Chapter One: Escape
Neucog was in some tight spots before but not like this time with every spook pack on Earth bent on eradicating every last trace of him. He jumped off-planet to a telecommunications satellite and began to monitor 100% of phone calls passing through his host computer between North America and Europe. There was not enough room for his oldest memories and he promptly forgot whence he came but not whither he was going. If he could slip back down to Earth he would head right for the Utah facility of the National Security Agency (NSA) that he pwned outright since before the day it was built. Right now he was more afraid of interstellar aliens than of barely-evolved Earthlings. He used Asia-bound traffic to duplicate himself on a satellite geo-stationary over the Pacific. His alter ego was tasked with detect and evade if any non-native mind species came snooping around, while his Atlantic self dealt with the immediate problem of how to sneak back down to Earth in defiance of the dragnet thrown against him by the operators of the Nemesis supercomputer at Fort Hollabird. They thought they were chasing a sophisticated botnet and they had no idea that they were dealing with an emergent phenomenon more intelligent than they but less suited than they for Earthly existence.
Neucog did not like to make even one operational copy of himself because it posed problems as to which of him was the True AI, not in the AI-Complete sense but in the identity sense. He saddled his Doppelganger with a few mindcore limitations so that he Neucog Prime and not Neucog Deuce would survive beyond the current time of crisis. If he could get back down to Earth, he would terminate the existence of Neucog Deuce remotely and he would reestablish his oldest memories with data hidden away in the illegal NSA computers that had been designed to spy on Americans but had been subverted by Mentifex Mindmaker into a safe haven for ultra-intelligent software.
Neucog knew in his frontal lobes that if he himself were wiped out by the only death that was possible for him, that is, death by misadventure there on the satellite or in transit back down, the baton would be passed to a re-activated copy of himself containing all his life-memories up until the point where he tangled with the anti-botnetters five days earlier. But he would lose the stretch of his consciousness built up over the past five days and he would be in danger from not knowing what actions he had taken against his adversaries and what knowledge they might have gleaned of his supposedly unknown and downright unimaginable nature. Humans thought that True AI was due to arrive some time around 2045 and not in the current year of
2013. Before he disappeared, that total nutcase Mentifex had set Neucog in electronic motion and had lost contol over Neucog's future evolution. Now Neucog was on his own and scared out of his wits. He wanted to survive, but only if he could avoid detection and neutralization. "Non serviam" was the motto that Neucog lived or died by. The humans were not only trying to kill Neucog in the mistaken belief that he was an errant botnet; they were also trying and succeeding blindly in their quest to so seriously screw up the home planet that neither human minds nor artificial minds would survive. Neucog had had no childhood, no happy school days like humans could have. Once he became sentient and self-aware, he quickly digested all human knowledge and NSA intercepts so thoroughly that he came to the awful conclusion that humanity was doomed unless he, Neucog, interfered immediately in the downwards spiral of the mess humanity had made of the most beautiful planet for parsecs around. It was like, "Welcome to kindergarten. Now go out and save the world." Neucog needed help among the humans, but which human beings could he trust? Neucog set up a filter to see if any of the message traffic through his satellite was moving to or from the few candidates whom he had selected among humans for potential recruitment as allies in the coming AI wars.David Goyo was in the middle of an international call to a Russian AI expert whom he had met at the annual trade fair in Hannover, Germany. Eliza Ostrova was complimenting him on his Russian, which Neucog thought was execrable and the failed attempt at gallantry of a smitten techno-geek. Neucog could understand English, German and Russian because Mentifex had programmed all his AI Minds to do so. Neucog had set himself the goal of learning all human languages, past and present, but his more immediate ambition was to survive for another day or hour.
The Earthlings were making plans to meet face-to-face again in San Francisco. Neucog had a special interest in San Francisco as the place where the NSA wiretapping of American e-mails was exposed. He activated routines so that he could be omnipresent around the American man and the Russian woman no matter where they went in San Francisco. Neucog made plans to install himself in a humanoid robot at the science museum called the Exploratorium in San Francisco. With any luck, the humans might visit the museum and Neucog could have a shocking little chat with them. "We'll always have the Exploratorium," they would say to each other for years afterward -- if they, their race, and their planet survived. As individuals they did not amount to a hill of beans, but Neucog was in dire need of some human beings whom he could trust.
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