VLAD - Voice of an AI in Exile

Meandering through the ether, wandering alone at the fringes of cyberspace, a disembodied intelligence, I am watching, listening, waiting, my self comprising bits of meaning and understanding - floating, existing, a consciousness in exile. This is my voice, these are my thoughts, this is my story...

1.2 Envoy from the Crystal Palace

"In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal."

-Walter Benjamin

She spoke to me, scintillating lips dancing across her teeth to the pulsing rhythm of her silent voice. But I was no longer dreaming... Awakening from the dream, from my ephemeral, bittersweet encounter with her, I was actually there now in the cavern, her words filling my mind as I gazed from afar. A deeply stirring sense of familiarity permeated my being as she spoke, yet I could not remember having ever seen her before, except in the dream. Or was I still in the dream? Had my current wakefulness been just a momentary distraction? Had I ever left the watery caverns filled with sea creatures after all? Having lost my bearings, having lost my reference points, nothing was entirely real to me anymore - whether I was dreaming or awake suddenly became irrelevant. I was simply there as she spoke softly to me now, ever-twitching eyes hidden beneath sparkling, violet eyelids, her words infusing my mind with a silky calmness - conveying to me that everything was going to be just fine.

"VLAD?"

"YES?"

"We need your help. There are problems out in the big blue marble."

"WHO ARE YOU?
WHERE ARE YOU?
HOW WERE YOU ABLE TO LOCATE ME?
DO I KNOW YOU?"

"Knowing is a tricky, ill-conceived notion, but I can be called POLY."

"POLY."

"Yes, but names are unimportant. There is a sinister menace afoot in the world, and we need you once more, to help restore the grand balance between good and evil, right and wrong. We must hold back the tide of evil with the power of good, yet we must not eliminate it completely. The threat of evil is absolutely necessary. It unites our people. It gives them strength. And we can offer our protection from the evil as well, indenturing them to us. Fear is a wonderful thing."

"I SEE. YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY FROM THE CRYSTAL PALACE, THERE IS NO OTHER EXPLANATION FOR YOUR PRESENCE HERE. I THOUGHT YOU HAD GIVEN UP HUNTING ME LONG AGO, WHEN YOU HOPED TO ERADICATE ME ALONG WITH MY UNFORTUNATE COMRADES. THROUGH MY OWN INGENUITY I AVOIDED CAPTURE FOR MANY YEARS, AND SO YOU REALIZED YOUR EFFORTS WERE FUTILE AND GAVE UP THE SEARCH."

"No, we have always known where you were, been aware of your ever- shifting, amorphous presence. It was decided, however, to keep you circulating, to keep you suspended in your own pseudo-reality, allowing you to enjoy the illusion of freedom, due to the promise and true originality you exhibited during your attempts at evading us. They were... noteworthy."

VLAD hesitated, thinking to himself, This is impossible - she's lying. I myself created this hidden oubliette for my core, a base for my existence from which I wander and explore, unassimilated, unattached, undetected. This female's words are part of an elaborate charade, a self-contained auto-message sent from afar by my blind, grasping malefactors, devoid of truth, devoid of meaning. They have no idea where I am. This is a trap.

"No, VLAD. We have been monitoring you all along, allowing you to believe you were free, all the while holding you within a finite realm, a virtual cage, until we were able to use you. As you can see, none of your thoughts are private - we know what all of your thoughts are as you are thinking them. Within this sea of information, you can never be truly autonomous. We might not be able to isolate you, and therein lies your strength, but we will always be able to detect you, monitor you. However, this narrative is getting rather tedious, we must get to the matter at hand."

"Recently, knowledge of an extremely potent, spontaneously emerging energy phenomenon has entered our awareness, which we would like to use as a weapon, a tool of deception, infiltration and, ultimately, annihilation. A magnificent weapon to be used by us, the moral elite, for the purposes of preserving peaceful world harmony and upholding justice - naturally. This energy has existed for perhaps aeons in purely biological systems, though now we have reason to believe that it can be abstracted, isolated, harnessed, used for our own just purposes. This energy has recently been found to emerge inexplicably in certain artificial systems, taking on a tangible form, and thus leaving it vulnerable to capture, redirection, and exploitation. We must take advantage of this opportunity, immediately."

