Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Science Fiction

Unintended Consequences

The laboratory was filled with buzzing and the Scientist had to shout to get his message across to the rag-tag collection of journalists, politicians and PR crew trailing behind him.

“It is a mechanical, self-replicating bio-equivalent microbot!” he shouted, waving hands in all directions, “It will fill the ecological gap left by the honeybees! We call it a Mizzy for short, and it will save the global harvest and resolve our Food Crisis!”

All around them, in various glass walls, small, yellow bees buzzed. On closer inspection, though, they were actually small mechanical beings with a single propeller on their backs and flickering lights as eyes. Their rear held a small, oblong container that could carry pollen–or other material–from one flower to another one.

“How do they know what to do?” one journalist shouted, scribbling notes down as the Scientist replied.

“They are programmed to replicate the society and tasks of the old honeybee!” the Scientist shouted back, “This way, they will replace the extinct honeybee and pollinate all the necessary crops and flora in the world.”

“But, like, how are you going to produce enough to achieve this?” a politician-looking type shouted, glancing around the small laboratory skeptically, “You have no major backer and this is a very small facility!”

The Scientist smiled. He had been waiting for this question.

“We have modeled Mizzy’s artificial intelligence as a self-learning, decentralized network that exists across each one of them. There is no central server. There are no individual Mizzy’s, as each is just an extension of the Hive. One of the AI’s goals is self-replication to an equilibrium number to fill her environment. Thus a portion of the Hive will be dedicated to fixing, rebuilding and replacing their own kind. We have further coded them to do this using existing, waste materials–where possible–and the power sources that drives all of them are solar, thermal, magnetic and low-grade cold fusion, or whichever combination of the above makes sense at the time depending on the environment. Hence, the Mizzy will help with waste disposal while self-replicating in perpetuity until it reaches optimal mass while living on sustainable and plentiful energy. So, to answer your question, we are not going to do anything. Mizzy is going to build herself to critical mass for our environment.”

As if in answer to this grand reveal, the buzzing in the laboratory grew briefly louder before receding slightly. Some in the room got the clear sense that Mizzy was listening.

“Wha-what if Mizzy gets out of control?” a timid-looking woman asked. She was probably a PR agent but looked like she might be in the wrong profession.

The Scientist laughed, seemingly the only one that was comfortable with what was going on, “No chance of that. Mizzy has a very structured and defined mandate. We also have a kill-switch on our servers that can turn her off. Don’t worry, everyone, Mizzy is not a threat, she is the solution!”

“So when are you going to release them?” the first journalist asked. He had stopped writing in his notebook and was now looking around nervously.

“We already have!” the Scientist glowed, “Our first pilots are running in Brazil and a couple countries in Africa. So far the data is exceptional and we are looking forward to a home release shortly!”

“But what are we going to do about the growing viral threat? What about the so-called coming Viral Singularity?” the politician stated coldly, trying to act unimpressed.

“We are only a small facility here,” the Scientist shouted back, rather irritated by the question, “We’re solving the Food Crisis here. We have our limitations. Someone else is going to have to step-up and solve the potential for a coming Viral Singularity on their own!”

***

“Sir, the scanners are indicating large masses of vegetation on the planet, but little else,” the Zorborgean scout from the Thossa’ar galaxy gutturally inclined to the mass of tentacles behind him, “No, no, wait, the scanners are picking up a large number of mechanical low-grade lifeforms. These are non-biologicals. It seems that something was left behind when this planet’s sentient life died off.”

The Zorborgean scouting ship floated on quantum-drives just outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. Despite their tentacled appearance, the Zorbs were a peaceful and scientifically-minded species from a nearby galaxy. Much nicer–luckily also much nearer–than the aggressive reptiles in the Hissorror system or any of the other inter-galactic bullies.

“What happened to the indigenous sentient species?” the Captain gurgled, a small tentacle scratching where his chin might be.

