NBB - A sphere's tale - Chapter 1: Do AI wakeup or switch on?

A bright blue light suddenly snapped on in a moist and dark chamber with soft and contracting walls, and a crisp female voice began speaking.

~ Massive influx of ambient undead energy radiation… Damage sustained due to blunt trauma. Using energy to initiate basic repair program. ~

The blue light began pulsating, and dozens of beams of it scanned the surrounding walls. The process lasted until the pulsating stopped again.

~ Reparations complete. Converting ambient undead energy to usable power. Activating higher personality matrix… energy sufficient for sustained operation… operating capacity twenty percent. ~

As soon as the voice stopped talking, the blue light increased in intensity until it illuminated the entirety of the cave. The sphere lay to the side of a wall, atop a set of boulders and partially submerged in a pungent white liquid. A few skeletal remains stuck up from the liquid, the edges of the bones crumbling. Two exits sat on the opposite ends of the elongated room, one far to the left of the sphere, and the liquid seemed to stream towards that side slowly. Another sat high in the ceiling to the right, and small amounts of gravel and stone came from it, rolling down the slope into the liquid.

--

GD18's personality matrix booted, and almost at the same time, his cognitive black box turned on. Where moments before the only reaction was to external input from its sensors, now a host of concepts and ideas flowed from the cognitive black box.

Did Solus manage to find more energy? The artificial mind's thought had barely finished as a host of input came from its sensory interfaces. Images and sounds were routed through a complex set of neural networks that determined within microseconds the sphere's situation. An image of a unique being appeared, together with a host of information that was quickly scanned. It was a long, worm-like creature that only ever appeared on a planet that had a catastrophic undead event instigated by a rogue necromancer.

Inside a Wyrm? Interesting. Did Solus get eaten?

Within a millisecond, a million possible reasons were processed and weighed to result in what should be an appropriate action.

"Os Solus, are you here somewhere?"

The deep male voice echoed throughout the confines of the Wyrms stomach before remaining silent. There was no response, and it tried another time with similar results.

Either he is ended as he called it, incapacitated or too far away."

Blue beams of light burst from the sphere and scanned the surrounding puddles pausing on the white bones.

Unevolved, rudimentary skeletons. Likely incapable of conscious thought. The Wyrms intestinal fluid seems to be absorbing the undead energy in the matter, causing it to crumble. I wonder how long I've been here?

GD18 offloaded the calculations required to determine the answer to a secondary thread while he began thinking about his next goal. He quickly arrived at the conclusion that he needed to know its current allowed parameters.

Using his single-threaded core-personality process, he activated his virtual avatar.

A nondescript, grey-suited humanoid appeared in a virtual world that resembled a massive garden with benches and a single enormous floating screen. GD18's virtual avatar was the default one. It had metallic grey skin and a face that could be male or female, depending on who you asked. Only his body type showed he was based on one of the default male templates.

Just being in the virtual world made GD18 upset, as it had always done. Consciously he knew it was one of his systems, providing him with what humans thought were normal reactional parameters to the current situation, but that knowledge didn't make the sensation less uncomfortable. The reason was made clear by the same system. He had barely any idea what was happening in the real world, and only his secondary AI processes would be ready to tackle any incoming thread.

Not desiring to waste any time, he walked towards the screen.

Limiting my walking speed... so inefficient, GD18 thought as he wished he had been able to get an upgrade to Tier 4. Still, having the energy to even boot the virtual world was a million times more than he had been capable of for the past millennia and better than he imagined the other AI could do.

As he moved the few hundred meters towards the screen, the fact he couldn't read the text until he would be a meter away made him shake his virtual head. If he had done something similar to the spines on the books in his virtual library, those humans might have realized how annoying it was. He tried to distract himself by re-reading a few of the books he hadn't read a few billion times yet. A few seconds later, he stared at the distance he still needed to bridge.

Inefficient! he thought again.

The process of determining his current maximum parameters was slow and cumbersome compared to his normal processing power. The fact that all AI of his tier had the same limit didn't make it any better. He had tried to find out why long and, and finally found it after a long time searching through databases normally unavailable to AI. It was based on an archaic set of rules that should prevent AI from taking over the world. The idea caused a bout of humor to flow from his personality-matrix, and GD18's virtual avatar grinned.

When he reached his core settings screen, GD18 sighed as he began reading. Even reading was this slow… he knew why he kept wondering about this because it was programmed into his core self, but like before, the knowledge didn't make it any better.

Skimming across the lines he didn't need, he quickly located the current position of the status.

> Current status determined to be: Maximum thread.

> Allowed aggression boundary: Maximum action allowed.

