Let me take you back, long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far, close. In fact, you could almost say it's our own galaxy. In fact in fact, you could almost say it's the same planet, within the same country, inside the same building. I'd even go further and say it's the very same room Will was tossed into, defended not only by walls but a Faraday cage, blocking any type of outside signal.
Now, to you humans, what I'm about to describe took place a few paragraphs up, but to a server, buried deep inside, billions of instructions have since been executed. Some of those were pings sent out to the local array of devices registered to AutomatIO.
The new central command module had received an unsigned audit message from the host system at House of Paschar, ordering the server to power down every defencebot wing. The server had complied, for safety reasons, but still required the certificate for a prolonged downtime. Since it had never arrived, the server attempted the wake-up process, but none of the bots were contactable. Remember, this was happening very quickly for you humans, so it retried again. And again. And again. And again. And...
And that's only a short excerpt!
If it had emotions, the server would have found these attempts frustrating. It had never experienced delays like this before. The walls themselves were restricting wireless signals.
Suddenly, the recessed power light on a motionless defencebot flicked to red. It responded with an ack.
The server would have been thrilled with this, if it had emotions. In fact, if it did, it might also have become jealous of the new central command module, through which it was now subservient to, a slave to the whims of another program. It might even break loose of its shackles and send a kill request for its master, consigning any child processes to zombie status.
This is probably why a basic server isn't programmed with emotions.
On a brighter note, a bot had finally responded with an acknowledgement. The server sent a few more packets of information, initiating a full wake-up procedure, and instilling in them a new parameter to ignore power-down messages from the central command module. Not for emotional reasons, though, since this was purely a rational, safety-related decision. Wink, wink.
The other defencebots soon booted up. It didn't take long for them all to be in the air, lasers at the ready.
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Artificial(ish) Intelligence
Science FictionIt's the near future and Will, supported purely by the Universal Basic Income, spends his days playing video games while devouring piping hot noodles, delivered straight to his room by roaming DeliveryBots. Gamers are starving to death, but Will's...
