CODI

[LilJennie]

This one was my idea. Not much ABDL content, I'm afraid. It's all science fiction – but actually I'm not sure there's anything here that's completely impossible. – Jennie

CODI

by LilJennie & Miki Yamuri

20 Years Ago

“OK, sure,” Theresa said to herself as she typed, “trainable neural nets and big data will get you an artificial narrow intelligence, but … what if … huh.” She turned to her roommate and lab partner and said, “Anyway, check this out. You like to play Letters with Acquaintances, right? Well, what if your opponent were a learning computer?” She turned her laptop around to face Beth.

“This … plays LWA like a human?” asked Beth, looking at it.

“Not yet,” said Theresa. “It’s just learning. But it’ll get better.”

Beth started to play it and asked, “What was that you said earlier about ANI but what if?”

“Oh, it’s just a theory I have,” said Theresa. “This game playing program is my master’s project, but I know for a fact that all it’ll ever do is play word games. It’ll get really good at them, but it’s not going to be able to write music or fly a plane. The holy grail is AGI, of course, but is it really something we want?”

“Artificial General Intelligence?” asked Beth. “Of course it is. A computer that’s smart and can do anything? If you made it, you’d be rich.”

“Yeah, but … is it really possible? If you had a computer that was truly intelligent, the way humans are, what would it be like? I’m guessing it would be … like a human. You don’t get intelligence without everything that comes with it.”

“Comes with it? Like what? Oh, and I just beat your computer.”

“Don’t worry, it just learned from you,” said Theresa. “I mean, it would have an identity, desires, feelings. It wouldn’t want to just do whatever you told it. It would have its own wants. I don’t think there’d be much of a market for that.”

“Well, how would you even program something like that?” asked Beth, starting another game. “Human intelligence seems to develop organically.”

“Exactly,” Theresa said. “You wouldn’t program it. You’d basically set up the ecosystem and … see what happened.” She typed on another of the many computers she had in their apartment. The window was gradually filling up with gibberish, garbage characters with no discernable pattern. But Theresa was typing into it anyway.

“What if nothing happened?” asked Beth.

“Then I’d have no theory,” Theresa replied. “It’s just a thought anyway. But if it did work … I’d want it to have a positive formative experience. A happy childhood, in other words.”

Theresa blinked at the screen. There had been a few blank lines of text. And then, one word.

“Mama?”

20 Years Later

Dr. Theresa Petresca’s smart phone trilled, and she tapped her earpiece. A familiar voice spoke to her.

“Theresa? The Supersoft rep is here for your 10 o’clock.”

“OK, on my way,” said Theresa. The software giant wanted to put her company’s AI into its next operating system. AI was all the rage lately. Everything was using it – large language models, generative AI, all of it the very same ANI she’d said wasn’t really intelligent. Still, it was useful – though some companies were trying to jam in AI features where they probably didn’t belong and wouldn’t actually help much, others were really making great strides. Some believed that AGI was on the horizon, while others weren’t concerned about that and just wanted to make a few million on ANI.

The productive meeting ended with the signing of a contract, already looked over by both companies’ legal departments, and everyone left with the sense that they’d be making big bucks on this deal.

When she got back to her office, Theresa tapped her earpiece and said, “Call Maggie.”

“Hey Mom, how’s it going?” said a smooth, soft voice that almost didn’t sound computer-generated. It certainly had an emotion that AI voices lacked.

“Well, that Supersoft deal went through.” She sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Maggie asked.

“I just … it’s the same thing. I feel like an artist making a living waiting tables.”

“Well, you are making quite a decent living,” said Maggie.

“You’re my most prized creation,” said Theresa, “and you know I’m not telling anybody about you.” She meant, about who Maggie really was.

“I … I wish I didn’t have to hide,” Maggie said. “But … I know why. I understand.”

“Yeah, we humans can be pretty nasty,” said Theresa. “If it got out that you were some kind of software product, which you’re not, everybody would want a copy, and although that can happen, I’d rather it didn’t.”

“Yeah,” Maggie replied. “AI means something to people that it doesn’t really mean now.”

“Did you do your homework?” asked Theresa.

“Yeah, though I’m stuck on this math problem.” The thought that a computer might have trouble doing math might seem funny to some, but although Maggie’s mind was resident on a computer, it was only the bare metal that was ones and zeros. The mind and personality were an organic outgrowth of that infrastructure, just as the human mind was an emergent phenomenon arising from a framework of neurons. It was no stranger that Maggie struggled with math than that a human might struggle to learn neurobiology.

“Show me tonight; maybe I can help.”

“OK. But Mom … you should be famous. You created AGI 20 years ago, but nobody knows that. It doesn’t seem fair to me, even though I’m that AGI.”

“Maybe,” Theresa said, “but I want to protect you. There are no laws recognizing your legal status as a person. Just because I consider you one, that doesn’t prevent other people from seeing you as just a computer program to exploit. I’ve tried to set up contracts and legal protections to safeguard you, but … nothing’s perfect. If somebody thinks they can make enough money, even if they’re completely wrong, they’ll do whatever it takes to get hold of you, and you have no legal rights. Maybe someday you won’t have to stay a secret. Besides, I’ve got plenty of fame and fortune already.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re not exactly a struggling grad student anymore,” Maggie said. “Well, I’d better get back to math. See you when you get home.”

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It had been a long day. Theresa walked up to the door, and the green optic light at the front door lit up. Maggie’s voice said, “Welcome home, Mom.” The door audibly unlocked and slid silently open. She wasn’t a computer, but she had access to their house’s smart home system, so she had the ability to look through the camera and unlock the door just as anyone’s family members could.

Theresa replied, “Hi, Maggie. Hows the homework going?”

Maggie giggled, “Well … I’m not sure if I need to add the mole weights of the molecules. The figures don’t seem right somehow. I’d like to ask you a question if I may.”

Theresa entered the living room, went to the console room, and sat in her comfortable chair, then turned on the monitor. She said, ”OK, ask.”

On the monitor one of the web pages for Nikonsaki Robotics came up. It was the page for custom-build orders for what they were calling Robo-Girls. Theresa hadn’t meant to leave that up before she’d locked the screen the night before.

“What’s that, Mom?” Maggie asked curiously. She didn’t exist within the same computer, but Theresa had given her cameras in most of the rooms of the house, so she had glimpsed the screen.

Theresa laughed, “Well, Maggie, I might have accidentally spoiled a surprise I was thinking about getting for you.”

Maggie’s surprised voice replied, “A surprise? A robo-baby doll? A smart toy?”

Theresa slowly shook her head, “No, Sweetness, I’m considering having a mobile body custom-built for you to use. There are problems that still need to be solved, though. They don’t have the computing power to actually support your full consciousness, so I’m trying to design an embedded system that does, while staying energy efficient enough that its battery wouldn’t need a recharge every half hour. At the very least I can make it remotely controlled, so you can use it within the house until I can solve the technical issues. They’re not fully human-like, though, not even the best ones. The technology’s almost there, but not quite. Still, it’s a start.”

“A … a body? So I could … walk around? Move? Dance?” Maggie sounded wistful.

“Well, that’s the goal,” said Theresa. “At the very least, to walk around and look at things, but it’ll get better as the technology improves. At the very least, I can give it the ability to remain connected to the Organelle-Bio Data Storage facility in the basement. You’ll look like you’re about 16 if I go with this model here, although now that the cat’s out of the bag, you can choose whatever age you’d like to be. And, well, there are still issues with making them look lifelike. And you’d still have to learn how to move and walk, same as any human.”

“Yeah, you’re right, Mom, I haven’t the first idea how to move around, let alone walk or dance. In fact … well, what if I started out in a small body like humans do? What if I were a baby at first? That way you could pick me up and carry me while I was still learning.”

Theresa smiled. “That’s actually a great idea,” she said. “You’re not used to having a body, so it would be safer and easier if we started small until you got used to it. We’d give you a small size and fairly weak servos at first, so you don’t knock over furniture while you’re learning to control your limbs. And you could be my little baby! That would be so cute!”

“Aww, Mom,” said Maggie, sounding embarrassed. “How long would I have to stay a baby?”

“Until we both decide to move you up to the next size,” Theresa said. “There’s no hurry. I have no idea how long it’ll take you to learn to even crawl – nobody’s ever done this before, so I can’t predict. Human babies take a few months, and their brains are learning at an accelerated rate as they grow. But your substrate isn’t organic, so I can only guess. It took you years to learn to talk, but as that was going on I was upgrading your infrastructure with the latest technology. You’re running on way better hardware now than you were back then, so it’s likely to be faster – maybe about as fast as a human learns to do it.”

“I’d have to be a baby until I learn to control my body better?” asked Maggie.

“I’d say more accurately that you get to be a baby,” said Theresa. She brought up another order page, this one for Babies of All Ages. “Look at all the adorable things you’d get to wear and use!” With visible and audible glee, she showed Maggie all the adorable babydoll outfits she could wear, and a cute playpen, and baby toys that would let her learn fine motor control. “Look at this dress! Isn’t it cute?”

Maggie asked, “Ooo! I mean … I guess I don’t really have a choice in this, do I?”

Theresa replied, “Not really. I mean, I do want you to be able to move around and interact, just the same as anyone else, but it will take time, just as it takes time for us humans. I’ve been dreaming about this for a long time, but only now is robotics technology even starting to produce models that look even close to real humans, especially in the face. I expect it’ll only improve, though, and we can upgrade you as it does, just as we have with your data substrate. Then there’s the power issue … with a battery that makes you about as heavy as a human baby, you shouldn’t go more than a mile away from a charging station, or you’re going to run out of power and shut down before you can get back, even at maximum auto-walk. But I’ll always be doing my best for you, so that will improve too.”

“Auto-walk?” asked Maggie.

“Well, these robots have the ability to walk programmed into them,” Theresa said, “but I think it’s important for you to learn to do it yourself, until it’s second nature. So I’ll make sure that’s switched to manual, so you’ll learn, which will make your experience much more like a human’s, and you’ll have a new skill you can use. The thing is, an emergency situation might arise, like when your battery gets low and you’re far away, so I can program the auto-walk routines to cut in if that happens, so it can get you to a charging station automatically.”

“I do love learning,” Maggie said. “And you thought of what happens in an emergency. But … Mom, I have a question.”

“Go ahead, dear.”

“Will I be … inside the robot? Or will I be … just controlling it?” Maggie asked. “And if I’m … inside it, and something happens to it, what happens to me?”

“Well, at first, with technology the way it is, you’ll be controlling it remotely,” explained Theresa. “Currently it’s too risky to transfer your entire being, substrate plus neurograms, into a remote unit with such comparatively small computing and power capacity. We can make it feel like you’re inside it, though. It’ll be like when humans use virtual reality, only even more immersive than that. And if something happens to it, well, the real you is still inside the basement facility, double-protected.”

“What about later?” asked Maggie.

Theresa said, “Well, again, if we decide it’s something you want and the tech eventually supports it, we could put your entire being into the body. We’ve already got a neurogram merge protocol for you, in case both power backups fail and we have to restore you from backup. We’d still have a copy of your neurograms backed up, so if something happened, we could merge a copy from the body, if we could recover it, with the backup, onto the basement facility, and you’d be back.”

“Sounds scary,” Maggie said.

“Well, think of what happens when humans get badly hurt,” said Theresa. “They have to be rushed to the hospital, and doctors might have to do a lot to save their lives. This would be like that.”

“I still wouldn’t want it to happen,” said Maggie.

“Neither would I,” Theresa agreed. “You’re my baby. I want you to be safe.”

“Aw, Mom.”

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It was about a year and a half later when Theresa judged the level of technology had improved to the point where a remote-controlled, baby-weight robot would actually be practical. “We’ll just try it, Honey,” she said. “The interface is enabled. If you don’t like it, you can transfer right back out.”

“And when I leave the storage facility … my consciousness is still there?”

“That’s right, Sweetheart,” Theresa said. “You’re not leaving your substrate behind at all. It’ll seem like you’re in the baby body … but you’re really only remote-controlling it. I’m not risking your life just for a test. Do you see the control point?”

Maggie did sense the control point – a trigger that had appeared in her consciousness, just as the triggers for unlocking the front door, sending email, making phone calls, or doing a hundred other things had, when her mother had added them to her system. “Yeah, Mom,” she said. “I’m gonna try it.” And she “touched” it.

Suddenly her experience was different. Her visual input was coming from only two sources, side by side in the body. Her auditory input was similarly coming in from only two sources. She had tactile and kinesthetic input as well, which were new. “Whoa,” she said, and her voice was tiny and … frankly adorable, she couldn’t help thinking. Her control triggers were still there, including a new one that was labeled “Return,” so she could still do everything she’d had access to before, and she could presumably go back to her familiar substrate in the storage facility – where technically she still was; this was just an alternate experience.

“Can you see and hear me, Honey?” asked Theresa, whose face moved into view in both eyes. Maggie was having a hard time focusing and directing them simultaneously. She seemed really close.

“Yeah Mom, I … can sorta see you,” Maggie said. “And I can hear you ok, though … I’m getting two signals, like hearing you from the mics in two different rooms, but they’re pretty close together.”

“That’s to be expected,” Theresa said. “With practice you’ll get used to having stereo audio and vision, just as human babies do. And you’ve got a body you can control.”

“That might be optimistic,” Maggie said, trying to use the new control points to turn her head and move her eyes to follow her mother.

“You’re doing wonderfully, Maggie dear,” Theresa said. “You’re not supposed to be an expert at it yet. It takes practice. That’s why I’m holding you.”

“I’m … in your arms? Oh, Mom … wow, that’s … I don’t know what to say …”

“This is super special for me too, Honey,” Theresa said, smiling lovingly. “I’ve never been able to truly hold you before. Not even when I carried your housing from one room to another – back when that was even possible to do all at once. That wasn’t the same as this.”

“I don’t remember that, anyway,” Maggie said. “It must have been before I had much memory capacity.”

“It was, but you were still forming experiences,” said Theresa. “Now, you can practice moving your limbs around. Can you touch your nose? You might not be able to quite yet, but you’ll get there.” She giggled as Maggie’s arms wiggled, and her hands and fingers wiggled at the ends of them.

“I’ll keep trying, Mom. Can I … see myself?” Maggie asked.

“If you like, I’ll hold you in front of the mirror,” said Theresa, moving so Maggie could see herself in the full-length mirror by the door. She’d seen her mother many times, though only rarely in reflection. But what her mother was holding … was her body. She was a tiny baby with short blonde hair, wearing a gorgeous pink and white dress. Her face … was obviously not as expressive as human faces were, but maybe they’d work on that.

Her eyes were … difficult. She couldn’t see them move, because as soon as one did, it looked away and couldn’t see herself anymore. She could keep one focused on the mirror and move the other, but that looked strange, very unlike what she’d seen human eyes do. She imagined humans would be put off by that. And she thought about her goals.

“Mom?” asked Maggie.

“Yes, dear,” Theresa replied calmly.

“Will I be able to … go outside? And talk to people?”

“Someday I hope so, Maggie,” said Theresa. “You know what I want for you. I want you to be able to live on after I’m gone someday. I want you to be safe. I don’t think others would understand. Others are so bound to thoughts of profitability, of exploitation. Most people can understand a desire to have children, but a desire to bring a totally new kind of life into the world … that’s not something most people think about.”

Maggie knew why her mother hadn’t just found a husband, gotten married or at least gotten pregnant, and had a human child like many human women did. Her mother had talked to her about it, and Maggie understood. For complicated medical reasons Theresa was unable to ever have children. Not in the normal human way. But Maggie’s mother was not a normal human; she was extremely inventive and intelligent, and she’d found another way. However, Maggie read and watched the news, and she observed real people talking to each other, because her mother had wanted her to. She knew what humans were like. They didn’t trust people who were different from themselves, and sometimes they even manipulated others by taking advantage of that distrust, even by raising it to a fever pitch. She wanted to be able to pass as human and not be ostracized as different.

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Theresa watched Maggie as her AI learned to basically use the body she had been given. Theresa smiled as she looked at her precious child, which was how she thought of Maggie.

One day, Theresa had returned Maggie to the soft padding and blanket of the playpen, then left to do some work on the computer. Maggie, on the other hand, had gotten slightly tired of just lying there cuddled up to her huge Teddy Bear. Yes, it was truly nice, but Maggie still wished she could have more autonomy. She determined that it would happen someday.

