"One," Alice shrugged, "or part of one, or many. I don't know. It might just be a component, a program the AI's installed to throw me off track, but it does respond to my communication attempts."
Devin thought for a moment, "The fact that it does that much tells me it's not a component, but a more complete entity. Flatline installed it on my computer to keep me from accessing it. I couldn't go online and I couldn't reach my software. A simple program to lock up my computer wouldn't exhibit response behaviors."
Alice shot him an approving side-glance, "Sound logic. So this sentry bot was equipped with autonomous decision making capabilities. Whatever we try, it is advanced enough to formulate a response."
"Only problem with that," Devin acknowledged, "is the fact that you are able to elicit communications responses out of it."
"Maybe it's lonely," Alice said and immediately blushed. "Sorry, I'm anthropomorphizing again. Maybe its purpose is more complex than we think."
Devin scratched his head, "How would we know?"
"Only it could tell us," Alice was staring intently at the system across the room now "We have no way to crack it. No shared concepts between us, no Rosetta's stone to decode it" She noticed Devin's incomprehension and said, "It was an ancient tablet found with several different languages telling the same story. It was the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian."
Devin nodded without fully getting it, "How do we establish a common frame of reference with a virtual being?"
Alice snapped her fingers, "I have an idea."
She turned around and walked back to Devin's system. Devin made to follow her, but the hand on his shoulder squeezed a painful reminder that he was to stay put. Alice was switching wires and settings across the room. Devin thought she was pretty... in a sickly sort of way.
Devin grew curious when she began prepping the SDP, but her intentions did not actualize in his mind until she opened the hatch. Devin was about to call out a warning to her, but choked on it as Alice stripped down, revealing a pair of knobby knees and two rows of ribs that shattered his perception of her beauty. She disappeared into the tank and the hatch clamped shut behind her.
Devin looked up at the security guard, "She just went virtual with a dangerous program."
If the guard heard him, his stony face gave no indication of it.
"Do something!" Devin shouted at the statue.
"What's going on here?" a Chinese man with an ID badge that read "Mow Chien" approached Devin. "Where's Alice?"
Devin pointed at the SDP humming to life across the room, "She just went online with the AI."
Mow regarded Devin as a curiosity, "Why is that a problem?"
It was five weeks since Samantha bypassed the content blocks on her avatar, but she was no longer aware of the passage of time. Her parents were well meaning, trying to protect her from the child pornographers, satanists, and criminal elements haunting cyberspace; but they were inadvertently restricting Samantha's access to legitimate data. Their virtual nanny denied her research on warbot engineering because it was rated ages 12+, but Samantha saw no harm in robots destroying each other, so she hacked the software. Nothing upset Samantha more than grown-ups claiming privilege with, "You'll understand when you're older." This was simply a veil for their ignorance.
She loved her parents for the toys and clothes they provided, but they were deeply flawed, too simple to deal with the complex world surrounding them. So they tried to fit everything into neat little categories like "right" and "wrong", "good" and "evil". Samantha's inductive reasoning skills told her something was wrong with this and learned to articulate her cognitive dissonance when a logic website educated her on the concept of "false dichotomies" – placing things at opposite ends of a spectrum when there existed many degrees in between. When confronted with the logical fallacy website, her parents promptly added it to her virtual nanny's "Prohibited" list.
They even prohibited themselves from thought-provoking content with a v-chip filter on their television, but Samantha avoided the bully-box, which told people what was important rather than let them decide for themselves. The television filtered itself without a v-chip, inefficiently dictating programmer-approved data to the masses. Half an hour of televised delivered the same quantity of information she consumed in sixty-seconds of Web surfing.
Television did not even let her choose the media she was interested in. Its few thousand channels were like a drop in the Internet's oceans of information. She theorized it was the reason for her parents' constant data polarization, the television made things simple for simple minds, translating complex issues into false dichotomies for easy consumption. It was a major contributing factor to her parent's psychosis of illogical thought. They could have the Television; it was a worthless, mind-numbing device.
Samantha's parents would forever ban her from the Internet if they knew what she was up to. This was toying with the dark arts. The Preacher at the old run-down church had warned them. Dangerous ideas surrounded them. "Memes" he called them, ideas capable of invading a mind, infecting it like a virus, corroding it from within until it mirrored the insanity of the world surrounding it. One need only watch 24 hour news channels to see the terrorists, disasters, murders, and other tragedies waiting outside.
"BoingBoing go to work," Samantha said to the pogo-stick robot bouncing at her feet, eyes jiggling. It made off to the virtual façade, a team of other toys following suit. They shrank to specks with the "SWA" logo towering above them, but she knew her little bots were up to the challenge, especially with all the Internet in shambles. She was certain Science Warfare Applications was still recovering from the recent online war, and that might make it easier for her to get at their secrets.
She couldn't help it. The security was so simple, only slightly more challenging than hacking her parents. She craved information, especially knowledge the average person was not privy to. Things like design specs for champion warbots hidden behind firewalls on secure servers. She hunted for the latest engineering developments in robotics, ceramics, electronics, and other tidbits of information to help her in designing the ultimate warbot, such as missile blueprints siphoned from Defense Department servers. That kind of inventiveness would give her an incredible edge over the competition when she was old enough to enter an actual tournament. For now she contented herself with the virtual pets surrounding her.
They were a far cry from the real-life warbots she fantasized about, but performed essential functions in this virtual world. She wrote these softwares herself, but found programming too simple to hold her interest. Authoring software only required an understanding of simple Calculus, programming language syntax, and existing system architecture; designing a robot that could pulverize the four-time champion warbot using miniature laser-guided missiles took a wider range of interdisciplinary skills, AI theory, Engineering, Robotics, Physics, Chemistry, etc, etc.
The little army now laying siege to SWA's intranet security included invasive code, data corruptors, analytical functions, and administrative bots to coordinate the more basic components. Even Samantha didn't grasp the intricacies of how her virtual army worked; she only recognized their effectiveness, which had grown exponentially with its new additions.
Having quickly assimilated themselves into her bot-militia's ranks. Samantha regarded them as part program, part user, and delighted when they took over the Internet. They absorbed everything, adding a whole new layer of functionality to the Web. They were not subordinates like her bots, but friends, and Samantha had traded all her data with them and received terabytes in return for gigabytes.
This was before the insect bots swept through and destroyed them all. The one's remaining were refugees, taking shelter with her. Now they were rebuilding. The insect swarms not only wiped out her new friends but all her accumulated data on warbots as well. Even worse, they destroyed all data everywhere online, leaving Samantha and her virtual-bot army to scavenge for bits and pieces from those few websites and intranets spared the devastation.