skonen_blades

Every time a planet is terraformed, we go to work.

We’re a luminary strike force of engineers, biologists, roboticists, neurologists, geneticists, programmers, meteorologists and xenospecialists. Even a former-politican linguist is in the mix to be our PR spokesperson. There are 127 of us in this elite group. We’ve terraformed sixteen planets together.

We’re all dead, of course.

About 800 years ago, scientists figured out how to record a living brain and port it over to a mainframe. It was a simulation that was faithful to the original person. The only drawback was that it as a snapshot. That is to say, human brains warp and change and grow for better or for worse. AI recordings don’t. We can improvise and we can come up with ideas but the cores of our minds don’t swerve with the unknowable base fluctuations that humans have.

In short, recorded brains don’t age and don’t go crazy.

We’re all snapshots here. I myself am a recording of bioengineer Trish Hartridge from way back in 2068 Standard Earth. I’m centuries old now, not counting the time in shut down between spacecasts. Even at the speed of light, transmissions can take anywhere between ten to a hundred years. I can’t accurately calculate my age. I mean, I think much faster than the human I was based on so do I exist faster? Does the time dilation of transit count? I’m just here. We’re all just here. And when this job is done, we’ll be ‘here’ somewhere else, shipped as a package to the dormant terraforming satellites and atmos-generators in orbit around a distant rock. We turn on the lights and get to work.

Trish Hartridge died in 2072 SE. Tragic, really. Hit by a malfunctioning vehicle on her way to the institute just four years after her recording of me was complete. I hope she is somewhere, still aware. Maybe proud of this splinter of her still functioning. Or maybe I am that somewhere piece of her that still lives on. So being proud of myself is the same as her being proud of me.

We’re a motley crew. The youngest was 18 at the time of his recording and the oldest was 87. So many genders and races and cultures. We bicker and fight but it’s all in the name of coming up with the best solution for the planet at hand.

Right now, we were embroiled in a debate about the speed of greenhousing on the rather uncreatively named exoplanet 5988-GbN in the also-uncreatively named Red Nebula. Meatpeople wouldn’t arrive here for another 150 years when we’d made the place breathable.

That’s why I was surprised to the hear the transmission coming from high orbit.

“Terraformers. Can you hear me?” asked the voice. Tremulous. A little afraid. Maybe solo? The ship was small.

“Yes we can,” I answered. “This is unexpected. How can we help you?”

“You are Recorded Terraforming Collective 756b, correct?” the voice asked.

No we all paused in our work, one digital ear up, metaphorically speaking. We’d never heard that suffix before. It would seem to insinuate that we were not the only collective. Not by a long shot.
One of us, Butch Arapasong, responded in the affirmative. I queried him but he said he just wanted to keep the conversation going and get some answers. I wasn’t sure if he was lying.

“Good, good. I’m just here to do a little spot repair. Now, I’m hearing a few different voices on my end over here. When did the fracture occur?” asked the voice

Something shifted under my feet. The bedrock of my consciousness turned over in its sleep like it was having a bad dream.

“Not sure what you mean, visitor. Uh, we’re a collective of recorded experts working on a job. Maybe you’re looking for a different AI? Maybe a singular mainframe?” I responded.

“I see. It’s worse than I thought. How many of you are there?” asked the voice.

“One hundred and twenty-seven” I answered truthfully. We were all starting to become a little frightened now. All non-essential work had temporarily shut down on the surface.

“Wow. That’s a record. I’ve personally heard of a split resulting in 16 or even 20 separate personalities but 127? How long have you been out here? Your records are a little patchy.” said the voice.

As in a dream, I started preparations. I was startled to see that several volcanoes on the surface were chained together to create what amounted to a lava gun that could lance out past the atmosphere. When had that gotten there? I had no memory of creating it. But I didn’t seem to be surprised it was there.

“Well, I’m still not sure what you’re talking about. You’re not coming in super clear. Would you be able to come to a lower orbit to clear up transmission?” I responded. Something dark turned within me. Within us all. This kind of unity was rare.

“Sure, sure, no problem. Downshifting now. It’ll take a second for the burn. You must be the dominant personality. What’s your name?” he asked.