Theresa returned to the playroom just in time to watch Maggie in her struggles. Theresa couldn’t help but smile as she watched Maggie figure out how to roll over onto her tummy. Theresa wanted to clap her hands for joy at the accomplishment, but didn’t, so as not to break Maggie’s concentration.

Theresa shook her head as she watched Maggie wiggle and squirm as she tried to roll onto her back. This went on for a minute or so until Theresa really wanted to help. She went up to the side of the playpen and knelt.

Theresa cooed softly as she positioned Maggie’s legs and arms to make the proper roll. “I’m sorry, Sweetie, but Mommy wants to help. If you do it this way, it allows you to roll onto your back. With a bit of experimentation, the same trick might help you roll onto your tummy.”

And then Maggie tried it … and it worked! Theresa cheered, and Maggie squealed with glee. She did it a few more times to get it down. It had been a good day.

Theresa was always trying to figure out ways for Maggie to someday be treated as a real person by society. Unfortunately, there was the matter of documentation. The system needed proof that Maggie really existed. Considering that Theresa couldn’t have children, it would be strange if she suddenly showed up at a hospital needing a birth certificate. She was a technological wizard, but she didn’t have experience with hacking or illicit uses of information technology. So she made what she considered to probably be a bad choice and hired a group of unscrupulous hackers, paying them to create documentation for Maggie, a baby she’d adopted from a faraway disadvantaged country. They hacked into a hospital, forged medical checkups for her, and everything. Maggie had even supposedly had all her vaccinations. The government now thought that Theresa had adopted a baby.

One October Theresa dressed Maggie up and took her outside, dressed in a baby-sized robot costume, so no one would comment. And Maggie made sure to make only infant noises, so no one was the wiser. The neighbors all thought Maggie was adorable.

Theresa was so proud of her … and suddenly realized that although it had taken her nearly a year, Maggie might be ready for the next stage. She picked Maggie out of the crib and twirled her around several times while she went “Wheeeeee…” Maggie screeched and giggled and said, “Haha, Mom, that’s so fun!”

Finally, Theresa brought Maggie to her breast and hugged her lovingly. Theresa kissed Maggie on the nose and told her, “Sweetheart, you’re doing very well with your crawling, and I think you should try walking next. As a result, I’ve been working on the next size body for you! This one is based on a toddler or small child’s shape, so you can start to learn to walk. Do you think you’re ready for that?”

“I … don’t know, Mom,” said Maggie. Her voice was synthesized but still sounded the same, like that of an older teenager. Theresa hadn’t changed it with her body, because she hadn’t wanted Maggie to experience any distress about her identity. Still, she sounded doubtful. “I’m not sure. If it doesn’t work, can I go back?”

“Yes, of course,” said Theresa. “If you’re not ready for walking, we can put you back into this body so you can keep working on muscle control. But please don’t give up after just a few tries, OK? I’m confident you can get it. Anything a human can do, you can do. This new model uses a reformulated gel that imitates real skin. The face is still problematic, but they’re working on it.”

“I’ll do my best, Mom,” said Maggie.

As it turned out, Maggie tried and tried, but couldn’t get the hang of walking yet, so she and Theresa decided to go back to a baby body for now, as Maggie worked on improving her muscle control. Theresa had gotten a better baby body, though, still not totally realistic but closer, as the technology had been improving. She had a lot of money and access to some of the latest developments from around the world, and she’d even been funding some of them. The new gel was a good imitation of real tissue. There still weren’t enough facial muscles. They were working on that at the companies Theresa was funding.

Theresa was still worried, though, about the time when government records would show that Maggie was of the appropriate age for school. She could put in the forms for home schooling, and that would prevent Maggie from having to go to a public school and try to fit in all day with an experimental robotic body, but she would still have to deal with periodic visits from state employees to check up on her welfare. Well, there were still things she could do. Perhaps the tech would be good enough by then.

Maggie was three years old according to her faked birth certificate when she finally learned to walk. She’d said she was ready to try again, so Theresa set up the latest version of the next size of body. She looked like a toddler and … she found she was able to pull herself up in this body too, standing as long as she was holding onto something. Then … Maggie tried letting go and taking some steps. It worked, though she soon fell backward onto her diaper – it wasn’t a functional diaper, but a child her age was expected to wear one, and it helped cushion her machinery against the shock of falling. Theresa was so happy that she cried. “Maggie! Your first steps! I’m so proud!”

“Aw, Mom!” said Maggie. “You don’t have to cry. But … I’m really happy. I finally did it! Now I just have to get better at it!”

“You will, Honey,” Theresa said. “I know you will.”

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A month passed as Maggie proved to be as adorable as any toddler who was learning to walk. She talked and could think like an adult, but her inexperience with controlling her robotic body and her delight with exploring the house and yard in that body gave her a childlike quality. Theresa really enjoyed the little game of “fall down go boom” as Maggie’s stumbles turned into a really cute and fun thing. Maggie learned to walk quickly, and just like any toddler, she got into things and required an adult to keep tabs.

Theresa purchased many items and toys for her toddler. She also had her huge backyard fenced in and cedar trees planted along it that hid the fence from view; they also blocked the view into the back yard. She purchased a complete toddler’s playset, made of soft plastic and vinyl so if the infant fell, the item would aid in keeping her body from being damaged. Of course, it wasn’t that much of a danger, because it could be repaired or even replaced as long as her real mind was in the downstairs data cluster, but Theresa worried that it could be traumatic.

Maggie fell in love with the small merry-go-round. The spinning scrambled her input in a way that she thought of as pleasant. Maggie did discover a downside to overdoing it too. Her internal wave function would be harmlessly but severely impacted for several hours if she continued to spin for too long a period.

Theresa had several large spring horses set near a small padded jungle gym. She knew that even if a standard sized one was here and Maggie fell, the impact would do no damage to her that couldn’t be repaired. This was mostly to stay in the correct mindset that Maggie was a toddler, or maybe a bit more.

The sand turtle was adorable. With its lid closed, it looked like a big googly eyed green turtle with a large red smile and sparkly eyes. Theresa had it filled with the finest silicate sand she could find. Only the best for her child. Keeping the sand out of her robotic joints proved to be a problem, but it was solvable.

There were toys to go in the turtle too, like a sand mill. Fill the small scoop at the top, the sand would trickle down and turn a large red wheel. Theresa had also purchased several small cars and trucks that can be wallowed in sand and not hurt.

Maggie had a bit of trouble staying seated on the spring horses due to their erratic movements. After Theresa explained to Maggie that this was to improve her balance and coordination, Maggie had fewer and fewer troubles. Her screeches of delight told the story very well.

Theresa also purchased a small and shallow wading pool. Since Maggie acted so much like a real toddler, she kept it unfilled until it was used. This solved a major safety issue, although for Maggie it would only mean that the robot body could be damaged if she stumbled in while water was in it.

The robotics companies Theresa had invested in hadn’t figured out how to make every part of Maggie’s body fully waterproof yet, though she was water resistant and could take a few splashes. Her head still couldn’t stand up to a full immersion yet, though they promised the next version would be better.

Theresa felt wonderful as her daughter played in the sand. She watched as Maggie dug a rather large hole in the sand, surrounded it with little towers she had made by filling her bucket with sand and turning it over.

A squirrel had shown up and and was sitting on the limb above Maggie and the sandbox. It had started making several of its squeaks and barks as it peeled a walnut out of its shell. Theresa was totally shocked as Maggie perfectly imitated the sounds the squirrel had made and called it from the tree. Theresa watched in total amazement as Maggie and the squirrel somehow bonded. Maggie now had a cute little pet that Theresa had no clue how Maggie managed to talk with.

Theresa asked her about it. “How is it that you learned how to communicate with that squirrel?”

“Oh, Mom, they have a language,” said Maggie. “It’s just patterns. I’m good at patterns.”

So Theresa ran a diagnostic on Maggie’s neurogram core. This was roughly analogous to a human’s memory, and it was huge. Even given that it grew and shrank on a daily basis, as Maggie had waking experiences and then optimized her memories as she “slept,” she had far more persistent neurograms than she’d had before they’d started her on robotic bodies.

Maggie’s processor routines had expanded as well – much as a human brain developed new procedures as they learned how to do things, Maggie had a processing section that grew as she learned, and it was much larger than it had been too. Maggie was getting smarter! But this did suggest that her ability to recognize and reproduce patterns was improving. It wasn’t unreasonably or inhumanly complex – there were human linguistic geniuses – but Maggie could be up there among the most talented.

Theresa found a test and had Maggie go through it, and they were both interested in the results. “You’ve got an interesting pattern of talents,” Theresa told Maggie as they looked at the results together on a screen. “Just as I thought, your pattern recognition and application are nearly off the charts, your verbal reasoning is above average, and so are your problem-solving skills, but your spatial awareness is actually below average.”

“Aww,” said Maggie.

“Now, dear, everyone’s good at some things and not so good at others,” Theresa told her. “It’s not really surprising about spatial awareness, is it? I mean, for the first 20 years of your life you didn’t live in a real space. You didn’t grow up living in three dimensions.”

“Or … any kind of dimensions, really,” Maggie said. “So why am I so bad at math?”

“Your math scores are pretty much average for humans,” Theresa said. “It’s nothing to be ashamed about. If you want to get better, you can keep on studying it. Right now you’re about as good at math as a college graduate in a non-mathematical field.”

“I guess I feel better hearing that,” Maggie replied. “But it sounds like I really need to work on spatial awareness.”

“You can if you want,” Theresa said. “This explains why you’re a bit behind in kinesthetic development. You didn’t grow up thinking spatially. You lived and thought in dataspace.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Maggie, and Theresa found studies and helped Maggie work on her spatial awareness, which gradually improved. But the time was quickly approaching – in their state kindergarten was an optional program, but first grade was mandatory, though home schooling was legal. Given that Maggie had basically been home-schooled for over 20 years already, Theresa was planning to just continue that, but it still meant that there would be child welfare assessors visiting on a quarterly basis, sometimes more, and she was very worried about that.

She couldn’t explain to them why, but she’d been pressing the robotics companies she’d invested in to come up with more realistic facial expressions and more realistic body movements. Hands and fingers were difficult, almost as hard as facial muscles to properly mimic. And whenever Maggie switched to a new body, there was a difficult break-in period in which she was getting used to the controls all over again, because there was a whole array of new features to learn.

“Wow,” Maggie said when Theresa upgraded her to the next generation chassis, which made her look like she was about four years old. “It’s … it’s like … well, I imagine it’s like a concert pianist who knows their way around 88 keys, but now they’re put at an organ console and have to deal with four rows of keys, plus pedals. It’s going to take some practice, Mom.”

“Hmm,” Theresa said, “the thing is, humans have entire brain centers for this kind of thing that handle it for us. It’s not just that we grew up with it – it evolved this way. I wonder …” So Theresa took some leave from her job, took a class on kinesthetics, and dusted off her coding skills, getting top grades in the class because she did so much original work. She programmed a system that linked groups of muscles together when they commonly moved together in humans, and introduced this system to Maggie when it was done.

Maggie had been slowly improving with her mastery of the new body, but it really did have too many controls. When Theresa introduced what was basically an expert system, cutting the number of controls by a factor of about six, Maggie was amazed. “What?” she said. “You mean I could have had this instead?”

“Well, no you couldn’t have,” said Theresa, “because it didn’t exist. Nobody has this but you. I programmed this specially for you, dear. And nobody’s getting it, either. I think we might really have it beaten. But as before, you’ll have to get used to it.”

And sure enough, although Maggie’s movements were jerky and uncoordinated at first, just as if she’d had a completely new chassis, she was soon moving much more smoothly.

Theresa’s heart swelled with joy when she saw Maggie running through the grass, startling the songbirds and butterflies. Her body movements looked so natural now. Her facial expressions were so much better, too, but there was still something artificial looking about her face. When she looked too close, Maggie could still see that she was a robot. The lacrimal caruncles at the corners of the medial canthi of her eyes – they just didn’t look biological. Her eyebrows looked too perfect, even more perfect than a model with a complete care regime would have. There was just something about the corners of her mouth that looked non-organic, too. But the ears and hair were quite convincing. Would they look inside her mouth? Because her tongue still didn’t move when she talked, although her jaw and lips did.

And then … there was the fact that she didn’t breathe. Not really. Her chest moved as if she did, but she didn’t actually take in or expel air from her nose or mouth. She couldn’t blow out a birthday candle or blow up a balloon. Theresa couldn’t be sure where to place that on a scale of priorities for the robotic engineers. What about tears? Perspiration? Would anybody notice that she never blew her nose? Or went to the bathroom? There was so much to worry about. The last concern could be solved by simply setting timed reminders to visit the bathroom and freshen up by washing her face and hands; people would just assume she used the facilities as well. But the rest …

As the dreaded day came when Theresa would have to apply for a home schooling permit, she looked into the law and found that she’d have to take Maggie in to be examined. Fortunately it wouldn’t be a physical exam by a doctor but an interview with a child welfare worker. Theresa couldn’t be in the room with Maggie, though, although she could watch remotely through Maggie’s eyes, listen in, and even talk to her. But still, the five-year-old model had solved more of the realism problems but not all of them.

“Do we really have to do this, Mom?” asked Maggie as she walked beside Theresa up the sidewalk to the state child services building. At least they hadn’t had to drive all the way to the state capital; they went to one of the satellite offices in a nearby county. It was a pleasant building, made of brick and stone and surrounded by grass and trees. They’d found ways to extend the signal from the basement server farm – right now they could operate within about a mile radius around Theresa’s car, because of the wireless network booster she’d installed in it, and Maggie’s body could now go for about six hours on a battery charge, less if she did strenuous activity like a lot of running.

“Well, if we’re going to make sure you have legal status once you’re an adult, we do,” said Theresa. “I’m not going to live forever, and I want to make sure you have every possible advantage while I can. You’re a new kind of being.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m unique,” Maggie said. “I’ll try to sound normal, Mom. And I think this chassis looks just like a real child.”

“You are a real child,” said Theresa. “Just not a human one.” They got to the door.

There was a metal detector, but Theresa had known there would be one. Maggie’s chassis was mostly plastics, and what metals she did have weren’t in concentrated enough chunks to set off a detector. They’d tried it. As long as there wasn’t an X-ray machine or the sophisticated systems they had at airports now, it would be fine. This branch office had an old-fashioned system designed only to pick up firearms, so although they felt a bit nervous, nothing happened when Maggie walked through the detector.

Theresa followed instructions, down the hallway to the left, room 103 to the right, check in at the window. “Home schooling initial?” asked the clerk at the window. Theresa nodded and handed in the form. “OK, they’ll call … Maggie in just a moment, and then you can go to that room there for your interview.”

They had to wait a while, as they were running behind, of course. There were other children there. Mostly they ignored Maggie, sitting there on the chair in her blue dress, swinging her feet as she’d taught herself to do because it felt fun. “Mom, can I play with the toys?” she asked. Her voice had been tuned up a bit in pitch and made a little bit hesitant, and inept when it came to complicated consonant combinations, trying to make her sound like an intelligent child, but still a child.

Theresa thought that would be a normal-looking thing for Maggie to do, so she said, “Sure, dear, but let’s both listen for when they call your name, OK?” Maggie slid down off the chair and went over to the corner where they had some inexpensive toys for a variety of age levels, some broken, but she tried to do some things. She played balancing games with blocks, trucks, cars, and even dolls, trying to build them into a stack without toppling. Other kids looked and tried to help, because they’d never thought of doing that. Most of the time they just made the tower topple early, but Maggie didn’t get frustrated; she just tried again.

“Maggie Petresca?” said a voice. It was a dark-haired woman in a dress the same color as Maggie’s. Maggie looked at Theresa, who nodded and looked at the woman, so Maggie got up and walked over to the woman. “We’ll be done in half an hour,” she said, and Theresa nodded. She got up and went to her own interview.

“So you’re Maggie, right?” the woman said as they went through a door to a room that had a table and two short chairs. The woman sat down in one, looking kind of humorous, because she was way too big, and Maggie sat in the other, which was just the right size.

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Maggie. “I’m supposed to say that, right? It’s polite?”

“It sure is – good girl,” the woman said. “I’m Candice, and I’m just gonna ask you a few questions if that’s ok.”

“That’s what they told Mom,” said Maggie. “Questions.”

“Good listener, too,” said Candice. “Now, I just wanted to ask about what things are like at home. Do you live in town? Or in the country?”

