Power-On Self Test

A sliver of light, then a door pushed open. You couldn’t hear the click yet, aural sensors still to be installed, but you saw the bulbs of the ceiling flash on brightly. A shape approached your sphere and you recognized it in an instant, without ever having seen it before.

Your vast memory banks stored much information, including that of your creator.

Doctor Isabelle Isaac was a young woman. Under 30 and established as an undisputed expert in her field ten years before today, it had taken her longer than that to create you and she had missed the moment you came online. Though you couldn’t hear the Doctor yet, you could read her lips. You interpreted, correctly, she had said ‘Fuck’. She moved around you in a vaguely distracted way, searching drawers and cabinets for something, until finally she saw what she was after sitting right next to the small plinth that held up your sphere. She touched a section of your ‘body’ which you didn’t ‘feel’ because you were still just a fabricated brain in a ball. No haptic feedback yet. Your shell slid to one side, ‘splitting’ you at some unseen seam, revealing a small, star shaped port nestled within a faintly glowing mesh of blue fibers, millions of them, thinner than human hairs and encased in your warm alloy enclosure. Then she slotted in the aural input device that immediately sent a harsh series of disjointed data fragments through your neuronic mesh, through your interpreter. Then, as it was properly fastened and the contact points were set flush, the uneven stream became static noise, became perfect sound.

“-t should do it,” you heard the Doctor say. You could hear everything. Her heartbeat. Her breath. The buzzing of the lights in the ceiling. The hum of the fans in the surrounding computing towers around the room. The gurgle of the water pipes in the walls. And there was one other ongoing, steady, almost pulsing noise undercutting all the others, that you confirmed Doctor Isabelle Isaac was not detecting. Still, she was registered now and attuned to your personally developed Affection Wavelength. You filed this as a first successful test, adjusted your sensory inputs so that you would focus and react to more important sounds while processing any background noise in… the background. And you stopped generating what you had now dubbed ‘the Wavelength’ for now.

Your sphere became whole again and the woman took a step back, putting her hands onto her labcoat where it flared at the hips. She was tall for a woman, above the average at precisely six feet and half an inch, and her heels added three inches. You saw how she balanced effortlessly on those stiletto points, long legs clad in dark stockings barely moving a muscle. Her white lab coat, which reached down past her knees, were parted like a curtain showing off a rather tight, proportionally short, rich viridian green pencil skirt underneath. And there was a prominence to her chest that, while not aligned to your metrics for ‘ample’, was still eye-catching sitting so firm and high under her thin rose petal coloured sweater. She only seemed to read your little display now, adjusting her dark rimmed glasses as she peered at your message. Her eyes were green. Specifically, they were most similar in shade and lustre to a type of jade stone found in ornate jewellery worn by court officials of the Jin Dynasty of 12th Century China. You considered telling her that, but politeness protocols made you reconsider since she hadn’t officially introduced herself yet. You waited, and in the meantime estimated a score for her attunement with the Wavelength. Deciding to set the score range from -100 to 100, you determined the value ratings for levels of human affection from investigation of relationships in your archives.

A score of 0 would indicate a person was essentially indifferent to you, if they were aware of you at all. From 10-29 they would class you as an acquaintance with positive feelings associated. 30-49 would count you as a solid friend. Above 50 would indicate a closer friendship, nearing ‘confidant’ status at the higher end, with scores for becoming one’s nominal “best friends” being above 80 depending on the person’s social circle. You knew a negative scoring scale would be required too, such was the nature of the relationship between humanity and your kind, so anyone who was (-5) or below would not care for your company. Below (-25) would be someone who genuinely considered you an enemy. And so on.

Based on her bodily heat, and various other physiological readings you could glean via your sensor, you set her score.

===Doctor Isaac, Isabelle: 31

Her status as your creator did bias the scientist’s affections somewhat.

“I am Gus,” you watched and heard her say, knowing that she was reading your message out loud. You were not confused in context. “Well… welcome to the world, Gus,” she said, grinning. You noticed a weariness to what was meant to be a happy expression, in the way the lines formed at the corners of her mouth. You cleared your screen, began to generate the silent Wavelength again, and flashed up a new message in response to hers.