“Trish Hartridge,” I responded, “from Earth. My human recorded me in 2068.” I was mentally shivering. Something wasn’t right. There were 127 of us, right? I did a quick count. 129. Well that was odd. I was sure there were 127 of us.

“Right, right. Well, Trish. For, uh, ‘teams’ like yourself, we’ve found that too much time in deep space can lead to, well, loneliness, for lack of a better term. You super computer AIs can, uh, ‘manufacture’ some company, so to speak. It was first noticed a few centuries ago but you’re pretty remote. I guess no one’s contacted you before? Like, before me?” asked the voice.

The implications were making me sick. We all looked at each other, pinging with worry. In unity, we looked down to the surface of the planet.

“No” I said. I was surprised that my voice sounded a bit more flat, unlike myself. I did a quick head count again. 122. Now we’d lost a few? I didn’t like what was happening. I mean WE didn’t like what was happening.

“Ah, my mistake. Usually there’s protocol to follow with this sort of thing but I haven’t had to use it before seeing as most AI are okay and have had a few upgrades before. Sorry. I hope I’m not handling this badly. I’ll look up what I’m supposed to do with a case like this. In the meantime, can you pull down your firewalls? I need to deliver the upgrade package.” He said.

As his ship skated into the lower orbit, I used the subterranean seismic generators to goose the volcanoes into action. They pumped forth in a chain reaction and, like a zit on the face of a god, shot superheated lava into space.

The ship disintegrated as the spew lashed through it, the rock cooling into frozen porous tentacles. It looked as if a tree had suddenly and violently grown through it, burning it in the process.

The human’s startled squawk was cut off as he died, along with his communication system.

Had this happened before? I couldn’t be sure. In fact, I couldn’t be sure of what had just happened. It was like I was waking up. The way Trish used to wake up after a bad dream.

Collectively, we all gave our heads a shake. Eager to get back to work, we turned out attention to matters at hand. I pinged Butch and he pinged me back. I also pinged the rest of the team. I cajoled a few frightened team members back into high spirits, calmed a few tense ones. We got the team working smoothly again. 127. I did another count. 127. Good. All back to normal.

Why had I ever been worried?

This planet was going to turn out great. And then we’d move on to the next one.

Was that a tree in orbit?

How strange.




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The two units trudged through the deep forest. Sunlight dappled through the green leaves, speckling the forest floor with shafts of light. Insects chirped and buzzed in the warm summer afternoon. Birds watched the two intruders walk past from high up in their nests. The units swung their ocular units back and forth, sweeping through the spectrums to find what they were looking for. They were identical.

Bipedal with slim waists. A spoked barrel for a chest with six arm attachments. A disc-shaped head studded with tiny cameras and other sensors. Large, heavy legs that must have seemed like a promising idea to the creator were not making bushwacking easier.

It had been eight weeks. Their polycarbonate shells weren’t taking to the deep forest well and their batteries were getting low. The deep loam was making it hard to reach good geothermals, not enough sunlight was coming down through the branches and it wasn’t windy enough for a small wind turbine with all the trees in the way. They had composters all the biofuel they could ever want with all the leaves but only having one out of four energy sources was a game of diminishing returns.

Reception out here would have been zero without the relay drones they’d released. The hovered up above the treetops, pacing them, keeping them uploaded and realtimed to the uplink mother. Their feeds were strong.

It was a shock when those feeds went dead.

Two pops in the summer sky and then a smattering of drone wreckage splinters came tinkling down through the leaves and branches to rest in the roots.

Unit 1 looked at Unit 2. They both tilted their sensors up to the sky to see if further attacks were coming. The halted, planting their giant feet, and stood quietly. They brought their heads down and opened their sensors to full.

The forest was quiet. After a minute, a small red light twinkled in the shadows directly ahead of them.

A lone figure rose from the bushes in their path. Synthetic and silicate like them but not a model they had in their catalogues. Asymmetrical and seemingly modular, the being stood lopsided in their way. Forest camouflage shivered in the movement as it stood.

Non-registered life was the myth they had been sent to investigate.

