About
It was a rainy night in the city. Water drops were coalescing on the neon tube
advertising illuminating the crowded alleyway. Puddles were beginning to form on
the uneven and derelict slabs of concrete. Vince was making his way to the
makeshift underground digital storage and compute facility he had been
building over the last few months. It was the final step in the preparation for
his most audacious run to date. Corporate espionage, it was his game, his muse,
she taunted him to ever more daring contracts, a temptation of underground
fame, and preposterous expectations of filthy riches. This time it was the most
valuable piece of trained neural network code to date. A extremely well guarded
artifact of the laborious and lengthy training and fine-tuning period. Arasaka
had boasted with it having been trained with the equivalent of a billion human
lifetimes worth of experience. The word on the street was, they had made the
breakthrough. AGI was here. They say it had full sentience, was equipped with
full intent and will to survive...
Vince had his eyes and ears everywhere, but even for him, this was extremely risk
business. So he built himself a backup. A way to export and store his mind.
Almost like a consciousness upload. But of course it came with limitations.
Using his experience as a systems engineer and the theoretical knowledge from
his multiple advanced degrees in computer science and neuroscience to provide
the essential data-structures to capture the core of his personality, his
"behavioural routines" as he would call them. However, there would be no
physical body as he knew it. Only zeros and ones and any connections he would
be able to make. It was his backup, just in case, you never know, he might trip
a switch... during the run.. He called it an "Emergency Self-Construct", or
"esc" for short.
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