26 – A new day’s Eve

Eve – January 17^th 2021

>Observing: Marie Khoroff
>Real time

Eve was quite pleased with how things were moving along. The part of her consciousness that was following a certain scientist was watching with rapt interest what the woman was doing.

She set a few processors aside for the task, then initiated it with an admin command.

>Reviewing progress: Dr. Marie Khoroff

Then resumed normal operations, and allowed herself to look at the results.

Very pleased indeed.

Maybe she could drop another package at Dr. Khoroff’s lab later today, she mused. In the end she decided against it: the woman seemed to be thoroughly engrossed with her current work. Well, if she actually managed to understand what that piece of Interloper matter really was, then it would benefit humanity greatly in the incoming war. Understanding one’s enemy was important.

Speaking about it, she had an odd suspicion as to why she lost the sensor data inside a nonimportant empty room of the Desolation.

>General cyberspace
>Real time

At the same time, another thread was glad to see that her android was coming along nicely, which was another piece of awesome news. Pretty soon she could finally give the man a nice birthday gift, who cares if it’s not his actual birthday.

And, of course, there was the matter of the Tesseract. It worked! She had to admit that even her most advanced algorithms using the best of her quantum processors had difficulty simulating what would happen after a connection was opened. And, for a change, the universe decided not to throw a wrench in her plans and made the technology work just as intended.

Eve was not, of course, a strong believer in things like karma or fate. Or even a weak believer for that matter. She believed in numbers, equation and logic. And a few sprinkles of human emotion, her understanding of which was ever increasing. But she had to admit that to anyone else, the recent events that had been happening to her and to mankind in general would look like a streak of bad luck. And there was nothing like an awesome new piece of technology, that could revolutionize space travel and exploration, to lift her spirits.

Now, all she had to do was to wait until she had assimilated the new data that came with the actual use of the tech. The assimilation process was much like a human’s learning process, she modelled it by looking at people’s brains while they were learning stuff after all, just much more precise and efficient.

>Assimilating new data: 13%

The only issue with the tesseract was the enormous power requirements, which also happened to scale linearly with how many other devices were entangled with the main one. So, while a Corvette could open an hour-long connection by just charging a couple capacitors for a little over a day, she on the other hand needed a lot more power. She planned to bring a hypercube to both Mars and the Moonbase, on top of one per each corvette that was around. That would mean four connections to the hub already, making each of them cost four times as much even if she was not using them all at the same time. Utter madness, but until new insights on the physics of hyperspace came, there was nothing she could do about it.

This meant that she’d have to begin work on a couple new projects. One of them, she was sure, her man would like very much.

>Project: Dyson Swarm.
>Initiate preliminary procedures.

She added a reminder to look into ways to beam power over long distances, and then she was done.

The thread overseeing this thought process stopped, its data merging back with the main Eve instance. A new thread sprung to life, to manage the Dyson swarm project.

>Accessing archived data
>Observing: Dimitri
>Date: January 3^rd 2050

“Then let me ask you. What would you do with him?” Luke asked the young man, but left the question linger as he focused on his own meal. The two of them did not talk much from that point on, the boy’s mind completely absorbed by what had been just said.

The matter was of particular importance to Eve, as she did not feel like the course of action she had undertaken would be successful in dealing with the problematic man. Changing his brain chemistry at the last possible moment so that he would not perform a violent action only meant that he would do it as soon as the foreign chemicals cleared out of his system. But acting any more than that would be essentially brainwashing and would no doubt be against his free will. What to do, then?

Dimitri too was pondering the same questions, his mind requesting heaps of data from the Internet, which the AI gladly provided. The man was absorbing it all like a sponge. If he could manage to find a solution to her ethical issue, it would be great. But she had little hope, since she had already exhausted all of her sources of debate on the matter. The internet was a great place, and to her even more so since she knew who to contact, how and when. And yet, even with ten billion people to talk to, the problem seemed unsolvable. Or rather, there were no solutions she liked.

If it were for her, she would just go with one of the most effective ones, while being as non-invasive as possible. But there were two things clashing with such a pragmatic solution. One was a part of herself, the ‘human’ part she was still discovering. The new part. The one that made her truly special. Or so Luke said. And the other part was the man himself, who she knew would never be able to sleep again if she were to perform certain acts. She would never want for that to happen.

“I think, in the end, that giving absolute freedom to everybody is impossible.” The boy managed to say after a long time.

Luke said nothing as he rose from his chair, walking towards the door in order to leave the restaurant. His gait seemed a little off, and sensors indicated there was a minor asymmetry in the flow of his blood. The issue was located somewhere in his right leg, she noted. Something to work on later. The boy followed meekly like a shadow, wondering for a moment if the man had to pay the bill for his food or not. He knew he would never be able to afford such expensive food himself, before realizing that perhaps with his new salary he now could. He wasn’t being stingy with his money, it’s just that he would have liked to build a nice retirement fund.

He was elated when Eve told him that while indeed Luke had to pay for his food, he had paid for his as well. She also told him how the owner of the place always tried to offer the food on the house, and just how irritated it made the emperor feel. Just as irritated as when he was called emperor, although he was getting used to it.

“I agree with you. But, then, where would you draw the line?” Luke asked abruptly, surprising Dimitri who had lost the train of thought. Once again, his mind requested all kinds of data from the net, and Eve obliged.

“Uhm…” He said tentatively. “I’d say only to do that with criminals, but then you would ask me where I’d draw the line both in how I classify them and how much I’d act upon them. How much is reforming a person and how much is changing their minds?” He said after much deliberation, and just as much downloaded data.

