, Kwadwo Sheldon’s estate was severely affected by…