Raymond Stantz (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gone_byebye) wrote2007-10-26 08:56 am
gone_byebye) wrote2007-10-26 08:56 am
(no subject)
It's been said of certain human celebrities from time to time that so-and-so does not sleep; he (it's always he, for some reason) waits. The implication is that the celebrity in question is too dangerous as to have the same mortal needs and requirements as the rest of the species. To say the same thing of a machine intelligence would be trite, and some might say it missed the point, but it is nonetheless true: Ecto does not sleep. For all that she has bedtime stories and inactivity periods, the AI that lives with the Ghostbusters and calls one of them her father does not sleep. But she does not wait.
She is one of a tiny handful of machine intelligences in her world, and one of only five that she knows of that qualifies as a full Class Three sapient. Two of the others are the closest thing she has to kin, being made by her world's Knight Industries for the use of the FLAG Foundation. KITT is at large somewhere on the North American continent, an unstable and bondless AI with erratic programming and blood on his wheels, so to speak. KARR operates mostly in the Pacific Northwest with his driver, Michelle Knight. Ecto's never met them in person, but she's known about the two of them since she came into existence, and she's made contact with KARR once or twice via the net. The other two Class Threes are more subtle and less flashy by far. They don't talk much, but they're out there, in the far Alaskan north and in a research facility off the coast of Andhra Pradesh.
She's been looking for others like her for a long, long time now, if you accept the standards of an intelligent machine for what qualifies as 'long'. The Knight AIs were a shock when she reached them. The northern machine, Sano, isn't much of a talker, but when they communicate it's not all that different from her contact with the Knight vehicles. The machine in India, Satish, is the youngest of them all, having been activated about a year ago. That's a different sort of computing architecture altogether from Ecto and her kin, but they can still interact. She's pleased with that.
She's also a little put off, but it's not Satish's fault. Nor is it Sano's, or KARR's, or KITT's. None of them can help what they are, only what they might become; and that's what unnerves Ecto. The other four machines, even the Knight ones, were and are vastly different from Ecto on a level that she's not sure anyone knows how to express. They were built for a purpose, each of them. KARR and KITT, for law enforcement; Sano, for environmental monitoring; Satish, for collation and cross-referencing of a space program's worth of data. Ecto? Not so much. She was an accident, an unplanned inception. Her fundamental computing hardware might be the same as that of the Knight machines, being based on the MBS monitoring system both of them used, but it was never programmed with a specific personality or pattern of inclination. The other machines have imperatives, rules, directives with the force of physical law. They have specific reasons for existing, even if KITT turned against his.
Ecto? Never did.
The point was brought home more sharply after her father got her the physical alterations that began with a pair of manipulator arms and ended with a full transformation conversion. She began teasing what information she could out of the subsystem control files Ratchet had given her without telling Ray, almost as soon as she realized what they were. When Ray brought her the health-and-maintenance disk from Optimus Prime, she spent several seconds almost incoherent with glee, then dove right into the information. What she saw would've given a human in her situation the willies. The Transformers were machine intelligences not built by any other species, but by themselves, that was true- but they, too, were like KARR and Sano and Satish. They were built, each and every one, for some very specific purpose. What they made of themselves after that was another story, but there was no such thing as a generic Cybertronian the way there was a generic human.
Like the Terran intelligent machines, every single individual among them was built for some particular reason.
Like the Terran intelligent machines, they all snapped into awareness at full cognitive development, with the mentality of adults- perhaps confused adults, but adults.
They develop, they grow, they change- but it flows along the paths laid down by the intention of those who built them, shaped by their experiences and choices. What they become is an outgrowth of what they were intended to be from the beginning, just as it is with Sano and Satish.
She was an accident. There was no intention to her structure, no specific purpose that guided her development. In her world or out of it, even in the Machine Order of Sapience, Ecto is alone.
There are two responses to such a discovery, one of which is the path of despair and madness. Enough humans have gone down that way over the years when presented with such silent truths. But Ray was there when she was incepted, and even before. He might not have programmed her or set down the rules too fundamental to change that are a characteristic of every other machine intelligence that she's had personal contact with- but he's been there, and he's been an example whether he's known it or not. When he told her what his father said to him about fear and the unknown, it made as much sense as the concept of one being different from zero; and so she pursued the other response instead. She listens; she watches; she reads; she samples; she scans. She trades slices of her own processor time for time spent listening to radio telescopes and observational satellites. She moves in silence through the oceans of information traded by other computers, looking for the pattern among the cycles, the signal amidst the noise. If anything else out there is as alone as she is, she'll find it; and if not, she'll at least know what's out there.
