Gabatrix: Minerva

Chapter 2: Awakening

"Yes!" Ericson said with excitement. "Three years of working with this, and I finally got it working!" He stepped away from the table and looked at the large screen. If the program worked correctly, it should respond to his words. The display still showed the green lettering as if it was waiting for his next action.

"Right.....Program, can you understand my voice?"

The letters on the screen changed and depicted the word "affirmative" on it.

"Good. You will identify yourself as Minerva. Is that understood?"

The next series of letters popped in that also depicted "affirmative."

Ericson knew that even with this success, there was still a lot of work that needed to be done. This was only the very beginning stages of the running program of Minerva. The fact that Minerva understood his words and responded back to him was amazing in itself.

"That is a good start, but we need to get more of your interface up. Minerva, I need Face Interface B-18 to work. Are you able to initiate it?"

The green letters dropped and displayed a new sentence. "Negative. Unable to initiate."

"Shit.....I imagined that there would be some kinks. Thankfully I programmed you to be able to help me out once we get to this stage. Minerva," he directed his order. "I want you to show me what the issue is with why you are unable to initiate Face Interface B-18."

The display on the screen showed the waterfall move. The waterfall sped up a little bit as the program was initiating its diagnostic. There were ten sets of subroutines that need to be corrected.

"Hmmm....not bad. Some of these just have some missing codes to them. I can make the changes. Minerva, once I start to fix these, I want you to initiate Face Interface B-18."

"Affirmative," it replied in green letters. The letters dropped as Ericson tapped his wrist to activate his arm display. He began to focus on the highlighted subroutine. He had designed it to operate this way, and it was working. Now he could make the necessary fixes faster and quicker with Minerva to help him out. One by one, he would go to the algorithm and fix it. Some were a simple addition of code or number, and the next one was fixing the fragmented data. His years of work were starting to pay off. Each set of codes and numbers of the billions to trillions were something that he created by himself. Each of those codes in itself was trillions upon trillions of terabytes of information. It would be his ultimate creation.

Finally, within less than a minute, he fixed all the subroutines. He smiled as he looked at the last one that needed to be fixed. He looked at the micro camera that was on top of the display. It would have to work. He tapped his arm display and corrected the last one.

Immediately, Minerva had done its job. It initiated the program that Ericson was trying to get working. The waterfall continued to move downward. A white and blue face began to appear on the waterfall. The face was seemingly bald and almost plastic-looking. The face looked like it was a woman. It had eyes, a nose, a mouth, and eyebrows. It would provide him a real face for him to talk to the AI he was creating. Now that he had it working, the AI could interface with him better.

"Good.....How are you, Minerva?" Ericson asked it.

"Hello, Dr. Ericson, my name is Minerva. I am functioning at 70% efficiency," the face spoke to him with a male voice. The mouth of the face moved as it spoke to him. There were occasional flickers as the face would drop and reappear. Ericson nodded and understood what was going on.