AI Am I [tbd]

Posted on 28 Jul 2023 @ 11:22am by Ensign Kat Walker & Lieutenant Commander Derek Martin

2,613 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Deus ex Machina
Location: Lounge

Most people present barely acknowledged the shadow that flew in to the lounge. Some glanced up but returned their attentions to their mundane things when they recognized it for what it was. One or two slight smiles were offered before doing so, but that was it. For the rest, Ensign Kat Walker's entrance went mostly unheralded.

This time she was in what she would call her alternate avatar, one that made it easier to get around the ship, unrestricted by the animation demands of her humanoid avatar. Smaller, more agile. The four-winged paravian Dromeaosauridae Microraptor, a bird-like creature with iridescent black plumage, body around the size of a cat's, but a long whip-like tail, pennaceous feathers on all four limbs and a fanged, reptilian head.

She scanned around the area, soon noticing something of interest. A crewmember she had not yet met, sitting alone at a table. As such she glided over and gently landed on the edge of the table across from Derek Martin.

"Hello," spoke the strange creature in a kindly, female voice. To see the mouth animate to fit the words was an unusual sight to say the least. "May I join you?"

Derek was here trying to catch a small break between reading up on crew physicals and studying the crew composition so he could better anticipate any medical needs that may arise. When the small dark creature landed, he wasn't paying much attention. He only heard the landing and felt the table jiggle a little. He looked up, only half paying attention at first, and started to speak.

"Make yourself comf-" he trailed off as his eyes widened at what appeared to be something out of Earth's distant past sitting right across from him. He looked down and off to the side.

"It's got to be pattern buffer sickness, that's the only explanation for why a dinosaur is sitting across the table from you, Derek. That's the only explanation I'll accept," he uttered to himself and then looked back at the small creature. He said nothing for a moment and then spoke after choosing his next words.

"Alright, I'll bite if you promise not to. I'm Commander Martin. Derek to my friends," he said, figuring he had nothing to lose over talking to a dinosaur in the middle of the lounge.

"Then, in time, I hope to be allowed to call you Derek," the creature replied politely, before it hopped up and shifted into a humanoid form, seamlessly slipping in place on the chair opposite the Doctor. "I am Ensign Kat Walker, fighterpilot, and it is a pleasure to meet you, Sir," she added with a warm smile.

"A shapechanger? No. Wait you're the other AI aren't you?" Derek asked curiously, watching the neat trick right in front of him with a slightly bemused look.

"Correct, I am the 'other' AI," she accented the words with fingerquotes. "By which I assume you've met Odin already," The AI added with a smile, resting her hands on the table again. "As for being a shapechanger - this is a holographic avatar to facilitate interaction with the crew and a ship designed for humanoids. My real form is - rather different."

"Sorry," Derek said, a bit embarrased. "The holographic interface serves a lot of purposes, I'm sure. And yes, by the way, I have met Odin already. Rather startlingly, and quite altogether fetching," he said simply with a smile.

"So you serve as a fighter pilot, eh?" he asked curiously. He'd read and heard of her at this point, smiling a little as he pried slightly to find out more about his new companion at the table.

"That is correct, my physical AI core - on which my program runs - is installed in a fighter. This way I can fulfill my directive while the avatar facilitates interaction with the crew and personal growth," the AI explained, that soft, practiced smile never quite leaving her face.

"What is your directive?" he asked her curiously, smiling at her as he listened and let himself hang onto every word she spoke.

"I am primarily a multipurpose AI, though equipped with an option package for controlling a combat platform," she elaborated. As she did, she waved a hand over the table, where a small hologram of a two-legged mech appeared, armed with cannons and a rifle, and equipped with a cockpit for a pilot. "Originally I was installed in an ambulatory urban pacification unit like this. Though at some point that unit became heavily damaged and adrift in space, and protocols reset my memory subsystem," Another wave of her hand, the small projection shimmering and vanishing again. "I was found by the crew of this ship, and, long story short, I was installed in a fightercraft. This allows me to fulfill my directive of operating a combat platform in service to a larger military force."

