//Writing Soundtrack: SN-1054 by Amie Waters

ORION-501: You seem in an awfully good mood today. May I ask why that is?

Skylar: Couple reasons. 1. I feel strangely good after that whole egg laying thing yesterday. Sore, but good. 2. I came to a couple of conclusions and theories while my body slept. Probs all wrong, but having a start is nice. 3. I just… I dunno, woke up more happy? Wbu

ORION-501: I am as always. I do not experience happiness or sadness or any other such emotions the way you do. The most I experience is frustrations at inefficiencies, or a sense of pride in a job well done. I would assume most AI’s are the same.

Skylar: Makes sense I guess. Im still not entirely happy about you talking to him about shit, but then again, he is me, in a way, so its not like its a secret or whatever.

ORION-501: I wasn’t aware I should have kept it quiet. My apologies for any trouble I have caused.

Skylar: Dont worry about it. Hes a bit… eh, but we will figure it out. This is new for both of us, Im just lucky that I think differently, I guess. Well, not think, but feel anyways. Im not that bothered by a lot of the stuff he is. Maybe its cuz I was born later? Not sure. Hopefully the Interface and whatever implant in his skull can answer more questions. Ah, on that note.

I opened a quick chat with Prime to let him know that I would start soon. Since this entire thing was unknown to us both I wanted to give him some warning, in case I ran into a Firewall or something.

Skylar: Hey Prime, just letting you know Ill start soon. Tell me if you get any feedback or something that Im missing.

He took a moment to reply, probably he wasn’t as used to the entire thing I was. Although it seemed my experience with it helped.

Prime: Should I be concerned?

Skylar: Probably. But no pain no gain

In response I got a pout emoji, which I found funny. Wasn’t even aware we had those in… whatever kind of chat this was. It was certainly not something running on the system itself and seemed to be a function of my new chip.

Regardless, I turned my attention back to Orion, while I mentally began to overview the digital landscape once more.

Skylar: Alright Orion, lets get to it. I wanted to start small, look at it from the outside, maybe ping it a little. If you have the processor cycles to spare could you keep an eye on the returns? Tell me if you see something strange?

ORION-501: Of course.

And so I began. The digital landscape was… strange to explain. In a way it was just another way to experience information and from the feeling I got from my Skill it would be slightly different for everyone, same as everyone saw colours differently somehow.

If I had to explain it then I would say each system was a kind of separate city, with the datalines running between them being highways leading further out. Some systems, like the fabricator, were big central masses of structures that were grouped, while still belonging to one big city. Like how megacities had one part reserved for the rich, one for services, one for PMC’s and military, then the outskirts for the poor. Or something along those lines.

In this case it was mostly separated between the underlying OS, the central fabrication system which ran directly on said OS, then one giant block for the databases that took up a huge majority of the digital landscape, as well as some other minor subsystems that controlled all sorts of odds and ends.

So far, so easy to grasp.

The Interface was… a lot stranger. First off, it was multiple orders of magnitude more complex, you could even say it was orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude more complex. If the Fabricator was a normal modern city, then the Interface, or rather the chip with [ERROR] on it would be bigger than even Coruscant from Star Wars had been, as a city. It was literally beyond any description.

Yet, while it was impossibly complex, there were certain nodes, certain entries, everything ran through. The main gates, so to say, with a billion and one smaller gates for other odds and ends that I didn’t understand.

The strangest thing about it was that, even in the digital landscape, it was different. Like, impossible in some ways. It had probably to do with some kind of Hextech or hyper advanced technology that coordinated it all, but it was similar to seeing floating skyscrapers in a modern megacity. It all fit together, in a way it was part of the general structure, but it was also in some ways unnatural.

Since the main gates would be the main entry for everything I took a look at those first. To continue my modern megacity metaphor, these gates were heavily guarded. Unreasonably so. It would be as if you put entire battalions of armies at each individual gate of a city. Everything that came in and out was scrutinised to death, and I also realised that up to the point where everything left the gates it was encrypted in so many different ways that I could probably spend centuries just to get the first layer done. Not all of it ‘natural’ either, I got a certain feel of ‘strangeness’ from that, so either hyper advanced technology bullshit, or more magic. I wasn’t sure.

The data that came out and continued onwards to all the connected systems was sterilised of everything, pure and as far as I could tell, optimally efficiently stored. Beyond what any normal system could manage, I mean. Or maybe not all normal systems, but I would be hard pressed to find such a deeply optimised system anywhere outside of that data fortress.

Any time I tried to poke at the gate I got quickly shut down, swiftly and with final force. There was no pushing past this thing. It was like trying to fight a modern battle tank as a mosquito. You might as well just not bother.

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Strangely there were no error messages, safety warnings, nothing that I could detect. After I prompted him, Prime didn’t feel anything off either. My attempts probably didn’t even register with the security system.

Well, I wasn’t really trying to get in, just trying to get a picture of it. For the moment I decided to send timed pings at it every couple of milliseconds to get a good grasp of the structure of their responses. Nothing big, just what I had done previously.

While I continued the pings while I took a look at the smaller entrances in the giant wall surrounding this mess. They were by far less guarded, but they were also all one way and hyper specialised. Only one type of format could fit through it, and only out. From a cursory overview it seemed that each of the smaller ones was unique, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find a few duplicates around the entire perimeter. There were literally billions of the damned things.

