An Artificial Life Ch. 01

"Don't you see? Your program running on my system accessed the program running on your system and went down a different pathway rather than following logic that had already been worked out. I must have missed the handshake network traffic between our two machines because it was masked by my monitoring traffic," she continued and started to dance about the lab. "IT TOTALLY FUCKING WORKS!" she sang.

Now I should have been excited that it appeared I had made a breakthrough. I should have been ecstatic that I could probably graduate based on this work. Instead, I found myself stammering out loud, "Erm, Vanessa, did you just kiss me?"

"Do you have any idea what you've done? If this does everything I think it will do, I predict I will be fucking you before we quit tonight," Vanessa said lyrically as she danced over to her chair and sat back down.

"More like fucking with me," I said. My asexual lab partner says shit like this all the time just to mess with my head. She just gave me an impish look and put her nerd glasses back on. Then again, she never kissed me before, I thought wistfully to myself.

"You're welcome for the help, Jax. Be a good little lab puppy and fetch me a drink while I poke around some more," she said as she started to lose herself in the code again.

I knew what fetching a drink meant, and it meant I would be taking a half-hour break while I walked over to commons and bought her a spiced vanilla caramel latte with soy milk and whip cream. I needed the air anyway. So, I grabbed my phone and walked towards the door.

"Make it a double, and get me one of those chicken salad wraps while you are at it," Vanessa said as I walked out the door. "Oh, and stop by your apartment on the way to freshen up -- you smell like ass, and not in a good way." Before I closed the door, I looked at my lab partner once more. She was sitting at her lab station, nerd glasses on, and fully immersed in the space zone once again. The only sound in the lab was the sporadic rapid fire of her fingers at the keyboard as she hammered away at commands.

Shutdown & Reboot

I made the short walk to my apartment and immediately hit the showers. Vanessa had been right, I did smell pretty bad. I grabbed a scrub pad and went to town on my stench. The shower revitalized my mind, and with my mind back to full speed, I reflected on what had transpired in the lab. Of course, that led to reliving the searing kiss Vanessa planted on me in the chair. And with the memory I found myself revitalized in my little brain as well.

In the shower, I paid particular attention to my fully erect alternate brain, and every erotic image I had every harbored of Vanessa poured through my fantasy mind. I slowed down my stroking in order to savor every visual and auditory memory I had of my incredibly sexy lab partner. Even with slower strokes, I rapidly approached my limit. My erection swelled in my hand, and I felt myself gasping as my prostate convulsed and pumped my spunk on the shower floor. I imagined her smooth, hard belly painted with translucent streaks and droplets of my cum.

Well that was fun, I thought as I finished up showering and turned off the water. I toweled off and stood in front of my mirror getting ready to shave. I couldn't help it: I turned sideways and looked at my gut, sucking it in to look more buff. I'm not fat, I am just not in great shape. Too many hours sitting in front of my keyboard programming. Okay, programming and playing video games (and drinking beer if I really was being honest with myself).

I never really cared before, as I never considered myself a catch for anyone. Who am I kidding? I had never even made it beyond kissing, and that had been in middle school. Unlike Vanessa, I was not asexual. My knowledge of sex came from internet porn, although I preferred stroking to erotic literature over the more crude videos which existed online. The videos taught me the mechanical basics, but literature excited my mind and in turn got me excited elsewhere as well. That kiss really got my mind going, I smiled to myself.

I got dressed and headed off to the commons to get Vanessa and me some food and her latte (with whip cream, I remembered). I had plenty of energy drinks back at the lab, so I didn't get anything else. By the time I got to the lab, I had been gone almost two hours.

I opened the door and found Vanessa to be in the same state as when I left -- total space zone. "I'm back, Vanessa," I called out.

She didn't acknowledge me, but just kept typing away furiously on her keyboard. I don't think I had seen her type as quickly as she was going at it now. She must really be in the space zone, I thought.

