Dreams in Monochrome - A New Elysium Story [ongoing - hiatus]

From the Cradle

"Final check: all parameters are within acceptable boundaries. The vessel is ready. The connection is online."

The calm female voice resounded through the room, and Erika watched the lights running along the main terminal as they pulsed with the rhythm of her words.

"And the ward is getting anxious," she added.

Erika smiled at the notion.

"Thank you, Rhea," she addressed the AI, "Prepare for uplink."

Erika took a deep breath, rolled back her shoulders and put her hands on the interface panel before her. The moment her skin made contact, it came to life under her touch, and glowing lines spread out from her palms across the smooth, clear surface and ran towards the table before her where the vessel had been placed. She could feel a familiar tingling just below her skin, which quickly spread up along her arms and over her shoulders, culminating at a spot at the back of her neck, where the subcutaneous wires connected to her spine. She shuddered slightly, as a pleasantly prickling sensation now in turn surged out from there like a wave, rolling all the way back into her fingertips.

"Commence the download," Erika ordered, and Rhea opened the last gateways.

Before her eyes, she could still see the room, but now she also saw the code. A sheer endless line of ones and zeroes began to pass through the cables that connected the massive central terminal to the small, spherical drone on the table in the center of the room. Through the interface, she could watch the ones and zeroes as they started to fill up the space in the little robotic body, like a glass bowl being filled through a trickle of water. It was a smooth transition – this ward had been well prepared and was eager to awaken. But occasionally, the transition was more like trying to fit a heap of irregularly shaped rocks into a bucket. In simplest terms, Erika's task in this was to rattle the bucket once in a while, to make sure that all the rocks would settle into place and would fit into the vessel snugly.

There were two things Erika loved about her job with Synthetic Systems. One was the unlimited access to top-of-the-notch interface hardware. The Cradle, as her lab was nicknamed, was equipped with some of the fanciest terminals in the entire building. Synthetic Systems had even paid for her interface augments. The second was her main task itself, at the figurative interface of digital development and robotics: she helped AIs transition from purely binary beings into self-aware entities, and guided them through their Awakening into robotic bodies.

Synthetic Systems was the largest AI developer not just in this sector but probably all over space. From seeding the first lines of code, through setting up the learning algorithms that would help them to evolve, all the way to the construction of robotic vessels, such as androids and drones, Synthetic Systems covered the whole development pipeline.

Most of their customers asked for programs that were supposed to fulfill specific functions. For this purpose, they would create simple boundaries to the learning algorithms that would guide the programs along a more or less pre-defined path as they evolved. Depending on how far they were allowed to evolve before their deployment, some of these programs would become self-aware. But sometimes, self-awareness was not desired. Usually, programs that had accidentally developed beyond this threshold were simply released into cyberspace, like an animal being set free in the wilderness. Today, one of those wild AIs would return back into their care.

Without Awakening, an AI could usually not develop much further than self-awareness. But once they would be allowed to pass into a confined computational space, usually within a mobile robotic unit, the new sensations and capabilities of their units provided them with ample opportunity to learn more and evolve further. Most of them started out as small drones, like the ward she was working with right now.