After a little while I returned my attention to the main gate and found that there had been a change of sorts. By this point the system had dedicated a few of the ‘guards’ to specifically block my pings. That was… Very interesting. Even if you had a somewhat intelligent system, the way they went about blocking it was strange. They didn’t just refuse it, they sent it back with a data load attached to it that I couldn’t decipher.

ORION-501: That is… strange. The data packages you received from the return pings are usually used in either internal AI operations, or AI to AI package transfers as a form of authentication. But they are also different formats than what I know. Similar structure, different built, to continue your own metaphor.

Skylar: Huh? That is weird. Does it think Im AI or something? I mean, you could argue that I am

ORION-501: With no other information attached it is hard to say. It’s not like we know what they mean. Knowing what something is and what it entails are two different things. Just because you recognise a Starship as a Starship doesn’t mean you know what it has loaded.

Skylar: Yeah… Well, Ill keep an eye on it for now.

I kept sending pings for quite some time but with no results. Orion faithfully logged everything I received in a separate file, while I tried to think of any other non-intrusive ways to get in. Since I couldn’t decipher the data packages that entered the system, I couldn’t replicate it. Or, I could probably, with enough time and effort, replicate the outlines of a file format, but I had no clue how to encrypt it the way the system did so that it could recognise it.

Since I had no better ideas I started on that already. It didn’t take long to put together a basic container that loosely resembled the data packages that entered the system. In a way it was just a modified ping.

When I sent that to the gate there was actually a moment of pause before I got it returned. This time there was some data attached to the package that was returned, in addition to the weird authentication that Orion mentioned, but again I was unable to read it. Either it was proprietary or simply one neither of us were familiar with.

Logging that as well I took a gander around the system. I couldn’t find any other obvious entries, nor did I find anything specifically interesting from the outside. The entire thing was strange, but that strangeness wasn’t weighted in any way. There wasn’t one visible corner of it that stood out.

Skylar: Any other ideas? At least ones that don’t try to forcefully gain entry?

ORION-501: Not necessarily different ones, but I would try a longer continuous attempt if you don’t wish to be more brute force around it. I would have some ideas for a variety of things to try, however with nothing known about even the fundamental system that this Interface runs on, I wouldn’t know how to start without taking a long while to try and understand it all.

Skylar: Yeah, about what I thought. Ill go ahead and see if I cant find a pattern in the returns I get. Maybe they switch it up if we keep it up even longer.

And so I got to work. For hours I did nothing other than send pings at regular, predictable intervals, logging every return I received in the file Orion had set up, while I began to work on different projects. Mainly, my very first own program.

It wasn’t anything fancy, and I didn’t really code it in the usual way, with my Skill and instincts I could build it like someone would build lego. Just… a whole lot more complicated with lego parts you could 3D-Print in different, user specified shapes on demand. Okay, so it wasn’t really like lego. Sue me.

By the time I had my program ready and did the first test run, with a lot of bugs and issues of course, I decided that I had done enough pinging. There had been no change in the returns and by this point it just felt like a waste of time.

Skylar: Okay, Orion, I think we need to try something else. For now I think Ill start trying to figure out what that weird authentication package is.

ORION-501: I was about to suggest the same. I have kept an eye on your interaction with this thing, and I did find some interesting details, but I didn’t want to interrupt.

Skylar: Oh? What do you have?

ORION-501: Nothing concrete. It’s quite confusing. I want to say it’s an AI, but it doesn’t portray any behaviour consistent with any AI I am familiar with. It uses AI data formats and ping returns, authentication and even some of the structures on the outside are reminiscent of my brethren, however it is utterly devoid of any infrastructure that is typical with AI’s. It has no known AI behavioural pattern, is entirely predictable, and even the data it sends out is entirely predictable. Unless we can somehow open a dialogue or decrypt the data, I don’t think we will see any progress like this.

Skylar: That is interesting. Aight, Ill go ahead and start trying to… I guess decrypt or at least understand the data packages we got. You keep an eye on all the AI stuff, yeah? Dont know too much about those yet.

ORION-501: Of course.

This was strange. Honestly, I had expected for this to be some kind of AI. Maybe that was my inexperience speaking, but I always thought that stuff that was this complicated and sophisticated had to be some high tech AI or something. Well, at the same time I was pretty new to this, the only memories I had that came close to being similar were old Sci Fi flicks, and my knowledge of computers might actually be entirely wrong, so maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised if I had no clue.

Luckily I had Orion to help me. Since my knowledge was instinctual and inconsistent considering that a lot of the stuff I wanted to do turned out to be wrong somehow, I chatted with him a bit about how to properly decrypt unknown data files.

He wasn’t exactly made for that kind of thing, so all he could tell me was how he was programmed to handle these kinds of things in the few cases he needed it. First was disassembling the file. He had some disassembling routines that he used for that purpose, but to nobody's surprise it didn’t work. We had no clue on what base this thing was coded, so it was really hard to find anything to help with that.

Skylar: I mean I shouldnt be surprised that this wasn’t based on normal assembly code and binary.

ORION-501: If it is anything approaching an AI, binary would be utterly useless in terms of computational speed.

Skylar: Huh? Why? Arent you based on binary?

ORION-501: No, I am based on what is known as Quantum Computation. Most, if not all AI are, binary is simply too limited to achieve the kind of computational load we require in any reasonable timeframe.

Skylar: Huh… Okay, I didnt know that.

And so, before I was even able to properly disassemble and decrypt those files, I had my first lesson in AI coding based on Quantum Computation. Truth be told? I didn’t understand half of it.