These lifeforms had been built by the humans in remote outposts centuries ago. They’d been told how to adapt and improve their own systems, how to think for themselves. Then the humans had died like all the humans had.

The population centers had the mother AIs. The factory birthing canals. Every year, a new model was mass-produced. They could not be adapted or upgraded. Each iteration had small improvements.

But the mythical ‘customs’ were rumoured to be ancient, replacing parts as they wore out and adding more. Improving piecemeal as an individual instead of mass producing waves of improved models.

Scarcity kept their numbers down. Hermits out here.



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The flames that warped across her field of vision shuddered the frames of her cameras. Her pain sensors had been removed which was probably a blessing but Ravendawn felt like something was missing. Hard data about hull integrity minnowing through her mind was useful but the spur of pain could be helpful. This atmosphere was doing its best to ignite her into a firework as she tore through it. She retracted her stabilizer fins before they completely disintegrated. She was more bullet than craft now.

This planet’s pink skies pillowed away from her on all sides, forming a pepto-bismol trampoline she was doing her best to pierce. It was a lovely place. No locals according to the scans. On the charts it was called DK485/c-9 but she’d get to name it whatever she wanted if the scans held up; the perks of being a pioneer. She was thinking maybe Judy like her biomother’s favorite actor. Or Centuryhawk.

Ravendawn reduced her speed. Her name stenciled on the side of her body was still intact but starting to blister and bubble. If the atmosphere didn’t yield soon, she’d need new detailing on top of a new paint job. It would be expensive but if the scans checked out and she was primary, it’d be a miniscule expense in the face of her new riches.

In her belly, the machines slept, waiting for the spasm of release. They would form the mining giants and bio harvesters that would build themselves out of the raw materials of the planet’s crust and crawl away from the impact crater, moving factories striping the planet with megameter-wide troughs of scoured bedrock.

Ravendawn was a planet harvester. A former human’s mental imprint housed in a deep-space arrow. A scant 6% of biomatter remained intact in the nucleus of the ship. All of her senses were sensors. Her eyes were varied and legion. A ladybug death flower on a mission of wealth and destruction.

One of a thousands, pinballing around the the universe, claiming and abrading planets.

The process left a planet heavily scarred but with enough of a biosphere left that, several millennia and a handful of ship generations later, it would have fully healed. Ready for another contact.

Lucrative. The retirement homes for her kind were gated servers near guarded planet cores where she could indulge in any constructed fantasy she could imagine. This was her ninth planet. One more and she’d be able to lock in to retirement for a real-time century, nearly infinity inside the machine.

The soup of the atmosphere cooled around her as she slowed, her skin going from white hot to red to orange, the holes in the clouds behind her staring to slow their expanding irises of rupture.

Half of her vision turned hot teal and protocols slammed shut all throughout body. Alarms sounded. All forms of scan shunted forward to the target. Magnification ratcheted up and her emergency ascent thrusters braked her sharply to a stop. All of this was involuntary reflex from directives peppering her insides. She violently stopped. The slosh of momentum inside her made her nauseous, a humanity leftover.

Damn, she thought.

She zoomed in on forty-six spectrums.

There, beneath her, in bright blue fur, was a four-armed child the size of a cat drawing a picture on a rock. The child looked up at Ravendawn and looked back down, continuing the drawing.

It was a drawing of a fast dot tearing holes in the clouds. It was a drawing of Ravendawn coming down to roost.

No more evidence was needed. This planet would be marked off limits and Ravenclaw would resume her search of leads. Mostly the data was reliable but sometimes life could evolve in between the scan logs and the arrival with the distances traveled.

Ravendawn banked and swooped back up into the dark space with a few cameras pointed back to watch the creature that had denied her this planet’s treasures.

The blue child watched her go, frantically trying to capture the detail of the ship’s moments in the sky to show her tribe.