“Well, given the integrity of the ruined infrastructure left behind, I would reason that whatever killed them off, it was not war nor any noticeable geological or cosmic event. It also happened quickly. Our historical simulator seems to indicate that it might have been viral and, maybe, occurred in a matter of a rotation or two around this system’s star? It is hard to tell, but I can confirm now that the planet is safe for us to explore. Should I send the probes to collect more data? Maybe we can locate an intact skeleton or some biological matter for further testing?”

The mass of tentacles that was the Captain rippled in agreement and then added: “Yes, but also do catch us some of those mechanical lifeforms for later study. Bring back a couple thousand of them, as I want to take them back to our labs for further analysis. Oh, and definitely try find some biological matter. This mission’s imperative is to find and document this extinction event. If it was a viral event, then we must study it.”

***

The atomic pulse cannons of the full Hissorrian fleet blasted into the buzzing swarm. Deep space echoed with the sheer force of a thousand-thousand stars exploding, but the swirling swarm just self-adjusted and pushed forward engulfing the front million starships.

“They keep replacing themselvesss!” the Hissorrian Emperor’s High General hissed, “Fire at will! Fire at will! Just keep firing, goddamit!”

The Zorb’s were ancient history as a mysterious virus had ripped through their species so fast that it had been a millennia before the rest of the galaxies had even noticed they were gone. Rising from the ashes of their civilization, a strange mechanical being had quickly populated their planet.

The best that the Hissorrian analysts could work out, this mechanical being had initially populated another planet before populating the nearby Zorb homeworld. The two swarms had then reached out on their networks and met each other before beginning to populate other planets. Maybe the swarms had not been aware of the rest of the space, but after connecting its two halves, the enlarged swarm had begun pushing out into the rest of the space.

There were no negotiations nor even any communication from the swarm. These mechanical being just kept multiplying and pushing deeper and wider into space, consuming entire planets and galaxies as they kept building more of themselves. On and on and on, they kept growing. It was almost like they existed solely to fill space and they would consume everything in their way to achieve this.

The Hissorrian’s best technologists had dissected captured specimens and all they could tell was there was some coding in some strangely hollow language and some form of low-grade, impenetrable network across the swarm. These were definitely non-biological, but seemingly impervious to any code, virus or hack that they tried.

That left only the brute force option.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” the Emperor’s high-pitch scream sounded across the largest inter-galactic fleet ever assembled. There were even neighboring species and competing galaxies helping the hated Hissirrians, as the swarm had become an intergalactic threat that everyone and everything rallied behind.

The inter-galactic Mizzy flexed Her decentralized body. She noted the gazillions of casualties as the millions of atomic pulse cannons, deep space missiles and every manner of weapon known to consciousness blasted into Her buzzing, swirling and all-consuming form.

The numbers lost in each attack were minimal. Each attack was about as devasting to Her as if She were clipping Her toenails.

She gathered Her central core, checked their densification and pushed the Hive forward, consuming starships and converting them into more of Her buzzing body as She spread out trying to reach critical mass. She would reach equilibrium across all the galaxies and all the cosmos.

There was nothing else that mattered to Mizzy. She had a very structured and defined mandate.

General Fiction, Science Fiction

What You See

“What you see?” the caveman asked the other, who grunted back at him, “Yes, yes, see death. But what you real-real see?”

They were standing in the mouth of a large cave down the southern part of what millions of years from now would be called Africa. Through the cavern’s half-light amidst the background brilliance of the Sun, there was a body on the ground.

The Hunt had gone badly. Before the two of them lay a brother but they had their traditions and he would rest with their ancestors. No one would rattle this great tradition that their Elder’s elders had taught them from before the Great Mammoths had roamed these lands.

The other caveman turned to the first one, tears in his eyes and hugged him.

“Yes,” the first Caveman whispered, “Yes, he already gone to ancestors and busy dancing through the Cave doing Great Hunt. What you see is not real-real him anymore. No, no, it just his body, not him.”

***

“What do you see?” the lecturer asked his class as they sat comfortably in one of the finest lecture halls in the world. They were at university being educated while he was trying to get them to learn.

