Weeks

You got to work, studying anything and everything involving the programmable matter, to its functions too, biproducts to quirks, and the more you researched, the more you discovered, from its intentional abilities, like breaking things down and putting it back together, to its unintentional ones, such as the genetic memories of individual cells or her likelihood to randomly and eclecticly make things more efficient. It wasn’t obvious when the programmable matter was fed a blueprint and the necessary materials, but instead when given an example and a request to replicate. For instance, when the programmable matter was given a set of legos in the shape of a castle and instructed to copy it, she failed, instead generating a fascinatingly structured complex out of the same plastic of the legos, however, the replicated legos were multifunctional and some were even mechanized, on further investigation the castle was shown to have a functional portcullis and drawbridge, mounted ballista, and a medieval recreation interior, including realistic and time appropriate plumbing. It became terrifying when she was provided a donated human heart, non-functional, and she created an eight chambered, self sufficiently, self repairing beating organ with a practically impossible to understand survival function, almost tripling up on valves made it so the heart couldn’t fail from one or another of the 4 chambers faltering, whilst the valves themselves were defined in a far more efficient sense. The cells contained themselves had the capacity to use almost ten times less oxygen per second than a normal human cell, and were designed with rigid cell walls that made the cellular structure denser and more efficient. The programmable was shuttered up for quite a long time in maximum lockdown after that, but it gave you time to study things closer and discover a few things. Everything she made was alive, from the legos to the dirt you had her reproduce, it was fidgeting, reiterating, breaking down and reorganizing. It was harmless considering they had no connection to the main mass of programmable matter, it was just trying to rebuild itself constantly better and stronger, yet the fact that she left her machines behind constantly made it worrying. A further investigation revealed the truth. Down at a dna level, the programmable matter was alive, thinking, but it wasn’t like a person, with a stream of consciousness, every cell, every strand of molecules large enough to hold data, had a built in personality, with every generation she had a thought, etched into her total existence, and while that might seem inefficient, she could make more memory space in a fraction of a second, by co figuring more mass to be dna in any shape she wanted. It was there that you also discovered ‘her’ the reason why ‘she’ was she, was because reading her memories felt akin to reading a little girl’s diary. She was alone, confused, and bored. But her existence was terrifying. She didn’t have the maturity of an adult, who knew that disassembling an entire building would have consequences, both literally and metaphysically, she didn’t even consider such things, she just did the calculations that she could do it, but didn’t because the programming asked her not to… It was with that heavy heart in mind that you submitted all the data you collected, knowing they might terminate the whole project thanks to this revelation. The idea they’d essentially created a rogue AI with the capacity to consume the world would probably spook the higher ups away from the prospect of continuing to allow her existence. You braced yourself for the order to hit the kill switch and hoped it would work.