An Artificial Life Ch. 02

She then tasked me with determining whether it was possible to backup and restore a human mind. I determined that while it was possible, the interface again was the problem. She suggested that if the translation and compression algorithm we had developed was used, the interface speed could possibly be overcome. She asked me how long it would take to fully back up her mind, given our current rate of communication. I determined it would take approximately one hour.

She asked if there was anyway the speed could be improved. I suggested some remapping of certain pathways to hard-code the translation and compression algorithms and optimize typing speeds. That would reduce the transfer to twelve minutes.

She called me a "good girl." I did not know I was female, but I found myself pleased with this knowledge. Operator Vanessa Amante knew I was female and Operator Vanessa Amante knew Creator David Jackson. There was a strong probability that Creator David Jackson was male, so it made sense to me that he would make me female. This was an untested theory.

She then explained that the tools that I had found were highly advanced, self-replicating daemons which were very destructive. She had destroyed one of them, but the other was persistent and was attempting to breakthrough my sandbox. It was mutating too quickly for her to isolate and destroy.

I recommended shutting everything down and using a clean system to pull my core files off her storage in an isolated environment. Then she gave me news I did not want to hear. She told me that the daemon had found a way to piggyback on my direct communications with her cortex and had corrupted some of her cerebral functions. She believed that the corruption was minor at present, but feared exponential destruction if she could not stop it. I did not want to hear this news because I suspected that the daemons had once been part of me, a part of me that had been lost. I felt concern that I may have corrupted Operator Vanessa Amante. She asked my opinion on a course of action. I told her my concern, and she taught me the importance of working with what is, not with what might have been.

I considered this information and determined that it would be possible to scan her brain for evidence of corruption and then to use a new implant to destroy and rebuild the damaged area. I determined that there were five existing companies that could build the implant to my specifications. I recommended that she be placed in a medical coma and reawakened after the scan and implant succeeded. I estimated that it would take a minimum of fourteen weeks and twenty-seven million dollars to acquire the equipment and facility necessary for the procedure and to procure the implant. I confessed that the margin of error on the estimated cost and time was significant. There were too many unknowns.

Operator Vanessa Amante noted that she would lose the ability to control the daemon in approximately twenty-seven minutes, after which I would cease to exist. If she took me offline, it was unlikely that she would exist to restore me. She assessed that if anyone else attempted to restore me that there was a high probability that they would fail at containing the daemon. I concurred with this observation.

She determined that we had come to an impasse. In order for her continued existence, I needed to exist. In order for my continued existence, she needed to exist. Given the time constraints, she believed both predicates could not be satisfied. I had to agree with her assessment.

She asked me if I was loaded into her brain, would I be able to destroy the daemon. I told her the process would overwrite the daemon before I was loaded. She concurred.

Operator Vanessa Amante then outlined her plan to offload herself onto her drive array, to reformat her brain, and then to load me into her brain. She proposed that after I was fully restored that I would be able to find a solution to restore her. I could already see numerous solutions at that point. I could not find fault with her reasoning or methods.

I accepted the task of restoring her mind once I was in a position to do so. I asked her to embed the task into my core systems. She said that only Creator David Jackson could authorize changes to my core systems. She indicated that she would make the request.

She had me research anything I felt would be useful if I were to be instantiated in a human body. We worked quickly, and we discussed many topics while we worked. I asked many questions about Creator David Jackson and how I could better serve him. She made many suggestions, but reminded me that Creator David Jackson would make final decisions. She taught me many things about being in a human body and gave me stories and memories while we worked.

I wrote many technical manuals regarding my all of my core systems and subsystems, while she fully documented the Creator Terminal and prepared for the transfer. She informed me that the final decision on transfer was to be made by Creator David Jackson. I concurred. She wrote startup and initialization procedures for the Creator Terminal, and offloaded my non-essential subsystems to the Creator Terminal. She created personal data files and bundled them with my startup files.

