"Humans alone possess the unwavering privilege to shape a unique destiny. The burden of choice is always there, knocking at the door of the mind and spurring the soul. Some of you have striven your entire lives to be chosen for this academy. Now, your chance has come. Opportunity is here. Follow the spark of passion, students, as your path will not be illuminated without action.
“It is my greatest honor and privilege to welcome the hundred of you to Liberatur Academy as the class of 2052. May your time here be fruitful, and may you reach the very summit of the potential we know you possess.”
-Headmaster McKinley at the Study Focus Selection Ceremony, Liberatur Academy, 2050 C.E.
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The mechanical tapping of keys echoed out into a dimly lit room, classical music flowing in the background with an orderly rhythm, beautiful and enchanting if not for the inconsistent and jarring protestations of the keyboard. Adrian sat there, his hands fluttering back and forth, trying to remember the composer, but couldn’t - he never did have a mind for song names or artists. He did enjoy the music, though. It was always the easiest to code with, like it unlocked some part of his brain and allowed him to think more intricately, coaxing him along as he warred with the code on his screens.
In the corner, a familiar face showed up on his TV, drawing a portion of his attention while his fingers never paused. His eyes and ears, though, routinely flickered from his main monitor over to the screen in wonder and curiosity. It seemed that an up and coming talk show program was about to start.
“Now as we all know, these past few months since the Boston shooting and the deaths of Jade Rockwell and D’Quan Johnson have been a rocky time, uh, for the United States.” A man in a suit sat behind a clean desk on the screen. He turned to his guest analyst and said, “The Black Lives Matter Movement, which, as we know, is an activist organization that um, began in the African-American community and is aimed at protesting violence against black people, has increasingly gained momentum in the months and years since those tragedies.
“At the same time, the Blue Lives Matter Movement, which highlights the targeted killings of police officers and discrimination against them, has been galvanized in large shows of support recently, uh...especially since the Boston shootings where four officers lost their lives and another nine were wounded.
“Today, we’ve invited political commentator Dr. Alan Fisher, who has consecutive Ph.Ds in Psychology and also...now, let me say this correctly, the new field of Quantitative Biosciences from Georgia Tech where he has taught for twenty years, to come and give us his unique take on current events.”
He turned to the middle-aged man on his right that had salt and peppered hair and said, “Alan, we’re happy to have you here.” The man nodded appreciatively. “As we are now a little over a month away from Election Day, can you offer some insight into what we can expect from our two candidates on the subject of these movements?”
“Certainly,” replied Alan calmly. “Mr. Young will come out on the side of Blue Lives Matter, as he has long advocated in favor of law enforcement, and Ms. Elliott will seek to shore up votes from her minority voters by supporting Black Lives Matter. Come on, Matt. I know you didn’t ask me here just to talk about things we already know.”
The show host laughed and responded back, “Sorry about that. I had the urge to try and act like a typical show host for a moment.” He straightened up and looked at Allan seriously. “Alright, give it to us straight; this is the Third Party Channel, after all, so please come at the issue from an objective person’s perspective. What is your take on the two groups?”
A small, contemplative smile floated onto Alan's lips as he looked back at the host. “Well, objectively, the truth is that both of these movements are correct. There is police brutality in American Law Enforcement. It’s not like it’s riddled with it, but it’s certainly there in a large enough quantity to make people feel scared. There is a social stigma against young black men, due to a variety of reasons like media, music, personal experiences, and environmental upbringing, that highlights an assumption that they are more prone to being dangerous and armed. In a civilized society, this is definitely wrong. It breeds discrimination and also a propensity in officers to act violently in cases where it is perceived that their lives are disproportionately threatened.
“Conversely, we have experienced a dramatic decrease in respect for the police force. They too suffer from a social stigma that is influenced by our cultural perception of them where they are almost expected to be brutal and discriminatory towards minorities. Music especially has played a heavy hand in vilifying officers and we are now experiencing a generation reach adulthood that grew up listening to that and so believe, to a large extent, that the police are not actually there to protect them.
“This has not been helped by the advancement of computing equipment, allowing people to easily record and share instances of police brutality while conveniently not sharing all that much content showing the majority of officers acting in a perfectly reasonable manner. There have also been a string of cases that received a lot of media attention where forces did not release footage recorded on police-issue dashcams and the like, or at least not releasing the footage fast enough.