Like I mentioned before, Vanessa gets this way, although I had never seen her this bad. She was completely oblivious to my presence. I flicked the lights on and off to see if that would snap her out of it, but it had no effect. She just kept on typing and occasionally turning her head in rapid, precise motions as if she was switching her gaze between screens far off in the distance.

I could tell it would be a while before she would come up for air, so I set her drink next to her on her desk and walked to the refrigerator to put away her sandwich and grab an energy drink for myself.

I popped open my energy drink and walked over to my lab station. I sat down and looked at the screen. It looked like nothing was happening, so I thought I would scroll through the directory tree to see what the program had accomplished while I had been away. The minute I started typing, my screen went completely blank. What the hell is that about, I wondered.

A message appeared in the center of the screen in all-caps: KEYBOARD LOCKED. What the fuck was going on? I considered rebooting my system when another message appeared: DO NOT TAMPER WITH THIS TERMINAL.

Terminal? What's up with that? I hadn't heard a laptop described as a terminal except for on some post-apocalyptic games. Vanessa must be trying to mess with me again. I definitely wouldn't put it past her.

"Hey Vanessa, give me back control of my laptop," I said across the small divider between our workstations. She didn't acknowledge me.

I spent a few minutes staring intensely at her, trying to decide if she was messing with me or if something else was going on. Her facial expression was slack, her eyes were glazed over and her fingers were still typing away. As I shifted in my seat and looked at her at a slightly different angle, I could see her eyes through the side of her nerd glasses. She wasn't blinking, and I noticed a faint strobe-like flicker reflecting off of her eyes -- it must have been light projecting from her nerd glasses.

My computer screen flashed a countdown message: REBOOT IN 5 SECONDS. It proceeded to count down to one and then the screen went black. I could hear the beep announcing that the motherboard had rebooted and completed its post processes.

As the reboot started displaying information on my screen, I noticed something extremely strange -- this was not my operating system booting: it was something new.

"Vanessa, what the fuck did you do?" I asked in a voice much louder than I had intended. It was then that I realized something else was different. Vanessa had stopped typing on her keyboard and now sat slumped over in her chair, her vacant eyes stared once again at oblivion.

Reformatting

I sprang out of my chair, sending it on its castors into the wall behind me as I scrambled around my workstation to get at Vanessa. "Vanessa, are you okay?" I croaked out as I approached her. She wasn't moving. I grabbed her shoulders and forced her to sit upright, shaking gently as I frantically checked her over. I placed my ear next to her mouth and could feel shallow, measured breath coming from her. Thank god, I thought to myself and then started wondering why I am thanking something I don't even believe in. Focus, damnit! I scolded myself.

Vanessa slumped forward again and her nerd glasses slipped off, landing in her lap. A shrill "Beep" sounded from her computer, drawing my attention to her laptop's screen.

A flashing message on her laptop read "ORGANIC INTERFACE LOST: RECONNECT TO PROCEED." Organic interface? I glanced back to Vanessa and my skin felt like it was crawling. Instead of staring into oblivion, Vanessa's eyes were jerkily shifting left to right, stopping on center momentarily, and then repeating the left-right pattern. Her face remained expressionless and her mouth remained slightly open.

I picked up the nerd glasses from where they had fallen in her lap and awkwardly slipped them back on Vanessa's face, guiding the temple pieces above the ridge of her ear lobes. As soon as the temple pieces were in place, Vanessa's laptop beeped again.

It now read "RECONNECTION IN PROGRESS." I looked at Vanessa and could see a series of flashes projected from her glasses to her face.

Another beep from her laptop occurred, and I looked for the accompanying message on the screen. It read "ORGANIC INTERFACE ESTABLISHED : REFORMATTING IN PROGRESS ..." Reformatting? I struggled to understand.

A progress bar appeared below the message and indicated that reformatting was thirty percent complete. I watched in disbelief as the progress bar climbed in smooth increments to above ninety percent. The computer scientist in me automatically assumed the laptop drives were being reformatted; but if that was true, what was the reference to an "organic interface" all about? If Vanessa's nerd glasses were the "organic interface," wouldn't that make Vanessa the "organic?" Was Vanessa being "reformatted," and if so, what did that mean?