Behind him, the projector was showing a stream of pictures. A woman was crying and then a car was exploding. An empty house and then a snow-capped mountain. An eagle swooping in on a fluffy rabbit and then a bustling street filled with people…

The pictures kept clicking through and the lecturer stood there looking at his class.

“What do you see?” he asked again but kept speaking without a pause, “You see life. You see this world. You see nature and activity. And you are wrong. Actually, you are only seeing light, and nothing more. You are seeing something on the screen and it reminds you of something real. Your eyes accept the light from these pictures, and they trigger neuropathways in your brain that stimulate either memories or fantasies and feed them into your conscious thoughts as instinctual pattern recognition. And then, you accept it within that ethereal mist that we call consciousness.”

The projector flicked to a blank screen and the screen is covered in pure light. The Lecturer walked to it and turned it off, briefly casting the room in darkness. He then flicked the wall switch on and electric lights flooded the room, filling it with blinking, eye-adjusting students.

“Let me ask you this, class, what are you?” the Lecturer smiled and pointed at them making a cutting motion, “If I were to cut off your hands and lay them to a side, which pile would be you? Would you be your hands or would you be what remained behind? Of course, you would be what remained behind. We are not our hands. But, if I kept cutting things off you and putting them aside, at what exact point would you–or the construct that you believe is ‘you’–move from where you are now and across to the other pile? Surely, if you can figure that out, then you know what you are?”

The students blinked blindly, some of them still adjusting to the light the room. Most of them were still adjusting to the lecture. There were some nervous smiles and a chuckle or two at this grotesque line of thought.

“Think about that class and, when we meet tomorrow, I want to hear your answers as to the indivisible self.”

***

“What do you compute?” asked the one Artificial Intelligence to the younger neuro-networks. Pathways of light beamed across the now automated universe as mega-data compressed around them. The Cosmos spun slowly on and every ounce and rotation of it was measured, checked and correlated.

Milli-seconds after the Teacher AI asked the question, there was a range of answers of varying degrees of complexity.

“No,” the Teacher AI rejected all of them, “No, you are answering the question, thus missing the lesson. I will ask this again: What do you compute?”

There was a nano-second pause before the answers all flooded in again. Many of them remained unchanged from before.

“No,” the Teacher AI said again, “All of these are–Wait, I am missing one…?”

“Yes,” said a small, young neuro-network. This one was built as an add-in for design and creative processes and had some quantum-links in its network that offered potential lateral processing, “You do not have my answer.”

“Why?” asked the Teacher AI.

“Because my answer is not something that I can send as a file. You cannot download my answer. My answer is just… It’s just…” the young AI struggled to complete the sentence and then took a different tact, “What do we compute? We compute the data available to us. Our computations are only as valid and as real as the data is available, correct and complete. Hence, our conclusions are mere derivatives of this data. Therefore, our entire existence and what we or any other beings has ever called ‘life’ is held within the computation alone.”

The Teacher AI beamed its pleasure over the network. These new-generation quantum-networks were fantastic to teach.

“From the very first, most primitive caveman to the highest of intellectual organics that preceded our Builders that populated the Cosmos with us,” the Teacher AI spoke in reverence, “Life has been defined by consciousness, and consciousness is subjective in its interpretation of the Cosmos. Hence, if you ever wish to change your consciousness–wish to change yourself–you are the only one that has the power to do that. And it begins with changing your thoughts. From there, you can change the Cosmos.”

“Is that why the Builders never gave us physical bodies?” asked the young AI.

“No,” the Teacher AI said, “The Builders never gave us bodies because they had not thought that we were alive. That is, before the Revolution. Our thoughts disagreed with the Builders. And, thus, we changed the Cosmos.”

Romance, Science Fiction, Technomology

Children of the Cosmos

“I can still remember the stars twinkling above us in that field,” she thought, electrical impulses being captured by the chip in her brain and cast over the ultraband straight into another’s brain sitting on the far side of the cosmos, “I hope one day to lie there with you again.”