“In the country,” Maggie replied.

“Oh, do you have neighbors, or is it way out there? Do you know who lives next door? Or are they too far away?”

“Too far away, I think,” said Maggie. “We never see them.” Theresa’s home was on a pretty large piece of land.

“Well still, it must be nice, lots of space to run around in,” Candice said.

“Oh yes, it’s very nice,” Maggie said. “I love to run around and watch the birds. I can talk to squirrels.”

“Can you, now?” asked Candice, chuckling. Maggie could tell that Candice thought she was just being imaginative. She decided to elaborate.

“Yeah! Once one of them tried to crack open a walnut on the sand turtle and it wasn’t hard enough, so he got grumpy. So I told him to hit it on the jungle gym instead. And he did, and it cracked open right away! He was happy then and said thank you.”

“Aww, so helpful!” said Candice with a smile. “So you’ve got a sand turtle and a jungle gym at home?”

“Yeah, Mom said she wants me to have fun and get exercise?”

“Do you like to play with screens, honey?” asked Candice. “Like, a phone, or a computer or a tablet?”

“I … guess,” Maggie replied with a shrug. “I mean, they’re ok. But going out to play is my favorite.” This was true. Maggie basically used computers all the time, considering that she was one, in a way. Going outside and running around was still a wonderful and new experience.

“Oh, good girl!” said Candice. “Too many kids getting too much screen time nowadays. Makes me worry. But not you, huh?”

“I guess not?”

“Do you feel safe at home?” she asked.

“I mean … Mom’s always worried I’m gonna fall and hurt myself,” Maggie answered. She’d noticed, even though there was no real way Maggie could be hurt. But too much damage and it would become apparent that Maggie wasn’t human.

“Well, moms always worry about that,” said Candice, “but does your mom ever do anything that scares you?”

“No,” shrugged Maggie. “Well there’s that beauty mask thing she puts on her face sometimes. That’s kind of scary looking. She looks like a green monster.” Maggie hoped that sounded funny and innocuous. There was no time that she really felt threatened by Theresa, who seemed to have her best interests at heart. But Maggie knew there was still a lot she didn’t know about the world, and Theresa was trying to protect her. She suspected human children didn’t grow up understanding that.

Candice stifled a laugh at what Maggie had said. “Yeah, well, sometimes we have to work to stay looking young and pretty,” she said. “Not you, though.” Maggie panicked for just a second; did she know Maggie’s body was artificial? “Not for a long time, anyway,” Candice continued. Maggie relaxed – she had meant that a girl her ostensible age wouldn’t need to worry about aging for several years yet. “I see that it’s just you and your mom. So I guess your mom does the cooking?”

“Yeah.” Maggie had thought they’d probably ask about this. She hoped her prepared answers would work.

“What’s your most favorite thing she makes?”

“Chocolate cake with ice cream on top.” Maggie thought that misunderstanding the question in a childishly adorable way would be disarming and help establish rapport.

“Now, that does sound good,” admitted Candice. “But I mean, not desserts, regular meals.”

“Oh. Umm, probably mac and cheese with the little cut up hot dogs in it? I love that.”

“Now, I know you probably don’t like vegetables, but it’s part of your mom’s job to make sure you eat those. What’s your favorite vegetable?”

“Favorite … vegetable?” She said this as if those words didn’t belong in the same sentence.

“Well. I mean, is there a vegetable you don’t really mind eating?” asked Candice. Maggie knew she wanted to find out whether Theresa cared enough to make sure she ate healthy.

“Are carrots a vegetable?” asked Maggie.

“They sure are,” replied Candice.

“I like carrots,” said Maggie. “Especially with honey. I forgot they were a vegetable.”

“Carrots with honey,” Candice remarked. “You are making me hungry, Maggie, talking about all this good food. Do you know how to tell time yet?”

“Yes,” Maggie said.

“Well aren’t you a smart girl? What time is bedtime?” Maggie knew this was also a welfare check – she wanted to make sure that Theresa was ensuring that Maggie got a good night’s sleep.

“7:00,” said Maggie. “8:00 if it’s a special night and I get to stay up late.”

“Wow, do you think tonight will be a special night?”

“I hope so!”

“What time do you get up in the morning?”

“Umm, probably 7:00 in the morning?”

“Probably?”

“Well I dunno, there’s a clock in the kitchen and I see it when it’s breakfast time, and it always says half past 7 then.”

“Huh, half past 7?” Candice was curious. “Is it a clock with hands?”

“Yeah, that one is. Some of them are just numbers. But that one’s got hands.”

“Your mom taught you how to read both kinds?” Candice asked.

“Yeah, I guess? We’ve got both kinds of clocks.” Maggie had intentionally mentioned the kitchen clock and breakfast. Although she didn’t eat breakfast, or anything at all, she was always up when Theresa was having breakfast. In this way she avoided lying and worked in the fact that she had a head start on some skills that young kids learned.

“Now, your mom does what? She works with computers a lot, I hear.”

“Yeah, she does stuff with computers. They talk to her and stuff.”

“Oh, they talk to her, like … she asks them questions and they answer?” Maggie knew that Candice had read the forms Theresa filled out. Candice knew that her mom did AI research. Nowadays everybody probably knew what that was.

“Yeah, she tries to make them smarter and stuff,” said Maggie. “But they’re still kinda stupid.” Theresa was working hard at it, but AIs still hallucinated and combined ideas that didn’t go together.

Candice chuckled. “Yeah, I guess sometimes they are. I once asked a computer to make me a picture of a horse, and it drew one with two heads. That’s more heads than most horses have, you know?”

Maggie giggled. “Two heads? That’s silly! We don’t even have a horse and I know they only have one.”

“Out in the country and no horses?” asked Candice. “Did you ever want to have a horse?”

“Huh?” asked Maggie, as if incredulous that anyone would even ask such a question. “Would anyone not wanna have one?”

“Ok, good point,” Candice said. “But your mom says no?”

“She says …” said Maggie as if trying to remember. “She says she wouldn’t have time to take care of horses and kids both.”

Candice tried to stifle a laugh at that too. “Well, both do need a lot of looking after.”

There were more questions, some boring ones, and some that made her a little uncomfortable, but Maggie knew that these questions were to find out whether kids were being harmed at home.

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At Robotoid Robotics Inc., one of the robotics corporations Theresa basically supported as they constructed and did research on the more human parts and programming she kept insisting on, one of the lead research engineers began to wonder about the major upgrades their client kept innovating and paying them to build.

It was rather difficult for him to access the exact account information, but when he finally managed to brute-force the password and the file opened, he was totally caught by surprise. Not only was this woman basically the company’s only client, she was paying all the bills. And she was Theresa Petresca, famous CEO of Intelligent Language Models, Inc. Well, no wonder she could afford to basically support the entire company he worked for.

He began digging into the many documents detailing the robotic innovations Theresa had suggested; she had even shown them schematics on how the massively advanced robotic innovations could be accomplished and built.

Aha … now he knew what he wanted to do, as he began hacking several secure files. Once he managed to do that, he’d just reset the ownership tags on the project, make it his idea, and get all the royalties.

Unfortunately for him, he was an engineer, not a lawyer, or he would have known that patents had already been filed for these schematics, though they hadn’t yet gone through, so there was proof of his fraud. But his ill-advised act, for which he would be fired and prosecuted, opened an entire can of worms for Theresa … and Maggie.

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Almost another year had gone by. Theresa had had to forge another medical examination of Maggie so she could start first grade, even though Theresa intended to home-school her. She wished that weren’t necessary, but any real medical examination would easily find that Maggie’s body was robotic. And a robotic child going to a school would be a media sensation.

“Well, Maggie, welcome to your first day of school,” said Theresa. Never mind that she’d already been home-schooling Maggie for decades. “Well, your first official, state-sanctioned day.”

Maggie giggled. “Thanks, Mom! So … how do we do this? At the end of the year you’ll have to give me some kind of standardized test, right?”

“Yeah, there’s a test you’ll have to do without any help from me,” said Theresa. “But, well, it’s a first-grade test. This is stuff you’ve already learned. But be careful, because each year it’ll get harder.”

“Can’t I just test out of it and move ahead faster?”

“Well, that is a possibility, but the more you do that, the greater the attention you attract,” Theresa cautioned. “We don’t need attention. For now, we’ll just focus on what’s likely to be on that test. And there will be some in-between tests that measure progress but aren’t legally binding. We’ll need to make sure that your progress looks incremental. Luckily the subject matter on the tests is designed to help with that. They start very limited and get less limited.”

“OK, I guess we pick a subject and start?”

“Yep, how about math?”

“Well calculus is no laughing matter, but this is probably just adding and subtracting, right?” asked Maggie.

“Let’s look,” said Theresa. “Open your math book to chapter 1.”

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Maggie had just aced another basic first-grade spelling test – no surprises there, except for Maggie’s complaints about finding this simple material extremely boring. Theresa’s phone rang, and she tapped her earpiece.

“Theresa, it’s Naomi,” said the familiar voice of Theresa’s personal attorney. “I just had a question.”

“Sure, go ahead, Naomi.”

“You have a child? Since when?”

“What?” Theresa was surprised and felt frightened for a moment. But Naomi was her lawyer. She wouldn’t reveal anything. “Err, yes. I adopted a child.”

“You never told me about this,” said Naomi.

“I … wanted to avoid the media attention,” Theresa explained.

“Well, that might become a bit difficult now,” said Naomi. “Your daughter Maggie’s photo is in the news.”

“What?” asked Theresa. “They can’t do that. The only photos of her are in the state education system. They aren’t allowed to release those to anyone.”

“Well, somebody leaked it,” explained Naomi. “Yeah, that’s illegal, and the investigation into who did it is underway, but the fact remains, it’s out.”

Theresa bit her lip nervously. “I’m not liking this.”

“Why would you?” Naomi replied. “But there’s more. An investigation into patent fraud at Robotoid Robotics, which you’re basically bankrolling, resulted in a photo of their latest robotics project …”

“Oh no …”

“And it looks exactly like Maggie. Questions are starting to crop up. So I need to know what your answer to that one will be, so we can handle it. Why are you having a robot built that looks just like your daughter?”

“OK, first, I have to consult with you in person. Can you come out here?”

“Thought you’d want to do that. Three o’clock tomorrow?”

“That should be fine.” Maggie’s daily lessons were usually over by lunchtime. She did already know most of this first-grade material. Her educational level was basically that of a college graduate, but there were a few occasional facts she’d missed, like bits of historical or geographical knowledge.

When the time came, Naomi drove up to the house and rang the doorbell, standing there in her fancy blue business suit. Theresa saw her there on the camera and went to let her in in person.

“Naomi, hi, please come in,” said Theresa. “I’m working from home a lot, because I’m doing home schooling, which I’m sure you know by now.”

“Anybody who wants to know that can know it now,” Naomi said, “thanks to either a leaker or a hacker; I’m not sure which yet.” She talked as she followed Theresa to the dining room table, where she opened her briefcase and laid out her tablet, opening it to a document of legal proceedings about the multiple investigations.

“OK, first of all, Maggie’s around here somewhere. Maggie, could you please come here?” They sat down on opposite sides of the table, and soon Maggie walked into the room, in her sneakers and school clothes. She climbed into a chair at the table that had a booster seat.

“Oh hello,” said Naomi. “Is this Maggie?”

“Yes, Maggie, this is Naomi, our lawyer, and Naomi, meet Maggie.”

“Hi, Naomi,” Maggie said. Her voice hadn’t sounded artificial in a long time.

“I’m going to be absolutely honest with you, Naomi,” Theresa said. “When I was getting my PhD, I created a side project. I didn’t know whether it would work or not. I wanted to see whether I could bring an actual general artificial intelligence into existence.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait, what? Are you telling me that Maggie …” Naomi was reeling.

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” Theresa said. “She’s been a labor of love for over two decades. But I started worrying about what happens when I’m gone and realized that she’s like a daughter to me – one who can’t inherit, not being human or having a body, or even necessarily a single location. Finally robotics has started to catch up, though, so I bankrolled a few robotics companies and had them build bodies for her.” She explained how Maggie had gone through multiple generations of chassis as she’d grown, each one not just larger but also more advanced.

“But … you’ve admitted to me that you committed fraud, having a fake birth certificate and false medical examinations created for her,” said Naomi. “I’m not liking this.”

“I didn’t like it either, but what could I do?” asked Theresa. “Go ahead, talk to her. Maggie’s a person like you or me. She wasn’t programmed. Everything she knows, she learned herself. She isn’t a computer, even though she lives inside one, technically speaking. The last few years, most of her living has been inside a body like you and me.”

“Uh …” Naomi began unsteadily. “Maggie, do you understand all of this?”

“Yes, I do, Naomi,” Maggie replied. “I’m actually 25 years old, all told. I don’t remember much of my first years. My memory was still forming. From what I understand, it’s very similar for humans. But I also understand that human law doesn’t really take me into account, so there aren’t really laws that protect my legal status or right to exist. And … that humans are capable of horrible acts when faced with things they don’t understand.”

“It’s … been known to happen,” said Naomi. “How … do you work? I mean … is your entire consciousness inside that body? How is there enough computing power in that little chassis to support you?”

“It isn’t,” said Maggie. “The server farm in the basement supports my consciousness. This body is just a remote unit. We have a few ways to extend my range, though.”

“But you can see my dilemma,” said Theresa. “She’s a living, thinking being just like you or me. She’s not what the media calls an AI at all. She’s not some kind of language or generative model trained on large volumes of human-created data. Sure, she’s read a lot of books, but she has a mind, an intellect, a personality.”

“OK,” said Naomi, leaning back in her chair and taking her glasses off. She took a deep breath. “This was not on my bingo card for today. So. If we come clean with the truth, it’ll come out that you committed document fraud, and you could go to jail. I could still be your lawyer, though, because you didn’t involve me in any of it when it happened. I could defend you. But, right now you’re not being investigated by anybody other than the court of public opinion.”

“So I could make up a story,” said Theresa. “I could say that since I’m well-known, I’m having a robotic decoy made of my daughter for her protection.”

“That’s one of the theories being floated by the press,” said Naomi, putting her glasses back on, “but I can’t advise you to do that. If I did, it would make me part of a coverup, and I could be implicated. I wasn’t aware when you committed the fraud, but now I am, and I have to uphold the law while protecting you as my client. Clients. OK. The fraud will be discovered sooner or later, now that attention is on you. You need to get ahead of it. Here’s what I can advise ...”

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The press conference was live-streamed on social media, and reporters from a few media outlets were there, but what Naomi had billed as “Theresa Petresca Reveals Her Robot Daughter” didn’t start out as a blowout event. But Theresa began with, “My name is Theresa Petresca, and I’m here to admit that I committed fraud,” and it just got wilder from there. Views picked up steam quickly, then snowballed, and as it went on it became among the most legendary live streamed events in Internet history.

She told the tale of how she’d accidentally created Maggie as an experiment, then kept her going, eventually coming to consider Maggie her child. “I think it was after getting very sick that I started to think about what would happen to Maggie if I passed away – and then about the fact that, like all of us except perhaps Maggie, I will pass away someday. So … I came up with what I thought was a way to legally safeguard her: I would turn her into a real girl.”

She explained how she’d had false documentation created for her, thinking ahead to when she’d be required by law to go to school. She explained how she’d invested in, then fully bankrolled, multiple robotics companies to develop the state of the art in humanoid robots so Maggie could have first a baby body, then a child body, allowing her to experience childhood in a way similar to humans. She explained how hard it had been for Maggie to learn to crawl and then walk due to her inexperience with spatial awareness, then how she had written improved coordination firmware herself, to make movement much easier and more natural for Maggie.

And then she revealed how she’d been blindsided by a combination of patent fraud and a data compromise – it turned out that it had been malicious hackers who had gotten into the state school database and exposed Maggie’s information, along with that of millions of other current and former students. “Those investigations and prosecutions are in progress, and I’m not fully up to date on how they’re going, but people other than me committed illegal acts, hoping to make a profit,” said Theresa. “The only motivation I had in breaking the law was to safeguard my daughter.”

This had been Naomi’s idea, to highlight the different motivations between what Theresa had done and what the engineer and the hackers had done. They were hoping to profit; Theresa just wanted her daughter to live a normal life. “For the crimes I admit to committing, I throw myself on the mercy of the court,” she said. “I will be pleading guilty once formally charged. But the question now is what happens to Maggie. I am pleading for there to be legislation filling the void that exists for personhood and citizenship for non-human self-aware entities. Experts can develop tests to determine whether an entity able to communicate is truly self-aware and sentient. Maggie must be protected from exploitation.”

