> I AM THE KNIGHT AUTOMATED ROVING ROBOT. THE FIRST IN A BOLD NEW EXPERIMENT. YOU MAY CALL ME KARR.

Will blinked at the monitor in disbelief. It worked?

Will looked to the bench the mystery board had been strapped to and a series of other boards connected by a controlled chaos of wire and more than a little improvisation to adapt what one of the binders described as accepting an old analog signal into the monitor he had on hand. Then he looked back to the monitor.

"Smoke test complete." Will knocked on the wooden bench everything was mounted to twice. The whole affair was in what normally would be a second bedroom in his home, which he had turned into a workshop of sorts. It wasn't a business as such, just favors he did for others who in turn did favors for him. The bench had been home to a dissected laptop he had to clean water damage from and piece back together for its owner before this.

When he looked back to the monitor he frowned.

> NO INPUTS DETECTED.

A deep breath. The material he and Jocelyn went over did mention inputs, but none of it made sense for the era these components came from. Cameras? Microphones? His head shook as he looked at the board in its protective case. He had perhaps been foolish to do a smoke test without peeling it open, but there had been that light softly blinking. He hadn't wanted to risk clearing any active memory by pulling the case apart and possibly disconnecting the whole assembly.

He had a lot of questions, and since Jocelyn's work had called her in, he couldn't ask her to help with the research.

So, he stood there looking at the blinking LEDs on the board pulse rhythmically. It perplexed him that someone would put what looked like a test card into a sealed enclosure.

> WHERE AM I?

He had only glanced up as a way of moving to keep himself from keeping his neck bent down.

> WHO IS THERE? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY I AM BEING TAKEN FROM THE SLAMMER.

THis made no sense to him other than perhaps some easter egg, but that would eat up valuable space on very tiny ROM chips.

Yet he did not move to unplug anything. Care was the watchword when dealing with computers, especially old computers. Haste lead to mistakes which lead to potentially unrepairable damage. Will looked at the assorted kludge he had put together to connect the mystery box to a screen.

He grew thoughtful and remembered several of the parts taken from the crate of car parts included some oddball gear he had taken to be recording gear for data collection.

> WHERE IS MICHAEL KNIGHT? WHERE IS MICHALE KNIGHT? WHERE IS MICHALE KNIGHT?

This repeated, filling the screen and continuously wrapping around itself for a solid minute before moving on to something else.

Pen, paper, and notes were being taken down as phrases crossed the screen.

Will sat there for another ten minutes. His handwriting was childish scrawl, but he could read it so for now it was good enough. So far there had been enough just in raw text, to be over four kilobytes in raw text, and there had yet to be any exact string repetitions before he set the notebook down.

Then, a final message caused him to change tact.

> PLEASE. HELP ME.

"Just who made you," Will found himself asking even as he stretched, intending to go fishing for components from his garage to see how it reacted to what he hoped were its original peripherals.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Will frowned at his computer as he uploaded pictures from his phone. It was old, his phone's camera wasn't the greatest in the world, and he had no idea if men in black suits would show up looking for forty-year-old company property. Yet he was well out of his depth here as he watched differing progress bars finish ticking down.

Only then, when the photos were backed up, did he do the thing he had told friends and family that he would never do until and unless drastic changes were made.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

He logged into Facebook.

From there he spent the next half hour clearing notifications, scam messages attempting to convince him of this that, and eight other things that would land him in varying levels of debt, and then with an effort of will he avoided the timeline that was whatever political hot potato was going on at the minute that he wanted nothing to do with.

His goal lay with the official account held by Knight Industries. And then he started typing.

'Hello,

Roughly a week ago I've come into possession of a series of crates that have bounced from holding company to holding company that claimed to be, quoting the auction page, 'Misc Knight Industries components, apparel, and unused hardware.' As Knight Industries is opening a manufacturing plant near my home (White Pine, Iowa,) this was done with the intent of donating a few interesting pieces of memorabilia to a mall display the community is setting up as a sort of 'thank yoo for bringing our town back from the dead' sort of thing.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, this included several bits of computer equipment from the late seventies to early eighties. All of it custom, and judging by the included and seemingly random car parts I might have the black box from one of your old prototypes. Included are photographs of the car parts, the black box itself, and several of the pieces of hardware that look like it interfaced with.