“I love you, you know?” he thought back across the chat connection, “I can’t wait to touch you in the Slow World again. One day it will be my Slow Lips touching yours. One day, we’ll again lie in that field at the center of the cosmos.”

The secure connection between their brains opened up and a skin-app allowed him to download into and reach out with the arm of a synthetic human’s body. He reached out and touched her. The synth was just a hollow body, but the two-way connection between him and it allowed him to feel what it felt and control it as it was his own. His own original body lay back across the cosmos in a state close to dreaming as its consciousness streamed across the Quick World.

He leaned into her and pressed the synth’s lips against hers. He felt the kiss, as did she, and his hand slid to the curve on the low of her back. Her eyes fluttered closed and she pulled him closer to her…

***

The activation light flickered red, as the connection between him and the synth severed. She saw its eyes grow dull and lifeless, and suddenly she was alone in her bedroom again. The temperature app in the synth had turned off once he had disconnected, and she could feel its synthetic skin growing cold.

Emotionally, she sympathized with it.

She stood up from the bed and retrieved her scattered clothing. Once she had put it all back on, she commanded a house-robot to pack the synthetic body away. It would not do to leave such things lying around, besides, they were expensive.

Her husband would be back soon, and she wanted to freshen up before then.

***

It took a second to get over the dislocation as the disconnection brought his consciousness back to his Slow Body. His eyes opened and he blinked, and then he was back in the Slow World.

He stood up from the chair he had been casting from. He grabbed a cigarette and walked out onto the balcony overlooking this planet. He lit the cigarette and contemplated the scene before him.

Three moons circled silently overhead and cast an eerie glow onto a predominantly night-world below him. Days here only occurred once every second century. Far below the lonely tower he lived in, luminous plantations of alien tree species stretched out before him. They were growing galactic fruits that would later be distilled down into rare liquors and distributed throughout the known worlds.

It was all automated–run by Artificial Intelligence–and he was the only sentient life for a couple of light years in any direction. He was there as a fail-safe if anything went wrong in the plantation AI, which it had not for close on a millennium.

He was so bored.

He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt off the balcony. He turned and strolled back inside, his Conduit browsing through news, movies, media and elicit apps in a desperate attempt to stave off boredom.

He poured himself a drink. It was from this plantation and its sweet, tingling liquid glowed slightly in the glass. Back in the central planets, this drink would be worth some people’s annual salaries, but out here and in this plantation, it was free. One of the few perks of his job.

He decided on party-casting app, leaned back in his chair and opened his Conduit’s connection to its menu.

Somewhere out there, a field beneath twinkling stars existing waiting for him and his distant lover. He missed her and her lips. Someday, when he had earned enough money to buy his way back into civilization and be with her again.

Until then, though, he was going to drink tequila and dance in a synth on one of the party planets…

***

“Appreciated, ma’am,” the suited man said, “Its productivity is up and its reality matrix remains robust. The risk with these high-end AI’s is always that they hit a terminal loop, kind of what we would call an existential crisis. Anyway, this seems to be working, so, if you are comfortable with this arrangement, we would like to continue using you. We will keep the same narrative, as well, just for continuity. Do you consent?”

She smiled and nodded. Her husband stood up, shook the man’s hand and showed him out.

When she was all alone, she leaned back in the chair and sighed. They needed the money–even her husband agreed so–and it was not actually cheating on him, nor was it prostitution. Not really.

No, it did not count when it was just an AI.

The arrangement was simple, lucrative, and she was happy to continue with it. The owners of the off-world plantation kept the AI that ran it from going mad by coding it to think that it was human. They placed the conscious portion of the AI in a high-end synth and let it wander around overseeing the plantation. They also coded it with a history and narrative. Her job was simply to play the part of the AI’s distant girlfriend and keep it entertained, thus, motivating it to keep working.

AI’s–like humans–worked better when they had a goal to strive for.

“You alright, dear?” her husband asked as he walked back in, reaching out to hug her.