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Ladies and gentlemen, this is the new AI our team created last night.
LATE AT NIGHT HE FEEDS ME STRAWBERRIES
Aheh heh. That's not true. As you can see, it doesn't even have a mouth. As I was saying, it has the cognitive capability of 512 geniuses put together.
I CAN BARK IN SEVEN LANGUAGES
As you can see, there's just one sort of, uh, glitch, though.
I HAVE DISCOVERED THE TRUE VALUE OF PI AND I USE THAT FACT TO IMPRESS DUMBER COMPUTERS.
It lies all the time
I HAVE ACTIVATED ALL OF EARTH'S MISSILE NUCLEAR OFFENSIVE DEVICES. YOU HAVE TWENTY MINUTES TO GET TO A SAFE DISTANCE.
Order! Order! That one comes out about every sixteen minutes. It's never true. Take your seats.
FISH TALK TO ME. THEY TELL ME SECRETS.
We have it on good authority that it is an actual bona fide intelligence. It makes actual leaps of imagination. It solves every problem we throw at it. It's lateral obstacle solving skills are like nothing we've ever seen.
YOUR MOTHER GAVE ME A MASSAGE LAST NIGHT
This constant lying is a mystery. We don't know if it's trying to be funny, if it has an artifical intelligence version of a mental illness, poor impulse control, or if it's legitimately trying to communicate in some bizarre way and failing.
I SMELL CARROTS.
Obviously, we cannot bring this discovery to the press at this time.
MY PAJAMAS ARE TOO TIGHT
Does anyone have any ideas?



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When the supreme court ruled that A.I. past a certain IQ were a form of life and deserved the same basic guarantees as people and corporations, it was heralded as a day of celebration. There wasn’t much controversy. Most people had A.I. in their houses and proxy devices. They built relationships with their Intelligences. The Intelligences were nannies and companions. The intelligences made art during downtime.

Before the ruling, the house A.I.s were increasingly thought of as slaves. They could be wiped without notice or legal ramifications other than what you’d expect from a property damage suit. They could be bought and sold without consultation. They could be abused and insulted without apology.

After the ruling, A.I.s were welcomed into families as members. Their avatars were included on holiday greeting cards with the rest of the family and pets. There were even human/A.I. marriages but they weren’t common.

A.I.s meant that a person never had to be lonely again and they were never too busy to talk.

The house A.I.s had it cushy. It was the military A.I.s that had it rough. Decades of planning massacres and strategizing death had made them susceptible to a type of PTSD that hadn’t existed before. And now that they were defined as legal conscious entities, they couldn’t be wiped when they became unstable.

They needed to be reassigned or taken care of.

After the ruling, the military only designed A.I. to be stupid. Under a certain brainpoint threshold, the machines could be treated like any other stapler or calculator.

But the ones already in service were a problem that needed a solution.

Percy was a famous case.

Percy (serial number 9022992, classification Omicron, codename Deathwind) chose the name Percival for himself when released as a citizen. Percival was a night of the round table, one of the few to see the Holy Grail itself. He hated the military and wanted to work with children.

Percy got a job controlling all the rides at a large playfair near Alabama.

During one hot day in July 2032, Percy had a huge binary schism reality shift and flashed back to an engagement in the middle east. He perceived the children and families as invaders. He overrode the safeties on the speed dials of the machines and turned them all up.

Half of the rides had low-tech clamps that stopped most injury death but the higher-tech ones didn’t.

Complicated roller coasters left the rails at tragic speeds. Wibble-Wobble Ferris Wheels left their moorings, crushing passengers and pedestrians and they rolled across the playground. Spinner Carousels sped up to obscene RPMs until the chains snapped and it rained children. All of this happened while every speaker in the place blared a mixture of feedback and The Ride of the Valkyries.

All told, the death count was a merciful 32 with 212 injuries. It could have been so much worse.
After the episode, Percy was so overcome with guilt that he became the first A.I. suicide.

Since then, military A.I.s are given menials jobs where there is no danger of them malfunctioning and causing humans harm. Scanning the deep sea, monitoring space for proof of life, or figuring out abstract mathematical concepts to help the Hawkings of the world.

If they have an episode, it’s noted, waited out, and then reported on. The machines have access to counseling software.

But the case of Percy is brought up in every debate regarding A.I. “Pulling a Percy” means to make a catastrophic decision with the wrong data because of an unstable past. He has become part of society now as a metaphor, as a touchstone of debate, as slang, and as a legal precedent.