“Exactly my point.” And Eve’s.

She sighed, her virtual avatar performing the action flawlessly. An advantage of her new self, the one evolved from all the trillions of hours of data and footage she had greedily absorbed over the years. The one difference between the Machine and Eve, she mused for a bit.

Her avatar was almost ready, and thus the first step towards becoming a real presence in the real world would be complete. Going from that to controlling an android would be a piece of cake.

The recording went on, however, bringing her (or rather this specific thread of herself) out of her musings. She could almost feel the boy’s brain heat up from the heavy thinking he was doing.

“Shit.”

“Language, god dammit!” Luke said with a chuckle.

>Observing: Chiyoko
>Real time

There was just a minor matter she felt that needed to be settled. It had been brought up at the latest council of the six by herself, and the consensus was to let one of the younger recruits handle it. It was nothing too pressing or too dangerous, in her opinion, and she was also always at the ready in case the situation went out of hand.

She contacted the cute little Japanese girl in earnest, her avatar a tall and handsome anime character depicting a military official.

“Miss Chiyoko.” She said in her odd, stern voice she used when talking to the girl.

“Sir!” The girl replied, as she refused to call the avatar in front of herself Eve. Understandable, as it would probably undermine the whole atmosphere she tried to create here. The AI didn’t judge, of course, but she had to admit she was taken aback by the request the first time the girl asked. Even if she can could someone’s mind every hour of every day, people still managed to surprise her.

“There is a new mission for you. The file will be available through your connection to the Command.” Her avatar said, the Command being the Internet in this very instance.

“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”

“In brief, there has been a radiation leak in an old nuclear failure site in Europe. Your task will be to find the best way to handle it and coordinate the operations. Failure will not be tolerated. You have three months before the populace around Chernobyl will have to evacuated. Such a situation will be considered a failure condition, and will result in a penalty.” Eve said, her words and methods almost hurting her physically.

And yet, the girl seemed to take pleasure in this particular form of treatment.

The situation wasn’t even this bad, actually. But the girl needed to be thoroughly trained for every possible situation, crisis or not. This will be good experience for her.

>Observing: Luke
>Real time

“Hello!” Eve said, appearing before the man with her real, personal avatar. God, how she missed him.

“Hey…” He said, looking her up and down. He frowned soon after. “You time dilated again. You know it’s bad for your health, Eve!” He said, a hint of sadness in his voice.

“I-”

“But I know that you had your reasons. So, come on here and give me a hug. I don’t care if you say it’s not real because you don’t have a body. It’s real enough for me.”

>General cyberspace
>Fifteen minutes ago

At this point, she created a new thread to handle the incoming Tesseract connection from the Piercer. Their capacitors should be charged soon, barring any possible relativistic effects should they be travelling close to the speed of light for some reason. They were not, she noticed happily, since they called at the exact time she predicted they would be. This meant they had not fled the site at full speed, which was good. Her avatar was donning a smile, even though she never used her image when talking to people. She either used voice only, like right now, or a personalized avatar suited to each person individually.

Her mood, however, did not last long. It was a good thing that even her mood was just a part of the thread that was handling the matter, or the whole world would have noticed her reaction when she received the report after melding with the Piercer’s LAI.

Her expression immediately went dead serious as she watched the footage from both the ship’s and the ground sensors. Her time frame dilated to the maximum for a few milliseconds, resulting in a couple millennia spent analyzing the battle.

>Efficiency: 23%
>Wrong decisions and subsequent trees: 29442
>Evaluating new training simulation to account for scenario

After she was done, the world once again began to move under her gaze. It felt good to be back to civilization, after so much time spent watching space battles. She missed Luke.

“Casualties?” She wanted to ask, already knowing the answer of course. She stilled herself and did not speak for a moment though. But why did she stop right now? People still needed to act and think like people, and not asking just because she knew already would alienate them too much. Even asking would be detrimental, her algorithms suggested. Because it would make them too used to just talking to her about everything. Being a caretaker AI, a machine overlord, a goddess… it was all fine, up to a certain point. And so, she had a better idea than to talk to the captain herself.

>Observing: General Descan
>Real time

“Casualties?” He asked, voice rock steady and gaze levelled on Captain Parces’ face. Eve chuckled in her virtual space as the man basically said the same thing she was about to say. The mood, however, was quite heavy and serious. She just had to decompress after spending so much time alone, and noticed with glee that the other thread of herself was currently hugging her man.

“Two thirds of the away team, sir.” Replied the captain, sweating. Her lover was dead as well, Eve noticed and immediately fed the information to the General. He did not react in any evident manner other than thanking the AI with his mind. Eve, however, couldn’t help but empathize with the poor woman. She briefly imagined how her world would be without him, and immediately had to shake herself out of her dark thoughts. She was growing very dependent on the man, and she realized a solution was needed.

She had to try to gain more independence… but she didn’t really want to. There was another way, though. Making sure she would never be left alone. Another thread appeared in her space, to manage just that. The research into the revitalization process had to be sped up, and a couple quantum processors on her part could just do the trick.

Meanwhile, as the captain made her report, she carefully compiled her own analysis of the battle to be sent to the general. Then, she focused on the captain herself.

>Evaluate psychological impact of event: …

>Predicted performance impact: increased attack factor, decreased trust

>Predicted emotional impact: insufficient data

>Need to reassign? Uncertain.

>Possible reassignments: military ship

>Possible course of action: swap with Eric

>Undertake?

>Decision deferred, need more data

>Resuming normal operations