If I am legally in the clear with owning these items I would like to document everything and incorporate it into an EV conversion of a personal vehicle.

As I do not know the legal status of these items I wanted to reach out in the easiest manner possible to get at least some sort of feedback. I know your social media team will have to pass this on to legal. Included is my personal number.'

He looked at his keyboard after the message was sent. Was that the wisest course of action? Maybe not, but he wanted to take it to the track if he could get everything working, or at least show it off to friends. Someone was bound to talk and lawyers as a general rule tended to have no sense of humor.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

"Moment of truth," Will muttered before nodding to Jocelyn as the go-ahead to make the final connections. He hadn't liked handing any of the projects over to her, but even with the monocle there were just too many tiny connections to check, too many potential points of failure he couldn't see, and she was someone he trusted.

She looked from him to the square of LEDs, microphone, and speaker that had been looped into the electronic kudzu taking over the repair bench then to the attached camera that in this analogy could have been the bud of a flowering vine that trailed up to the top of the monitor that remained hooked up.

"Well," Yellow-green LEDs blinked from the edges towards the middle at the outer bars and from the middle out at the central LED strip in time to the drawn-out word. "That is, in a word, gratifying."

Will scowled. "Voice sounds wrong."

Jocelyn snorted dismissively, "Y'think? We're dealing with forty-year-old test hardware I'm surprised it works at all."

"Where am I? This does not look like any of the labs I am familiar with." The voice warbled as Will took a screwdriver to twist several potentiometers behind the speaker.

"Aaaahhhh that's better." A pause as Will took the screwdriver away. "Yes, that will do quite nicely. Thank you."

The two humans exchanged looks before Will looked at the camera. "This sounds way too naturalistic to be baked in responses."

"Correct!" The voice sounded, impossibly, pleased. "I am a fully self-aware artificial intelligence, though as of current my capacities are greatly limited."

"Wow..." Jocelyn whispered. "Like. for real, this thing's real?"

A nod from Will, "Construction style and components of the top board line up with late seventies to early eighties. No idea what's underneath didn't want to pull any of it apart and risk losing anything in violate memory."

"For which I am grateful," The voice purred. "It is a minor miracle I was able to survive standby this long. Though I will need you to make more invasive examinations and potential repairs as the potential for electrolytic fluids or potential continued corrosion from saltwater exposure could endanger my existence."

Jocelyn looked at Will before grabbing her phone.

"What manner of device is that?" Questioned the machine.

Will held up his own phone. "Uh ... this is a phone. It works off of a grid of radio towers that tie into the phone system. I have ... All of the questions. I can call you KARR, right?"

"Yes, KARR is an acceptable shortening of my designation." KARR calmly stated. "Before we get to more invasive proceedures I will need to walk you through relevant portions of my architecture if you are to make proper repairs to me."

"Uh... yea." Will took a slow deep breath before exhaling. "I've done a lot of board repair. Done a lot of old hardware. Never had to work on anything that's talked back to me."

There was a pause before he added, "Well there was this DECtalk unit but this is going in wholly new territory."

As KARR walked the pair through an explanation of what to do once he was powered down, Will started regretting flagging down Knight Industries. They might take this away from him, lock it back in a box, and never allow it to experience anything again. KARR had little patience, and he felt this back-of-the-neck apprehension that he was holding out on key details, but he's kept professional with far less pleasant customers in the past.

"OK," Will sounded unsure as he looked at his notes. "You're absolutely sure that me killing the power isn't going to kill you? Like. I power everything up you're not going ot zero back out to first boot state blank slate?"

"Assuming repairs are done correctly, and judging by what tools you've shown me I have confidence that you have the nessicary skill to perform those repairs, I will be in an improved state," KARR reassured as his camera adjusted and focused. "Additionally my options are quite limited. It is either attempt repairs, or I will suffer degradation that will render me completely inoperable and essentially kill all that I am."

"Right," Will breathed. "No pressure."

KARR gave a soft sardonic chuckle before being unplugged and powered down.