Hush...

Nicholas Rush- AI (Artificial Intelligence)

*************A Stargate Universe One Shot***********************

It was late, and almost everyone aboard the Destiny had retired to their quarters, the ship still propelled forwards through space as she sailed easily through FTL, the blue and green hues of subspace a comforting presence to those aboard. They'd grown accustomed to the play of lights, not much unlike the aurora borealis back on Earth, that playfully engulfed the ship in its luminescent glow as it flew through space.

And yet, Dr. Nicholas Rush found himself wide awake in his quarters.

He'd tried fruitlessly to re-read the final chapters of a perfectly mediocre novel, and found himself unable to concentrate. His mind kept wandering, going over and over the moment he kissed Moira. What the hell was he thinking?! What on earth had possessed him to do that?!

After Young and Eli called on him after the power-surge in Destiny's systems, he'd made up some excuse about having to work and hightailed it off the observations deck. He knew that Moira probably saw right through it, her being the ship's A.I and all, but he needed time to think, time to analyze whatever the hell had just happened.

And now he found himself wondering what Moira was doing, if she was wandering about the same things, worrying about the same questions replaying in his head over and over like a broken record.

Probably not.

She was, after all, a program. And programs didn't over-think and over-analyze the way a human would.

Artificial Intelligence was something still quite new and incomprehensible back on earth, since its impact and potential were substantial and far-reaching. An algorithm with the capability to adapt and adjust was still unheard of on earth, despite the years of research and impressive amounts of money invested into it. Intellectual machines, as it were, hadn't quite reached their potential on Earth, although there had been promising projects and quite a few breakthroughs over the years. And yet, it wasn't unthinkable that the Ancients, before focusing their resources on other ways of evolving such as Ascension, had been indeed capable of producing a self-sustaining intellectual machine capable of adjusting and adapting to its surrounding. It was even possible for it to develop a personality, with character traits and unique processing patterns akin to a human brain's.

Since it could tackle technical, statistical, economical, mathematical problems and the ones based on probability, the Creation of a functioning Artificial Intelligence would highly depend on outside factors, such as giving the A.I. a physical interface that would help the A.I. to interact with the outside world and as a result – learn and evolve. It seemed like Moira had done just that by downloading her consciousness-if that's what you could call the complex algorithms that made up her software and programming- into a humanoid body, modifying and adapting it to being able to sustain Ancient Technology with the help of Naquadah-based life-forms. With her multiple information streams, ability to make complex associations, interpret sensory input, and extrapolate from past and present information, Moira was something far beyond human capabilities when it came to technological advancements. The fact that she was self-aware, and able to plan and strategize, capable of making rational and logical decisions, and 'act human' in a way, made her a unique and powerful creation.

The ship had been aware of their arrival ever since the destiny dropped out of FTL that first time and the ninth-shevron address was dialed from Icarus, that much Rush knew. Despite the ship functioning at bare minimum capacity, it had still managed to activate all the necessary systems to allow for the survival of the stranded crew. Hell, it had even sensed their distress when the life-support was failing. Even though the survival of those aboard wasn't a priority to the Destiny's mission, and although it didn't have any particular additional value to it's programming, it still started adapting to the presence of those who had come aboard. It was astonishing, really. Rush himself had spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the ship had chosen to help keep them alive, and figured it had to do with some statistical calculation of mutually beneficial interactions, which reduced their stay aboard to nothing less than a sort of symbiotic-relationship in which the host benefits from the presence of the almost parasitical presence of a foreign matter.