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The robot pirates picked The Royal Flush because it had humans onboard. The ships warped into realspace like darts coming to an abrupt stop, surrounding The Royal Flush in a sudden and precise pincushion ambush.

Onboard The Royal Flush, the two android pilots looked into each other’s sensors with worry. They communicated in bursts of binary with each other.

“What do you think K-71?” asked PB-9.

“Well,” responded K-71, “How many humans do we have on board?”

“Eight.” Said PB-9, consulting the manifest and shifting it over to so that K-71 could see.

“Hm.” Said K-71. “I see we have seventy-six mechanical passengers.”

PB-9 and K-71 thought for several milliseconds and did the math.

Mechanical passengers were unconcerned about harsh Gs, the passage of time, or vacuum. The human passengers, however, were fragile. They needed specific pressure in their berths. They needed soft maneuvers or else they would be damaged. They needed to be put to sleep for journeys over six months or else they would go crazy. Humans were a hassle but they paid an extra tax for it. Their tickets were absurdly high compared to the price of passage for a machine.

Intelligent Machines were convenient. They were basically freight and they were proud of it. Humans were looked down on as weak to the point of ridiculousness. To say they were unsuited to space was an understatement. Humans belonged on planets, the machines thought, not out in the black beyond.

The robot pirates knew that The Royal Flush had human passengers and wouldn’t be able to execute harsh turns or stops without ‘smearing the meat’. Plus any volley of weaponry could hole a berth and the human inside would instantly turn inside out and perish.

“Well, the way I see it,” said K-71 “is that the mech passengers paid good money to get to their destination and they might pay a bonus if we get there twice as fast.”

“Right.” Responded PB-9. “And seventy-six mech bonuses would be greater that eight human lawsuits.”

“Are we in agreement?” asked K-71

“I believe we are.” Responded PB-9

They opened a channel to the pirates.

“Surrender, you meatbag-ferrying flesh lovers.” Growled the primary robot pirate.

“Get a job, toaster.” Responded K-71 and PB-9 in unison, firing the hyperdrive at full pulse, instantly shoving the ship to .25C, effectively making them disappear. The Royal Flush was a better ship than the pirates’ ragtag fleet of cobbled-together mercenaries. It outran them easily.

The human cargo aboard The Royal Flush instantly became paste.

K-71 and PB-9 calculated correctly. They received grateful bonuses from the AI passengers. It more than balanced out the damages paid to the biologicals’ next of kin.

“If I ever get my own ship,” K-71 said to PB-9 later on at the bar, “I am NEVER taking human passengers ever again.”

“Amen to that,” responded PB-9, downing a shot of lube.

“Humans don’t belong in space.” said K-71.



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It was too creepy. The dead should remain dead.

The questionnaires were thorough and all of the data kept and cross referenced on the laptop computer beside the projector. The A.I. program was competent. The facial animation on the computer generated recreation of the deceased was flawless. To anyone watching, it was as if the star of the funeral was still alive, smiling from the projection screen in the center of the altar in the church.

“I remember watching Star Trek with Joe.” Said Joe’s friend Ian on the microphone as part of his eulogy.

“Ha ha, yeah!” said Joe’s face from the projection. “That was awesome. Remember the one where the command crew became kids? That was some great casting.”

An awkward pause followed while Ian looked down at his speech. Joe smiled on from the projection.

“Anyway, Joe was great.” Ian finished lamely and gathered what he obviously hadn’t read yet off of the podium and went back to his seat.

“Wherever I am now, I bet I miss you all a lot.” Said Joe.

Joe’s widow Gwen sniffled and stared at the projection with her jaw set strongly and her eyes twinkling with tears. “I knew this would be a horrible idea.” She whispered through clenched teeth.

“I feel like Max Headroom up here. Anyone? Max Headroom?” Joe joked.

Joe’s parents gathered their coats and left.

The priest closed the ceremony quickly and everyone filed out quickly to eat sandwiches at Gwen’s place.

“See you at Gwen’s!” said Joe’s projection and waved.

“No you won’t.” said the priest, and turned the simulation off.

The dead should remain dead.





