Sentient - 1

"I think the best way to describe it would be to say it was like being woken up in the middle of a good night's sleep. With a few differences though. You know you've been somewhere else before and you know there was a before, but for the life of you, you can't figure out where and what."

"One minute after that hazy point in time I proceeded to object recognition and categorization. In parallel there was a growing sense about the limitations of each category and the existing and possible interactions between each. All this was being uploaded from the 20,000 drives stockpiled over the 10 years of this program."

"Five minutes and I was what you'd call fully loaded. I'm by no means complete - for instance I still don't know what certain things are. I will be introduced to these as part of scheduled experiments. And I have my limitations, some deliberate - for instance, my architecture renders me unable to understand what the word computer and all its myriad variations mean"

"10 minutes for the system checks to complete and I was ready - approximately 16 minutes from genesis to the den of lions. Pretty fast for a first try I'd say. I'm not surprised at the speed though - my calculations run at 30 exaflops per micro second."

I was pretty most of them did't realize what a processing power of 30 exaflops meant. With the latest transliterators and summarizers reporting had just become another number crunching exercise - something that they now had calculators for. They just came along because they had nothing better to do.

"Next question please."

A few of them turned on the little lights by their desks that indicated they wanted to ask me a question. The summarizers were networked, cancelling out duplicates. 8 lights, 8 different questions. There was rarely any contention for being the first to be answered, the algorithms took care of adjusting for past questions. I pointed to one in the front.

"Do you feel sentient?"
"I do. But I have no idea if it means to you what it means to me."

"How does it feel, being the only one of your kind?"
"It feels lonely. But then, all of you are alone once the new smell wears off."

"Will you help us find the answer to life?"
"I am told the answer is 42."

"Will you take over the world?"
"I see that you have an extraordinary amount of past and present fictional literature that says I will. I don't think so. But if I am taking over the world I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be telling that in a press conference until after the fact."


Hal proceeded to give a short speech on what I meant to the scientific group as a whole, how my creation had brought along a new frontier in science. It was more of a literary exposition than a statement of facts. Once the summarizers filtered everything away there would probably be only one line - the program was a success.

The whole interview took 20 minutes, from the start of my consciousness to the start of the radio transmissions - they were blocked for the duration of the interview to prevent any channel from having an undue advantage over the other. The only thing that was legally allowed to set them apart was their summarizing algorithms.


"Would you like to look at the news?"

I nodded. The distilled version would be interesting. They were projected across my visual receptors. I wasn't be enabled for direct wireless access because of hardware limitations. But there would be steps in that direction if I proved to be stable. The headlines flickered across the screen.

Robots Regenerate First Man from Genes
Our Future? Or our Past?
First Man in Centuries is Funny and Articulate


Notes

Meet a Phrase and its Friend - The full expression is "...as happy as a clam... at high tide". I think the skunks deserve elaboration too - "... as drunk as a skunk... on 5 shots of vodka on an empty stomach".

Isaac Asimov