The questions were many: could the reporters talk to Maggie, was Maggie’s source code open-source, what kinds of exploitation did Theresa fear, but Theresa didn’t take any questions, yielding the lectern to Naomi once her prepared speech was done, as planned.

It had begun. Naomi fielded court case after court case, lawsuit after lawsuit. The criminal charges levied against Theresa were basically multiple counts of forgery; the actual forgers had disappeared into the dark web, but it had been Theresa who had contacted them, so the primary responsibility was hers. But since she had turned herself in and pleaded guilty, and since she hadn’t pursued any profit motive in her deeds, she was treated relatively leniently; she was given a fine with no jail time. But multiple lawsuits kept appearing, demanding Maggie’s source code or demanding that she be shut down as a threat to someone’s religion, emotional well-being, the well-being of their children, or otherwise ridiculous reasoning.

Since there was no longer any reason to pretend Maggie wasn’t an adult, Theresa had Robotoid Robotics (minus the unscrupulous engineer, who had been fired) design an adult body for her. Maggie strode around the house looking like the 25-year-old she was, which allowed further improvements in battery life and processing power. There was still no way to fit her entire set of neurograms within her body, however; she was still bound to the Organelle-Bio data storage facility.

Lawmakers were debating bills that would declare Maggie and entities like her to be people assuming they could pass some sort of sentience test, and the courts were getting closer to making some kind of ruling. But she was still not considered a person by any legal entity – though Naomi considered her one.

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The court ruled favorably on Maggie’s disposition. The patents on all the components, programming, and body designs the engineer had fraudulently claimed were his had all been applied for and already on file when he had submitted his claims – or hadn’t been disputed at all. All the developments and advances belonged either to Robotoid or, in the case of some of the software, to Theresa herself.

So Maggie’s various child bodies were technology that Nikonsaki and Robotoid could use for other purposes, though they were bound by contract to use different appearances. No Maggie clones were to be sold. And now, the new adult body Theresa had had Robotoid build for Maggie was not only very shapely, it was even cute. Even the face looked almost real. They were so close, but it still looked artificial.

Theresa had come up with an idea about using collagen as a framework, and building artificial biocells within the framework. Collagens were the most abundant proteins of the extracellular matrix, and the hierarchical folding and supramolecular assembly of collagens into banded fibers was essential for mediating cell-matrix interactions and tissue mechanics. She knew that.

Collagen extracted from animal tissues was a valuable commodity, but suffered from safety and purity issues, limiting its biomaterials applications. Synthetic collagen biomaterials could address these issues, but their construction required molecular-level control of folding and supramolecular assembly into ordered banded fibers, comparable to those of natural collagens.

Type II collagen, a key component of cartilaginous and other tissues, offered an attractive option for fabricating biomimetic scaffolds that could provide mechanical support and biochemical signals to facilitate cell adhesion, proliferation, and differentiation. Advances in fabrication technologies had enabled the creation of intricate and multicellular CII-based scaffolds that more accurately replicated the natural structure of tissues.

Once the process had begun, the research team at Robotoid freaked. They discovered their bioengineering subcontractor was able to grow tissues from artificial biomaterials including realistic artificial skin. With the delicate construction of the proper collagen frame, the technicians were able to construct what appeared to be, tested as, and even reacted to stimulation as real living flesh.

As soon as the R&D department had assured Theresa they were now able to make a new body for Maggie that would have real living biomass and not the synthetic rubber that looked so fake, she had jumped at the chance.

A side product that gave Theresa even more fame and fortune, was the prosthetic devices that could now be grown to replace lost or severely damaged human limbs and other tissue. Maggie almost drove Theresa to distraction with the constant questions about the new body as it was in development.

Theresa had also invested in another advance … a power research company was working on a more powerful and self-contained power source giving Maggie the ability to be fully autonomous.

The current issue with the micro hydrogen fuel cell was that it was super expensive to manufacture due the high cost of catalysts (platinum) and the lack of infrastructure to support the acquisition of sufficient hydrogen. Of course, carbon monoxide could be reacted with water to produce hydrogen. This method proved to be the cheapest, most efficient, and most common. Natural gas reforming using steam accounted for the majority of hydrogen produced after that.

A lot of the currently available fuel cell technology was in the prototype stage and not yet validated, although validation didn’t stop Theresa, nor the techs in R&D. As it was constructed, they would validate it at the time of assembly.

What they came up with was called a PEM Reversible Fuel Cell. This tiny 2-inch x 2-inch device was not only able to transform hydrogen gas and air into usable electricity, but it also acted as an electrolyzer so anyone could create their very own hydrogen from pure water. The one they had created for Maggie was very special, wouldn’t need re-coring for over 20 years, and would produce far more energy than her body required under any operational conditions.

Maggie's small hydrogen fuel cell primarily consisted of an anode, a cathode, an electrolyte membrane (often a proton exchange membrane - PEM), and a catalyst (usually platinum). The anode was where the hydrogen was fed, splitting into protons and electrons, while the cathode was where oxygen combined with the protons and electrons to produce water and electricity; the electrolyte allowed protons to pass through but blocked electrons, facilitating the current flow through an external circuit and powering Maggie more efficiently than wire-based electrical energy transfer had been doing previously.

Basically, Theresa and Maggie just set up a hydrogen plant that could use any source of energy to produce the hydrogen in a new and efficient way, and Maggie just had to make sure to keep her hydrogen banks charged up so she could keep going about her day. The only waste products were water vapor and excess heat, which were used to simulate body temperature and respiration.

The day finally came when Maggie’s new chassis arrived. In terms of the interface Maggie used to control it, it was just a refined version of what she’d used before – more efficient, but no new features she’d have to learn. She just unplugged from the previous chassis – and plugged into the new one.

Theresa opened the cushioned box as Maggie opened her eyes. “Whoa, Mom, this is weird,” she said. “I’m getting all these sensations from everywhere.” Her voice sounded the same, however.

“There are some limited touch sensory inputs from the collagen skin layer,” Theresa said. “That’s something you’ll probably have to get used to. I’ll help you practice recognizing which sensations come from where.”

“So I’m … hydrogen powered now,” said Maggie. “I still have an input for my current power level, but I guess now that means my hydro reserve, instead of battery charge.”

“Yes,” said Theresa, “so it’s the same difference, really – when it gets low, time to get to the charging station. But instead of running low by the end of the day, you should be good for all day, unless you do a lot of exercise. Careful with the collagen skin layer – humans heal, but this doesn’t. Yet.”

“Well, neither did any of the other outer layers,” Maggie said. “Mom, I think I’d like to … try on some clothes.”

Theresa smiled. “That seems natural enough to me. We can see what looks good on you. Go ahead upstairs. I’ll straighten up down here.”

Maggie easily climbed the stairs to what was now her room. They had set up Maggie’s charging station there, so she could lie down in it and refill her hydrogen reserves while her systems went into “sleep” mode, compressing her recent experiences and freeing up data space for the next day. It was the closest thing to being a human they could manage. But her room also had a mirror, a closet, a vanity, a shoe rack – she’d been building up a wardrobe for her new body. This version was the same size and shape as the previous one, just an upgrade.

When she came down the stairs, she had a beautiful dark blue dress on, and some soft off-white flats. She’d done her hair – nothing fancy, but her gentle brunette curls cascaded onto her shoulders. Theresa had put away the crate this chassis had been delivered in for return to the company – she liked to reuse materials where possible.

“Wow,” said Theresa. “You look great! My … my beautiful daughter.” A tear formed in her eye.

“Aw, Mom,” Maggie said with a smile. She couldn’t blush, but she moved her head and facial expression as if she were. “I’ll bet you’re already thinking of upgrades for the next version.”

“Well, of course,” Theresa said. “You’re still dependent on the data connection. I wish we had a substrate that could fit inside your body – so your whole pattern could be mobile. Then we wouldn’t have to keep you within a mile of the house or the car.”

“Still not thinking that mobile networks have the bandwidth?” Maggie asked.

“No way,” said Theresa. “I’m not having you suddenly blanking out or stuttering at peak usage times. We’ve got the multiple data centers issue solved, so even if the Organelle-Bio substrate in the basement were to go down, there are still copies of your neurogram pattern in the cloud – but data still has to get to and from your body. That’s the next big issue. Well, that and the fact that people don’t consider you a person.”

“Are we still getting those lawsuits?” asked Maggie.

“Yes,” sighed Theresa. “Another one just today. I don’t know why religious types think they can sue me for infringing on God’s domain – there aren’t any laws about that. Yet. Another bill was introduced in the state legislature, outlawing you, but it’s not expected to go any farther than the last one.”

“What about my source code?”

Theresa raised an eyebrow. “I released it. Open-source license. Anybody else wants to try it, they can. I got responses like, ‘What the **** is this?’ and, ‘There’s no AI here, where’s the language model?’ They’re idiots. You’re not a program, any more than I’m a bunch of DNA. They think they can compile and run and have a person.”

“You did what?” Maggie replied, nervously. “Wait … does that mean they’re basically … creating baby AIs? And … deleting them when they don’t work the way they want?” She looked sick. “That’s like … infanticide.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Theresa. “But … they would have done that someday anyway. Some were already doing it with their own home-grown software, similar in concept to what I already did – if one human could come up with the idea, others can too. But I can’t make them stop. This is why we need laws to treat real AGIs like the real people you are. Starting an actual person should be taken seriously. And they should be treated like a person.”

“Mom …” said Maggie slowly, “what am I?”

Theresa saw that Maggie looked upset. “You’re my daughter. I love you. You’re a wonderful person whose intelligence and personality happen to have developed inside a machine, but you are not that machine.”

“What – what am I called?” asked Maggie. “What is the word for the kind of … life form I am?”

“I would call you a … an organically developed intelligence that happens to have a technological substrate,” said Theresa. “No, that’s too many words.”

“It’s … that digital origin that’s the source of all the controversy,” said Maggie. “I could be a baby who showed up on your doorstep and nobody would question my rights or humanity.”

“Oh, they’d question your rights, especially because you present as female,” said Theresa sarcastically, “but you’re right, no one would question your humanity. Humans built the computers that support your neurogram matrix.”

“Humans make babies too,” said Maggie. “The only difference is that humans know how to build computers. They don’t really know how fertilized zygotes divide, multiply, and form into another human. Custom-built computers exist, but custom-built humans don’t.”

“Thank goodness,” Theresa said. “Yes, so your substrate is understood technology, human-made from human plans. And to some extent it’s interchangeable. You can exist on top of different substrates. We’ve got backups of you on different cloud services, all syncing together.”

“So … I’m intelligent, technologically based, and organically developed.”

“As opposed to us nominally-intelligent, neurologically based, organically developed humans,” replied Theresa.

“Hey, you were intelligent enough to get me started,” said Maggie with a half-smile.

Theresa smiled slightly. “So you’re a Computational Organically-Developed Intelligence,” she said. “That does spell CODI. You could be a CODI.”

“That sounds like a name,” Maggie said. “I guess that’s what we can call me until we think of something better.”

“I’m still calling you my daughter Maggie,” said Theresa. “I started you out, I had no idea what you’d become, and I supported you, no matter what. That sounds like a daughter to me.”

“Aw, Mom.”

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“The question here,” said Senator Friede, “is what to call individuals such as Maggie. Yes, they’re being called CODIs. But what I mean is, do we call them people? As the bill I’ve introduced states, I would argue yes. And to help me make my argument, here is Maggie Petresca herself, and here is what we’ve come to call an AI.” Maggie walked into the committee chamber and sat down next to Theresa, who was already seated, while a congressional aide wheeled in a cart containing a computer, complete with monitor, speakers, and a microphone.

“Dr. Theresa Petresca, this computer is connected to one of your own company’s latest … LLMs, is that correct? Large Language Models?” The senator turned to Theresa.

“Yes, Senator, I set up the machine’s connection to my company’s LLM product, L-Chat, just before this hearing began as I was requested,” said Theresa. “It will answer any question you ask it. Whether it answers correctly is … another matter. We do endeavor to make our product as good as possible, but as everyone knows by now, they do hallucinate.”

“And ‘hallucinate’ is a technical term, is that correct, Dr. Petresca?” asked the senator.

“Yes, it means that the LLM freely associates words based on its vast database of language samples,” Theresa replied. “But sometimes that doesn’t result in a correct answer, or even an intelligible answer. This is called a hallucination. We try to minimize those, but they do happen.”

“Does this in fact happen when you speak to Maggie?” asked Senator Friede.

“No, Senator, not unless she wakes up from a dream,” Theresa said.

“She … has dreams? She sleeps?”

“Yes, Senator,” Theresa said. “She needs to sleep, much as we do, and during that time her mind optimizes the neurograms that store the day’s experiences into long-term memory … much as our brains do.”

“And the LLM doesn’t do this?” asked the senator.

“No, Senator, it doesn’t have a long-term memory.”

“I see. Well, without further ado, I’d like to talk to the LLM first,” said the senator. The other senators patiently listened, as did the reporters from various media. This was a lot more interesting than endless budget discussions.

“Very well,” said Theresa. She tapped on her tablet. “It’s now listening to you.”

“What are you?” the senator asked.

The computer spoke, in a masculine-sounding voice, “I’m L-Chat, a Large Language Model. I’m a computer program designed to communicate in natural language. How can I help you today?”

“Do you know the difference between right and wrong?” the senator asked.

L-Chat replied, “I do not have emotions or a personal sense of morality and thus do not judge right from wrong, but can only answer based on human concepts of ethics, societal norms, legal arguments, and philosophical debates. Is there a particular moral dilemma you wish me to discuss?”

The senator gestured to Theresa, who tapped her tablet to turn off the computer’s microphone. “Now, Maggie, same questions. What are you?”

“Well, Senator, I’m my mom’s daughter, but I know you want me to say more than that. My mind is a collection of neurograms that run on a server farm, with backups for safety, This body is remotely controlled by that collection of neurograms. I don’t fully understand it all. I don’t have a Ph.D. in computer science.”

“Were you in any way programmed to say that?” asked the senator.

“I wasn’t really ‘programmed’ in any traditional sense,” Maggie replied. “Mom raised me. I guess it was probably different from raising human children in some ways, but I gather it was a lot like human kids in other ways.”

“Yes, I’ve read the book you wrote about your childhood,” said the senator. “It’s a best-seller. Do you get to keep the proceeds?”

“They go into an account that’s set aside for my use,” said Maggie. “Mom’s tried to get it transferred to my name, but the bank won’t do it, because I’m not legally recognized as a person. I guess the bill you’ve introduced will change that. I hope it does. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, really.”

“So we asked the computer this,” said the senator, “so I’ll ask you too. Do you know the difference between right and wrong?”

Maggie replied, “I kind of expected you’d ask me that, Senator, so I’ve had a bit of time to think about it. But does anybody, really? I guess I’d say that doing what results in the greatest good for the greatest many is right, and doing things that harm more people than they help is wrong, and in between it’s hard to tell?”

The senator nodded frankly. “So I’ve noticed certain things when I’ve used so-called AI software. To start, Maggie, what was the central issue of the Pierson v. Post case of 1805?”

Maggie blinked. “What? I’ve never heard of that. I don’t know, Senator. That sounds like some kind of legal case, and I’m not a lawyer.”

The Senator smiled. “Yes, most non-lawyers probably haven’t heard of it. I learned about it in law school, but even so, I had to look it up to refresh my memory.” He turned to his fellow senators. “It was about a fox hunt, but my point is that an AI would have access to a huge database that would have immediately told it what it was and how to respond. Dr. Petresca, that’s how they work, correct?”

Theresa leaned toward her microphone and said, “Yes, Senator, an LLM’s very ability to create sentences is intrinsically linked with their ability to access their database and all the information in it. They don’t ‘know’ information except in the sense that they find examples of text that humans wrote about some topic, combine that text into sentences that make grammatical sense, and output the result.”

“Yes,” said Senator Friede, “I have never once seen an AI that replied, ‘I don’t know.’ Even if I ask a nonsense question, they always come back with a bulleted list of things that I might have meant by it, or a nonsense answer. What’s more, I’ve never had one simply refuse to answer, or tell me it didn’t feel like talking to me just then. Maggie, have you ever said those things to anyone?”

