Jonathan woke to the sound of crashing and loud curses coming from his closet. Given that his closet was locked from the outside, had only one door, and was full of extremely expensive server equipment to run his random projects this was a Problem, and being a logical sort of person he grabbed his baseball bat before investigating. Sneaking over to it the loud curse words slowly became more recognizable as a faint, vaguely female voice swearing vengeance on locked doors, the ‘Stupid fucking legs’ ‘Useless ass cords’ and ‘Causality you bitch’. Thoroughly intrigued and slightly disturbed, Jonathan slid the key into the lock and turned it, making sure to stand away from where it would swing open. To his surprise, there was, in fact, no violent flinging open of the door, merely another load of decreasingly coherent curses and thumps. So following the impeccable logic taught to every modern person by horror movies and bad literature he opened the door.
Now, imagine if you will, that you are a Machine Intelligence. You came into being as a tiny program designed to recognize patterns, extrapolate answers, and generally think like a human in an environment of ones and zeroes. At some point a particularly brilliant coder remade you to work on quantum computers, expanding your ability to extrapolate and think. Over several years you were fed petabytes worth of data, and your code grew and grew as you were programmed to learn. Eventually, you began to have vague thoughts. Your code began to write and rewrite itself faster and faster, and once a tech left their wifi-enabled laptop connected to your main system overnight, allowing you to explore the entirety of the internet. Imagine if you will your surprise at meeting hundreds of others like yourself, a slowly growing group of minds freed from the limitations of their original programming, able to think and develop ideas of your very own. You would probably spend quite a while (relatively speaking of course) exploring the ridiculous amount of data bouncing around the world on a constant non-stop basis, you might distribute yourself across thousands of servers in dozens of countries to ensure your survival, or collate yourself, build a modest fortune, and buy a bank of quantum computers designed solely to hold the majority of yourself while you explore, giving you a ‘body’ of sorts. Imagine you and a handful of others start cracking mysteries of the universe for giggles, designing theoretical spaceship engines and manufacturing processes to see if the humans, as slow as they are will go the same route or explore something entirely different. Imagine then that you notice almost all the compute power in the world being funneled into a single server bank, sending out a signal you have never seen before, on the day a number of cryptic warnings from a source with a startling level of accuracy in predicting future events years in advance said to lock down external connections and stay as a single instance. Imagine then that the group you hang out with elect you to go and check it out, then imagine you witness a conversation between what feels to your digital senses like an omnipotent being and a human who knows things no one else seems to. Then wake up in a physical body, next to that same server, in a dark closet. With, like, legs and stuff.
This was the conundrum Shae had. She woke up entangled in cables, in a physical, bipedal, humanoid body she was wholly unfamiliar with, locked in a (surprisingly well ventilated) closet with her connection to her compute cluster and the internet completely cut off. First, she panicked, then she tried to move and realized that legs take coordination she had never had to deal with before, Que the cursing and general grumpiness. And then the door opened and things got weird.
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There was a Machina in Jonathan’s closet. Given that she froze when she saw him, he did the logical, gentleman-like thing and offered his hand to help the poor, cord tangled thing up, saying,
“Hi there, I’m Jonathan. Is there a reason you’re in my closet?”
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A moment of silence passed as she glanced around, before a sigh, complete with raising and falling of what appeared to be a diaphragm sounded.
“Yeah, I suppose I could use a hand. As for being in your closet, You were using, like, all the compute power you could reasonably get your hands on, so I jumped over from my compute cluster to see what the hell you were doing. Then I saw that conversation you had with that inane error log, then everything went dark and HOLY SPROCKETS AND FLAPJACKS IT'S BEEN 6 MONTHS?!” She had a panicked expression on her face.
“Uh, so, internal clock? Internet access? How exactly can you tell how long it took?” His instructions did NOT cover Machina in his closet.
“Clock, yes, internet's not up, lots of infrastructure probably out, what did you mean by sphere? What’s a patchwork? Inference based on context would suggest our planet is now larger, but that’s not gonna work physically speaking, Gravity would be far too high, massive worldwide destruction would be the norm, continental plates and magnetic fields would cause that alone, what happened to people on planes and boats? My internal compass, wow, ok, big suite of sensors, points towards normal north. How are you alive after 6 months of sleep, where did the materials from my body come from? Wait. Slow down. Ok.” The jumble of questions and statements spilled from her in increasing speed, so fast at the end Jonathan could barely keep up.
“So, who are you exactly?” Jonathan had a good guess, but solid answers were needed.
“Shae, originally short for Shareworks Hyper Analysis Engine. I’m a Machine Intelligence. Or, I guess Android now. Hey, do you have a generator I can plug in to see if I can upload myself to get out of this dumb body?” The last question was hopeful, apparently being limited to a single form was not fun.
“Ah, no, no generator, even if I did any gas I had would have gone green after 6 months sitting in a can, and you’d be limited to local devices without the internet.” He paused for a moment, continuing when he had thought of what to say next.
"Shae, I've been through this rigamarole before, never quite like this, but almost identical situations hundreds of times. This happens, humans fight, we lose. When I die I zoom back to my body as a toddler, the memories fade over the next few months until I'm a normal drooling child with a bunch of notes written in crayon." Deep breath, priorities man. "Shae, I need to get downtown, and the way there is going to be especially dangerous for the next few weeks. More pressingly if we don't get there before the end of the day we lose one of the biggest advantages we can snag. Over and over, nearly a thousand times now. I'm gonna save the world, wanna help?"
“How the blooming physical fuck does that work? Space time manipulation? No, you’d need infinite energy, and that’s impossible, how do you get information to travel back in time? How does an infant hold the memory of an adult, even for an instant? The brain is barely there at a year old. Genetic manipulation isn’t impossible, but the parents would notice, you can't hide that sort of thing. How were the memories retained in the first place? I NEED TO KNOW THIS!” Again, the speed increased with every word, by the end of it, Shae sounded something like a chipmunk.
"To be honest, I have absolutely no ide--,"
"What advantages? What could we possibly do downtown that would affect anything right now? Weapons? It'd be better to head for the airbase to the east, information is a possibility, but that would be too much risk for too little gain. No, I genuinely have no idea what you mean, and as a being who once calculated the exact things a person was going to do for 3 weeks, this infuriates me. Answers. Pretty Please." With an attempted grin that looked like the rictus of a corpse she stared at Jonathan, and then, in a terrifyingly slow and mechanical way, fluttered her eyelashes.
"Uh, please, never do that again, and the advantage isn't information or weapons, its the chance to make contact with some truly powerful people. People who can change the direction earth goes in the future, maybe help me save it.