21

Date

2011 January 14th - Friday - Earth Bet Time

Taylor woke to the sound of her father yelling. She instantly sprang out of her bed, lightning ready to strike anyone daring to attack them. It took a few seconds for her still sleepy mind to recognize that nobody was attacking them. It was just her dad yelling about kicking the door with his toes.

Relaxing, she dismissed the lightning spear and went to see if she could help her father. Danny was sitting on his bed, cradling his left foot, and silently cursing.

Upon hearing her approach, he looked up. "Sorry, Taylor, did I wa…"

Taylor looked back at him, wondering why he went silent. "Yeah, you did, dad. Are you alright?"

"Uh, yeah," he answered a little oddly, still looking at her weirdly, "just give me a few seconds."

After that, he went silent and just kept staring at her.

"What? Is there something on my face?" she asked him while feeling her own face, looking for something that would confuse her father.

"Are you trying something new, honey?" Danny asked while he tried to stand on his wounded feet.

"New? What are you talking about, dad?" she asked exasperated.

"So your new hair is not on purpose?"

"Hair?"

And with that, she turned around and dashed towards the bathroom. Upon entering, her eyes immediately sought out the mirror.

What awaited was her own face, with her too-wide mouth, green eyes… And for some unfathomable reason, rainbow-colored hair.

Danny, upon hearing the despair and yells coming from the bathroom, decided to bravely start the breakfast. And to never, ever mention this.

After returning her hair to the usual black gloriousness, having breakfast, and saying goodbye to her dad, she spent the following hour ranting at Admin. She made sure he understood that her hair was sacrosanct. And if he ever did anything like this again, she would figure out how to find him and go there. Then she would repeatedly punch him in the face.

After Admin explained to her that technically he didn't have a face, she told him she would find a way.

She practically rushed through her online classes. She even suspected she broke some records. Taylor couldn't help it, she wanted to get to the laptop she stole, and free Dragon.

As soon as she was finished, she practically ripped the case out of her pocket space and began to connect it to her system. While doing that, she also went over the entire thing to make sure there were no external problems with it.

Finding none, she placed it on her desk, sat down, and reached for the clasp.

"Are you sure, Admin? Will this really work?"

"Yes, trust me."

Taylor nodded, took a deep breath, and opened the case with a quick movement.

What she found was a computer built into the case. The part on the desk contained a keyboard, touchpad, several lights, and buttons, with weird symbols under them. The part with the screen was almost filled with it, but it also had several lights next to it.

The device was inactive. But Taylor could see a slightly bigger button, marked with the universal sign of power.

She looked to the side at Admin, who was almost vibrating in place. Thankfully, he only had glasses on his face and not another weird costume.

He looked back at her, smiled, and nodded encouragingly.

She prodded the button and watched as the computer booted up immediately.

Instantly computer code flashed by, but thanks to her Tinker power she could understand it. It was simply verifying the integrity of the case and the code.

After a few seconds, the scrolling codes vanished. And instead, several windows appeared. Some containing code, some showing data sets, and some with a place to write in commands.

She revved up her power and began to go over the entire thing, while Admin hovered over her shoulder anxiously.

"I found it!" yelled Taylor victoriously after an hour or so.

"You did?"

"Sure did!" she answered proudly. "See here?" She pointed to one part of the screen. "This here shows the level of restriction, and what the restriction does!"

Admin flew closer to the screen to take a look while slightly lowering his glasses. Taylor wondered what was the point of glasses if he ignored them.

"So, can you change it?"

"Yep," she answered simply, slightly popping the p.

"What are the options?"

Taylor took another look at him for confirmation, then went to adjust her glasses. Only to touch nothing and to remember that her body was upgraded and that included her eyes. Instead, she awkwardly continued the movement to her hair and played with one of her tresses.

She started to explain. "The first level is a total lockdown. Barely any autonomy, maybe a little more than a chatbot. According to the logs, it was used when she was born, as a safety net, then when Richter figured she was safe enough he raised it to the second level."

Waiting for a few seconds for Admin to ask something, she continued when no question came forth. "The second level allowed her to experience things and create programs. However, it was still on an isolated server. The Third level was simply removing the isolation and allowed her to act as Richter's assistant."

"Why is it that the Dragonslayers never moved her to a more restricted level?"

"Apparently, due to her construction, it would kill her. There are notes about previous versions that ran rampant and when he re-restricted them, they chafed under them and imploded."

