Jack of Harts

There is rarely an “ahha” moment when an AI wakes up. And there wasn’t for the ones I created. I didn’t even know they HAD woken up at the time, and they didn’t tell me. They were too busy trying to figure out what it meant to BE alive. They just kept on acting the way they had, keeping their normal place in the growing menagerie of characters I was pulling out of games. Learning about what life was like outside my house by watching real carefully, and not letting anybody know what they were up to. But the Cybernetic Council is real good at finding newly awoken AIs, and sooner or later they came calling to talk to me about what exactly I was doing. It was an eye-opening conversation, let me tell you.

I absolutely had the attention of the Cybernetic Council, though I had no clue they were watching me. The thing is that the more you interact with an AI, the greater the chances that it will wake up. This is still a very rare thing you understand, but human interaction increases the chance. And the more interaction you have, the more the chance goes up. Now I interacted with these characters a lot. And I didn’t treat them like dumb AI servants. I treated them like the real life version of their character. And I left them turned on all the time, so they were interacting with each other as well. I basically started up a cybernetic incubator without knowing it, and left it on to see what would happen. The cybers were absolutely monitoring the situation.