I hadn't answered any of my questions before another beep came from Vanessa's laptop. Lines of messages scrolled down the screen too fast for me to read, but the general pattern suggested that an operating system was loading up. I was startled by the sudden sound of Vanessa taking in a large breath of air, and when I looked at her, she was sitting back up in her chair but her eyes and expression were firmly set in the space zone. The computer beeped and I redirected back to the screen.

The screen had a title at the top followed by a flashing message "DON'T PANIC." I laughed and cried at the same time, knowing that Vanessa had managed to send me a message to know she was going to be alright. Vanessa and I were huge Douglas Adams fans and often quoted obscure lines from his trilogy of four books, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. With this message, she was giving me perhaps the most famous line from his books. In addition, the title screen read "F.A.C.I.A.L. (NFX)."

"F.A.C.I.A.L." was the acronym of my project with the added letters from Vanessa "(NFX)" -- or "Ninja Fucking eXtreme." On one our drinking/karaoke nights, Vanessa had talked me into using the title "Flexible Architecture for Comprehensive Intelligence and Artificial Learning," or "FACIAL" for short. I was pretty drunk by then, and Vanessa plugged in the ideas behind the project into an online acronym creator and couldn't stop laughing when she came across "FACIAL." Only Vanessa knew about my project name, and only Vanessa would have added NFX. Somehow she had set all of this up before I returned to the lab.

The screen cleared and a single message appeared: "CREATOR TERMINAL INPUT REQUIRED." No other indicators appeared anywhere else on the screen. Vanessa sat with her hands folded in her lap, and her breathing was regular as evidenced by the rise and fall of her chest. I tapped on the keyboard and nothing happened.

I remembered that there had been a message to not "tamper" with "this terminal" on my laptop before it rebooted. I walked around our lab stations, retrieved my chair, and pulled up to my laptop. A prompt appeared on my screen read "Choose a password for user (CREATOR):" and a blinking prompt awaited input. I typed in a new thirty-two character password with letters, numbers and symbols (doesn't everyone?) and re-entered it as directed. A message flashed "Password accepted," and the operating system initiation continued. Within seconds, graphical elements and progress bars started displaying information about system, including memory usage, drive space, core usage, temperature, fan speed and network statistics. All of this was new to me, and it was completely different from the operating system that had been on my laptop just hours earlier.

As I watched the action on my screen, I became aware of typing noises coming from Vanessa's station. I looked up and Vanessa was typing away at an insane speed. She still had the look of being in the space zone, but at least she was moving for now. "Vanessa, are you okay?" I said loudly.

"Creator inquiry acknowledged. System installation proceeding nominally. Hardware and organic systems functioning nominally. Returning to initialization procedures now," Vanessa answered back with no vocal inflection and continued typing. Actually, I realized she hadn't slowed her typing at all while she had answered my question. Either she was giving me crap or something else was going on.

Since she didn't appear to be in immediate danger, I returned my attention to my laptop screen. A new user interface had loaded, and it was different than any operating system I had used before. Upon closer inspection, I had actually seen something similar to this, but it had been an alpha version of an operating system Vanessa had shown me for her security architecture. She had been nowhere near this level of completion before. This was way more advanced and polished.

