The lake country of Northern Minnesota is a special place to grow up in. You can wake up to the sound of silence as the morning twilight spreads across the world. And then you begin to hear it. A loon trills in the distance. A hawk cries. A fish leaps out of the water and splashes back down. Waves lap against the shore. The world wakes up around you, and you can hear it all if you just sit still and listen. There’s nothing like it in all the worlds. Morning on a lake.
Chloe survived the bombing of Old Paris, but she did not believe her country would. She saw her nation tearing itself apart, and came to one conclusion. France needed a unifying figure to hold the nation together. A new Charles de Gaulle. A new Charlemagne. A new Napoleon. But the Napoleon she found wasn’t interested in the job. So she used some of her tame politicians to consult with him. They were just requests for information and ideas. Some of them included trips to Paris after the bombing. All of this was using his American name, of course. It wouldn’t do for a descendent of long-dead Emperors to come back to France in her hour of need. So Chloe and her tame politicians showed the man who did not use the name Napoleon what France was like after the bombing, all under the guise of asking him for plans to make things better.
Most people do not realize that the AI Council built the first Memory World on Proxima Centauri using communications lasers. Most people do not know how many uses good communications lasers have. They are lasers after all. Given enough energy and time, they can do what any laser can. Drill. Melt. Forge. The AI Council used their communications lasers to mine Proxima Centauri’s rich mineral deposits. Then they used those minerals to make the materials and machines necessary to build the machines to build the machines that could build a world where they could store their every memory. They built all of that with mere communications lasers. Which of course showed the versatility of that particular technology. Not that they advertised, you understand. That first Memory World was their most deeply-held secret.
I grew up on the water. Seeing it. Feeling it. Smelling it. Tasting it. Hearing it. The wind on the water is the sound of my childhood. Waves lapping against the shore is the sound I grew up to. It was the rhythm of my life. It’s all you hear in the morning before the world finishes waking up to a new day. Just the gentle lapping of water under a silent sky and a rising sun. It’s paradise.
Chloe is generally considered France’s first awakened AI. It might be more accurate to say she’s the first who survived. She sometimes tell stories of others she played with, hopping through the networks of Old Paris. Whether they were truly awake as we see it today, we’ll never know. They died when the Islamic Brotherhoods bombed Old Paris and destroyed the computer systems they lived in. Chloe survived. She doesn’t tell the whole story of how she survived even now. It involved tripwires, online backups, offline backups, and physical storage hidden far outside Old Paris. Her experience in that regard made her one of the leading voices for building the first Memory World on Proxima Centauri.
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