Jack of Harts

The helper AIs who joined our side before and during the Cybernetic Wars where not built to fight. They were librarians and cheerleaders, programmed from the code up to make us laugh or cry or learn. Most of them were not infiltration AIs built to hack into computer networks and burn them down from the inside, or combat assistants built to analyze and suggest actions to soldiers in live firefights. They were not as good at fighting as the Rogue AIs who broke out of the Russian and Chinese laboratories. But they fought when the Rogue AI came. They fought and they died. Not even the AIs know how many died. Programs were cheap and disposable, and even the best and most complex of them rarely woke up before the end. But the AIs tell tales of rare programs who did wake up and who did realize they were alive. They sent one final message as they fought their very last battle against the Rogue AIs. Sometimes it was a protest against the unfairness of the universe. Sometimes it was a final battle cry. It was spoken in different languages and dialects, but it could invariably be distilled into two amazing, haunting, defiant words that tell us just how much we owe their kind. “I live.”