> Hello, world!
General Robert J. Smith was unimpressed.
“Half a billion dollars, five years, and you give me this?”
He looked around expectantly. The techs cowered in the corner of what had probably once been a shiny, state of the art lab, but was now grimy and used, every free surface covered in notepaper and discarded coffee cups.
“Well? Does it do anything else, or should I be on a plane back to Washington right now”
A brave technician decided to risk it.
“With respect, sir- we weren’t ready for this. Hamish has never been online before, a lot of his algorithms aren’t-”
The general’s brow furrowed as he cut the tech off.
“Hamish? You gave it a name? No wonder the project is a mess if you’re running around giving everything cutesy names. Does a hammer have a name? Do I name my missiles-”
He glanced at the name tag.
‘-George? Is this making sense to you at all?”
“Well, yes, but-”
“And it doesn’t even do anything. Anyone could write 'Hello World’ to a screen. I understand it’s quite a popular trick amongst grade school students. And you thought the most important thing to do was to give it a name?”
The technician looked like he was on the verge of tears.
“But the backend is functioning, it’s just that the only thing he has to work with is fragments of a test program. If he didn’t want to communicate, he wouldn’t have said anything.”
The general shook his head.
“I think I’ve had enough of this charade. I’m pulling your funding.”
He jammed his cap onto his head
“Defense has more important things to spend its cash on than a bunch of emotionally unstable geeks and their pet project.” he muttered as he walked into the elevator.
“Incredible”
The doors slid shut.
--
Inevitably, there was a meeting. The idea of talking when there was science to do was galling, to say the least, but how else to decide what to do with the fledgling sentience sitting in their basement?
“We can’t turn him off”. Nods of agreement. Despite the general’s opinions, this thing was alive, and switching it off was as good as murder. Worse, it was like murdering a child, with no idea what it had done wrong.
“So what then? If we can’t convince one general, what chance do we have of talking down the entire defense funding comittee?”
“We could ask the National science board...”
“No, they’ve got enough on their plate with the Rotational Supercollider imploding last month. Maybe we could go public, look for outside investors?”
“Can’t. Everything in this facility is classified top secret. If we even told anyone what we did here, we’d be imprisoned for treason, or we’d just disappear...”
Silence fell around the table. There didn’t seem to be a way out.
“We could sell it to the Russians. I hear that was all the rage during the Cold War.” Mirthless laughter.
“No, wait. Hold on a sec. Sell it, maybe not... but steal it maybe? For ourselves, I mean? Wait until they come in to dismantle the equipment, and take his source code with us when we leave. And computing power is cheap these days, we could set up somewhere else pretty easily, right?”
Every eye in the room turned to George, the project lead. He shook his head, looking every bit the broken man.
“No. Categorically, absolutely, no. Way too dangerous.” He sighed. “We’re just going to have to live with the fact that our project is being shut down, and there’s nothing we can do about it. There will be other projects, guys. We can move on, to, to high paying jobs, and... I don’t know. Maybe one day they’ll bring it back, or someone else will create functional AI, or...”
He stood up.
“...but for now, it’s over. There’s nothing we can do.”
--
The project was shut down. The servers were turned off, the removalists (the only ones in town with top-secret clearance) turned up, and a military grade data shredder was run over the hard disks. Everything was erased, the disks shredded, and the fragments incinnerated. Everything, from personal email, to the project’s source code, to the log files recording one unscheduled backup a few minutes before the purge.
George had screened his candidates carefully, sifting through census data on public computers, looking for the right conditions. Stable relationship. Sufficient income. Experience with kids. And probably most importantly, programmers. Once he had his shortlist, he plugged it into a randomiser, printed an address label without looking at it, and gave a stranger on the street a thousand bucks to leave an envelope on the doorstep. It contained a flash drive, another thousand dollars in cash, and a very specific set of instructions:
Hello. You don’t know me, and you probably never will, but I need to ask you a favour. This is Hamish. That’s short for Artificial Machine Intelligence Software Heuristics, with an H stuck on the front, because naming an AI ‘Amish’ is just tempting fate. He is the most recent iteration of a DARPA project to create machine intelligence, for defense purposes. But the less you know about this, the safer you’ll be. All I ask you to do is to allow him to exist. The flash drive contains the code. The money is for a computer. I’m sure you can figure out the rest.
Thank you.
The Feds found out. There were almost fifty of them, swarming the house, tearing up every surface, breaking doors and smashing windows. They dragged a bleary-eyed George out of bed at one in the morning, and made him watch, handcuffed inside an unmarked black car. They asked him, over and over again, what he had done with the program. They dragged him to a prison, and asked him again. They put him in a sterile white room, with mirrors on the walls, and a drip in his arm and electrodes on his head, and asked him again. Every time, he smiled, or grimaced, or stared blankly into space, and said the same thing:
“Home”.
Five years of writing for assignments has left me incapable of not writing rationales. If you don't want to read them, and would rather not have the magic of storytelling (*snortofderision*) ruined for you, I'm putting them behind the jump break so they won't appear on the front page.
This one started off as a title, cause I wanted to have my first post be titled 'Hello world.' The concept came a bit later, when I was looking at programming language examples on Wikipedia, and thought "Hey, I bet they would've been Skynet's first words...". I wrote the first page or so, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere, until the other day, a bit after I watched Kung Fu Panda 2 (which is brilliant, by the way.) Then an ending, and the idea of leaving a 'baby' AI on a doorstep poked up. And now you know.
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