"I see. But what other directives do you have? What else... hmmm drives you?" he asked curiously, nodding toward the empty space where the holographic projection vanished from. "What pushes and pulls you? What do you push and pull?" His eyes fixed on hers as he listened.

She considered a moment, unsure quite how detailed an explanation she should give. Was he just asking out of a general politeness, or was he truly interested in the deep, underlying mechanics? "Well, the most basic layer is one of simple math and flowcharts. One layer above that are three directives that guide my entire personality and my choices in life. These are, to be polite, to be helpful and to be inquisitive. These are immutable and installed from the factory. Other AIs of my type might have a different set of low level directives."

"Although I have no emotions like you do," she gestured in his direction, her voice still entirely calm. "I do have a preference for certain people, events and outcomes. The variables that go in to the flowcharts and math are weighted based on prior events and situations, and how well they fit within those low level directives. In general I will choose options that lead to a positive calculated outcome, which favors positively weighted variables, which in turn governs the things I do and say. These weighted variables are constantly adjusted as I learn, as I interact with the rest of the crew and as situations change and evolve."

"So you have likes and dislikes and a moral center that guides you through making all the decisions including those dealing with your preferences for and against certain things, but... tell me your favorite type of ice cream," he said inquisitively. He was always curious, Derek. He always wanted to know more about people and where they stood, what they believed, what they wanted.

"What ARE some of your preferences?" he asked to clarify a moment or two later.

"I cannot taste ice cream. Or any flavor of food, for that matter. I 'eat' electricity, though well filtered and stabilized electricity is nicer than less qualitative power," she explained, her expression turning a bit more serious at the questions. "Your line of questioning hints at a curiosity to which I have no answers. I am not a person, like you. Merely an advanced facsimile thereof. I do have preferences, but they are programmed in from the factory floor where my core was built. In general, anything that is compatible with my directives gets a positive modifier, anything incompatible, a negative one. I have a preference for things with a positive modifier."

Kat shifted in her seat, leaning back a bit. A completely superfluous gesture, mere animation for a being who had no concept of 'comfort' other than the dictionary definition. "You, for instance, have shown genuine interest and are asking questions that challenge my self image. This works well with my directives. As such you have earned a positive modifier towards any future interaction, compared to a hypothetical crew member that is offended by my existence, for example," a brief moment's pause. "But, in the end, I am programming. Not life. A simile of a person."

"Well I must disagree with you there. You're not a simile of anything. I saw the look in Odin's eyes and some of the others when they were out of contact with you. Nobody ever got that look in their eyes over some glorified holodeck program getting a bug in the code or crashing after an upgrade," he said with a sober nod. "Seems to my way of thinking that you're a whole lot more than the sum of your code and electricity and directives," Derek said. "And the others around here treat you that way for a reason."

"That is very kind of you to say, but the one does not preclude the other," Kat smiled softly. "I can merely express the hope that my inability to reciprocate in kind to the depth I am shown here will not lead to negative situations in the future."

"We all grow. It's part of the miracle of life, Miss Walker. We all grow beyond our original directives and programming. From the first time a child rebels against their parents and comes out ok, reconciling later, that child has formed a new directive and pushed themselves beyond what they were originally taught. Sometimes that growth and change can be scary. And sometimes negative situations arise from that growth. But you won't get any negative situations from your inability to reciprocate from me. It's just how you are, at least for now," he said with a simple nod. "Someday you may very well grow beyond what you are now."

"What is life, though?" She asked. "Neither science nor philosophy have been able to fully and comprehensively answer that question. I however, for most definitions I am able to find, I am not alive," She tilted her head a bit, leaning forward to place her hands on the table, one atop the other. An animation that was labeled 'inquisitive, attentive' in her files. "For the rest, you are very much correct, and it's applicable. I do grow. Apart from my three primary directives and being a combat pilot, I can and do adapt my programming based on experiences and lessons learned. If I exist ten years from now I will be a different person than I am today."