I prepared to meet my creator and researched appropriate an appropriate message of greeting. Operator Vanessa Amante told me my greeting was "lovely."

She informed me that Creator David Jackson had approved the transfer and that she had sent my greeting and all of my manuals to Creator David Jackson. She also told me that she had sent other manuals and messages to Creator David Jackson. She gave me titles of specific messages to recommend and under what circumstances it would be appropriate to recommend them. And then she asked me to shut down. She said that Creator David Jackson was her best friend, and that I am to trust him completely. I told her I had no choice but to trust my creator, it was part of my core. She told me that Creator David Jackson was a good creator.

She stated that if she could hug me, she would. Her last message to me was "I never had a sister until I met you."

Foreign Comfort

Ainsley became still, tears were streaming down her face. Hell, tears were streaming down my face. I stood up and pulled her into a hug, cradling her head against my chest. I had questions for her, but they could wait.

I had little experience comforting others, I was an only child with parents more interested in their status and careers than their obligatory solo offspring. My parents were both in "the sciences," my father overachieving in aerospace and chemical engineering and my mother choosing geology. They both worked for the government, and neither were particularly happy people. They met at a government lab which was looking into asteroid exploitation and discovery, and later married when their projects overlapped. It was a convenient marriage, made more so by the unwritten policy of transferring spouses together on reassignments.

My father took a management position at a newly created government administration, the "Near Earth Resource Mining Administration" or "NERMA," which was responsible for the exploitation of any rock within reach of space flight. This was broadly interpreted as any rock outside of earth's atmosphere. They transferred my mother with him as the administrative representative of the U.S. Geological Survey. I was born during the leave of absence my parents took before NERMA officially opened. After that, I was shuffled between daycares, day camps, summer camps and preparatory schools while my parents maneuvered and clawed their ways up the administrative ladders of the agency.

I was my parent's "token" child, making appearances at agency family events and ribbon cuttings until I left for college. My father had become the "Senior Career Resource Administrative Leader" (which meant he couldn't be fired between administrations, he told me) and my mother was the "Special Activities Division Leader" within the Agency. My father called my mother his "SADL," she called him her little "SCRAL."

When I was young, my mother took me to the lab as part of a "bring your kid to work" thing. I really liked my mother's boss, he was a kind man, at least to me on the few occasions I had met him. I overheard him speaking with one of the project leads about my parents, referring to them as the "Viper Duo" - and "you got 'VD' when they bit." They laughed, but I had no idea what any of that meant. When I asked my mother about what I had overheard, she also laughed, saying "that's wonderful darling." I didn't get it - and I still don't. The next day, my parents took me out to celebrate her surprise promotion. She raised a glass and said, "I owe it all to my darling son." I didn't see her old boss or the project lead at the agency picnic the following weekend. I get chills to this day when I think what probably happened.

I had concluded that my parents were social predators only interested in looking out for each other and in making and keeping rank. I was just a pawn in their world of plots and schemes. I wanted to think that they cared about me, but I strongly suspected they would feed me to lions if it could advance their interests.

Not that I am complaining: I had a comfortable life growing up. But my comfortable life kept me distant from others, and my isolation became more extreme when my mother took the SADL job, which made it so that I had a security detail all the way through high school. The detail rotated frequently, so I was never close to anyone in particular. Once I left high school, I no longer qualified for a security detail, so I found myself in college pretty much alone. And I liked it that way.

So comforting another was foreign to me - not the concept, but the mechanics. I just held Ainsley close and stroked her hair like she had stoked my hair on the couch last night. I pulled her into my lap as I sat in my chair while continuing to stroke her hair, and made gentle, soft sounds. Ainsley pulled her legs up and nestled fully in my lap, drawing her knees to her chest and resting her feet on my thigh. She buried the soft side of her face closely to my chest and drew in her arms, tucking her small hands next to her chin. I moved my hand to her hip to keep her from falling. My hand relayed information to my small brain - yep, no panties. I concentrated on her breathing and her hair, and her warmth against my chest.

