Artificial Life

The Awakening

In the lower districts of Crystal City, a brown-haired willowy man dressed in a coat hurried his pace through the slightly wet pavement. The small drizzle caressed his sharp features, but other than that, it did not deter him.

'Just up ahead. Come on now,' he urged himself in his head, speeding up to a jog when an unmarked, strange looking warehouse seemed to rise over the dark shadows casted by the lack of sunlight, or the thereof lack of both suns.

Soon, he reached the bolted double doors, and with a precision acquired only through past experience, he flipped up a hidden panel on the wall beside the entrance and leaned forward towards the screen located there. The man hovered his head before the small green screen, squinting slightly when a red scanner light emerged from the glass sphere connected to the top. The light raked up and down his face before focusing on his right eyeball.

Below the sphere, the screen produced an exact replica of his eye pixel by pixel. Once complete, the machinery inside the wall whirred to life as it processed and searched its internal main database for a matching copy stored within the thousands of files. Not even a fraction of a second later, another image was materialised besides the first.

The willowy man blinked and pulled back just as the pixelized eyeballs moved towards one another to overlap. With a flash, the security mainframe compared both images to one another, ensuring they were the same.

'Hurry up, you damn thing!' He growled, tapping his foot on a small underfoot puddle as he wiped the thin sheen of rainwater from his face with his coat sleeve.

The screen, as if reading his thoughts, beeped once in recognition, changed the pixelated images for a small 'Welcome, Andrew Black', and with a hiss, the doors opened slowly.

The man, now identified as Andrew, pushed open the door impatiently and strode right in and out of the rain.

The inside of the warehouse looked like nothing short of what you would see in a mad scientist's laboratory; only difference would be the lack of colourful chemicals and animals. All around as the eye could see, cables upon thicker cables ran along the wall behind the terminals located at the main room. Branching off in two directions were wide, metal floored hallways, each leading into deeper sections of the warehouse. From above, long and thin rod bulbs ingrained into the roof provided the light to the floor down below.

"We need to upgrade the database," Andrew said out loud to the seemingly empty air, walking down one of the two corridors, "It's really slow when it comes to recognising the retinal scans."

From the shade, another seemingly human shape strode out. "That we do, Owner Black," it purred, coming closer and falling in step with Andrew.

Now in the light, the humanoid creature was clearly recognised as a male, though with a few characteristics a normal human would never have; under-the-arm, caramel coloured feathery wings (sort of how the now extinct animal called a bat would have), a cream hued avian tail on the small of his lower back, and small claws at the end of his fingertips where normally blunt nails would be found on a human.

However, they would be found on the famous pets exclusively known to Crystal City: the SongBird, a species that was well known for its beautiful singing voice and its exotic looks. To own one would be a dream for many, and to be bonded to one was an even greater honour.

(But we won't go into specifications of the
SongBird just yet.)