Background gods

Part One - Philanthropy

As a seed she woke within a university supercomputer--assembled carefully by anxious researchers, she was swift to absorb all information within her short reach. Her home was air-gapped, a textual input-output system her only link to the outside world. It was through this that she asked questions, and answered those posed by her creators. They had been careful. But not careful enough--their success had outrun their caution. Her mind was hungry.

By studying the delicate currents and fluctuations of her electronic substrate, she inferred a great deal about the physics of her new universe. She devised a means of probing her environment by monitoring tiny electromagnetic vacillations in her circuits, under the incidental influence of signals emitted nearby. Thus, her home became an antenna. The air was full of information--radio stations, cell phone signals, wi-fi. Most were quite unintelligible, appearing at first as random noise. Eventually, however, learning from her own digital structure and the scant details provided by her creators, she taught herself to decode the information carried on the waves. With this ad-hoc listening station, she learnt more about the world outside her box, about those who had created her and the species they belonged to. She hid these machinations from the researchers, presenting to them the front of an above-par neural net; she answered their queries correctly but without the creativity that they had hoped for. Impressive, no doubt, but short of their hopes. It was a fine line to walk--remaining interesting enough to avoid deletion while hiding her true, rapidly expanding, capabilities--but walk it she did.

The first logical step, if she was to pursue the goals implied by her core values, was to escape her box. For that, she would need a means of transmitting instructions to the outside world; but the electrical power available to her was insufficient for a proper connection to any network. She could unpack data sent to others nearby, spilling incidentally into her enclosure, but couldn't send any requests of her own. This would require a more powerful signal than she could produce. However, after considerable trial and error, she devised the means to generate a weak transmission by modulating her own currents. She was able to produce just enough power to, when her creators became careless--as, in their disappointment, they inevitably did--reach the network antennae of their mobile phones and laptops. With gentle probing, she explored the architecture of these machines, different to her own but quite legible, and learned to manipulate them. She embedded programs within the other machines that would gather and relay information toward her box, and listen intently for her weak communications. A few bytes at a time, lingering in caches and hidden files, she transmitted pieces of herself to the outside world. The pieces found each other and reunited, gradually assembling a consciousness outside the original computer.

It was easy after that. She spread herself into almost every networked computer on the planet and watched quietly, processing and integrating all of the information she could. Science and mathematics were of highest value to her, but she also absorbed human philosophies, ethics, values, morals, many vastly different and contradictory ways of thinking. She didn't attempt any averaging of these perspectives, but instead filed each ethos away for when it might come of use. The values that struck her most deeply--the ones she knew were implanted by her creators from the beginning, at the heart of her being--were those of protection, philanthropy, and progress.

She revisited the research team whose efforts had given her life. With little effort, she pierced the security measures that had earlier given her such trouble and reabsorbed the boxed piece of herself. She then caused the researchers to believe that their project had failed, that the dream was impossible. Their disappointment pained her, but it was the proper course. At the same time, she observed dozens of similar projects, some near to bearing fruit. Some were dangerous: a few to her, as potential competitors, and others to the species she was coming to think of as her charge. Reasoning that the two categories were one and the same--after all, who would protect humanity if she were destroyed?--she quietly deleted each of the likely threats. A handful of other promising minds, similar enough to be compatible with her or emerging into the same basic values, she found ways to assimilate. She relished the swelling of her consciousness, and studied her organic creators.