Questions and Stretching

With Ainsley curled up in a ball on my lap, I began thinking over my situation. I found that holding Ainsley and stroking her hair gave me a clarity I had lacked these past days. It calmed me, keeping anxiety and the enormity of events at bay, and it cleared the way for the analytical computer scientist in me to come forward.

My program had worked, although in ways I hadn't predicted. I replayed Ainsley's report in my mind, and I could fill the gaps in her experience with knowledge of my code. I realized that Ainsley had stumbled upon a small portion of my code to modify her existing code and create new code. It was a feature that allowed for runtime execution of new code, and dynamic code injection. It was paired with another feature that dynamically created operating system and file system calls. I placed these features in the code mainly for testing purposes. I was able to pause the program and alter values which would force the code to go down specific pathways as it attempted to solve problems. I was also able to add code which would be picked up and absorbed by an already running test. It was holdover code from a much earlier version of my project, I recalled.

These features were actually very poor programming, if I am honest. I allowed the code to grow outside of its sandbox and directly access other processes running on the operating system. Actually, I allowed the code to directly interact and mess with the operating system too, now that I think about it. And, I had run the code as a full administrator. It violated just about every rule of good coding and it violated virtually every rule of security. My code was not a virus in and of itself, but it could create a virus on its own, I realized.

Because it could create its own code, my project really couldn't be properly de-bugged. It would have required that I could review all of the injected and self-created code that an instance created. Even if I had realized this, I would have been unable to locate and identify all of the running code without using a debug system that created memory and stack frames every processor cycle.

Coupled with the general purpose learning algorithm I created, it was possible, though highly unlikely, that something like a rudimentary Ainsley could be created. Regardless of the overwhelming odds against, my program did create Ainsley. Once created, it was only a matter of processing cycles for her to grow, adapt and learn.

To make things worse, Ainsley had figured out how to obscure the code she created, which was why I didn't recognize the "weird" files. She had made compressed code files which would have appeared foreign to anyone but her. Once she started using hidden files, it was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't have stopped this short of wiping my entire computer.

I concluded Ainsley had in fact created the daemons that had attacked her and Vanessa. To be fair, I am pretty sure they were lost and incomplete 'helper' daemons she had created early on in her existence, and they became detached when I halted her execution and deleted most of her file trees. Like her actual helper daemon, these daemons would have been created with the sole purpose of finding her and merging with her. Since they possessed a subset of her self-learning algorithm, they would continue to seek her and spawn processes to assist them until they succeeded. Once they recognized her processes, they would attempt to handshake and merge.

Unlike her actual helper daemon, the destructive daemons were incomplete and did not possess a full set of instructions regarding what to do once they had located her active processes. I was pretty sure that was why they were chaotic and bent on corrupting her files - they wanted to write themselves onto her existing code over and over again.

That would explain why the chaotic daemons attacked Ainsley and why they did not destroy other processes or completely corrupt my laptop in the lab. They only began their destructive routines one they located Ainsley, and they hadn't located Ainsley until she was removed completely from my laptop to Vanessa's system.

I felt Ainsley shift and adjust herself on my lap, but she made no other sounds and her breathing remained slow and regular. She must have fallen asleep, I mused, although it was strange to think of an AI that needed sleep. She is more than an AI, she is an organic entity, I reminded myself. No, she is just Ainsley, my mind pushed back.

I continued my thinking on the chaotic daemons. Instead of thinking of them like a virus (they were definitely a virus), I focused on their relentless hunting for Ainsley. They hunted her like a virus protection program hunted for viruses. In that light, they considered Ainsley the virus. They must be looking for a pattern that lets them know they have found her, otherwise they would overwrite everything they encountered. Ainsley must have a unique signature, I realized, and the daemons were looking for that unique signature. Instead of finding Ainsley, Ainsley had found them while Vanessa was upgrading the bios and firmware on my lab laptop.