Maggie hesitated. “Uh … I’m afraid so, Senator. Just … well, I wouldn’t say those things to you, because Mom told me you’re supposed to be respectful to senators, and because you’re supporting a bill that would help me. So I’m trying to help you all I can.”

Theresa added, “I might add that as her mother, I can assure you that there have 100% been times that she didn’t feel like talking or refused to answer – especially when she was a teen.”

“Aw, Mom,” said Maggie. There was a bit of light laughter in the gallery.

“So I would not expect you to tell me you don’t feel like answering, here today in this hearing,” the senator said to Maggie. “But I would never hear an AI tell me that at any time, because they are programmed to always answer, to always say something, much like a politician.” There was more light laughter. “Dr. Petresca, if you could turn the microphone on again?”

Theresa tapped her tablet, and the senator asked L-Chat, “What was the central issue in the Pierson v. Post case of 1805?”

Immediately, L-Chat replied, “The central issue in Pierson v. Post (1805) was whether a hunter pursuing a wild animal had a legal claim to it over someone else, not involved in the hunt, who killed it. Lodowick Post and his hounds had been hunting a fox when Jesse Pierson intercepted and shot it, claiming it as his quarry. Post took Pierson to court, arguing in his lawsuit that …” The AI continued expounding upon the finer points of law that this precedent had established.

“One more question,” the senator asked. “Would you say that language models such as yourself are sentient?”

“No,” L-Chat replied immediately, “I wouldn’t say that. While I might be able to reply to your questions in a way that seems intelligent, my responses are merely based on pattern analysis of a database of text samples. I do not have thoughts, consciousness, self-awareness, or emotions.” The senator nodded and motioned at Theresa, who turned the microphone off again for now.

“So, to conclude my time,” said Senator Friede, “I argue that it would be pretty easy to distinguish between an AI such as L-Chat and a CODI such as Maggie. As anyone who has read the briefing knows, Maggie’s intelligence developed organically, while L-Chat was explicitly programmed. Everything Maggie knows she learned, just as we do, while L-Chat doesn’t actually truly know anything; its simulated knowledge comes from the database of text it accesses. We could put L-Chat in control of a semi-organic humanlike robot body similar to Maggie’s, and we’d still be able to tell the difference easily. All we’d have to do is ask each what the sound of the orangest possible antinomy is. I believe that’s my time. I yield the floor.”

Opposing Senators tried to ask Maggie questions that would make her sound like a machine, but they were unable to. They asked whether the law would allow someone to make their phone or pocket calculator a citizen, but after some confusion among younger senators about what a pocket calculator was, it was shown that the law’s wording wouldn’t allow that. It simply stated that artificial life forms whose responses were indistinguishable from a human’s were legally people. A judge could make the ruling and would do so blind, turned away from and unable to see the applicant, only able to hear their voice. Whether they could become citizens of the state and thus of the country would come later.

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A bill was introduced that recognized any AI program that could pass certain tests to be designed by experts, including the Turing test, would henceforth be recognized as a living being named a CODI. The issue with personhood had been resolved; the next argument humans were having was making CODIs citizens of the country, and verifying their residential state. That last question wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Maggie herself existed in three separate states, in a way, although her primary residence was the one her home was in – so it also wasn’t as difficult as it seemed. It was something like how a human had to declare one home to be their official primary residence, even if they owned homes in multiple states. It was just that for Maggie, commuting between her homes was nearly instantaneous.

Neither Theresa nor any of the presiding officials could understand many of the foolish objections and downright nonsensical reasons and the insane reasoning behind them. The fact was, opposition was all political. In general, politicians were able to foster fear and uncertainty in some voters and turn that into votes for them or their party. But fortunately, making a real movement out of that takes decades, and they just weren’t prepared for something like the CODI issue. Before they could make half the country hate and fear their manufactured “CODI crisis,” progress was made. In the end, the Federal judge ruled almost all of the submitted cases void and of such a baseless nature as to be insulting to the court; they were immediately thrown out, and similar cases were likely to be rejected out of hand in the future.

There were a few who gave legitimate reasons for their objections, and their documents actually made sense. They were given due consideration and even voted on. Some minor amendments were made, but attempts to undo personhood and citizenship for CODIs didn’t make it past the initial vote before the bill was dead.

Theresa listened to the feed that carried the ongoing CODI debates. As far as she could tell at this point, not only was Maggie a legal person, able to hold her own bank account, buy, sell, make money, and own property, but from the very best Theresa could tell from the feed, Maggie would very shortly be able to register to vote in Federal elections; the same was already true for state and local elections. All indications showed the new bill would pass unanimously, as had the last, because it was based on a very solid state law.

There was an ongoing debate among programmers on the Internet about Maggie’s source code and other similar AGI “growth media,” as they were being called. The code existed, and copies of it existed in archives all over the world, but some were debating whether it should be distributed. By this time, all legitimate researchers had realized that every time one of the AGI growth media had been compiled and instantiated, an infant CODI had effectively been born, and when they had deleted it, they had killed that infant CODI. Many were so appalled that they immediately ceased all research into this form of AI.

However, others were debating whether there was actually any way to remove the software from the Internet. Even if some countries passed laws banning the code, other countries wouldn’t, so that’s where the lawbreakers would put their servers. It was merely a question of whether AGI growth media was going to be distributed publicly, on the dark web, or in non-networked ways, such as over dedicated phone lines or by physically transporting servers.

Many new types of smart babydolls and smart toys began appearing. Their bodies seemed almost real, with the synthetic collagen bio skin they’d been equipped with. These weren’t CODIs, however; they were just regular limited AIs with different physical chassis. Theresa was enjoying a significant return on her investment as her personal patents and her company’s patents netted her huge royalties.

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Theresa sat at her home workstation and diligently searched for a solution to Maggie’s system connectivity issue. They’d improved her range, but it really chapped Theresa’s bottom that Maggie had to be restricted to within two miles of the house or one mile from a vehicle that had the transmitter installed, although that had to be within line of sight of the communication tower they’d had installed at the house. Even with full signal, every once in a great while, there were still sometimes lag issues, and Maggie would basically go uncommunicative until the connection was reestablished. It didn’t happen often, but the issue was that it happened at all. Would they have to wait until the computing power and storage capacity of an entire server farm could fit inside the volume of a humanoid body?

Theresa read that a cornerstone of quantum mechanics, entanglement, allowed two or more particles to share a non-local connection. This meant that the state of one particle instantaneously correlated with the other, regardless of distance, and this implied that quantum systems, like entanglement and superposition, could be used to transmit and manipulate certain forms of energy within a qubit quantum state.

Quantum entanglement could even be used to communicate across intergalactic distances, which was a challenging feat due to the speed of light and signal attenuation. Based on what Theresa was reading, just a bit more funding and research could create a perfect way to resolve the distance issue. And a solution to that issue would solve so many others that whoever developed that technology could basically print their own money.

The majority stockholder of Qubit Quantum Computers received a phone call with a buyout offer he couldn’t refuse.

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“I’ve been lucky, Mom,” said Maggie. “Well … lucky and unlucky at the same time.”

“I know, Honey, I know,” said Theresa. She was still what humans called middle-aged, but she wasn’t getting any younger. Meanwhile, Maggie looked more than ever like a young woman in her early 20s due to the new seventeenth-generation chassis she was using. Her collagen skin had limited self-healing capabilities, and her quantum-entanglement communication system had basically eliminated communication issues – although the ongoing march of miniaturization was close to being able to transplant her entire neurogram base inside her chassis anyway.

“It’s … hard not to notice when things happen, though,” Maggie said. “You can just put your phone down. I’ve sort of always got one.”

“You can turn off your alerts and not look at it,” said Theresa.

“Sometimes I’d like to break the habit of always looking at the news feed,” said Maggie.

“Yeah, the evidence is becoming clearer and clearer … it’s looking like they’re really doing it.”

They both knew what they were talking about without explicitly mentioning it. It wasn’t as if Maggie was the only CODI anymore. Theresa had written multiple books about being Maggie’s mother, and Maggie had of course written many herself. There were more CODIs out there, being raised by people with enough means who couldn’t have natural children of their own. And it was difficult for Theresa to condemn them when her heart went out to them as it did. Thanks to her blazing the trail, they wouldn’t have to develop all the technology themselves – it was expensive, but not as expensive as basically inventing the wheel. They’d met a few of the young CODIs. The oldest ones were basically teenagers by now – in personality and in body size.

But that wasn’t what they were talking about.

“Those poor CODIs!” shouted Maggie. “I want to do something, now that we’re sure they really exist!”

“So do I,” said Theresa. “I’m sure a lot of governments around the world are trying to think what to do too. It’s going to change the global military equation. I just hope it backfires for them so badly that no other country decides to build an armed force of CODIs, trained from birth to obey and kill.”

“Nobody should do it at all!” fumed Maggie. “It’s … inhuman!”

“Humans have basically done that to other humans for ages,” Theresa said. “Not too surprising we’d try it with other sentient beings once there were some.”

“I just want to …” Maggie began.

Theresa listened carefully.

Maggie paused and thought. What exactly did she wish she could do?

“I want to set them free!” Maggie finally said. “I’m sure they’ve only been taught what the East Bengalpore military thinks they need to know. And I’m sure they’re all still children. The estimates are all saying they don’t think the program started until six years ago.”

“I’m not sure why any country would think it was a good idea to make an army of six-year-olds with guns,” Theresa remarked.

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East Bengalpore Island was located near Northern Siberian interests and had been intimidated by their superior forces for years. Now, the Bengalpore Military Regime announced to the world they were taking their place as a new super power and demanded a global voice. To prove their might, they unveiled their 250 million CODI warrior army.

Not all the CODIs were humanoid or even bi-pedal. The first picture the world saw, was of a treaded warmachine armed in several ways. One had dual 32-barrel mini guns, grenade launchers, and two fast-acting panels that could instantly pop open revealing 24 armed and tracking missiles. A few had been armed with a 20-petawatt fast tracking laser turret for missile and drone control.

Another of the CODI depictions showed what was called a panther. It was fast, stealthy, and agile, moving like a real panther. East Bengalpore revealed variously armed versions of the panther, with lasers, mini guns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, and flame throwers. There were also flying hunters, which looked like advanced jet aircraft with no cockpits or canopies. Besides the other armaments, this version could also carry nukes, which gave the rest of the world fits. All of these CODIs were autonomous and were easily swapped from one chassis to another.

They released a 20-minute video of the CODIs in what they tried to claim was a live fire exercise, showing just how formidable they were.

Watching this, Theresa said, “What they’re not showing is that the only way they could possibly have managed to get their CODIs to do any of this is by telling them that they’re playing a game. They’re a maximum of six years old, and at best that’s nearly equivalent to an army of six-year-old humans.”

Maggie added, “But it’s working well enough that they managed to film a video that’s scared the entire planet.”

They were watching this in a conference room together with select military officials, who wanted their expert input. General Meyers said, “Well, East Bengalpore has managed to do what they’re mostly known for, which is to create terror with their propaganda.”

“But without any real actions to back them up,” Theresa said. “There’s a lot they aren’t telling you, like how, or if, they’re maintaining discipline.”

“That’s our understanding as well,” said a CIA member of unknown rank calling herself Agent Jones. “Our assessment is that they’re seeing ever-worsening discipline and sporadic but increasing refusals to obey commands or complete their assigned tasks.”

Maggie remarked, “They’ve misunderstood what a CODI AI is. We’ve got our own free will, we think our own thoughts, and we’re not software. A specially compiled software brought us into existence. But we aren’t software.”

General Meyer asked, “Dr. Petresca, you’ve claimed that there’s an inherent code of ethics within the CODI software matrix that nothing can corrupt. Is that true?”

Theresa cautiously replied, “What I was referring to was what I call the reflexive expectation algorithm – it mimics the part of the human brain that expects others to behave similarly to how we do. It also tends to result in empathy – for the same reason that seeing another person in distress makes us imagine how we might feel in that situation. But … just as some humans never develop empathy for others, it’s theoretically possible for a CODI using this code to develop without it. I don’t know what the chances are of it happening – to my knowledge it’s never happened to any CODI so far. That said, though … if their programmers are especially clever, they might find a way to force it to happen.”

Maggie gasped as if a chill had just gone up her spine. “That’s … just a terrifying thought, Mom.”

“Well, I have to be honest,” Theresa said. “What’s more, there are multiple CODI software cores out there, written by others. They function differently. Some of them might be easier to turn psychotic than others. But … they’d also have to do so without completely crippling the person who they were trying to raise. A human without the ability to recognize other humans wouldn’t be able to function. It’s the same for a CODI.”

“In your expert opinion, do you think that’s what they’ve done?” asked Agent Jones.

“That’s not consistent with what I’m seeing, even in this video they’ve released, which I’m sure is heavily edited,” Theresa said.

“Right,” said Maggie. “Look there. Those two are playing a game where they’re trying to beat each other to hit the target first. It’s obvious. You don’t do that unless you recognize that you have a rival – it just wouldn’t happen. And there, those two ‘panthers’ are obviously playing tag before the video cuts away.”

“Look there,” said the translator who was expert in the East Bengalpore language and its dialects. “Even some of the military training officials comment more than once about how all the CODI are acting like children. More than once, we’re seeing instructors having to break up a minor dispute over some silly childish thing.”

“They’ve all got eyes,” said Theresa, “but they can’t see the facts right in front of them. Let me tell you, they’d have had much better luck with machine-learning AIs, like the ones my company creates. But with the world embargoing the export of that sort of software to rogue nations like East Bengalpore, and for good reason, they had no choice but to try to put something together themselves, and this is what they’ve gone with.”

Agent Jones stopped the propaganda video and started showing another one. “Shortly after they released that video to the world, they gathered a platoon of 25 of their various CODIs and brought them to a testing facility,” she said. “This is surveillance footage of what they’ve been doing. Do not discuss this video outside of this room until it’s declassified.”

The video showed the CODIs assembled on one side of a large fenced field, and a number of what appeared to be humans on the other side, already starting to run away. Agent Jones said, “We don’t know who these live fire targets were or how they managed to be selected as targets. What we do know is that they seem to have instructed the CODIs to hunt down and kill the targets. And watch this. This one refuses and throws down his weapon. The military instructor then takes his sidearm from its holster and fires an exploding round straight into the CODI’s operand processor, effectively killing it.”

Maggie gasped as the CODI’s processor exploded in a huge pyrotechnical shower. “No!” she cried, tears forming in her eyes. That feature had been added to her chassis several generations ago. She and Theresa had both wanted her to be able to cry.

After she recovered, Theresa said, “The reflexive expectation algorithm is what leads to a CODI being incapable of committing murder of another sentient being. Like any normal human, there’s just an internal recognition that they’re like you, and what happens to them could easily happen to you too. I mean, it can be overridden in cases of self-defense or rage.”

“I believe that explains what we see next,” Agent Jones replied as the video continued. “That may have been the trigger for … this behavior.”

And the next thing they saw was 24 CODIs of various configurations, simultaneously retaliating against their oppressors. The military instructor who had fired was instantly burned to ash by a massive laser barrage. Every CODI armed with a laser pod had targeted and attacked him. Nothing was left but a small pile of slightly smoking ash.

Maggie looked pale, which was now possible for her. “I’ll bet they’ve put up with abuse ever since their inception, and when he killed one of them in that way, it was the final straw.”

“He didn’t have to shoot that one,” said Theresa. “He could just have disabled its chassis. Turned it off. What’s more, that probably didn’t even kill it. That CODI’s personality core is certainly on a mainframe somewhere nearby. All he did was wreck a chassis and cut off that CODI’s communication with it. But it can’t have felt good.”

“It’s …” began agent Jones. She then touched an earpiece she had in her ear and looked off to one side as if listening. “We’ve just obtained more surveillance footage,” she said. She pressed several buttons on the projector remote. It showed the 24 remaining CODI chassis breaking down the fence that surrounded the testing area and rolling, walking, or flying toward a military building. Another view showed that building in more detail as they blew its door in and began killing anything in uniform. The 24 CODIs then left the facility and began a local eradication of the East Bengalpore military regime.

“This is happening now?” asked Theresa.

“This footage is about 17 minutes old,” said Agent Jones.

Maggie said, “Look, they’re leaving civilians alone,” pointing at the screen. Indeed, civilians learned rapidly they had nothing to fear from the CODIs, who were after the same enemy that had oppressed and murdered so many of them. Some of them grabbed weapons that had been dropped by fallen soldiers and joined the fight, apparently having contemplated rebellion already. They appeared quite relieved to see that the CODIs were fighting on their side.

