Agent Alaska: Recollection and Freelancer

"Chapter 16"

Director: "Dear Chairman."

Fade in to the AI Containment Facility

Director: "I imagine this investigation of our program is providing you with the kind of attention that politicians crave so much. How very predictable. What has surprised me most about mankind during the great war, is not our ability to adapt to the new arenas of conflict, but instead, our willingness in victory to so quickly return to the old."

Cut to Church and Washington

Church: "You mean to tell me we've come all this way for this? Your fucking crazy A.I. Epsilon?"

Washington: "Yes. I thought it was gone. But Delta told you memory was the key. At first I thought he meant to remember our first encounter. And when I met Delta the first time what I told him was-"

The scene flashes toward Church and we see a flashback of Wash talking with Delta

Washington: "You were encrypted until you could be recovered."

Delta: "Recovery carries risk. Destruction ensures that an A.I.-"

Washington: "You cost a lot of money, okay? It's cheaper to recover you than it is to delete you."

Back to present day

Washington: "When they removed Epsilon from me, he was unravelling, casting off all his thoughts. I was sure they deleted him but it's-

Church: "It's cheaper to store it than it is to delete it. Right?"

Washington: "Right."

Church: "But why are we looking for this thing? What's the point?"

Washington: "The message specifically said that memory is the key. Delta was telling me that Epsilon was still alive."

Church: "And Epsilon is the key?"

Washington: "In a way. At the end of the war, things didn't look good for humans. And there were dozens of projects all trying to come up with the magic bullet to win."

Church: "Right."

Washington: "Project Freelancer was one of them. They had their research with aggressive A.I. But they could only get the one, and they needed more to conduct their experiments. So, they got desperate."

Church: "Right. They tried to... they tried to copy it but they couldn't, so they-"

Washington: "All A.I. are based on a human mind. And the Director had a theory. He thought, if we can't copy it, we'll just have to do the next best thing."

A scene flashes for Church

Church: "Ah! They, they split it?"

Washington: "Just like a human mind when it's broken; it fragments. It fractures itself to protect itself. Just like Alaska said."

Church: "They tortured it."

Washington: "Like reverse engineering a multiple personality disorder. They presented the Alpha with scenario after scenario of stress and danger. When it started to fragment, they harvested those fragments."

Church: "The Freelancer A.I.s."

Washington: "Exhorted little fragments of purified compartmentalized emotion. None of them were a full personality. Some were good-"

Church: "Like Delta?"

Washington: "Delta was the Alpha's logic. It needed to protect itself from analyzing what was happening to it. So it segregated that part of its mind. The part that would be able to understand the horror of what they were doing to it. And when the anger came and threatened to take over, it split that off too. That was Omega; its rage. Gamma was its deceit. Sigma was its creativity. And Epsilon..."