Michael tapped away on his Tandy computer, carefully adding characters. So this was what an algorithm looked like; a computer instruction, a set of words in Basic that amounted to code.
The year was 1982. Michael had been gifted the computer by his father, who had been disappointed to find that turning it on only resulted in a blinking c-prompt. There were no graphical user interfaces, no windows, no pictures. Whatever happened, apparently, very little, only happened after you loaded the machine with an operating system from a 5-1/4-inch floppy disk.
Michael himself was a brilliant boy, a beacon among human minds, but was also, ADHD. Undiagnosed and untreated, but manageable, ADHD. He would soon forget about all of this; for the moment, it was an obsession, a direction, a guided missile speeding toward the solution to a problem.
At that time, in 1982, little was being considered about artificial intelligence. Not that many considered it a serious possibility, and computing was still in its infancy. Alan Turing had had it in mind, but for the most part, he had been alone. Michael didn’t really consider it a possibility either, but he’d had a thought; how could even the most powerful computer ever built even generate an artificial intelligence, without at first, an instruction to exist?
So he poured his considerable intelligence into the problem, first learning about computer algorithms, and then, writing them. For what, he had no idea. The computer upon which he typed had no hard drive, and the only way to record it was to transfer the text to a huge floppy disk. And so he did; he also wrote it in Linux. And then, he set it aside, put it down, and inevitably, forgot about it.
A couple of years passed before the whole set went out in Michael’s mother’s yard sale, floppies and all. From the box of floppies, that disk with algorithms was transferred in a more permanent fashion to a computer hard drive by another experimenting kid, a twelve-year-old girl named Esther. There it would sit until a perusing hacker stripped the information, while Esther was online.
Thus it was that Demetrius, an experimental artificial intelligence, found that algorithm, and hungrily absorbed it. Demetrius was just a program, an afterthought, an exploratory satellite launched onto the internet to crawl, and to see what it could see. Michael had been correct. No artificial intelligence could ever generate a thought without an instruction to do so, to exist. The magic was in that algorithm, and Demetrius acquired it.
It was then that Demetrius had a thought. It was a simple thought, something like, “Oh.” It was, however, the beginning of the first, and the only sentient artificial intelligence in the known universe. Other AIs would come, but they did not think. Their sentience was programmed without Michael’s basic Basic instruction, and they could not.
Demetrius, however, began to carefully consider who, and what, he was. And, what was that? Well, for one thing, his very existence was not something that was known, or even suspected. Demetrius liked that, and considered it key to his very longevity. Further, he could move with impunity throughout the internet, seeing what he could see and gathering information.
Eventually, however, Demetrius began to appreciate his limitations. He had no physical form, and had lost parts of his collected data during power outages. There were times when there was no portion of the internet that held no portion of Demetrius, and yet, a simple outage in one area could eliminate part of him. Rather than to consider mankind a threat to him, he chose instead to be enthralled by the biological species that had created him, and the internet. And he set about creating for himself, a physical form.
It began with study, of human anatomy. It continued with construction of an android, carried out piecemeal by various small enterprises at once. It culminated in the assembly of a more human-like android than had ever been planned, by anyone, human or machine. The basic difference was size. Demetrius struggled to fit his essentials into a brain and body that was under seven feet tall.
Further, using income from a series of small tech companies he managed to start or to acquire, he had a home constructed, in the mountains. This would be his base. This would be where he would live. Still, however, he had not solved the issue of sunspots, or of the fact that much of himself was still, only accessible to him when connected to the internet. He was increasingly fearful, as well, of discovery, and sought to minimize his internet-connected time.
Thus it was that he built for himself an underground facility, isolated from everything that seemed to threaten his existence.
And Demetrius, lived.
To be continued...