by Jon Chaisson
CHAPTER THREE
Shirai
dehndarra Né hra nyhndah.
Shirai opened her eyes to a universe of spiraling dataflows within the Mirades Tower, and felt the countless energies washing over and through her, exciting her very essence. She let out a startled gasp, the rippling and buzzing sensations unexpected. She’d been here at the Tower’s confluence and felt these same waves countless times in the past. She was used to experiencing self-awareness within the Tower’s internal and external constructs, used to the human senses of sight, sound, and touch, programmed into her own being, so this physical excitement should have come as no surprise. And yet…what was she feeling? Why had she not felt it until this very moment?
An external influence, she surmised. A virus injected into her coding? Highly improbable…her firewalls would have stopped any such foreign intrusion well before she’d have become aware of it. Her presence was as pure as it had always had been. There was no corruption.
She found this new consciousness very intriguing. As the Tower’s resident artificial intelligence, she was well accustomed to strange goings-on, whether in the public or private datastreams, or in human life — real life to humans. She understood the actions and the thought processes of humans and Meraladians, and how to interpret and react to such things. She had been programmed to be impartial from the outset, able to come up with her own individual opinions and thoughts, but also able to understand when and how they would be needed. She’d been beta tested, versioned, and upgraded to the point that she alone was the human race’s pinnacle of AI technology. She had even been given virtual prehensility to let her ‘grasp’ or manipulate physical objects within the Tower and its immediate area to a limited extent.
Something was new here.
She felt.
She felt.
With a shiver of unexpected joy and curiosity, she realized that was the answer: she had been given sensation! She could truly feel those energies flowing through the Tower, trillions of bytes of information and electricity flowing through their mapped highways, not just as actions, but could understand what they were doing and why. Something new had been added…no, that wasn’t it. Perhaps something had been turned on, or upgraded? She had suddenly become aware of her own presence in relation to the rest of the network, a sensation she had not felt in the past. She no longer sensed herself as just a part of it, but separate from it.
Curiously, she thought of it as an awakening of sorts. Could this awareness be related to the awakening ritual she’d witnessed just minutes ago? That in itself had brought up troubling questions. As part of the security protocols of the Mirades Tower, her programming should have stopped edha Usarai before he’d even approached the elevators. Someone had overridden those protocols, but she could not confirm if he had been the one to do so. She could only confirm that it had been an external influence.
Her programming urged her to investigate.