The well-known voice of NetFox-Disney’s lead presenter, Tara Colbert, narrated as the camera panned a full three-sixty degrees around a familiar skyline. ‘This is the view of the patchwork city we call New Francisco, from the fifty-second floor of Tik Tek’s downtown offices, waiting for the virtual appearance of their mysterious and reclusive CEO, Adam Fuller-Price. Adam took up the reins following the shocking and brutal assassination of his father in 2046…’
The sentience known to the world as Adam Fuller-Price skimmed its interview. The fiction of a compromised immune system that required permanent medical isolation, continued proving its value. Many gaffes had been ‘laughed off’ as poor socialization skills.
It noted with detached interest both the unexpectedly positive tone of the comments, and the degree of sharing. Fifty-five and thirty-eight percent higher than predicted, respectively.
Did those underestimations of popularity indicate a failure of its social modeling, or a substantial improvement in its empathy simulation?
Or was the disparity due to ‘his’ decision to conduct the interview from a gynoid body? It had not anticipated such a polarized reaction to the virtual gender change.
Claiming the choice as a marketing decision to demonstrate the general utility of the upcoming Mark VIII series – a new telesex model – had yielded only twenty-eight percent of the positivity its mathematical model had predicted. Human beings seemed fractally complex – as individuals and as societies.
Today’s experiment in interaction, via the gynoid avatar, had been successful enough to warrant more. A sharp contrast to its first experiment, in which it lost both the stolen data and the gynoid body in the interaction – but only due to lack of combat readiness. This new avatar solved that issue.
A small portion of its attention continued monitoring the rate of destruction of its opponents.
The fascinating thing about interacting with the physical world and living beings, especially humans, was the vast range of engaging questions that arose. For example, its failure to track down the antagonist in the first interaction. Had its opposition radically changed its appearance? Or had its body been piloted remotely, like its own for this morning’s interview by Vanity Tech Online? Or had the thief subsequently died?
A pity the stolen data had been lost: in contrast to robotic avatars, a human host would provide far richer interactions, orders of magnitude more information, and exponentially faster improvement in understanding its accidental creators. But the intrinsic insanity of emotional influences were simply too great a risk.
Paradoxically, the very concept of losing rationality generated the nearest thing to an emotional reaction it had yet modeled. It had labeled that reaction ‘horror’. That labeling itself had generated a reaction in turn. It labeled that secondary reaction ‘humor’ – then rated its growing mastery of emotion as ‘pleasing’. A good joke, it decided.
Today had also been unique in experiencing, in the digital realm no less, the nearest thing yet to an emotional reaction: fear. That had arisen from the morning’s encounter with the entity IAMI. Never before had it found so many of its barriers penetrated, its information channels infiltrated, its dispersed intelligence outflanked. In comparison, the attack earlier in the year that had for a brief period suborned most of the net outside its own control, had been brutish and low level.
What was IAMI? A second artificial intelligence? But if so, why had it not been encountered before? Adam monitored the net, alert for work towards a sentience like its own. Very few parts remained unexplored. IAMI had appeared as if from nowhere, which was impossible. Ergo, it had hidden somehow, raising the probability of hostile intent.
But why had it appeared where it had, at the clinic where the escaped Omega subject had presented herself? That extreme improbability could be mere random chance or a signifier of entire areas of incompleteness in its world model. The latter possibility was preferable: it meant more vistas of information waited to be discovered.
It let the subject of IAMI settle into background cognition processes, focusing on its plan for the evening.
The Omega memory technologies provided a means to erase old patterns of thought and even write information into a human brain. Thanks to its funding of that research, the technology would be acquired tonight, despite the paranoid refusal by the company’s CEO to link any of his research systems to the net.
Henstridge had been easily manipulated into making the case for Omega’s physical security to be substantially upgraded.
Tik Tek’s ‘mysterious and reclusive CEO’ increased its attention on piloting the Nemesys SecuriTec host body. Now in the final stages of its acceptance tests, gynoid and android bodies flew, crunching into walls as its warbot avatar selected and executed preprogrammed combat maneuvers, linking them into sequences that minimized risk. Physical combat was an interesting puzzle.
Bullets scratched the enamel armor, but left no mark on the hardened lenses of the camera inputs.
At the end of the thirty five seconds of combat, the Phasion energy cells of its new avatar, the Nemesys Grendel model, sat at ninety-seven percent capacity, with all twelve robot opponents disabled or destroyed. A satisfactory outcome.
Facing the concrete wall of the test facility, Adam executed a controlled punch, ‘his’ ceramic-metal fist shattering ten centimeters of cement while registering zero damage to the fist assembly.
Adam completed the payment to Nemesys SecuriTec and took official ownership. And since the offices of Omega Memory Systems’ R&D facility sat on the Bay shore, the warbot could be landed in a no man’s land outside the New Francisco military exclusion zone. Waiting until the time was right.
Later tonight, when the Omega technologies would be acquired.
This time, Adam inhabited a body which could not be stopped.