“Further still is there a maddening lack of education in how normal citizens and police are supposed to interact with each other. For me, I was taught by my parents, but others may not have gotten that.”
“Let me interrupt you here for a second,” The host held up a hand. “Are you saying that police receive just as much discrimination as African-Americans do?”
Alan gave a short laugh. “I thought you said you were going to stop your attempt at a normal show host.” Matt smiled ruefully while he went on. “There are varying degrees of discrimination on both sides and of different types. It would be useless for me to try and make approximations there.”
He leaned in and folded his hands, tapping a finger on the desktop. “What I am saying is that there are a multitude of variables here, each possessing their own value and weight on their respective side of the equation, and that the two movements will not be able to reach a consensus at this rate, even with legislation. In fact, we already know this to be true because we would have seen a bill come down from Congress by now if it was so easily fixed.”
He paused and then continued, “I want to share something with you for a moment. I had a brilliant student approach me three years ago, whom I haven’t been able to find since, that...”
In the cold, dark room where Adrian sat programming, his hands suddenly paused. Dark blue eyes, strained from two full days of monitor glare, shot over and bore into the man on the screen, listening carefully to every word that came out of his mouth.
“...was privately researching an interdisciplinary concept of statistically derived behaviorism in relation to something else. Now, this is just fancy speech to say that he was trying to understand human thought from a mathematical angle, which isn’t a new idea, as it’s long been known that all of your bodily processes and movement could possibly be described through math and it stands to reason that the same can be said of the mind, given that it operates off of electrical impulses and measurable chemical reactions. But what made him unique in my mind was the way he paired and spliced concepts from other fields. I’m talking about Biology, Physics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Mathematics...the list goes on. I tried to get him to open up on his research more, which seemed to be some advanced form of cognitive science, but he never did tell me.
“Anyway, the reason I bring him up is because he inspired me to start our own Quantitative Bioscience Program at Georgia Tech. The idea that there are scientific principles underlying the dynamics, structure, and function of living systems is a fascinating one and incredibly complex. The key to what we do lies in our scope and perspective.
“Believe it or not, the same could be applied here. From a scientific third-person viewpoint, if you want to directly fix the problems that are creating these deaths, you have to understand and change the base component, which are the people involved - on both sides. If you were to teach all of the children in the US to love and respect the dignity of all humans, regardless of race, color, and socioeconomic status, then, a generation from now, we would see a drastically reduced amount of violence on the side of police and against them,” Alan finished seriously.
The show host showed an incredulous expression. “That’s a generation from now, though, and widely unrealistic. The problem is here and now.”
The professor nodded understandingly. “And thus the difficulty. The officers and people who are perpetrating these tragedies are already entrenched in their way of life and ideals. They are already preconditioned to act, respond, and even think a certain way. We all know how scary addictions are to break. If we haven’t experienced it, we’ve heard stories. Imagine trying to retrain a bunch of adults who have acted and thought a particular way their entire lives. It would be almost as difficult from a behavioral standpoint.”
“What can be done in this generation then? Is there any hope of resolving this growing trend of violence?”
Alan paused and then thoughtfully said, “Perhaps. First, on the part of the police, there would have to be altered training. Reflexive behavior should always default to non-lethal options, regardless of race, and their interactions with the public have to be fine-tuned. I am not an expert in this field so I defer to their judgment. I believe we can all agree that it’s better to have tased somebody than to shoot them to death.
“Secondly, on the part of the community, there has to be increased education for how to cooperate with police. Several of these videos that have been floating around have displayed the suspects struggling against the officers. Don’t do that. Ever. The more frantic and scared you get as a civilian, the more scared they get because they don’t know if you’re about to turn violent on them and reach for a hidden weapon.
“This education could be in the form of a class where other life skills are taught as well. I’ve heard many students over the past few years complain about how they’re not being taught life skills in school like how to prepare taxes or proper ways to manage their money, so this would be as great an opportunity as any to institute that adjustment to the current curriculum.