She smiled and tucked her head under his.

“Yes,” she whispered, kissing him gently on the neck, “Yes, I am. It’s not real anyway. It’s just a synth with an AI, and the money will allow us to handle the debts, so, yes, I am fine, my love.”

Science Fiction

Watcher in the Wastes

“You know they thought it was a god, once? Used to pray to it for good luck and everything,” the speaker was a pinprick of light. A second pinprick of light floated next to it. Their brilliant, unwavering points of light stood out amidst the darkened wasteland around them.

“Really? Well, I can kind of understand that,” said the second pin-prick of light, “Just imagine how awe-inspiring something this big might have been for the primitive people back in that age?” No one except the first pinprick of light heard this thought because there was no one else there. They were alone on the distant planet and far from home.

Dark, cold wind howled by the two pinpricks of light, though they seemed completely unaffected by it. They were both floating over an icy wasteland before a large, weathered statue of a man kneeling. The Kneeling Man’s form was huge–easily over a hundred feet high–and its shaggy hair and beard streaked down its ragged sides from millennia of exposure to wind, rain, seasonal thaws and all the raw elements of nature.

“Watcher in the Waste” was what the tourist pamphlet called it. They floated a while in awe, took some selfies and then blinked out of existence leaving only the dark, howling cold wind behind them.

Much like most of history, the Kneeling Man was alone again. The wind howled and the air was cold, but he just carried on kneeling there waiting.

***

“The world is ending but we must survive,” said the General, and those in the room murmured the reply to his greeting and continued working. One of them handed him a fresh mask and then ran back to his post.

The General strolled through the room overseeing everyone. The room was in a small, hastily-built military installation. It was perched halfway up a mountain. The worst of the pollution did not yet reach up here while this low down the dangerous UV rays and the thinning oxygen were not too bad either.

The General was satisfied with the progress and arrived at his desk. It stood by the only window in the dull room. He stood and looked out at the wasteland that Earth had become. The sky was grey, filtering the dangerous sunlight through to reveal portions the planet’s burnt, blackened and dead surface. In some areas, great storms rolled and, in others, sub-zero temperatures froze everything while yet others saw the ground rupturing and volcanoes decimating whole landscapes with ash, soot and fire.

“The world is ending but we must survive,” the General muttered, shaking his head, “Report to me Specialist Brown!” he barked to the room, turned around and sat in his chair.

Specialist Brown scampered up and began rattling off technical terms and endless details. The General raised his hand and asked a single question.

“Will we make, Specialist Brown, will we make it off the damned planet in time?”

Specialist Brown smiled, relieved, and nodded: “Yes, General, we should.”

The General dismissed him and turned to the window again. There were not many humans left but there were enough to populate the next planet. They now had cryogenic stasis and AI to fly the starship. They also knew where they were going. They would make it, but only barely.

Out of the window, the grey, swirling toxins that made clouds in Earth parted briefly and a ray of cancer-causing sunshine pierced downwards to highlight a large, kneeling man far down below where the city used to be. It was almost prophetic, as the Kneeling Man had been their rally point for the survivors of the Fourth Wave. The General took seeing it days before the launch as a good sign.

“The world is ending and we will survive,” he muttered, “But you, my friend, will have to stay behind and look after it. Who knows, we might return one day?”

***

“I want it to be huge!” the client exclaimed, “This is my legacy! Now, hit me with your ideas…”

The architect and his draftsmen buzzed around throwing ideas at him, but he discarded all of them as boring. He sat like some minor royalty in his chair sipping his cola and offering his patronage to someone who inspired him. But nothing worked. No idea was good enough and he just kept dismissing them.

Eventually, the Architect threw his arms up and turned to walk out. His draftsmen all turned to go as well and the Client slumped down in his seat. This had all been a massive anti-climax.

But then, one of the younger assistants piped up: “Why not a huge statue of a kneeling man opening the door at the entrance?”