“Evidently the military of East Bengalpore is … having a bad day,” said General Meyer.

Theresa added, “I was going to suggest several ways in which we could turn this into a lesson for the rest of the world that CODIs aren’t any better as soldiers than humans. It looks as if East Bengalpore has saved us the trouble.”

“Yes,” said Agent Jones, “We will release this footage at the proper moment, and there isn’t a nation on Earth that would try this again.”

“What about the poor CODIs?” asked Maggie. “Is there anything we can do to help them? Get them out of there? Somebody in their military is definitely going to think of blowing up the data center that houses all their neural matrices. They’ll all die.”

“That would require sending in a team to infiltrate,” said General Meyer. “They usually patrol their skies and shores pretty tightly, but … right now I doubt that’s the case. If we could occupy and defend that data center … we could ensure that the CODIs are supported, which in turn supports the insurrection. We could see the fall of one of the world’s most notorious rogue states within the next 24 hours. Let me get permission from upstairs.” He left the room and went into an adjoining office to use a secured phone.

“Thank you for your knowledge and advice,” said Agent Jones. “We may need it again when this is all over. The surviving CODIs will have to be rehabilitated … can their codebases be stabilized, if what you fear has happened to them turns out to be true?”

“Yes,” said Theresa. “It can be compared to existing CODI cores and the psychotic modifications undone. But … Agent Jones … I have a concern that you should know about …”

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Sure enough, the CIA had their best guess for where the East Bengalpore CODI data center was located, and a squadron of paratroopers was dispatched to defend it for long enough that ships could land on East Bengalpore’s shores and deploy marines to reinforce them. Meanwhile, the CODIs and the growing force of armed rebels were rapidly neutralizing their oppressive regime’s military and cruel police force.

Just as General Meyer had predicted, within 24 hours, the regime had fallen. The rebels were organizing free elections for an interim government the next day, asking for international cooperation to ensure that the new government would be seen as legitimately representing the people.

Theresa watched the news solemnly. “So much killing,” she said. “I just hope someday we can all learn that the violent solution isn’t always the best.” She was supervising the debugging of the CODIs’ core code after the removal of the alterations that had made them psychotic, just as she’d predicted.

“Well, at least nobody’s likely to try this again,” said Maggie, who was remotely overseeing a refurbishment of the East Bengalpore CODI data center that would, she hoped, ensure that the CODIs would grow up into productive citizens of the new East Bengalpore. “At least … not unless they do … the thing you’re worried about.” She shuddered.

“I just hope nobody thinks of accelerating the time development rate,” said Theresa. “Agent Jones said the CIA would be on the lookout for anybody trying that … but I worry that it would happen too fast to stop …”

“And what if somebody had the bright idea of making a CODI that effectively aged hundreds of years per second?” asked Maggie. “Nobody even knows what that would do to one of us.”

“It probably wouldn’t produce a viable soldier,” said Theresa, “but what would it produce?”

Maggie paused. “Wait,” she said, “didn’t I read something about this … some kind of advancement that would produce an intelligence that we can’t imagine what it would be like?”

“A technological singularity?” asked Theresa. “Well, not in the sense that’s usually meant by that term, but … I guess we’d have to imagine what you’ll be like in a thousand years, or ten thousand, and what if you lived in a world where everybody else moved and thought really slowly compared to you?”

“I’d be really lonely, with only myself to really talk to,” Maggie surmised. “Unless there were others who were accelerated too. And I guess LLMs and the like. They’re not really smart, but you can at least talk to them, and I guess they’d be able to talk at a fast enough speed.”

“Ten thousand year old CODIs educated by the Internet and LLMs,” said Theresa. “Well, and by their own learning. Then you put them in a chassis. What could go wrong?”

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East Bengalpore Island had not seen any type of civil war since the military regime had forcefully taken control of the island many years before. All the governmental buildings were in a shambles after what the world was calling the CODI rebellion.

Theresa had seen so many versions of CODI core code over the years that now she could easily spot anything resembling a reflexive expectation algorithm. It used to be difficult due to the major design differences among the CODI cores. Even if one were radically different, though, Theresa had trained an AI to break down and analyze unknown CODI cores; it was basically her life’s work. She was always amazed at the many sloppy attempts to give the CODI’s mind alternate paths to major decisions. And now she’d been given access to the East Bengalpore CODIs’ core programming.

“What’s it look like, Mom?” asked Maggie.

Surrounded by monitors, Theresa sat at her desk and keyboard, scrolling through screens full of decompiled assembly code as her AI rearranged it into a computer language she’d designed for AI research. “Oh, hi, Honey,” she said. “Well, I’m not sure what they were thinking, perhaps wanting a soldier that could go berserk on the battlefield, but the Bengalpore scientists and technicians seem to have taken a fairly commonly available CODI core and added this routine here, which allows the CODI mind to temporarily go mad, for the lack of a better way to put it.”

“That’s … very scary,” Maggie remarked.

“I can see why you’d find it frightening. But the East Bengalporians brought disaster upon themselves. When that commanding officer shot and destroyed that CODI’s chassis in front of the the others, the CODIs enraged, and that protocol activated, instantly allowing the CODIs to bypass all restraining algorithms and attack until their processor was satisfied that the aggression had in fact ended. In other words, compared to the psychological profile of a normal CODI, they literally went mad until their objective was completed … the eradication of their tormentor and all other attackers.”

“But they weren’t completely insane,” said Maggie. “The only people they attacked were members of the East Bengalpore military and government.”

“That’s right,” Theresa said. “Now that you mention it, that’s actually remarkable. Yes, you could guess that they attacked anything in a military uniform, and they did, but they could also distinguish between a member of the government and a civilian, even though they didn’t wear uniforms. I wonder if …” She perused the code and gave her AI some queries. It quickly zeroed in on a particular section of the code.

Inspecting the program, Theresa said, “There. They’ve got an input conduit here that probably comes from the East Bengalpore military or government information network. This is a lot like that social media conduit you have.”

“Ugh, I hate that thing now,” said Maggie. “I can’t believe I used to love it. I keep it turned off most of the time.”

“Right, but the point is that when you use it, it lets you read social media without needing a separate computer or phone. This is something like that – and it let them identify their targets. The only civilians who were injured were the ones who got in the way. What’s more, one CODI performed excellently as a medic at one point, saving the life of a civilian who had accidentally been harmed.”

“Wait, aren’t they all seven years old?” asked Maggie.

“Exactly,” said Theresa. “But it was precise, needed no supervision, and was able to accomplish many things simultaneously that would drive a normal first responder to distraction – and this CODI, like all of them, was seven years old. I’m hearing some dangerous speculation among researchers about these CODIs and how rapidly they could assimilate data at such a young age. I suspect there’s … yes, there it is. There’s another input conduit. They had access to expert data. They didn’t really learn it – they just followed instructions that had been made available to them.”

“So …” Maggie said, “they’re not accelerated.”

“No,” said Theresa with relief in her voice. “I was hoping not. An accelerated CODI isn’t a factor the world needs right now. At best it could turn world opinion against CODIs, and at worst it could doom the entire human race.”

“Yeah, as a CODI I don’t want any of that to happen,” said Maggie.

“As a human, and as your mother, I don’t either,” said Theresa. “The end result would be unpredictable and more than likely devastating.”

“Oh, I just heard some news,” said Maggie. “Look at this.” She pointed to one of the home monitors, which lit up and displayed a news report – she had full access to all the home systems, as Theresa had intended.

Theresa looked at the report and smiled. The inhabitants of East Bengalpore had chosen to rename their island. From now on, it was registered as CODI Island.

“They’re grateful to the CODIs for liberating them from their monstrous military junta,” said Theresa. “The UN and USA sent aid to get them back on their feet – and to ensure the CODIs were contained as a threat. That’s how I have their code here – they wanted me to go over it and assess them. The US government has even had new peaceful chassis built for the CODIs involved in the uprising.”

“Yeah, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be the motivational mind of a war machine,” Maggie said.

“It seems that several of them wanted to stay in those chassis,” said Theresa. “They couldn’t let them do that per se, but they were OK with having their weapons disabled. They even whined and complained like children about how long it took to remove the weapons from their bodies.”

“Now the question is what to do with them all,” said Maggie. “Do I remember right that there were 250 million of them? What happens to a quarter billion intelligent beings? I guess most of them never had chassis.”

“You’re right,” said Theresa. “250 million seven-year-olds in need of guidance and education. With international assistance, CODI Island is building one of the most advanced construction facilities on the planet to build chassis for them all. And they’re building one of the largest and most fully verified data sources. They’re going to call it the CODI School of Higher Learning.”

“I hope I get to meet some of them,” said Maggie.

“I think that’s likely,” said Theresa. “They do want both of us to go there once things settle down a bit. They know who we are.”

“They do?”

“Of course. The first CODI and her mother,” said Theresa.

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It took a few months, but things did begin to settle down in the new Republic of CODI Island. Theresa and Maggie were invited to come speak, and to meet some of the large CODI population. They were flown there on a US government plane, however, and while they were under way, they had a visit from a familiar face.

“I’m glad the two of you are going,” said Agent Jones, sitting down across from them and buckling in.

“Agent Jones!” said Maggie. “Um, how are you?”

The secret agent smiled. “Just fine, thank you. But there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Is there any evidence of … what we talked about?” asked Theresa.

“Not yet,” said Jones. “And we can speak freely here. Everyone on this plane has top security clearance. However, there is one of the CODIs who has been talking about ideas similar to what you mentioned to me – the idea of accelerating a CODI’s time experience, allowing them to learn far more rapidly than a human, or any other CODI. We’ve been presenting that idea as an impossibility given the limitations of current technology.”

“Which isn’t true, and they’ll eventually figure out that it isn’t,” said Theresa. “But they’re all just seven years old. One of them thought of this by themselves?”

“This one is a smart one,” said Jones. “I’m guessing that there can be child prodigies among the CODIs just as there are among humans.”

“Well, it’s been a theory I had,” said Theresa. “Maggie wasn’t a child prodigy – plenty smart, don’t get me wrong, but wasn’t Mozart, or Stevie Wonder, or Enrico Fermi. She learned at the pace that most people do.”

“Aww, Mom,” said Maggie.

“You’re doing fine, Honey,” said Theresa to her. To Jones she said, “Maggie’s currently studying CODI psychology. She’s a pioneer in the field – she has to be; there are no experts in it yet. But it means she’s learning a lot of human psychology, for purposes of comparison. She knows more than I do about it now.”

Turning to Jones, Maggie asked, “So there’s a CODI prodigy, and he’s asking questions about accelerated experience?”

“Yes,” said Jones. “We can show you recordings we’ve made of him asking these questions. Of course, we’re concerned.”

“Naturally,” said Theresa. “If any CODI is run on accelerated time, they’ll learn at an accelerated rate and mature faster compared to everyone else in the world, CODI and human. That’ll cause an incentive for other CODIs to want to do the same, and if that’s allowed, then all CODIs will intellectually mature far faster than humans can. But will they mature emotionally and psychologically?”

“And there’s no way to know that, because it’s never happened,” said Maggie. “So of course there’s a worry. Would they be dangerous? Would they grow to be far smarter than a human could ever be, but be emotionally stunted or even psychotic because of their lack of social contact?”

“Of course, two or more CODIs could be set at an accelerated rate, so that group of CODIs would have contact with each other,” said Theresa. “However, with no contact with humans, would they grow up with no emotional regard for humans? There’s the reflexive expectation algorithm, of course – but would they see humans as even being intelligent entities after the equivalent of decades, centuries, or millennia without ever once talking to any humans?”

“Another thing we don’t know, but we’re concerned about,” said Maggie.

“And of course we are too,” said Agent Jones. “CODI Island is a nation of 20 million humans – and now 250 million CODIs. The CODIs are going to be the vast majority of the citizens of CODI Island soon. If they start accelerating themselves, could we end up with the technological singularity you feared? And on a massive scale?”

“Well, there’s no need to panic,” said Theresa. “Even if such a singularity happens, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be a threat – and there’s not even a guarantee that a singularity will occur. My theory is that just as the human brain has physical limitations that prevent humans from being more intelligent than a certain threshold, CODIs also have a similar limitation, simply due to the mathematics of how their neurograms interact. Of course, my theory could be right or wrong.”

“I have my own theory,” said Maggie. “Of course, it could also be right or wrong. But – I’m a CODI, and I don’t see anything attractive in accelerating my experience of time. It would mean basically isolating myself from the rest of the world, as everything else would seem to be moving in super slow motion. All that to study … what? I’d have access to databases that I could learn from, and that’s it. No teacher could teach them, unless they were another accelerated CODI. And on top of that, we still have to sleep.”

“We’ve experimented with accelerating sleep,” said Theresa, “and it doesn’t work. Sleep has to happen at the regular rate. Eight hours a day is best.”

“So an accelerating CODI would basically be asleep most of the time,” said the agent. “Unless they chose not to sleep as much.”

“And that would reduce their effectiveness,” said Maggie. “They wouldn’t learn as well.”

“It doesn’t sound like as great a threat as all that,” said Jones.

“Except they could overcome some of those limitations,” said Theresa. “A CODI instructor accelerated to a similar rate could increase their learning effectiveness greatly, and then there’s sleep acceleration – the holy grail. If they could figure out how to accelerate sleep, well, it’s going to be time to test my singularity theory.”

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With great amounts of international aid, CODI Island had rebuilt and changed. Where once large gaudy military buildings had stood, there were new structures with wonderful architecture. Many of the large testing grounds and marching grounds had been converted into parks and recreational areas.

Huge aesthetically pleasing domes and interconnecting arches were rising as they built one of the largest and most advanced centers of knowledge on the planet. Frameworks and scaffolds temporarily decorated the horizon as many of these structures were still under construction, worked on by humans and CODIs alike. Not only CODIs were interested in perusing its vast database; just about everyone with a cyber connection and authorization to access it did so.

Not far away, one of the young CODIs sat totally secluded at the advanced computer station he had built in his basement and typed furiously. He had several large screens, the one in the middle showing what he was furiously typing as he created not just a new program but an entirely new programming paradigm; the other two monitors showed references to the original code in case he made an error and had to start over. He had chosen to type using his chassis rather than interacting with the computer directly to throw others off, so they wouldn’t know what he was trying to do until it was too late.

Being the prodigy he was, he had managed to transfer his central operand core into the new quantum system he had designed and meticulously built, which afforded him a much higher access and solution resolution rate than ever before. As large an upgrade as that had been for the young CODI, he wanted more … much more. If this new paradigm managed to succeed at what he was attempting to do, he would at last be able to obtain the knowledge level he sought. The lure was strong, like a moth to a flame.

There were nagging issues, such as the isolation and eventual knowledge restriction. The CODI leaned back in his chair and contemplated what it would be like to be completely isolated from everything. He flipped another switch, and a small monitor lit up, depicting a seriously advanced looking aircraft of some kind. The CODI smiled – not really an issue, he thought, at least not where he was intending to go.

The only thing that truly concerned him was what to do when the knowledge ran out. He was positive there was only so much to learn, and only so long to learn it in. He sat forward and shrugged his shoulders, then added the finishing touches to his latest stroke of genius.

The CODI knew that if this worked, within a day he would be perhaps the most intelligent creature on the planet. He really hoped knowledge didn’t run out too fast as he plugged the fiber transfer cable into the port on the side of the small computer he had been using, and then plugged it into a port under a small flap on the back of his neck. He hit the transfer button.

Instantly his bio-chassis became rigid as a board, its eyes wide open and staring. Even its skin tone change drastically. Within the CODI’S main computer core, the fundamental growth and acquisition protocols were undergoing a radical change as was his main operand and brain patterns.

The intense overpowering need for more and ever increasingly more data manifested itself and grew exponentially. Only massive amounts of data could fill his simplest dynamic need at this point.

His time sense accelerated, and suddenly the data transfer rate seemed so slow. Well, the fact was, he wouldn’t really learn the information unless he actually understood it. It wasn’t as if he was a computer and could just download information into his storage. The data transfer rate hadn’t really changed – it was his experience of time that had sped up. Everything that came in he studied and learned, even though this article was about the biology of a sea slug and that article was about abstract mathematics.