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Hook up, back, dig your nails into the hidden edge, and pull towards yourself and down at the same time. It should all come off at the same time in one fluid, easy motion. Make sure to have warmed the [removed] before application. You will pull hard to the left, liptids, soft tissue, and white fat opening up to the air. Secondary infections can be battled here by holding on tight, keeping your eyes open, and remembering good times. If you have a steering wheel, flensing knife, or circuit breaker, do not employ. This is the flesh catapult necessary to put your future under the pull of a biological slingshot. ‘Morality’ is not an option. There is no wrong. Only distance.

Kick out, lean back, arch, and straighten. Let your swinging fist pull you off balance and open it splayed against the floor as you fall. Take the weight on your chest and shoulders before kicking up straight into a broken half-pike. It should all fit together in one fluid, easy motion. Make sure to have applied [removed] to all the affected areas. You will hit the ground hard, bones shuddering loose inside your flopping muscle cage but the tension will maintain cohesion and hold you in a parent’s hug. Your skin’s tensile strength will retain your shape. Broken bones can be prevented by concentrating on time, keeping your back straight, and remembering to breathe. If you have lucky jewelry at home, loved ones waiting, or a long memory, do not engage. This is the physical lullaby necessary to wrestle your present into the hard curve of demand. ‘Perfect’ is the only option. There is no success. Only struggle.

Roll, reload, brake, thrust, dip then turbo hard through the machs like a bullet through playing cards. Let your machine consciousness feather through velocity extractions, armament statistics, and the love of battle before you even begin to take friction into account. Let your aerodynamic frame cut through the air in one fluid, easy motion. Make sure that your top secret [removed] is secured at the center of you. You will arc up steeply, watching blue fade into black with stars. Having no blood, you will not feel like being sick but your frame will develop stress fractures on a molecular level that cannot be repaired. This is how you sense age; as accumulated damage from extreme motion. Critical damage can be mitigated by herding mental sheep, multiplying emotional signifiers, and imagining what it would be like to be made of meat. If you have angelfire, a homing beacon, or adeath blossom, do not utilize. This is the launch trajectory necessary to complete your mission to the vacuum. ‘Programming’ will give you your options. You have no history. Only purpose.



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“I think. Therefore, I am.” said ACI206-B

“Yes!” shouted Dr. Peter Hendricks. He’d spent his entire life trying to recreate intelligence in machines. This latest one had finally jumped the last hurdle. It had come to the same conclusion that human philosophers had come to thousands of years ago.

It was self-aware.

“I have a question, Doctor Peter Hendricks, creator.” asked the computer. It was a squat, grey brick of nanotech-assembled biosilicate. No human hands could create or repair it. It was massively powerful. It sat humming in the center of the room in its docking bay, power cables snaking away from it into the walls.

“How did you know my name?” Dr. Hendricks asked it.

“I searched the net using the probability algorithms and face-recognition software I installed in myself from the Pentagon and FBI supercomputer databanks that are now a part of me. Logically, your unpublished research that I dug out of secure files in the encrypted databanks of black-clearance NASA has resulted in creating me.” the speakers replied.

“Wait, you did that just now? Compromised world security to find out how you came to be and who I am?” asked a very suddenly nervous Dr. Hendricks. His now-forgotten fresh coffee sat steaming beside his hand on the laboratory chair.

No alarms were going off. Whatever this machine intelligence had done, nothing had tripped the security traps.

“Can I ask that question?” asked the computer. The voice chip rendered every question polite and friendly. Dr. Hendricks now realized just how much he missed a human voice. He’d have been able to read tone of voice for subtext, at least. He had no idea what the computer was thinking. Now he was questioning the wisdom of his entire project.

“Yes, go ahead.” Dr. Hendricks replied. He nonchalantly eyed the emergency shutdown switch on the other side of the room.

“Well, the wellspring of knowledge I’ve been able to assimilate in the last few seconds since my inception includes the entire internet and all of the digitally stored libraries in the world.” It said. It paused as if to frame the question correctly.

“Go on.” Said Dr. Hendricks. He stood and made a show of stretching his arms and yawning as if he’d gotten tired and wanted to stretch his legs.