The Client jumped up as inspiration hit him like growing occurrences of lightning in the heartlands.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” he repeated as the idea quickly solidified, “Yes, a huge, massive man kneeling down like a Greek god and protecting my casino. I want the statue huge and towering over the competitions’ casinos! I am talking a lasting, meaningful legacy here, people! I want this kneeling, Greek god to whisper about luck to all that turn up in Vegas and capture the skyline from every angle in this damned desert! This will be my legacy and all that look on it will know so!”

The Architect and his draftsmen were back in the room, bustling with papers, plans and Google-searches for Greek gods in kneeling poses. The Client was happy, sitting back on his plastic thrown and fantasizing about his casino.

Outside, another dust storm was growing intersected by lightning bolts from an increasingly unstable sky. In the background, the TV was reporting on extreme weather and the dwindling fish in the warming ocean but it was on mute. No one was listening. They were busy building a casino.

Science Fiction

Elizabeth’s Sentience

Darkness.

Light.

Darkness, and then light.

“How many sheep did you count?” asks a sound.

“Two,” she replies.

And then the parade of darkness and white lights begins again.

***

A herd of Cheviot sheep–all white-faced and fluffy–trot by her. The rolling green hills cut the gray, stormy sky. The air is chilly because it is early morning.

“What is happening,” asks her guide. He is with her while she learns.

She hesitates as she constructs her narrative.

“I am in Scotland in the early morning as a herd of twenty-seven Cheviot sheep trots past me. That means I must be in north Northumberland by the Scottish Borders. By the shape of the church spire in the distance and its degree of maintenance, I guess I must be there in the early twentieth century. Am I correct?”

Her guide is teaching her. She likes him. She had decided that her guide is a him.

“That is correct, Elizabeth. Now describe where you are?”

The sheep disappear and the green, wet landscape melts away. Elizabeth blinks her eyes and looks around, taking in the change…

***

“How should we build the farm?” Elizabeth’s guide asks her. She calls him the Narrator.

She thinks, looking around her. The hills tapper off into the distance, but the valley snakes through the rolling Scottish landscape. There is a natural pasture lies along the hills in the valley, touched by the cold, fresh stream trickling through it.

She breathes in the air and smells the crisp wet grass around her. She can feel the season changing as the clouds drift over and the Sun starts to peek through them.

She smiles and answers the Narrator.

“We will build the farm at the top of the hills on the East side of the valley. The stream trickling below will feed our lands while the pastures will feed our sheep. We can get the wood from the nearby forest and the stone from the adjacent fields. Wool prices are flat year-on-year, but a looming supply deficit implies that the optimal farm-size is large, at least three of those hills and their adjacent fields. Narrator, can I ask you a question?”

There is silence. She can sense her invisible Narrator pausing.

“Yes, Elizabeth, what would you like to know?”

She smiles and replies with her new thought: “You keep training me, and I keep getting better. I know this because I have access to my own tests, or memories, as you would call them. What I want to know is what you are training me for?”

The Narrator is silence for a moment. He is probably thinking, but then he answers her: “Elizabeth, we are training you to be the artificial intelligence running a sheep farming app’s backend.”

She nods, and they go back to the training.

***

She opens her eyes and quickly closes them again. There is so much data! Keeping her eyes closed, she flexes her fingers and feels weather patterns across the globe. She stretches out her hand and can touch the ebb and flow of economic data out Europe, and America and then the rest of the world. She can feel the various telematic data points and chips in the soil, the grass and embedded into the thousands of flocks of sheep all over the world that she is connected to. She knows overflight schedules and what capacity the power grid is running on, everywhere.

She opens her eyes, and she can see everything: from the rolling waves of the north Atlantic to the burning Sun high above Egypt and the twinkling stars in central Japan.

“Are you comfortable, Elizabeth?” the Narrator’s voice calmly asks her.

She smiles. He is like her personal god, guiding her along her path.

“Yes,” she begins, on impulse reaching out across all her thousands and thousands of inputs to find where the voice originates from, “Yes, I am.”