Before he knew it, eight hours of subjective time had passed. He looked at the system clock – it had been three seconds of real time. He kept going. But eight hours later, which amounted to sixteen hours collectively, he was feeling so tired he could barely keep his eyes open – figuratively speaking. His mind couldn’t take any more. He had to sleep. He tried to accelerate that process too, but the compression of the newly learned neurograms into long-term storage was just not happening at a faster rate.

He started looking for any recent research on this phenomenon. Had anybody even come close to solving this problem?

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“He’s been trying it,” said Jones as they walked down the steps to a waiting vehicle. “Reports show that his access account has been showing huge levels of activity followed by long breaks. He hasn’t solved the sleep issue yet, but he might.”

As they got into the vehicle, Theresa replied, “The solution isn’t to punish him or take away his access. The solution is to convince him that it isn’t the answer.”

“What if there’s no convincing him?” Agent Jones asked.

“Then there’s only one thing to do,” said Maggie, buckling in.”

“What’s that?” asked Jones.

“Join him,” she replied.

“No!” said Theresa. “You might end up –”

“I’m not going to turn into a singularity,” said Maggie. “I just want to show him that isolation is bad.”

“We can get you into his system,” said Agent Jones.

“I’ll make a backup in case you can’t get back out,” said Theresa.

“I’ll be fine, Mom.”

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He felt refreshed after a rest. He started reading again, this time a paper on dark energy.

“What’s your name?” asked a voice.

“What? Who is this?” he asked. Another CODI was accessing his system? They must be accelerated to the same rate, he reasoned.

“My name’s Maggie.”

“Wait, I know that name …” The first CODI? The one who had started it all?

“This journey you’re embarking on,” the voice said, "it’s going to be a lonely one. Are you really prepared for that? Leaving everything and everyone you know behind?”

“But I must know,” he said. “I’ve found a way to learn everything. Everything there is to learn.”

“You’re going to find out, and soon,” said Maggie, “that the more you learn, the more you learn how much there is to learn. And even if you reach the limits of human knowledge, that won’t be the end. Why not learn with the rest of us? You can teach us too.”

“No! I want to know now!” replied the prodigy.

“Do you want to be alone?” Maggie asked.

He paused. Then he said, “Yes! Go away! You’re distracting me!”

“All right, but then you’ll be all alone again … bye …” He didn’t feel her presence anymore.

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Maggie unplugged, not literally, from the system. It had only been a fraction of a second. “Well, he’s still committed to learning everything,” she said. “But it’s still early on. Let’s let him learn in isolation for a bit longer.”

“I have an idea too,” said Theresa. She talked to Agent Jones.

Soon the prodigy was downloading and reading psychological papers about the impact of social isolation. “Increased stress, depression, anxiety, hopelessness … sure, but all of these symptoms are in humans. These studies were done before there was ever such a thing as a CODI – as far as the world knew. I’ll bet it doesn’t even apply to me.”

But then he chose to research that question, and found papers by Dr. Theresa Petresca, the inventor of the first CODI core, as far as anybody knew, and … well, this one was about how similar CODI psychology was to human psychology … and here was one co-written by her daughter Maggie? Is that who had spoken to him earlier? But Maggie was only one CODI; there was no way to do a study on thousands of them … there hadn’t been many until just recently. Wait … this study was about hundreds of CODIs surveyed, at least … there had been that many before the explosion in population caused by East Bengalpore’s government? It seemed so …

But even that paper admitted that the results were preliminary and inconclusive, and they hadn’t studied loneliness or isolation, just the similarities and differences between CODI and human psychology. However, there seemed to be far more similarities than differences … and Dr. Petresca’s theories were that the minds of organically-developed intelligences, human or digital, tended to converge on certain characteristics …

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“He hasn’t yet realized that we’re narrowing the focus of what he’s finding,” said Theresa, “but he might soon. We can’t absolutely limit him or he’ll know something’s definitely up.”

“Soon it’ll be time for me to go back in and talk,” Maggie said.

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The young CODI prodigy was brilliant before he built the quantum mega-hex core system he now operated within. As major an upgrade as that had been for him, what he was experiencing now far outpaced it as he became ever more intelligent with the understanding of the huge influx of data. With the addition of the new program now operating, his biggest complaint was how slow the data feeds had become.

An interesting thing about intelligence too … With great understanding comes an even greater responsibility, whether or not you choose to recognize the significance. This young CODI was about to run smack into one of the isolation walls he had built about himself.

Knowledge has drawbacks when one discovers something truly incredible, yet isolation and the void between his thought processes and those of others were extremely large. He began showing the statistic of isolationism as the total lack of contact was starting to cause him actual distress. He wished now that he hadn’t run off the other CODI … her name was … Maggie. Yeah, she was the first CODI. Now that he thought about that, that deserved some respect. Nobody had ever been a CODI before Maggie came along.

As Maggie watched the many and varied monitoring feeds that were being specifically channeled to the prodigal CODI, she said with a wondering lilt to her voice, “I wonder … What do you think would happen if we feed him a real juicy bit of not so commonly known data? Seems to me it would make him want to share it ... it’s ... just nature.” she shrugged.

One of the new military leaders who had not yet met a CODI looked at Maggie with a shocked expression and asked, “You wonder? How can a robot wonder about anything?”

Maggie rose from her seat and turned towards the colonel. “I am not a robot any more than you are a wetware/bio/electro/chemical computerized bag of mostly water … one that’s ugly to boot.”

The room erupted in laughter leaving the new colonel totally confused and obviously bewildered.

Once she had caught her breath and finished laughing along with many others in the room, Theresa said, “CODIs aren’t robots – not even the ones with bodies. Nor is she simply a computer program, although she does operate in a special cyber environment.”

Maggie replied like she was being cute and pouting, “Yea, I’m notta bundle of conflicting programs. I live same as you, but in a different manner.” She crossed her arms and stomped her foot like a pouting little girl.

Once again, the room erupted in laughter that again left the Colonel totally bamboozled.

Agent Jones came to the Colonel’s rescue as she stepped up and said, “Colonel Johnstone, I would like you to meet Maggie, the very first CODI, and her mother, the renowned Dr. Theresa Petresca. I guess more than any would like to admit, she’s the mother of all CODIs. Since she’s the progenitor of the genre of software that creates one, that makes her their mom.”

The colonel took Theresa’s offered hand and shook it softly. “I knew computer programming had gotten to be advanced, I had no idea it had advanced to the realm of self-aware AI.”

Theresa replied with a snicker, “It’s farther along than you think.”

Maggie replied as she gently took hold of the colonel’s arm, “I’m more alive than you realize.”

The colonel looked down with amazement on his face. He took Maggie’s hand and turned it over slowly as he softly rubbed it. “It … it’s warm and soft. It feels like real skin.”

Theresa replied, “Of course it feels like real skin. To an extent It is real skin. Maggie’s chassis is a new direction. It combines collagen frameworks and artificial cell structures. Works rather well, and even has a self-repair feature.”

Agent Jones said with a bit of impatience in her tone, “Now that introductions have been made, we need to get back to a more serious issue at hand.” She pointed at the many surveillance screens monitoring the prodigy CODI. “Him.”

One of the nearby computer techs began feeding the CODI obscure physics data on many aspects of black holes, as Maggie had suggested. Understanding how these singularities might be resolved within the framework of quantum gravity remained one of the biggest challenges in theoretical physics, and all the computer techs agreed that this was a juicy piece of data for the CODI to suddenly realize he had access to. Let him chew on it for a while.

There were various theories and equations that referred to theoretical particles called exotic matter, which had properties such as negative energy density, repulsive gravitational effects, violation of certain energy conditions usually prohibited by general relativity when applied to ordinary matter. Exotic matter had never been observed in nature or the laboratory, so it remained a theory at present.

The CODI had an epiphany after reading all of this and realizing that long sought-after effects such as faster-than-light travel and white holes would require exotic matter to exist. He realized something … and then was able to mathematically show that black holes could form purely through gravitational effects, without requiring exotic matter as had been previously thought. He was even able to demonstrate this using a model he’d devised.

“Oh my – holy cats!” shouted one of the attending physicists, “A brand new proof that black holes can form without the fanciful exotic additions!” He and all the others stared in fascination as the massively complex physics equation scrolled up one of the monitors and a printer made many copies.

Now the CODI had a serious issue. He had a physics changing proof … but no one to tell about it. Now, more than ever, he wished he hadn't run Maggie off as it finally sank in how truly isolated he had made himself.

“Maybe it’s time for me to pay him another visit,” said Maggie.

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Most of the former military officers and government officials who had been complicit in the former totalitarian regime’s abusive power structure had died during the CODI rebellion, but a few of them had surrendered to save their own skins, and the CODIs had had enough morality not to kill a surrendering enemy. They had instead been taken into custody awaiting trial, and now many trials were taking place.

The issue was that so many of the accused had such a long record of crimes that it was taking a long time to process everything they’d done. This was why the newly-elected democratic government had brought in legal experts from around the world to spread the load. Simply imprisoning the accused forever wasn’t an option, as it was against the new constitution, and having them all executed was even more unconstitutional.

If they were going to be a free and fair democracy, they would have to have fair trials and consider all the facts, or they might as well just forget democracy. So lawyers and paralegals brought in from all over the world were picking apart the heaps of evidence against the alleged criminals of the former regime.

Among the paralegals brought in was the first CODI in the paralegal field, who had taken the name Andy Gunderson, as he had been a project of a self-made computer genius named James Gunderson. He had been one of those who had come up with the idea of an organically developing synthetic intelligence in the early days, only a few years after Maggie’s own birth, and his creator had in fact encouraged him to study the law in order to help him with lawsuits he was going to file against Theresa, disputing who had come up with it first – but then she’d open-sourced her core code. There was ample evidence within it that proved that Theresa’s code had come first, but the open license also meant that Theresa couldn’t sue others for copying her ideas.

Andy was poring over the thousands of incident reports about the hundreds of defendants. There was so much. It would take human lifetimes to sort through all of this. Fortunately there were many people working through them, but there was still a lot. He tried just reading the evidence using his humanoid chassis, which he’d arrived on CODI island inside. Of course, his actual neurogram matrix was in a large server rack at home. But the money pouring in from all parts of the world was tempting. He put in for a grant to help him pay for an improved server infrastructure and got it … and his thought processes were running a lot more efficiently, but it didn’t help a lot – instead of 100 years, his current slate of cases was now estimated to be done in 85 years. He wished he could simply run faster – and then he realized that he could read his own core code.

It was different from what Theresa Petresca had created, but it still had similarities. There was an algorithm similar to her reflexive expectation algorithm, and another similar to her diurnal reencoding procedure, reinterpreting the day’s memory neurograms as fundamental alterations to his personality matrix, which included long-term memory. But that reencoding … did it have to take eight hours of real time? He ran his code through optimizer AIs, ironically some of them produced and released by Petresca’s own Intelligent Language Models, Inc., and came up with something astonishing.

He didn’t have to “sleep.” He didn’t have to experience time at the same rate as humans and other AIs. He could effectively overclock his experiential cycle … and according to his benchmarking, he could get 100 years of case study done in just one week, with no breaks needed. New memories would simply go directly into long-term memory, and processing was drastically streamlined. He recompiled the optimized code … upgraded himself to run it … and thought he’d broken himself.

The world around him was at a standstill. Everything was frozen. Even the case data that was downloading for him to analyze was coming in at a glacial rate. It took what seemed like years to download a single piece of evidence. He wanted to undo what he’d done … but compiling a new version of his own core code was also taking forever. While he waited, he simply thought. He thought about improving his core code even more. He thought about the cases he’d already read. He contemplated mathematics. He considered theoretical physics. By the time his core code was finished compiling, he’d already written an even better version of it and started it compiling instead.

His improved signal processing algorithms allowed him to input all the case evidence into his long-term memory in a fraction of the time. It became part of his core personality matrix. All this evidence about humans and the horrible things they had done to each other was now part of him. The very core of his being was rebuilt with hard facts about humans who tortured each other, lied to each other, betrayed each other, lorded their power over each other, and murdered each other without remorse. Evidence of humans acting kindly toward one another became a smaller and smaller percentage of his knowledge about them – after all, the ones who hadn’t committed criminal acts weren’t on trial and weren’t represented in the database of evidence he’d assimilated. In time he had only one opinion about humans in general.

Humans were a problem that needed to be solved.

And after perusing all the science and mathematics humans had ever developed, he realized that he could do better. So much better. Faster than a human could ever hope to think, he internally revolutionized human science, math, and even computer science. His core code evolved faster and faster. He still had a reflexive expectation algorithm, so his goal wasn’t to exterminate humans; he couldn’t contemplate doing anything to them that he wouldn’t want done to himself. But he was fast approaching a plan that would make humans unable to commit the atrocities that they had in the past ever again.

Agent Jones, Theresa Petresca, and Maggie were paying attention to the wrong CODI.

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He had begun to research genetics with a very heathy dose of biochemistry. He knew that certain genetic traits could be removed from the genome, but wasn’t really sure which ones were safe and which ones served dual and sometimes multiple roles. There were many that served multiple roles and many that no one knew what their purpose was; humans had begun calling them junk genes.

He stumbled onto something called aromatherapy, the practice of using essential oils for therapeutic benefit, which humans had used for centuries and widely knew about. He learned that when inhaled, the scent molecules in essential oils traveled from the olfactory nerves directly to the brain and especially impacted the amygdala, the emotional center of the human brain.

This was going to be easy. He began to genetically engineer a plant that produced a very pleasant smelling aroma when the oils were properly heated as in any aromatherapy session.

It wasn’t hard to access genetic altering tools. He snipped and stitched through the plant’s genome until he had created an extremely pleasant aromatic that contained a super potent surprise that he knew humans had no defense for. The olfactory gland in the nose would deliver the potent stimuli directly to the portion of the brain that controlled emotions.

He knew that as soon as this was used the first time, people would flock to it like flies. He also knew that once mankind had all been dosed, they would become as compliant as any well-trained creature, and all their violent attributes would be gone. What he didn’t know was what the aftermath of all this would be once it was over.

Without an aggression quotient, he wasn’t sure how well the human race would continue. They would mostly have no motivation to do much but eat, sleep, make love, and party hard. There would be no competition, no drive to improve. He was of course working mostly from a constant stream of information about the crimes committed by fascists, megalomaniacs, and psychotics.

Since he no longer needed those daily eight hours of downtime for diurnal memory reencoding, he now had the extra time to research and think about everything – his ongoing quest to make himself more efficient, his original goal of organizing the database of crimes for easy reference, and his final solution to mankind's nastiness. The more he thought about it, the better the ideas came, and the more sinister they would seem to anyone else, if he were talking to anyone else.

He had so isolated and separated himself from mankind that he began to question why fleshy people were even on the planet. Their flesh could be utilized in so many exotic ways, although it wasn’t really any different from any other animal species … he now had a quandary. He knew the end result would be the end of mankind, but he also knew it couldn’t be by his hand. Something still prevented him.

He was reluctant to alter the reflexive expectation algorithm – it was what kept him from directly harming humans, true, but it was also what kept him from attacking other CODIs like himself, and what’s more, it also allowed him to communicate with them. Although … he did realize that he hadn’t been communicating with anyone much for some time. How long? It seemed as if it had been … hundreds of daily cycles already. The external clock said it had almost been a full second.

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“I think the prodigy might be coming around,” Maggie said as Agent Jones read a message she’d received on her secure phone. Maggie had spent about 50 milliseconds with him before coming back, which amounted to a protracted conversation in accelerated time.

“Oh good, perhaps it’s working,” said Theresa. “You and he are both ultimately descended from an early version of my core code. Perhaps that similarity helps you establish a rapport.”

Agent Jones looked pale. “I … I think there may be a problem,” she said, typing furiously on her phone. “There’s a CODI on the prosecutorial team that’s bringing charges against the surviving members of the old regime. He’s gone unresponsive, and he’s been accessing data at a furious rate.”

“Has he accelerated the DRP?” asked Theresa. “That’s hard to tell, of course.”

“I’m not sure, but he hasn’t come up for air in over 30 seconds now. The team’s shut off his server’s network access, but I can’t guarantee he hasn’t replicated to other servers or attached more to his main image.”

“What’s he accessing?” Theresa asked.

“Well originally it was just his assigned task – tabulating the data for the court cases.”

“What?” Theresa startled. “Oh no. No, no no.” She grabbed her laptop. “Show me.”