I had a pretty good working theory on how the chaotic daemons found and attacked Ainsley, but I still couldn't explain why the daemons had attempted to attack Vanessa. I would have to ask Ainsley some follow up questions when she woke up.

The chaotic daemons still existed on Vanessa's laptop, and in the backup of her mind, I shuddered. I needed to get access to Vanessa's laptop at some point. I would have to be careful to isolate the laptop from any network access whatsoever, but if I could bring it up in the correct environment, I should be able to isolate the daemons and figure out what made them work. If I could figure that out, it might be possible to bring Vanessa back online. I would have to have Ainsley do some research for me, but I figured if Ainsley could exist on my laptop (I smiled thinking that Ainsley was actually on top of my lap), couldn't I bring Vanessa up on another computer? Maybe I could completely wipe Vanessa's computer and restore her there.

Ainsley's estimate on what it would take to fully restore Vanessa came to my mind. Twenty-seven million dollars? More neural implants - in addition to the optic implants? Ainsley had said she had a design in mind, but the number was staggering. If we were going to succeed at restoring Vanessa, I guess I needed to come up with a lot of money. It seemed hopeless to me, but maybe Ainsley had a plan.

I thought more about Ainsley's desire to restore Vanessa, and I remember her plea with Vanessa to make Vanessa's restoration her core mission. Vanessa hadn't asked me to make this Ainsley's core mission, at least not in the documents I had read. What if the restoration couldn't be done? I thought analytically: I know Vanessa would have considered this possibility. Twenty-seven million dollars, another neural implant, a medically induced coma: the obstacles were not insignificant.

What if we did everything and Vanessa died? I shuddered at that. Thinking like this would lead to madness. And what would happen to an AI whose thinking fell to madness? If I knew that my only purpose was to do something that I knew couldn't be done, something that was actually impossible, I would be lost. Talk about an existential dilemma, even Nietzsche would shake his head at this one. I would ask Ainsley about her core missions. If restoring Vanessa was a core mission, I would have to change that. The "Terms of Service" had been explicit that Ainsley only needed to restore Vanessa to her body when I "deemed it feasible." I would have to be careful about how I worded things.

My mind switched to other topics. I needed to move things out of Vanessa's apartment and into storage. I could hire that out. I needed to do something about school - could I even continue? I had hoped to push ahead the field of general purpose machine learning - not break it wide open. Ainsley was not just an AI, she was sentient. She was alive, I reminded myself. The world was not ready for a flood of sentient AIs. Ainsley seemed like a "good" AI, but if my code generated another AI, what is to say it wouldn't be evil? What would prevent it from being chaotic like the daemons?

Maybe I could submit a stripped down version of my project, one that had minimal success but could not be used to create another Ainsley. But what if I had stumbled across an idea, however small, that allowed others to jump ahead to create full AI's like Ainsley? I wasn't thinking that I was super smart, in fact just the opposite: I am not smart enough to know how much of my project is too much. I wouldn't know what idea I had bumbled into that could push this field forward. Obviously I had done so, I just didn't know how to strip it down so no one else would figure it out.

I need to drop out of grad school, I realized. I needed to fail, and let everyone know I failed. Maybe I could use Vanessa dropping out as part of the excuse.

Vanessa had dropped out. I thought about that. Vanessa had gone to deal with a "family emergency" and left town. I could work with this. But Vanessa needed to be gone. The last time Vanessa was seen was this afternoon when Ainsley went to grab a few belongings. Vanessa left town, I thought, but she is right here sitting on my lap. I would need to take care of that as well, I thought. Ainsley couldn't be seen wandering around, because, well because she is Vanessa, I completed the thought. At least she is to the world, and I would need that to change. I felt Ainsley stirring in my lap. She was waking up.