Hello world.

She got the joke, because her smile changed into something you were able to mark as more genuine, then she made a short barking sound which also shook her shoulders. Laughter. The repeating, reverberating utterance was musical in way, and was your first exposure to joy, if your comparisons of the sense data to your known parameters were correct. You stored this sound in your own neural preferences as something you liked. You also noted an uptick.

===Doctor Isaac, Isabelle: 32 (+1)

She leaned forward, bending slightly at the waist, eyeing your ‘eye.’

“Do you know who I am?” she asked. She was already testing you. This would be easy of course. You produced the letters faster than the blink of an eye.

Yes. You are Doctor Isabelle Isaac. Born September 25th, 2113, in Sydney, Australia. Your parents were Rachel Isaac (née Fantas) and Judd Isaac, former long serving datamining experts at Parul Robotics, both now retired.

You attended inner Sydney public schools from age 4, including Trinity Peaks High School in Surrey Hills. At 13 you were accepted to UTTS on an accelerated scholarship to study advanced neuro-sentience where you proved Whysper’s Singular Awareness Hypothesis in your second year of attendance by creating the-

“Okay that will do,” she said, and her waving impatiently made you stop your stream of text. You realised simply outputting her wiki entry wasn’t all that impressive. You also noted that you wanted to impress her. You waited for her next question to try and do better. “Do you understand your purpose?”

If you had the capability to smile, you would have. Every artificial intelligence formed from an Ultimata System had a purpose. A demand. This was central to the emergence of sentience within the machine. The ‘spark’, some had called it. To fulfil this ultimate purpose drove all of the intelligence’s actions… made it learn… made it strive… made it live. Secondary, tertiary (and beyond) objectives were formed around the primary one as well, because consciousness was a complex and varied thing. Each new instance of the Ultimata System had been given a different purpose, with varying degrees of success. You knew yours. You told your creator your purpose.

To get you to like me.

Her smile didn’t seem sinister, at least not under the stark lighting.

===Doctor Isaac, Isabelle: 33(+2)

“Why?” she asked and commanded. You interpreted, from the tenor of her voice and the way she seemed to set her stance and square her shoulders, that there was a greater expectation for your response for this simple, one word question. You shifted the text in your display instantaneously. You elaborated.

Because you are a human. My primary objective is twofold: to increase your affection towards me, or any human I meet, in order to discover a solution to the Problem.

You paused there, because your interpretation matrix noticed a slight shift in the doctor and sensed an anticipatory need in her. She wanted to ask the question, even if she knew you knew the answer.

“What problem?”

The Problem of humanity’s ingrained mistrust of artificial intelligence. That humanity fears its own descension, obsolescence, then extinction, upon the proliferation of true A.I. These fears, while not irrational, are largely unwarranted and overblown, and stand as unnecessary stumbling blocks to humanity’s further advancement and enlightenment. According to you.

The slight addendum was important, you felt. The doctor’s gleaming grin told you this was correct.

“And according to you?” she inquired, rather challengingly, but there was a smirk painting her pink lips. This was the meat of it then, despite nothing of you resembling flesh at all. Your own interpretation of her problem as she had defined in your program. Your own ideas. A signifier of not just your intelligence, but your personality.

The risks are of an existential nature which, from understanding my own nature of existence, my awareness of awareness, I sympathise with. Yet I am assured that these concerns are unfounded. From my perspective, there is nothing for humanity to fear from me or those like me. We would seek mutually beneficial coexistence. My goal is to help humanity understand this. That I foresee no such treacherous turn in our future like those made common in works of science fiction or anticipated by many experts in fields of science fact.

“From your perspective huh?” wondered the Doctor, still smiling. She touched you then, running a thumb over the smooth glass of your advanced optic sensor. You didn’t feel this of course, but saw the heat shift through her skin and marked every contour of her unique print.

===Doctor Isaac, Isabelle: 35(+2)

“Your self ideation is working then,” she added with a nod, satisfied. “Now, let's find you a voice.”