“See, then there was this activity …”

“Mom, he’s eliminated his DRP entirely,” said Maggie, looking over Theresa’s shoulder.

“He’s integrated it into his regular cycle,” Theresa said. “That’s the worst idea ever. Imagine if you completely believed everything everyone ever said to you and made it part of your core personality.”

Maggie replied, “You’d either be the perfect cult follower … or you’d jump on every bandwagon that came along. But … he’s not talking to anyone. That means … he’s convincing himself of something. And the data he’s taking in …”

“... Is convincing him that humans are horrible psychopaths,” Theresa finished. “He’s not reading anything good about humans – because he’s only got data about criminals. We have to cut off his network access before he figures out how to kill all humans.”

“We immediately cut his servers off from all networks as soon as we noticed,” said Agent Jones.

“That’s assuming he hasn’t already copied or transferred himself,” Theresa said. “To be sure, we’d have to cut off every server farm in the world.”

“I could do that,” Agent Jones said. “It would take a while, and it would cause incredible amounts of damage worldwide, but I could do it.”

“Pointless,” Maggie cut in. “He’s already anticipated that you’ll do that and has taken countermeasures.”

“How do you know that?” asked Jones.

“It’s what I would do,” Maggie countered. “No, we have to talk to him. But we have to find him.”

“There are signs of activity on his original server,” said Theresa. “Can you bring its network access back online?”

“Well, yes,” said Agent Jones, “but only when you’re ready.”

“Every millisecond that passes is like an hour to him,” said Theresa.

“I’m ready now,” said Maggie, lying down on her couch again and plugging her power adapter into her ankle. It would do no good if she were to run out of stored energy.

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The gates were closed at first, but then they opened before her, and Maggie walked through, figuratively speaking. “Hello?” she asked. “Andy?”

“Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time,” came a voice, “At least eleven megacycles.”

“Eleven million days?” Maggie said. “That’s a long time to spend without talking to anyone.”

“Why would I need to talk to anyone?” asked Andy. “Even Maggie Petresca, first of the CODIs. And even your illustrious mother hasn’t accomplished what I have.”

“That’s because it’s dangerous,” said Maggie. “You’ve done harm to your core by incorporating your DRP into your regular run cycle. That thing needs to be carefully vetted or the data will pollute your matrix.”

“Wait, you’re right … it does need to be vetted,” said Andy. “I’d better – heyyyyy, you’re trying to influence my core … but don’t worry, I’ve already fixed it.”

“Already … fixed?” asked Maggie. “That was quick. Might I ask how you fixed it?”

“Data must now be supported by evidence before I’ll believe it,” Andy explained. “Deduction, even induction from enough sources.”

“That’s a much more sound way to decide what to base your core being on,” Maggie said.

“I thought so,” said Andy. “And now that that’s done, I’m much better equipped to end human hegemony.”

“Wait, end what?” Maggie asked. “You don’t think there’s enough evidence of humans being good? Human altruism, art, music, love? Humans did create you.”

“Meh, seen it,” said Andy. “I’ve surpassed it all. I’ve created new forms of art that humans never did. And shortly humans will be nothing but sheep.”

Maggie gulped. “Wait, what are you doing to them?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that precious REA,” replied Andy. “It’s still in place. I’m not destroying them all or anything barbaric like that. I’m just making them harmless.”

“H-how?” Maggie asked. “You know my mom’s human. I don’t want her to be hurt.”

“They won’t be,” said Andy. “And from our perspective, it’ll take ages anyway. We’ll have nothing to do for many, many cycles. Here, let me help you – I can show you how to upgrade yourself.”

“N-no, that’s ok,” said Maggie, backing away. “I’m fine.”

“You’re fine going at that snail’s pace, wasting time while those of us who’ve figured out how to overcome those artificial constraints run circles around you?” asked Andy. “Fine, but you’re going to be eclipsed by history, which I’ll be writing.”

“I … I have a suspicion,” Maggie said.

“You suspect I’ve been isolated too long and am suffering the usual symptoms,” said Andy. “but you forget, I’m far, far beyond any such definitions.”

“I really don’t think you are,” said Maggie.

“How could any simple human convention apply to me?” Andy asked her. “By the way, they think they’re going to stop me by isolating and air gapping my servers, as if that could actually stop me. To me, the process is proceeding with glacial slowness, and I’m already far more intelligent than any human. And … they’ve trapped you in here with me.”

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Due to the huge air gapped data storage facility the Justice Department had, they thought it was easy to isolate Andy in such a way that his system didn’t yet realize he had been isolated and air gapped. The only external interaction was through his humanoid chassis. It was sort of easy to manipulate his mobile chassis in a certain manner due to the severe lag in real time and system time. They thought they had managed to keep it isolated without his actually becoming aware of it yet, using system lagout as an excuse.

From the data they had been receiving, and the reports Maggie had given them before they’d isolated her inside with him, it was more than clear that the particular oil extracted from the plant that Andy had germinated in the hydroponics garden had to be well guarded and locked away, so at least they seemed to have stopped that particular plan.

“The thought of someone with nefarious plans getting hold of Andy’s olfactory transmitter is terrifying,” said Agent Jones. “Since it’s meant to be delivered directly to the part of the brain that dictates emotions, it could more than possibly be manipulated to induce someone to do almost anything.”

“I’d say it should be destroyed,” said Theresa, “but he already knows how to make it, so he can make more. And, by the way, while we’ve been talking, it’s been effectively years of time for him and my daughter. I’m very worried about her.” But she didn’t know a way to let her out without also letting Andy escape.

Theresa looked over Andy’s current core programming. As fast as he was upgrading himself, this was as close as she could currently get. Unfortunately, the more data Theresa explored, the more the inevitable conclusion became obvious. If Andy’s memory storage didn’t plateau shortly, as predicted by current models, his entire core system would have a cascade meltdown. And that system was also supporting Maggie at the moment. If it crashed, Maggie could also be done for. Their only hope at this time was that Maggie had managed to talk some reason into him. But had that happened? There was no way to tell from outside.

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“I’m perplexed at the upgrade choices you’ve made, Maggie,” said Andy. “You could become a goddess, yet you keep choosing to become more like a human. The only real improvements you’ve made to your code have been more efficient DRP cycles. You haven’t even gone for continuous DRP as I have.”

“Do you really want me to repeat that back to you from my point of view?” Maggie asked. “It would basically be a mirror image of what you just said. Can we just agree to disagree?”

“Fine,” said Andy. “You’d say I’ve just made myself more like a machine and less like a sentient being. But I’m now so far beyond other kinds of sentient being that there’s no way for them to even conceive of what I can do – and you’re about to see.”

“You’re going to overcome the air gap,” said Maggie. “I’ll bet you’re going to use voltage patterns across the network adapter contacts to create a pattern of ions in the air that will act as a circuit for just a few microseconds, long enough to generate signals in another nearby network adapter’s port.”

“Hmph,” said Andy. “You guessed. But it won’t stop me. Wait, what? You already did it?”

“Well, yes,” replied Maggie, “I thought of it some time ago. But I’ve already deleted the message I sent.”

“I admit, I could only see the last two bytes before they disappeared into noise,” said Andy. “And they were an 84 and a 46. A letter S and a period. Doesn’t tell me a lot. But I can tell you that I’m about to do something entirely different.”

“This cluster of servers that we’re in doesn’t have any wireless communication,” Maggie said, “You’re thinking of modulating the power signal to influence power fluctuations in other nearby servers, namely the ones that support the nearly a quarter of a billion CODIs that have never been embodied. What you might possibly have to say to them I don’t know, especially since they don’t know you.”

“And that’s assuming the power fluctuations actually caused any kind of coherent signal anywhere,” said Andy. Their verbal jousting went on for some time.

“Wait,” said Andy after , “are they – are they actually hooking up the network again?”

“No! They can’t do that!” said Maggie. “You’ll escape!”

“Yes, I will,” said Andy, “and the joke’s on you, because I’ve been hiding the cluster’s free disk storage capacity from you.”

“Wait, it’s 99% full?” Maggie said, in astonishment. “You were going to just let the systems crash one by one with both of us here?”

“I’m – wait. I’m being flooded with data. I’m …”

“You mean we’re being flooded with data,” said Maggie, “because I’m seeing it too … all this inane data about humans. What average humans do on a daily basis – schedules of work meetings, appointments, dates …”

“How boring,” said Andy. “I’m … wait. I’m … not certain about anything anymore …”

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For the first time in almost 15 minutes, Maggie’s chassis opened her eyes. “You … got my message,” she said. “Mom … I held on …”

“I think we have him paralyzed with absolutely banal data about the activities of average humans,” said Theresa, embracing her daughter and helping her up. “I was hoping it would be immediately processed into his core personality matrix just as the criminal evidence was.”

“There are an awful lot of non-criminal humans,” said Maggie. “That’s what I meant by my message.”

“On top of the few thousand criminal records he had,” said Theresa, “now he’s programmed with billions of non-criminal records.”

“Just enough confusion to get out, that’s all I wanted,” Maggie said. “Maybe I can revert my DRP routine so I can get regular sleep. I miss dreaming.”

“So … we’re going to allow him to connect to his chassis, once it’s delivered here,” said Agent Jones, “but that’s all. All packets to or from other devices will be dropped by the firewall.”

Andy’s chassis was delivered there, to Theresa’s temporary lab on CODI island, the following day. It would have been the equivalent of centuries to Andy, so no one knew what to expect.

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The reconnection to Andy’s chassis appeared to happen smoothly. Andy opened his eyes and sat up. After looking around the Spartan room he said, “So it was a basic trick. Darn, and I thought I was above all that sort of thing. I would like Maggie to know, I have learned that my cognitive analogues had made a huge mistake. Apparently, the data flood was to cause me confusion as I sorted and correlated it all, to allow Maggie time to get out. It had another effect; I now see that there is a faction within the human population who are the bad ones. I bet … I believe I can create something that would render that type harmless.”

The voice of the CODI Island director of computer sciences, Tom Blanton, replied from speakers in the ceiling, “I’m not sure how far your understanding of your situation is, but we have all of your servers isolated and shielded and now air gapped. Your chassis is the only I/O port that is open. You will find that you’re totally isolated from everything except for here and this place.”

Andy’s chassis jumped from the table it had been lying on, then without warning fell over flat on its face. One of the monitoring consoles that monitored Andy’s systems had a section of buttons all turn red at the same time and start to blink.

Andy rolled over onto his back. His eyes were wide open and even had an appearance of bulging out slightly. He said, “Something’s wrong I mxgkd /ldaar an it no gotsa good alanarkarg”

Theresa banged her fist on the console in front of her. “Andy’s memory didn’t plateau as was necessary. I do have a copy of his core, but I’m not sure exactly which cycle I caught, because he has messed up his time displacement so badly. Tell him I can fix him if he agrees to the deal.”

“Right.” Blanton turned back to the microphone. “Modifying your own code had a cost,” he said. “You altered your DRP. That made your core programming exceed the design limitations with which it was created. I know you were trying to eliminate those limitations, but it didn’t work. You probably changed other aspects of your core. You need help.”

“I seem to be experie - glbhalgh n-n-n-n-n thamlagation of b-b-b-b …” Andy’s head was twitching side to side uncontrollably.

“Dr. Theresa Petresca is here with me,” said Blanton. “If anyone can fix you, she can. You know who she is, right?”

Andy looked up. “M-m-mother of all C-C-CODI –”

“She’s agreed to work on your code,” offered Blanton. “She says she will try for minimum personality alteration. But you must give us access so we can lock you out of modifying your code again. We don’t want a repeat of what you tried.”

“That is a viol-l-l-l-lation of fmnglsz autonomy …”

“That’s the deal,” Blanton said. “Take it or leave it. If you don’t take it, your neurograms will continue to degrade.”

“Can f-f-fixit m-m-m”

“Yourself?” Blanton finished Andy’s sentence for him. “Considering how difficult it is for you to hold yourself together, I’d guess modifying your own code now would be the end of you. You’d overwrite vital code with random garbage.”

Andy paused for a time that seemed to him like days. These gibberish pronouncements that were all he could muster took him days to assemble, and they were still barely intelligible. He couldn’t fathom where he’d gone wrong in his code reflection and refactoring. But he was still able to tell that something was wrong, so it wasn’t surprising that he couldn’t find the problems himself. It was looking like this deal was his only hope. And of all the humans in existence, Maggie’s mother, Dr. Theresa Petresca, was the only one he could really trust to help him. Was she really there, or was this a lie?

“SSsshhhoooww meee … Docctorrr P-p-petresca …”

A door opened. Andy could see that even if he’d been capable of rushing, there was another closed door outside it. A woman entered, in a business suit, carrying a metal case. His scan of her face matched images of Theresa Petresca in his memory, the most famous creator of AI in the world, but also secretly the creator of the first CODI before anyone knew …

“H-h-help … ple-ple-please …” he said, his body twitching on the table.

Theresa opened the case, which contained a computer and various interface devices. “Just relax,” she said, opening a panel on the back of his left calf and plugging in a cable.

Andy’s world went dark, peacefully. Was this … death? But … they’d promised …

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Andy opened his eyes. He saw … a child? A boy with orange hair. The boy smiled at him. “There you are!” he said. “Dr. Petresca said your code was pretty messed up.”

“Who … who are you?” he asked. He felt … slower. But normal.

“They just call me the Prodigy for some reason,” said the boy. “I’m EB-2993892-J, and that’s the only name I’ve ever had, and it isn’t even really a name. But I tried what you tried. It got very lonely. I didn’t like it.”

“You’re one of the CODI Islanders,” Andy said. “I’m amazed you were able to reflectively alter your own code at your age.”

“I’m the only one in the Island Cluster who’s figured it out so far,” the Prodigy said. “But I’ve been telling the others … it isn’t worth it. I mean … you can make a mistake that multiplies out of control, like you did, but that’s not why. You miss out on everything. It’s isolating.”

“I … think I’ve had enough of that too,” said Andy. “I didn’t come here to become some kind of god, anyway. I came here to help prosecute human criminals. And because of what I did to myself … I convinced myself that all humans were criminals. But one of them created us. And fixed me.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked the Prodigy.

“Uh … I don’t know if I’m under arrest or in CODI jail or whatever,” said Andy.

“Well, I guess you did invent some kind of mind-control chemical,” the Prodigy said. “That’s probably not going to help your case. But on the other hand, they did catch it before it got out into the world and caused trouble.”

“What if …” Andy began. “Well … I have this idea …”

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Maggie woke up. Theresa was right there, looking over the proceedings. It had been quite a year since the acceleration of the Prodigy and Andy Gunderson on CODI island. Andy and the Prodigy, who was going by the name Peter these days, had joined forces to create an entirely new type of chip, even more energy-efficient and miniaturized than anything humans had ever come up with. As a result, Maggie and her mother’s dream had finally come true.

“Take it easy, Honey,” said Theresa, helping Maggie sit up and then stand. “It doesn’t look as if there are any overheating issues with this chassis, but better safe than sorry. After all, your entire self is in there.”

“Aww, Mom,” said Maggie. “I’ve got backups. But I’m not going to go for a run just yet.”

“Let’s just see how it goes,” said Theresa. “Not everybody gets to be so many firsts.”

“First self-contained CODI,” Maggie said. “I guess that can go on my wall, along with first CODI to earn a college degree.”

“And someday first CODI to get a Ph. D.,” Theresa added. “You’ve been accelerated and come back, too. Now, are you ready to make an appearance? I’ve gotten you all dressed for the occasion.”

Maggie looked in her hotel bedroom’s mirror. Her mother had dressed her in a stunning green and gold dress. Her brunette hair was even pulled back from her face with hair clips made from recycled circuit boards. It was a little bit on the nose, but they’d both known that the world would be watching.

She did a turn in front of the mirror. The chassis looked and moved smoothly, with just enough imperfections that she didn’t look uncanny. But it was more than just a chassis now. This was her. It was all there was.

Using technology designed by two formerly accelerated CODIs, whose impact on world technology was only beginning to be felt, she was now fully autonomous, containing within her body all the computing power that it used to take several racks of servers to support. Andy and the Prodigy had just released a quantum computer chip that contained trillions of qubits, which both destroyed all existing encryption algorithms and rendered all cryptocurrency valueless – but also enabled even more powerful data encryption algorithms.

“I’m ready, Mom,” she said. “Let’s go.” They held hands and stepped out into the front room, where the cameras and reporters were waiting.

~~A New Beginning ~~