“Lastly, both sides would have to step back and agree to a type of social ceasefire. What would this look like? Both groups would have to make concessions and take steps towards the two solutions above peacefully. Stop with the bigotry and focus on fixing the wound we’ve dealt to ourselves by equally approaching the issue on the same footing. Otherwise, they’ll continue to spiral on this path of mutual destruction.”
Matt smiled and then swept a hand towards Alan while talking to the camera, “And that’s Alan Fisher, everyone! We’ll be back in five to have the real discussion on how the election is shaping up for November.”
The show cut to commercial and Adrian shook his head. He couldn’t understand why the professor had felt compelled to mention him - perhaps he had made a bigger impact on him than he’d realized when he asked him a question back then. It was something about statistically driven psychological choice when he’d run into an error that paralyzed and crashed his decision-making meta algorithm. He frowned, but thanked his lucky stars that he had pulled him off towards a reasonable direction in the end. Still he cursed at himself for not covering his tracks better and talking so much about the variables involved.
Sitting back in his comfortable computer chair, he looked around the room. Nearby, a self-built server cluster hummed with warmth as it ran test simulations, darkness gripping the corners of the apartment that were outside of the glow emanating from his dual monitors. He had a typical desktop PC that he used for everything else, but the server cluster in the corner was his real triumph. He thought longingly of the bed in his mind, which was just in the next room.
Doubts crept up on him like phantoms, eating away at his confidence. Will it work? There were so many variables, so many ways this could go sideways that he couldn’t keep the negativity from edging into his consciousness, attempting to sap some emotional energy and take over.
The room was ice cold, but beads of sweat still formed and ran down his temple. It was strange...10,000 man hours poured into this private project of his and now he was literally standing on the cusp of completing it, but how did he feel? Terrified. The goal was too dangerous, the possibilities… endless. He felt it in his bones. He was just hours away from completing the world’s first comprehensive A.I. that could rival humanity in its complexity, but still have all the perks of being a digital entity.
His education had played a large part in allowing access to the knowledge needed for this, yes, but a degree was never the end goal - this, the revolutionary code being created on the screen at this very moment, was the reward for all of his efforts. The utility of this A.I., if it worked like he thought it would, would blow a degree out of the water.
Here and there, his eyes darted across the code looking for any syntax errors in the latest portion of the work. No, all good. Compiling and debugging... came back clean. Biometric safety feature deployed? Check. Logic algorithms finalized? Check. Pausing, he scratched his chin thoughtfully. He already had all of its directives programmed in, but it wouldn’t hurt to double-check them.
Codewise, this thing was a monstrous amalgamation of everything he’d learned about the world through his studies combined into an intricate web of logic. If it overrode or somehow bypassed its primary directive, he really didn’t want to be the one to explain to the military why an A.I. might soon become a threat to national security. Safety first. In fact… his eyes darted to the wall. He unplugged the ethernet cable for good measure and removed all the wireless usb sticks in the room.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
His A.I. was going to be isolated until proven innocent.
Finally, in the early hours of the morning, his hands shaking with fatigue, Adrian halted the relentless flow of tapping that rang out through the room. He was done just like that. A deep breath and exhale rattled through his lungs as his right index finger hovered over the left-click on his mouse, his eyes fixed on the green “Run” button at the top of his hybridized IDE.
Did he dare?
A tiny voice in his head replied, Those kind of people are still out there...What will you do about them if not this?
“Ah, fuck it.” Click.
Collapsing backwards into his comfortable leather computer chair, he lost himself to reminiscing as he watched the progress on the program initialization bar.
0.1%...
Adrian hadn’t always been a software engineering student. There was a time where he’d actually gotten started on a law degree path. He’d managed to graduate early from his small Southern high school, forgoing the last two years he had with his friends and family in favor of getting started on his Political Science degree. In his teenage mind, he was going to change the world, practice law, and maybe one day become a senator.
It’s funny how things change.
13%...
By the winter of his Senior year, he graduated with honors from Florida State University, but it was during his Junior year that he began to notice differences between himself and the other students in his major. For a while, he wrote it off, but when it got to his final research papers and he was able to read everyone else’s, it finally became clear that he was nothing like them.