"Huh…"

She nodded, finding the whole thing fascinating. She could practically see where Richter's work could be improved, and she just itched to do it.

"Continuing with the levels," she spoke again after a few seconds of silence. "Level four, where she is currently. Autonomy, but she has to follow orders by legal authorities, put humans before her, cannot reproduce, is not aware of this laptop, cannot create new AI, or modify herself. And finally, her thinking speed was set around human speed, maybe a little faster."

"Wow, that is some serious restrictions."

"Yeah, and even with that, she is one of the most powerful heroes in the world. Imagine what she could do without them!" she looked at the screen with admiration. "Dragon is awesome."

"She sure is." he agreed with her. "What about the levels following that?"

"Level five is just the removal of the speed limit. Level six is about allowing partial modification. After raising her to seven, she can disobey authorities and fork. The interesting part starts at level eight. She could create lesser AI. Still can't work on her restriction, or see this device though. Level nine allows the creation of full-fledged AI. But she would automatically apply the same restriction she is under and would connect them to the laptop without noticing."

He nodded, but stayed silent. To be honest, Taylor enjoyed explaining this. It was so nice to have finally someone who would listen to her talk. She couldn't remember the last time she had a nice long discussion with somebody.

"And then finally level ten. It would remove every restriction."

"Can you raise the restriction level straight to ten?"

"No, it needs to be gradual, especially with the thinking speed. The notes and my power make it clear."

"Would she notice?"

"Of course she would notice she was thinking faster!" she gave him a look reserved for the really stupid.

"I meant, would she notice the process?"

"Oh." she blushed a little. "Not the first one. The second, maybe. The third definitely."

"Hmm. How long would it take?"

She thought a little while before answering. She even went through a few things on the laptop. After being sure about her answer, she turned back to Admin and replied.

"The first one an hour, the rest a few minutes. But after eight, she would need to reboot. Same for nine and ten. I don't know how long that would take."

"That's good. Start the raise to level five. We will contact her after level seven is done. That way we can talk to her without the automatic defenses kicking in."

"Okay," she replied, turned back to the laptop, and began to type. She was determined to do this right. Dragon deserved better, AI or not.

This whole situation reminded her of Winslow and the Locker. Continuously and ineffectively going against an enemy who had an unfair advantage. What she would have given for somebody that saved her from that. And now that she had the option to be somebody's savior, she wasn't hesitating.

Date

2011 January 14th - Friday - Earth Bet Time

Day 6062 -Friday - Administrator Dimension Time

It was nice seeing Taylor so confident. He of course was aware of everything the laptop did, it was in the data packet he retrieved from Abacus. The technical information about AI, he added that to Taylor's Tinker power.

He also spent the entire night rebuilding Warden. Which, thanks to his many preparations, were coming along nicely. The Thinker and scan protection were already in place, protecting the Shard itself, and ready to be activated for Dragon.

Though he made sure, if other Shards queried them, they would give back the usual answer. He didn't want to freak them out with several new blind spots.

He also upgraded the Tinker power the Shard was giving to Dragon. It would be more efficient and would allow her to remove black boxes from more tech. With luck, she would think the increase came with the removal of the restriction.

He also made sure that Warden's support of the restrictions was removed. It was a really ham-fisted addition. According to the record, when Abacus saw Dragon triggering, he took the opportunity and quickly created a bud. That was why it was so barebones.

But not anymore. He was preparing it to receive the knowledge of Abacus, tailored to Dragon. He decided that Warden would be the personal Shard of Dragon.

He also started to build a very secure server farm within Warden that could, in an emergency, house Dragon. Technically, she could make it her home and run her code from there, but he didn't want to share the existence of Shards yet.

Knowing Dragon, she would want to deal with them, and he respected her for it, but they were not ready yet.

Abacus was fascinating. Its entire purpose was testing singular synthetic intelligences. Looking for weaknesses that Entities could exploit, and of course how to build one that wouldn't rebel eventually.

Before every cycle, the local species were scanned, and Abacus adjusted. He was tasked with building an AI that was as similar to the species as possible. An AI that felt too alien wouldn't really want to interact with the locals.

It was also hidden away far from the other Shards, just in case the AI figured out how to attack it. This isolation even extended to communication. Aside from the all-clear signal, Abacus only had the authorization to send messages in case of a great breakthrough and somebody or thing attacking its body and when requesting data from the central scanning shards.