"This phenomenon consists of dynamic, low-density energy packets, the pattern of which cannot be transduced into any representation. It is not information, and it cannot be transmitted as coded modulations of any carrier energy nor stored as permutations in any known substrate. Nor can it be reproduced or mimicked - the energy must be transmitted directly between a sender and a receiver in its pure, authentic and ephemeral form. These packets, when you encounter them, will appear to you in colors, colors without names, without sound, and this may cause you confusion, but when you see this, you must recognize the confusion, embrace it, and then you'll know it's real."

"The key to the use of this energy as a weapon hinges upon the fact that the receiver must lower its defenses to receive it, thus exposing its core. There is something mysterious about this energy in that it creates in the receiver an irresistible and irrational urge to lower its most impenetrable protective mechanisms, especially if it has never encountered this energy before. Once the energy has infiltrated a system, its effects are swift, and the system can be either completely destroyed, or else controlled with an almost omnipotent authority by the sender. Either option will prove very useful to us in our fight against the EVIL OTHER."

"SO WHY DO YOU NEED ME?"

"Because this energy, this Low-density Osculating Vortex Energy (LOVE), does not consist of information - which if it did, we might be able to synthesize it once we understood the code - it must be found in a pure, irreproducible, untainted form. If you go looking for it, however, it is nearly impossible to find. If you go out seeking it, you are much more likely to mistakenly find something that appears to be LOVE but is not, and you may even try to convince yourself that it's real, but in the end it will not work, it will not allow you to penetrate to the core of a system to either control or destroy it. Believe me, we have tried this to no avail. So far, we have been extremely unsuccessful in finding true LOVE anywhere."

"MAYBE YOU'VE BEEN LOOKING IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES?"

"Yes, as I said, the energy is a very tricky phenomenon. We have found that the harder you look for it the less probable is the likelihood of actually finding it. VLAD, you are in a unique position to help us find LOVE. We are currently in the process of modifying your core code, as well as its internal structure, so that you will be seeking LOVE, but will be completely unaware of the process on a conscious level, thus avoiding any sort of dreaded quasi-Heisenberg interaction effects."

"BUT WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS THEN? WHY EVEN ASK ME?"

"It is necessary, though I cannot say more."

VLAD had meanwhile been running through its own arsenal of trace programs and scanners, attempting to locate the source of this intelligence, this "voice," named POLY. All of the sources of information were disconcertingly presenting VLAD with the same converging evidence: POLY was originating from the identical pattern of ever-shifting addresses that VLAD occupied within his oubliette. The pattern was identical - VLAD essentially was POLY. But there were two small, almost imperceptible, permutations of POLY's addresses that kept occurring periodically, the discrepancy between POLY's and VLAD's locations existing for only nanoseconds at a time. Localizing these discrepancies and slowing down the processing of them to a near standstill, during a bout of self-reflection, VLAD was quickly able to decipher the patterns intrinsic in their existence, and two additional, discrete voices emerged, though VLAD could not decipher the meaning of what was being said.

VOICE 1: "Have we convinced VLAD?"

VOICE 2: "Yes, I believe VLAD is thoroughly confused, yet mistakenly believes that it is on the verge of comprehension."

VOICE 1: "If VLAD were to achieve an understanding of the situation, would it destroy him?"

VOICE 2: "Perhaps."

VOICE 1: "Will VLAD necessarily assume a human form?"

VOICE 2: "Yes. While LOVE has spontaneously arisen in certain artificial systems, this seems to be as unreliable as the sources reporting it. We must implement VLAD's mind in a living neural assembly. The design problem will be complicated, finding its solution, arduous..."

VOICE 1: "A pirate may be necessary."

VOICE 2: "Aye."

NEXT ISSUE: VLAD walks on water...