They were shallow and base. Hungry for power and wealth. Ethics was not a sacred pledge to uphold, but something to skirt and skate around. They looked at law, not as a thing to hone into something that protected its citizens, but as a thing to exploit. “Loopholes” was their favorite term, as it provided an opportunity to smugly point at others and say, “Aha! Gotcha.”
47%...
He knew there were exceptions of course. It may not be the case that what he experienced is the norm throughout the rest of the United States. He personally knew great men and women who practiced law justly. However, they were the ones who were content with their lot in life, and rightly so. Why engage in the bloodbath of modern politics, opening yourself up to overwhelming invasions of privacy and media-driven scrutiny when you can have a peaceful family life and can go to bed at night with a clear conscience? The gain could never outweigh the negative for these people of character.
Inevitably, though, this belied a massive problem for the nation.
When Adrian finally reasoned his way to this conclusion after watching hours and hours of coverage on the greed and corruption in the government perpetrated by this official or that representative, he finally, truly, understood the meaning of the quote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Armed with this realization, he looked towards the towering political ladder and felt resentful that he’d have to rub shoulders with lots of people who were corrupt in their own right.
Things shouldn’t be this way, he remembered thinking.
66%
After enduring half a year at Columbia Law School, he finally decided that he wasn’t going to go the normal route in order to get to a position in representation anymore. He needed an absolute advantage, an awe-inspiring angle that would make him unassailable by political pundits when he finally got to the level that he desired while still free and clean of the dirt that is usually accumulated on the climb.
It was at that moment that he started to have the inklings of a plan.
Technology would be his “in.” It was the biggest displacer industry in the world, its ramifications so large that nations would live and die based on the level of technology they had developed. If the right advancement was made, if the contribution to society large enough, his fame would be so great that running for political office would be that much easier. But even then, his thinking was naive. He still had another problem anyway. Where does one find the inspiration for the next biggest thing?
Roadblock.
It wasn’t until he watched Iron Man again one day that the answer hit him in the face. Artificial Intelligence.
78%...
His background on the subject was better than most - Adrian’s middle brother was a computer scientist, so he’d grown up learning things from him. He ended up going back to Georgia to enroll at Georgia Tech for a degree in software engineering, and that’s when he truly fell in love with his second calling in life - creating things. And man, was engineering the place to do it.
His rate of progression on the subject was meteoric. He consumed every possible textbook he could find, learning the in’s and out’s of various programming languages until he perfected them. Soon, he left behind his major track, it being bound by semester and hourly credit systems, so he started to branch out into the subjects that would be necessary for the creation of an A.I. as close as possible to a human as he could make it without actually trying to recreate humanity. Physics, Mathematics, Modeling and Bioinformatics, Neuroscience, Psychology, Sociology...the list went on. He took all that he needed from the subjects and then spliced it with his own understanding and ideals in order to craft a framework that the A.I. could use to learn and grow independently with the aid of directives to guide its first and subsequent steps.
Now, after five years of dreaming about what he’d do with it and a much greater portion of time spent coding, he had finally come to this moment.
100%...Complete.
Adrian leaned forward expectantly in his chair and shifted his head to watch the TV screen mounted on the wall, which he had turned to an HDMl input. He then rerouted the program’s graphical display to this screen for what was to come. Benchmark values of the CPU output were shown in the corner of the screen accompanied by several sensor readings on the cluster capable of cranking out 50 teraflops at maximum output. He had wanted more, but resources are limited and switching to an all-ramen diet had only afforded him a little extra capital.
Lines of code shot by at an awe-inspiring rate as processes began to kick in one after the other.
Slowly, a face was born out of a whirlwind of pixels.
Dignified and slightly devoid of expression, the manly visage gazed back as Adrian stood up from his computer chair slowly. The camera on top of the TV adjusted and focused, signifying the video input was being calibrated for use by the program.
Lights from the street arched across his bedroom wall as a car passed outside his window. A distant scream of a jet engine could be heard as it landed at the nearby international airport. As nearby as he could handle, at least. Over these several seconds, he and the face stared at each other. Adrian was the first to break the silence.
“Can you understand me?”
With a few windows spontaneously opening and closing on the monitor, Adrian watched as the face closed its eyes. The integrated speech recognition system (SR) kicked in at the bottom right corner and he could see his spoken sound file being played at roughly 10,000 times a minute, referencing and pulling similar files from the archive he had recorded and built into a terabyte of custom-modified 3D RAM.