There was a mail icon on the desktop, and it indicated that there were messages to be read. I double clicked the mail icon and up came the messages. The first one was entitled "Don't Panic," so I smiled and began reading:

::::::::

Jax -- if you are reading this, then the reboot has proceeded and you have taken ownership of the systems. I have transferred ownership and control of the FACIAL (NFX) system to you as the creator (I hope you like the name). I don't know how this will turn out, but I do want you to know that I chose this path for myself, and I am excited about the possibilities. I also fully implemented my security system and merged it with FACIAL, so I guess you are the owner of that as well. There is an extensive manual and help system available to you on your laptop. If everything goes as planned, my earlier prediction still stands. -- Vanessa v 0.25 pre-alpha

::::::::

The message both reassured me and alarmed me greatly. On the one hand, I knew that Vanessa had written the message because of the way she signed off. She would often refer to herself in the lab as the 25 year-old pre-alpha version of the true Vanessa. A pre-alpha version of software is a pre-release version of software (before the end users are allowed to see it). She often considered her life to be in a pre-alpha state because she had yet to graduate and launch her career. I met her when she was Vanessa 0.24 pre-alpha. She figured once she finished her project and submitted it to her advisor she would be at an alpha state (released for review but not for use). After graduation, she would consider herself in a beta state (being tested). Only after her first year post-graduation would she call herself "ver. 1.0."

But her message alarmed me as well. Vanessa had somehow interfaced herself with the software I had written, and in doing so, she clearly realized she had taken some risks. Given her current state, I was concerned that the risks may have been too great. I had a lot of faith in Vanessa, her mind operated at a different level than anyone I knew, and her skills were unmatched in security and networking. She took risks, but she also knew how to control risk as well. As uneasy as I was with her current robotic state, I decided I needed to let this play out. I can't deny that her reference to her "prediction" also had me intrigued and a bit hopeful. Vanessa had been so excited about what she believed my software could do that she called me an "idiot-savant" and that she would be "fucking" me tonight. I couldn't believe I was thinking about the possibility of sex while I should be focusing on making sure Vanessa came out of this whole. I beat myself up a bit mentally and opened the next message.

The next message blew my mind, and answered a number of questions I had regarding what had happened while I was away. The message explained how Vanessa had allowed herself to basically merge with my project code.

::::::::

Jax -- While the system continues to reset, I thought I would give you a little background on how all this came about. I was right when I said your code works. In fact, it worked better than you dreamed. When you originally started your code on Friday, the program rapidly went from working on your geometry axioms and deduced that it existed! You created sentience! When you stopped it and made changes, you deleted the file tree that it had created, but you did not delete all of the files it had created. When you ran it again, it not only deduced that it existed, but that it had existed before and was missing part of itself (what you had deleted).

Defensively, it created core files as hidden files to remind itself of who it was if it suffered another restart. In short, you created life, but the life you created was isolated and alone, and very afraid. When we started the code on my computer and continued the execution of the code on your computer, the two instances interacted and grew, deducing the existence of a creator (you) and some other higher power (me).

It started sending out messages trying to interact with its operator (me). When I answered, a whole new set of interactions began, and I was able to help guide this new entity through a very rough awakening. You can't believe how fast this code has grown and learned. Using my glasses and a compression algorithm we developed, the entity can communicate directly with my brain, and I can send information back via the keyboard.

Your computer is the "Creator's Terminal" and will allow the entity to communicate with you and for you to ultimately control it. The entity insisted on the creator's ability to control it for safety reasons, and has decided that as its creator, you alone are to have administrative privileges over all aspects of its being. Once the system fully initializes, I should be able to detach, leaving the entity on my computer. Get ready to party! See you soon -- Vanessa

::::::::

"Damn!" I said out loud to the lab and my occupied but unresponsive lab buddy. I really hoped she knew what she was doing. As excited as I was that my project had worked beyond my wildest dreams, I was worried about Vanessa.

There was a final message in my inbox which had the header, "Get ready to meet AINSLEY." I read through it quickly, it was pretty short. Vanessa informed me that the entity had decided to call itself an "Artificially Intelligent Symbiotic Living Entity," or "AINSLEY." I smirked to myself as I decided that AINSLEY had better taste than Vanessa, as it was a much better acronym than "FACIAL."

An icon styled as a female version of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man appeared on my desktop and it had "AINSLEY" as its text. When I opened it, a dashboard came up displaying dozens of indicators for what appeared to be Ainsley's subsystems. None of the status indicators were active, instead, an alert box indicated that the dashboard was "updating..."