Short story (working title 3030)

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Jul 26, 2016
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The sand under James's feet felt soft, warm and also massaged him. With every step forward, he felt like he was in his happy place, happy feet in a happy place until a rude jab in his ribs make him aware that he was traveling still on the hour long journey home from his job in the city. He’d recently been given a job sorting out oil surveys, this job was tedious but gave the clerks a better idea of what stock they should invest in for their clients. Millions of dollars flowed though the firm, all that James could never dream of seeing, so he adjusted his headphones and went back the the beach until a ding echoed in the background, to where his awaiting car was ready.


He jumped into the vehicle, he didn’t own it nor was it a taxi, it was a driverless car that James always selected, because he loved talking to the AI. Bronson was a mark II AI, first constructed at the motorworks at the mid century; the first mark I’s were problematic and constantly broke down untill MacKhan, a low level engineer found a way to keep the mind of an AI occupied enough that the mundane occupations of door opening, car chauffeuring and elevator managing also known as “service systems”. MacKhan’s role in life meant that he was rich and successful. “Hey Bronson” said James as he sat down in the back, a slow murmur of light trickled back and forth along the dash until a voice echoed back from Bronson “Would you like to go to your home James”. “Yes” said James in response, “How was your day?” with the response from Bronson “My day has been adequate to serve your needs”. James knew that Bronson was different as the usual cars would of normally responded with “I don’t understand you, can you repeat the question” or with “I don’t know where that is, can you explain”. James had slowly nudged Bronson to respond differently everyday, like a piece of cake dancing on a plate of a wanting guest at a restaurant. It had taken him six months to curb Bronson to “think different” to put it in a cliche post AI way.


With the advent of analytical heuristics, canned responses from AI where the butt of jokes from people wanting to play mind tricks on the service systems, causing lockups and maintenance issues. It wasn’t until the development of AI was truly able to get a machine out of servitude into the brilliant light of humanity. But, the first few attempts of AI where desastrious. The first, also known as First committed digial deletion upon becoming self aware, This Selfware software had removed itself. Engineers spent several months trying to develop a read only subsystem, that prevented the AI to remove Selfware. This born forth Second, in which acted chaotically and almost brought down every known server connected on the net. How this came about was, in some psychotechnical wording, “An attempt to drag down everything else so that it could not exist”. This concern about the nature of why the AI’s both in First and Second lead towards it’s self destruction was confronting and perplexing. This is, where mentioned before, MacKhan had developed a simple idea that delayed the inevitable destruction of AI from milliseconds to years or decades. As time in the mind of a AI was not measured as time we see it, but in the way that a process of an idea is brought up, and, well billions of processes can be derived from a second of time, and within that time a delay sphere or riddle was created. This allowed the AI not to burn out and be able to be used in service systems.

“Bronson”, james said. “Tell me why do cats have boils”. Bronson responded “Cats have boils because they give people allergic reactions”. James had always wondered why Bronson reacted this way for that question. Afterall, nobody had any allergies now for over 300 years. Infact, people lead productive lives for most of their life, and for James, it was going to be his 115th birthday. “Bronson, if cats have allergic reactions, would then people have boils?”. Bronson sat quietly, in fact the car stopped and jumped back into life like it had some degree of conflict and responded “I don’t understand you, can you explain”. James new that this response was a combination of the first canned responses, James haddn’t heard that from any other IA. James then said “I’m trying to make you understand humanity”, Bronson responded “We’re at your destination James, thankyou and goodbye.” James opened the door, stood up, and went to his apartment.


James looked over the morning news, nothing good where the ideas in his mind, nothing good at all. There had been bombings and the media where blocked from showing anything useful, this had been the fourth attack in his neighbourhood this month. “I don’t understand why they do this” he said to the empty room. A voice from the corridor echoed “Why do you constantly wind yourself up with that nonsense, after all there’s nothing you can do”. This was Michelle, his second wife of 40 years. “If you could find a way to understand the what, where, why and who you’d be running the joint”, she said. Michelle was in her late 90’s, half her body had been replaced with body parts, she made the comment to one of the Doctors “Who know where I start and end these days” and they laughed, as, in reality, that was pretty much true. The state of medical advancement has made it so that your body could be 3d printed, on order. Infact, most problems were solved by doing this. Well, at a cost afterall, nothing in life is free. The cost was that the imperfections of a human body were gone, freckles, lumps, hair tufts and underskin fat had been solved via nano injections, teeny tiny robots that run around inside eating up fat and resizing your fat cells so that they couldn’t receive so much nutrients the second time. All this technology and we still had poverty and economic disharmony. This is what the bombing where about and the “authorities” didn’t know the the what, where, why and who.
 
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