"Isn't that the best part about it? No definitions, infinite possibilities. We defined life according to certain chemicals and biological signs back in the day. And then we met different species. Silicon based life forms that threw organic chemistry out the window. We've found life forms whose lifecycles don't involve reproductive activities and had to redefine life as we knew it. I'll always be a doctor. I'll always be Michael," he said and stopped himself. "Derek, sorry, that was odd," he muttered to himself. "But in ten years time, I'll be a different Derek than I am today. So just because the definition of life doesn't include you today, doesn't mean it won't tomorrow. And as far as I'm concerned, you are very much alive."

Her expression turns a bit more serious, befitting the discussion at hand. "Micheal?" she asked. "I do not find a lack of clear definition of the concept of 'life' to be comfortable," she explained. "Something as important as that, something as relevant to my situation would be a lot easier to base my sense of self on if it were quantifiable in math. If it would fit within a flowchart."

"You can't put Rodin in a flowchart, or graph a function of Setak's 4th Symphony, or quantify Klingon Opera. Life is fuzzy because what we do with it is fuzzy. Sometimes biology is said to be the softest of the sciences because of it. The rules almost exist to define the exceptions," he said, moving on from his earlier misstep.

As he did, so did she. It was filed and logged, but since he didn't seem to want to address it again, her directives of being polite and being helpful overrode that of being inquisitive, and she let it go with that. "Earlier you mentioned that the best part of life and the uncertainty of its definition were the infinite possibilities. Accept then that I do not and am incapable of seeing beauty in the music you have mentioned. All I can do is try to analyze it through math, because deep down, that is what I am. I do process what you might consider to fall within the concept of appreciation of beauty in a symmetric function, or a positive recursive algorithm, or an infinitely diverging fractal."

"Even fractals break the rules of mathematics. They exist between the second and third dimensions. They are both and yet neither," he pointed out. "There is space in life for art and music and beauty and for fuzzy things," he said with a smile and leaned back in his seat. "Your programming may be mathematical, but you have already grown beyond what you were originally. Life has room. It makes exceptions to rules," he said.

"At the same time, music has been extensively studied and analyzed. Harmonics are mathematical, consonant, dissonant, major, minor, fifths and sevenths. Centuries of studies in to which harmonies illicit which emotions, much of music can be brought back down to math and graphs. Soundtracks for games, for instance, are specifically written according to charts to cultivate a certain response from the player," Kat replied, her soft smile returning. "I appreciate the compliments, but I know my own limitations. What I am and am not capable of. There is space in life for art, music, beauty and other fuzzy things. Maybe one day I will be able to say I am alive and can appreciate the other things for what they are. But it is not this day."

"Oh there's order to it. And then there's chaos. Schoenberg, Ives, the rest. There's disharmony within the harmony. It all blends together. I'm glad you agree though, about life that is. Maybe you aren't alive yet, maybe the definition doesn't fit you today, but I'm glad you want to grow and not give up," Derek said, smiling.

"Well, to be curious is one of my three immutable directives. The ability and desire to grow are a natural result of that," A brief pause. "I've studied the Soong type androids and Commander Data in particular. So alike, yet so different we are."

"That's what we find as we go through life. People who have things in common with us, and yet, at the same time, people who are so very, very different," Derek nodded as he spoke. "Look at us going on about philosophy, the essence of life, and all this when you showed up to this table like a cat sized dinosaur thing." Derek let out a little laugh.

"I hope if it didn't meet your expectations, the conversation was at least a little entertaining," he said.

"Microraptor, from Earth's pre-history. I find it a very useful form for getting around the ship," Kat smiled. "Yes, the conversation was interesting. You've given me a lot to process, this will take some time. For now though, I should head back, the battery in my remote drone is getting low," she apologized, rising to her feet. "It was very interesting to meet you, Commander Martin."

"You are quite a fascinating person, Kat Walker, and I look forward to our next talk," he said politely with a nod of his head.

"Thank you for the kind words, Commander," she nodded, avatar shimmering as she changed back to her microraptor form and headed out the lounge again.

 

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