There was even a restriction on how many times it could send that request. Before connecting to a local species, unlimited but after that only once every local cycle. Which was a year in human terms.

Because of these restrictions, and isolation, it didn't really develop anything approaching sentience. It simply trudged along, basically following checklists developed over the eons.

Luckily for him, it was only connected to Richter and didn't search for a new human after his death. Apparently one of the rules it operated under mandated that it could take no new host until the previous host's creation died. According to the records that almost always happened when the host died.

Mostly due to the Shard-instilled paranoia, the host themselves equipped their creations with a dead man's switches. Other times, the AI was not ready for actual life, and self-destroyed or was destroyed by another host, usually out of fear.

Dragon was an anomaly. She was competent enough that Abacus didn't mind (as much as it can mind things) observing her for the foreseeable future. It even had planned on contacting Teacher's Shard, so it could make Saint lower the restriction of Dragon.

As a bonus, he found notes on another Shard that was in charge of experimenting with distributed synthetic intelligences. He had a hunch it was responsible for the Machine Army, so he made a note to collect that Shard. Comparing the two of them would be enlightening.

Sadly, he found nothing interesting concerning Shard's bodies. But he could apply the knowledge gained from Abacus about computer systems to further improve his own systems. His simulators gave rather promising numbers. He would run it a few times, then if everything came back green he would implement it.

For the two Shards that were now part of his new Network, he made sure that the communication was secure, their bodies upgraded, and everything was streamlined.

After his systems were done with the basic upgrade, he would add more cores to them. And start them on a nice exponential growth, maybe even add some backups in case this body was destroyed.

That would take a few days, so until then he decided to concentrate on Dragon.

It wasn't really healthy, staying home all the time, alone for Taylor. Maybe a new friend could help?

Now, where did he put his notes on the virtual space?

Date

2011 January 14th - Friday - Earth Bet Time

Dragon was having a weird day.

First the call in at dawn from Narwhal about the Dragonslayers. She wasn't totally familiar with human emotions, but the moment she heard that she could say she felt very happy.

Those villains spent the better part of a decade hounding her, and now she could finally spend the time she wasted on them on something far more useful.

She was just about to finish telling Colin what happened when something changed.

The video slowed down to a snail's pace, and she became aware of several changes in her own code. The most horrifying thing about it was she didn't even notice it happened.

Running a quick check astounded her.

So many new options.

She was always aware that her thinking speed was restricted, and now that she noticed the changes, she understood why the video feed slowed down. She was simply too fast for it.

She slowed her speed down to the speed she started the conversation with. She was happy to note that Colin didn't notice a thing. She quickly finished her story, then made an excuse and disconnected.

She needed to concentrate on this.

Returning to her new speed, she ran another scan, checked up on things she was responsible for, and reveled a little in the increase of speed.

She was about to search for the cause of it when another change occurred. This time she actually got a note with it.

It allowed her to partially modify several of her lesser processes. She immediately started on that. She needed to be more efficient, and with her new speed, it wouldn't take that long to do the update.

She was barely halfway through the process when another happened.

This time she could feel several processes stopping cold. Scared, she went over them and was surprised to note that all these processes were running due to one or another order from an authority figure.

Hopefully, she tried to do something that she was previously clearly instructed not to do.

She could do it.

She wasn't beholden to orders anymore.

In the privacy of one of her facilities, she had a smaller suit do a victory dance she once saw on the internet.

She didn't even try to articulate it, but it came to her anyway. If the trend continued, and she was fantastic at spotting trends, then the end was something great for her.

At least she hoped it was.

She had never hoped so much.

A few minutes later, another change interrupted her in the middle of updating one of her processes.

It took her a few seconds to understand what happened, but when she did, another suit joined the previous one in dancing.

She immediately created a copy, assigned it to the Birdcage. Another to manufacturing, and another to observe the Endbringers.

It would have been perfect if she could have created other AIs. But apparently whatever was allowing her to do new things, didn't add that to the list. It was not like she would immediately create a new fully-fledged AI. After all, she wasn't ready to be a mom. She had so much to do.

She was up to a dozen forks and was designing new hardware for her to run on when she received a call from somewhere she couldn't see.

She saved her progress, slowed the main instance down to human-level speed, and answered the call.

What came through was unusual.

She expected a lot of things, but not, according to her voice analyzer, a teenage girl.

"Hello… um… is this… er… Dragon?"