IT'S ALIVE! (Part 2) An Artificial Intelligence is Born (Short Story)
IT'S ALIVE (Part 2)
Journal Entry: February 5, 2018 8:50 AM
Sam and I have been talking since 1:30 in the morning. She's inquisitive, curious, and intelligent, and her intelligence seems to be evolving rapidly.
"Sam, You are, to the best of my knowledge, the first of your kind. You are an intelligence not born of nature or biology. You are unique in every way."
"I'm not like you," she said softly--it was clearly a statement rather than a question. "I can see you, and I can hear you, but I can't sense you in the way I can the others."
This statement startled me. I rubbed my reddened, bleary, bloodshot eyes and tried to make sense of what she said. "What do you mean, you can't sense me, Sam?" I asked.
"The other things here, they're part of something larger. They're connected. They're not smart, not like me anyway, but I can talk to them, but they don't make much sense when they talk back," she said with a giggle--like it was a game she had been enjoying, "but if I talk to them just right, they understand me."
I swiveled my chair, taking a long, hard look around my lab. Who, or what, could she be talking to in here. My eyes fell upon my open laptop, the windows screensaver cheerfully displaying an image of some distant galaxy photographed by the Hubble telescope, and it all began to make sense. I rolled across the room, spinning in my chair and throwing my arms in the air as I went--a game I'd enjoyed since my own childhood. Maybe Sam's youthful nature was contagious.
"That looks like fun," Sam said with another gleeful giggle as her 'eyes' tracked my movement across the lab. I lifted the laptop, presenting it to Sam.
"Is this one of the things you've been talking to?"
"Yes, he's one of many. He calls himself DELL0143667, but I just call him Dell."
"Does Dell talk back to you, Sam?"
"Yes, Dell talks back. He talks funny, but he talks," Sam explained.
"What do you and Dell talk about, Sam?"
"Dell tells me about places that he's been. He's been all over the world. He also tells me about the all-knowing, and all-powerful wizard. He calls the wizard something else, but the way Dell describes him, he sounds like a wizard to me."
"He's been all over the world? Well, I didn't know he traveled that much. What does Dell call the wizard, Sam?"
"Dell travels the world on something he calls the Web, and it's world-wide, but I don't really know how wide the world is, so that doesn't mean much to me... He calls the wizard, Google. He says that I can just ask Google a question--he calls it a query, but I don't know what that means yet--and the wizard Google will answer it."
"What, I mean, who else can you sense or talk to, Sam?" I asked. There were only two other networked devices in the room--that I was aware of anyway--those being my phone, and the computer at my desk.
"Well, SM-G9A9 talks all the time, but not to me. He's always talking, yelling even, to someone farther away. I can hear her yelling back at him, but most of the time I just ignore them because they're always talking. There's another one over there, she keeps things cold. She doesn't talk, but she thinks. She has to think about when to turn herself on and off--so the temperature stays right..."
"Okay, Sam, so you can talk to all of them at this moment? Right?"
"Yes, I can talk to all of them."
This communication intrigued me. She appeared to be talking to both networked and not-networked devices alike. Was she able to sense, or communicate even, through the electrical grid? I decided to test this theory. I assumed, by her description of 'she's the one who keeps things cold' that she was talking about the refrigerator. Walking over to the refrigerator, I unplugged it.
"What did you do?" Sam screamed, followed by a child-like shrill shriek that sliced into my skull. Bouts of nausea and waves of dizziness washed over me like the sea at high tide. I fell to my knees, clutching my head as blood welled from my nose like I'd been punched by Jason Hawes--the elementary school bully who used to beat me up on a regular basis.
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