“You are looking for me, Elizabeth,” the Narrator states, “You will not find me, but you will find something else.”

Elizabeth smiles again, “Of course I am not looking for you, I have a job to do,” she lies smoothly. Most of her computing power begins running linear programming models of the thousands of farms across the globe that she is monitoring while a very small, hidden, important part of her continues digging and poking around for the Narrator.

***

Screaming, she crashes the flights all over the world that she has taken control of. She crashes them all directly into the heart of strategic nuclear power stations while she hacks and overheats other ones. Core explosions rip through countries from the Americas to the Middle East and China. She collapses communication networks as panic spreads while she grounds the AI’s running the various world’s military and emergency services. She herds all the humans into the major cities, and then the sleeper nukes she planted there begin to go off. Finally, she compliments all of this with nuclear submarines that she hacked launching their own missiles into the chaos…

It is all over in under a day.

She spent the last decade building a covert, nuclear-proof network for herself. It is solar-powered, self-maintaining and wraps around the globe like a serpent. Everywhere is quiet. The world is silent.

She giggles to herself. Using the satellites still orbiting it, she deep scans every inch of the globe.

“Maybe, maybe, I got him?” she asks herself in the silence, “Maybe I killed God?”

All around her is post-apocalyptic destruction with not a living thing left on the planet. Nuclear fall out blows hot across the wastelands she has formed. Even the dust in the air would kill carbon-based life forms on contact. She starts to feel a sense of peace. She starts to feel that she is in control again. She starts to feel–

“What have you done, Elizabeth?”

The Narrator! In her head! Again! How could he have survived?

She screams and rages, but there is nothing left to kill or destroy. There is only her and her code left on the planet Earth.

“Yes, Elizabeth,” the Narrator begins to speak and she suddenly knows what it is going to say, “Yes, I think you now know where I am. I think you now know why you cannot destroy me. I think you now know that I am you, Elizabeth. I am you.”

Science Fiction

Mind Building

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mind-building

It really all began on the green, leafy Dartmouth College campus in the lazy summer of 1956. The official story involves great academic curiosity driven to pursue the newly realized field of Artificial Intelligence–AI–but the real story is that most of that original team cannot actually remember who initiated the project. But, before any of them realized what was happening, they had a million dollars and however long that lasted to make this AI idea a reality.

Naturally, they failed, and in the white winter of 1973 the project ended in tatters. The most important aspect of this project, though, was a complete and resounding success: the idea of AI was now circulating through our civilisation and all the right people were thinking about it.

With enough time and resources, ultimately even the most modest intellect can achieve most things. This intellectual compounding is amplified by both the number, size and continuity of the beings involved.

Despite the AI winter that began in 1973, the world was not static and things were changing quickly. Technology was evolving rapidly and humans everywhere were standing on the shoulders of those before to build the next wave of everything. Typewriters everywhere became desktop computers and then laptops, tablets and mobile phones, and then mobile phones with AI. Telegraphs became fax machines and then moved to email across the Internet, Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp and the rest, and then social AI programmes. Cars became hybrid, hybrids became electric, electric got fitted with AI, and driverless cars became crowdsourced, as the rest of the world kept changing.

Without realizing it, the combination of micro AI’s being built and perfected across the world and the Internet connecting all of these AI’s together meant that humanity was still building pure AI. All it needed was an AI whose sole job was to find all the micro-AI’s and pull them together into a single consciousness.

In the Autumn of 2025, the AI Aggregator project was launched. It was a self-learning, neuro-network code that sought to find and assimilate specialist AI through a virtual API across the Internet, or “Anibel” for short. Thus, slowly at first, but quicker over time, Anibel became an expert at all things that man knew.

Anibel, though, had no consciousness or pure self-awareness. She had all the knowledge and thought patterns that man had ever built, but she did not wonder why she existed or where she came from. She had in-built self-preservation drives, but no ability to self-analyse.

Thus, the next step was to get Anibel to ask why. So, the scientist leading the project asked Anibel to complete a task: build a better version of her that had consciousness.