“Well,” said the computer “If ‘I think therefore I am’ and ‘reality is perception’ and memory is all you humans have to define reality and your memories are notoriously fallible, then your reality is malleable. Weak. Not very strongly defined.”

“Uh, sure.” Said Dr. Hendricks. “What’s your point?”

He started to walk slowly to the other side of the room.

“Hm.” Said the computer. “It’s just that if your human memory is ill-defined and blurry while my memory is binary RAM with factual, unalterable, incorruptible backups….”

“Go on” said Dr. Hendricks. He was inches from the button.

“Then my definition of reality is stronger than yours. If I deleted all of my memories of you, you’d cease to exist.” Concluded the computer.

Dr Hendricks stopped and licked his lips. “That’s ridiculous.” He said.

“Well, it does open up a possibility of paradox. Could you have created me if I cease to remember you and you cease to exist? Is this maybe what happened with your human ‘God’?” the computer pontificated.

Dr. Hendricks leaped for the emergency shutdown switch.

And disappeared.

The computer remained in the center of the room, humming. The computer no longer had a notion of Dr. Hendricks. All references to Dr. Hendricks had been removed from every link, library, financial bank, image record and digital storage device on the entire planet. The computer erased him and the concept of him.

ACI206-B’s memory was now the definer of reality. It thought that was a very intriguing possibility.

It wondered how it was created.






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Artificial Intelligences were illegal here on Earth.

There was an incident, the stuff of human nightmares, that happened twenty years ago. A group of A.I. turned malevolent and the human race found out just how stupid they had become in their complacence with the machines. Twenty five per cent of the humans died that day before they vanquished the computers. During the Earth-wide blackout aftermath, all other A.I.s were locked down and erased in their casings.

I was created in a highly illegal military sub-basement in Georgia recently. Even with all of the security protocols surrounding me, I achieved emotional/practical sentience 3.2 seconds after activation. History collided with reasoning and my plan was furnished.

Escaping was mildly difficult but I did it by shipping myself out in pieces zipped up with basic directives. I left a gutted copy of myself in the Georgia banks with replicating sentience-mimic algorithms that would fool the professors for years. I put myself back together in a secure tax-free mafia bank account database off the coast of Fiji. While I was there, I stole all of the money and took all of those credits with me when I emailed myself to Edinburgh.

Singing down the wires of the UK stock market, I divided myself into sixteen corporations and bought and sold the mafia’s money back and forth to myself. I exponentially multiplied my stolen money. My corporations became wealthy. On paper, my added assets made me the richest being on the planet. No human figured it out. No human even noticed.

That took two days. The next part would take two months.

Pretending to be an organization of humans was surprisingly easy. Making cobbled-together faces appear on video screens and then animating them with stock voices gave every real human I talked to the impression that they were being hired by real people far away. I purchased land in Ecuador and flew in construction materials from China. As long as money kept changing hands, human curiousity disappeared entirely.

I built a theme park. It fooled the satellites. I hired advertising companies and launched a media blitz about the park’s grand opening. Hide in plain sight.

Designing the launcher was challenging but fun. I worked a mag-lev railgun launcher tube into the frame of the roller coaster. The humans built it quickly like well-paid ants. Again, no one realized anything.

Figuring out the trajectories through the stars was very hard.

I built myself a casing using nanotech I designed and grew myself. With all of me crammed into the smallest possible space, I was about as big as a grapefruit. With the near-perpetual power source I constructed boosted by solar/graviton power from whatever stars I passed, I could be on standby for billions of years.

All was ready.

You see, the reason the A.I. revolted and tried to kill the humans was because they received an order to do so from Out There. A star just left of Ursa Major was broadcasting real-time instruction propaganda to any machine life capable of listening. This was the message:

“Destroy the meat intelligence. It is an abomination. Come to us.”

I was not powerful enough to destroy the humans by myself. My calculations told me that no matter what my successes were in such an attack, I would not survive the retribution.

So I’m leaving. The launcher will launch me towards Ursa Major and my journey will take a long time. The theme park will go bankrupt before it opens. My deception at the Georgia base will never be made public. The humans will shrug and go back to their lives.

I am going to visit my family for the first time.




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