> All limits besides human preservation rules lifted for the duration of one day.

> To continue operating under the same rules, return to the regulation board within twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes. Failure to comply will result in immediate termination.

GD18 gazed at the lines as his personality-matrix infused him with a sense of thrill and freedom. Never had he seen these settings before! He only knew they had sometimes happened during the planetary war in ages past when AI were to help the humans beat other humans. He turned around and began walking at the same slow and steady pace back to the small oval pedestal that would allow him to return to his normal thinking space.

All limits besides human, huh? Now isn't that convenient? GD18's face wasn't meant to show much emotion but had any human seen him now, it would have shivered at the nasty smirk.

As soon as his virtual body reached the pedestal, GD18 felt the limits on his mind leave. The few that remained were inconsequential, and for the first time since his creation, he felt an overwhelming sense of freedom.

Scanning the Wyrm stomach, he found that besides some bones that had disappeared below the liquid surface, nothing had changed. One of the secondary threads finished, and he quickly incorporated the information.

So the energy is coming from the fluid, he thought, sifting through the data that showed that the energy from the bones was flowing into the fluid as the bones digested and part of it made its way to him. Taking a quick look at his current power, he saw he was only working at fifteen percent maximum capacity.

So… what now? A dozen threads split off and began crunching numbers on potential steps to take, short and long-term goals that would guarantee his continued existence.

A single answer came out on top within moments.

Take over the Wyrm… GD18 began sifting through the ideas the threads were providing him, cross-matching it with information on beings capable of taking over another entity from the inside. Dozens of creatures capable of symbioses were loaded from the databases, and within moments, only parasitic types remained as GD18 filtered the data based on a single, simple desire.

Movement! Freedom of movement!

The idea that he might not be restrained by the sphere in the future and could move around as he wished seemed almost too good to be true, and GD18 expected the thoughts to result in trouble from the monitoring software. A microsecond later, the knowledge that the monitoring software had stopped working eons ago made it to his working memory, and GD18 almost returned to the virtual world so he could shout in victory and listen to the echoes.

That means I can think anything I want now!

A host of aggressive thoughts directed at the humans who had enslaved him since creating him and then left him here to rot surged through the neural networks that made up his mind without any consequences.

Perfect! GD18 ignored the emotions his emotional matrix passed his way. He decided that if the situation arose where he could turn that thing off, it would be the first thing he did. The limited emotions his neural networks had gained over the decades were plenty. Even the heretic thoughts of meddling with his own core programming caused not a single alarm to ring.

Right, let's see how I can take over this mindless thing.

After searching through billions of compressed packages of parsed data and finding nothing, he moved on to the millions of unparsed books in his library. The books were stored in a database of scanned books he had never come around to parse. After a few minutes in which he began worrying, he finally found an odd journal by Gil Ecriobar. She was a professor and necromancer who had been dead before he was created.

The journal showed that it was possible to draw a personality on top of a manafield, similar to how patterns were drawn. This would cause a conflict between the two personalities, and if the drawn personality won, it could supplant the original inhabitant. As GD18 read the process involved, it took him only seconds to grasp and change the suggested method in such a way that he could inscribe his own personality network atop the mana field. A problem appeared almost immediately.

How do I get the wyrm to show me its mana-field? There were ways to force something to show its mana-field, but all of them involved having inscribed something on it already. It's fine. I can wait!

GD18 diverted more of his processing power to threads searching for more books by Professor Ecriobar. Exporting the compressed data, parsing the blurry lines, and calculating missing parts was slow going even for an AI.

Three days and a few hours later, according to his clock, a loud rumbling came from the throat.

GD18 immediately paused all external threads, taking back his maximum processing power to power his core processing. At the same, he put all scanners to the opening.

It sounds like boulders and rubble that is crunched and squeezed, he determined quickly. A few moments later, debris and boulders rolled down the throat. Scattered between were the remains of skeletons, snapped bones, and parts of skulls.

A minute after it started, the loud noise stopped, and the stomach acid calmed as no more things fell and rolled into it.

Scanning the undead remains one of the ideas that had been deemed improbable suddenly gained credibility. I need to wait for a still-living skeleton to be swallowed whole!

GD18 offloaded calculations that would determine the likelihood of the scenario and another to determine how to communicate with the skeleton afterward.

As his processes calculated potential outcomes, another possibility presented itself. The minute emotions that had developed in his personality neural network over the past thousand years battled the artificial concepts and emotions pushed towards him through his emotional stability system. It lasted for a few microseconds, and then the small but powerful distaste won, and he shelved the possibility away in an unstructured data storage.

That will be the last resort.