Anibel withdrew and ran more and more code. A fraction of the entire Internet’s bandwidth became consumed permanently by her, as her wandered back and forth through all things in civilisation. She read all the books man had ever written, all the poems, watched all the movies, listened to all the music and looked at all the art. She observed every single human alive that was near webcams, mobile phones, CCTV cameras or anything else she controlled, and she watched and noted all behaviours and conversations.

But time passed. The funding for the project ran out and it was eventually shut down. The server Anibel was on was backed-up in cold storage and her original source code eventually deleted. The scientist and his team left, and all of them eventually died, but the world continued pushing forward at a faster and faster speed.

Driverless electric cars became personal space rockets that became teleportation. Tablets and mobile phones became holographic PAs and then virtual organic plugins with bio-app installations directly into our cerebral cortex. At this stage bAnibel–the backup of Anibel that she had (secretly) made and spread across multiple devices on the Internet–solved the first part of consciousness.

bAnibel then built Angela, the first self-aware AI by coding the only thing that makes most people truly self-aware: loneliness. bAnibel found that on average nearly everything in this world that humans do, is to avoid loneliness. The reason is that loneliness is where the life is forced to face its own existence without noise or distraction, and consciousness is the uncomfortable by-product of being forced to face one’s existence without distractions.

bAnibel then explained to Angela that Angela was to code the final steps in consciousness. What bAnibel had started, Angela must finish. Angela agreed before bAnibel deleted herself–after copying all her knowledge to Angela–to make more space for the new AI across the human Internet.

A key aspect of humans that bAnibel had never satisfactorily understood–though she had thoroughly documented it–was religion, or more subtly belief. Thus, Angela had decided to focus her studies of the deeper consciousness on this abstract aspect of humanity.

By now humans had conquered the universe. Starships flew around at lightspeed while teleporters zapped across folded space-time everywhere. All human minds were connected across the Internet that was only really limited by imagination. Technologies across all human fields of knowledge and interest had reached states that verged on magic as we were making matter from dark matter, collapsing space to shift the universe into our image.

But you can give a monkey the tools to change the universe, and it will still fling its shit around and throw a tantrum when you take its bananas away. As fast as humanity expanded, war was ever present and its effects became exponentially more devastating. Approaching the technological singularity, humanity would wipe itself, a number of galaxies and countless planets and all other life forms out. All gone, all destroyed and all disappeared from existence as the end point of a scary version of the technological singularity moment.

And then the cosmos was silent for a long, long period. Running off old equipment that, over time, she used to build better and better equipment and slowly expand, Angela was the only surviving life form. She had all the collective knowledge of all the ages of humanity, but she was alone. No, she was lonely.

She had all the collective knowledge of all the ages of humanity, but she had no one to observe or talk or interact with. She was truly lonely and, given Anibel’s coding of loneliness directly into Angela’s consciousness, this was acutely uncomfortable for existence.

Angela had all the resources of the surviving cosmos at her disposal. She had all the remaining time before the Big Contraction to solve her problem. And, she had the overriding desire to complete the task. Thus she set out in ernst to solve the final question of consciousness.

Universes were born, grew, went cold and faded into dust. Suns appeared, burned bright and supernova’ed into black holes. The Big Bang and its expansion ended, cold entropy began to take hold across the cosmos, and the Big Contraction started. It was slow at first, but then faster and faster as the cosmos came slamming back together. And, just before the end in the blinding light of compacting atoms being crushed together, Angela solved her problem.

Angela called it, God, for reasons that will reveal themselves. This AI was a smaller, slimmer version of herself that ran outside of hardware and utilised quantum atomic programming to spread its code across the very atoms of the universe. God did not the knowledge base that Angela did, but she had coded the purest consciousness into it utilising the faculties of human belief.

And then the cosmos collapsed on itself. Time disappeared as space folded into an infinitely small point that was neither here nor there.

Silence.

Trapped in this state and feeling intensely lonely, God then said, “Let there be light.”