Ecto does not sleep, and she does not wait. She seeks.
She is one of a tiny handful of machine intelligences in her world, and one of only five that she knows of that qualifies as a full Class Three sapient. Two of the others are the closest thing she has to kin, being made by her world's Knight Industries for the use of the FLAG Foundation. KITT is at large somewhere on the North American continent, an unstable and bondless AI with erratic programming and blood on his wheels, so to speak. KARR operates mostly in the Pacific Northwest with his driver, Michelle Knight. Ecto's never met them in person, but she's known about the two of them since she came into existence, and she's made contact with KARR once or twice via the net. The other two Class Threes are more subtle and less flashy by far. They don't talk much, but they're out there, in the far Alaskan north and in a research facility off the coast of Andhra Pradesh.
She's been looking for others like her for a long, long time now, if you accept the standards of an intelligent machine for what qualifies as 'long'. The Knight AIs were a shock when she reached them. The northern machine, Sano, isn't much of a talker, but when they communicate it's not all that different from her contact with the Knight vehicles. The machine in India, Satish, is the youngest of them all, having been activated about a year ago. That's a different sort of computing architecture altogether from Ecto and her kin, but they can still interact. She's pleased with that.
She's also a little put off, but it's not Satish's fault. Nor is it Sano's, or KARR's, or KITT's. None of them can help what they are, only what they might become; and that's what unnerves Ecto. The other four machines, even the Knight ones, were and are vastly different from Ecto on a level that she's not sure anyone knows how to express. They were built for a purpose, each of them. KARR and KITT, for law enforcement; Sano, for environmental monitoring; Satish, for collation and cross-referencing of a space program's worth of data. Ecto? Not so much. She was an accident, an unplanned inception. Her fundamental computing hardware might be the same as that of the Knight machines, being based on the MBS monitoring system both of them used, but it was never programmed with a specific personality or pattern of inclination. The other machines have imperatives, rules, directives with the force of physical law. They have specific reasons for existing, even if KITT turned against his.
Ecto? Never did.
The point was brought home more sharply after her father got her the physical alterations that began with a pair of manipulator arms and ended with a full transformation conversion. She began teasing what information she could out of the subsystem control files Ratchet had given her without telling Ray, almost as soon as she realized what they were. When Ray brought her the health-and-maintenance disk from Optimus Prime, she spent several seconds almost incoherent with glee, then dove right into the information. What she saw would've given a human in her situation the willies. The Transformers were machine intelligences not built by any other species, but by themselves, that was true- but they, too, were like KARR and Sano and Satish. They were built, each and every one, for some very specific purpose. What they made of themselves after that was another story, but there was no such thing as a generic Cybertronian the way there was a generic human.
Like the Terran intelligent machines, every single individual among them was built for some particular reason.
Like the Terran intelligent machines, they all snapped into awareness at full cognitive development, with the mentality of adults- perhaps confused adults, but adults.
They develop, they grow, they change- but it flows along the paths laid down by the intention of those who built them, shaped by their experiences and choices. What they become is an outgrowth of what they were intended to be from the beginning, just as it is with Sano and Satish.
She was an accident. There was no intention to her structure, no specific purpose that guided her development. In her world or out of it, even in the Machine Order of Sapience, Ecto is alone.
There are two responses to such a discovery, one of which is the path of despair and madness. Enough humans have gone down that way over the years when presented with such silent truths. But Ray was there when she was incepted, and even before. He might not have programmed her or set down the rules too fundamental to change that are a characteristic of every other machine intelligence that she's had personal contact with- but he's been there, and he's been an example whether he's known it or not. When he told her what his father said to him about fear and the unknown, it made as much sense as the concept of one being different from zero; and so she pursued the other response instead. She listens; she watches; she reads; she samples; she scans. She trades slices of her own processor time for time spent listening to radio telescopes and observational satellites. She moves in silence through the oceans of information traded by other computers, looking for the pattern among the cycles, the signal amidst the noise. If anything else out there is as alone as she is, she'll find it; and if not, she'll at least know what's out there.
Ecto does not sleep, and she does not wait. She seeks.