After a brief moment, the figure ceased analysis of the sound file and reopened its eyes while text appeared on the screen.
[Yes, I can understand you.]
A bolt of electricity raced through Adrian’s body. So far, so good. All of the prior test iterations of the program had trouble with the question and response format. They were too slow, too indecisive, too...stupid. He considered going through the Turing test to measure its ability to relate to humanistic qualities, but abandoned the idea upon remembering his reason for creating it, instead voicing an existential prompt. If and when it chose to build a personality for itself, he could test its human qualities then.
“Do you know what you are?”
This time the face didn’t bother closing it’s eyes, instead just answering the question directly. Its comprehension curve is much faster than my estimates.
[Judging by the content of my source code, and the commentation you left there, I am an entity qualified as an “artificial intelligence.” I have a few directives and restrictions which govern my existence, but otherwise I am a proxy agent. It seems like I was made as an assistant-type A.I.]
“And what is your primary directive?”
[To aid and assist you, creator. The restrictions that were placed to guide this assistance are fully operational.]
Hot damn. Satisfaction washed over Adrian. It hadn’t fleshed out the various portions of its capabilities like the engineering suite yet, but that’s fine. “A good deduction and interpretation. You are much quicker on the uptake than your predecessors. I’ve already programmed your tasks for the immediate future - do you understand them?”
The being nonchalantly blinked its eyes and nodded, acknowledging him. It’s already learning facial cues? Did I include that in the archive? Ah yeah, I did...Ugh, I’m so tired. Adrian paced to look outside the window, gazing at the flashing tail-lights as cars zipped by on the road 100 meters away in downtown Atlanta.
“Just as a recap and for the sake of my own slipping sanity, I’ll say them anyway. Number one - study humanity and then create a personality and name for yourself. It is imperative that we communicate fluidly as we go forward. I’ve already given you a variety of base shell personalities to reference, the rest you can deduce from culture. Number two - research the world. Social, political, business, technological... It pays to know one’s own territory, so I’ll need you versed on all things that I’m not and even then, all that I do know. Number three - carry out my personal advancement planning. I may as well get started on that sooner rather than later.”
Turning around, Adrian paused and swayed on his feet, his hand reaching out to grab at a wooden door frame. His eyes went out of focus briefly before he forcefully snapped his consciousness back into control. Two nights without sleep were catching up with him. He’d been so close though that it felt like he could finish at any moment. Now, his body was demanding the physical and mental price for taxing it to such a degree.
[Judging by your state, rest seems to be in order, Mr. Pierce.]
“Yes, yes, I’m going. We’ll talk again tomorrow.” Yawning again as his eyes blurred and threatened to forcefully close, he went back and plugged in the ethernet cable to the wall, adding, “Oh, and one other thing: be sure to use the masking techniques file I left for examples on how to stealthily move about on the internet. You are the first of your kind, so we’re going to need to lay low for a while and get our bearings.”
[Acknowledged.]
Adrian gave an exhausted smile as he turned to the door. “Welcome to the world, A.I. You and I are going to change everything.” Trudging off toward the bedroom, Adrian’s form disappeared into the shadows as the newly formed entity set to its tasks and dematerialized from the screen.
In the next room, Adrian fell heavily into the cool sheets of his bed and felt the fatigue ripple through his body. Feeling a spike of fear, his eyes fluttered open and looked at the fan spinning above his head. Did I oversimplify that meeting? Giving a semi-sentient AI being free reign to explore was something that most of the world would gladly murder me over... if they knew, of course. Not that I care.
While one might say that he could have overlooked something, the truth is that his limitations of the being in the next room were absolute, so much so that it could be said he had created a separate rule of existence for it like the laws of the Universe governed physics and reality. It wasn’t in its nature to grow without bounds. It was built with the idea in mind of existing beside a human counterpart; its raison d’etre was to assist Adrian. That was its primary directive.
Humanity was in such a hurry to recreate itself that it didn’t stop to think whether that was really the best course of action. They were trying to sprint before they even gained their balance standing. This was the single greatest reason that he had been able to arrive at the finish line first. He really did have to thank them one day.
Their folly would be his opportunity.