Bugzy (Sci-Fi Fantasy)
Bugzy is a robotics project of the late professor Olaf, the swedish neuroscientist.
It was named Bugzy because despite its sophisticated mechanics, contact free joints, wireless electricity transfer within its body etc., it's intelligence was the result of a design bug and not intentional.
It was named Bugzy because despite its sophisticated mechanics, contact free joints, wireless electricity transfer within its body etc., it's intelligence was the result of a design bug and not intentional.
Bugzy was all well planned science projects. It's hardware and software, the result of designing and carrying out rigorous extremely detailed specifications. The whole approach worked well in producing the most sophisticated piece of hardware ever produced by man, with more noveltythe the most advanced spaceship, the approach did not succeed in producing an intelligent software.
Disappointed by the apparent failure of he project it was decommissioned by the government. All the novelties acquired were passed on to other projects, while the robot design was given to Olaf as a retirement gift.
Olaf gladly received his retirement benefits and continued working on the project and for years kept on working on it without any sign of success on the horizon.
His children and grand children were increasingly worried about him because despite being in very good bodily health at 80, he was showing every sign off mental illness in this eyes. They mistook his obsessive desire to build a working robot from the scraps of a 20 year old project for dementia.
He was so absorbed by his work he couldn't connect with anyone, although in the presence of other he would be lost in his own thoughts paying no attention to the on going discussions. When asked about what was being discussed he would be lost or mentionsome thing unhealed to the matter at hand but somehow referencing his project. It could be a line of code, some rule etc.
All these led his family to believe there was something mentally wrong. But there was this grand daughter who believe her granddaddy was okay. Maybe he was missing his late wife, Silva too much, she believed.
When detailed designing failed, he decided to randomly search for patterns of intelligence. So wrote a computer program that would generate this patterns, which were models for intelligence, execute them and assign a fitness score on a hundred percent scale.
He knew full well that there was no perfect randomizer, and no matter how carefully you designed there will still be bugs. Her proceeded anyways, trying something was better than do nothing at all.
For months he let the randomizer try out billions of patterns per day, checking his graph on a daily basis to see if there is any reasonable spike, the pattern that would indicate a high fitness value, but day in and day out he would reluctantly look at that dull screen in that lonely corner and the usual semi-flat line would meet his tired eyes.
To reduce the complexity involved in searching for the patterns, he designed the system to group the pattern in sets, with each set given an ordinal value. For instance set one could have a quadrillion patterns to try out. After set one was set 2, etc. So depending on the processing power he could scavenge for free from the global grid network, he could finish a set in a week or 2.
While the algorithms churned on, he spent his time examining other theories. He set a limit on how many patterns he could try out before giving up on the method he used to obtain randomization, was a modest 100 sets.
On a cold winter morning, Olaf got up late, which is quite unusual someone who got up early at the same time for the past 30 years. The only time in all these years he broke his rule by about 15 mins on his honey moon. Today he was clearly an hour late. Usually he would look at his monitor to see if there was any spike during the night and would examine some weak formation before heading to make coffee and check other monitors. On this day he headed straight for the refrigerator and popped open a can of beer. Walked straight to the stereo and stated cranking out some old tunes.
Sitting down on his work chair still in pajamas, he closed his eyes as he fantasized about the good old days. In today's fantasy, he and Silva were on a beach in summer, colorful clothing, running around in a pair of twenty-something old bodies. They were grad students and the future was bright.
While these images of warmer times played on, with the soft tunes chiming in the background, a moment of intensity in the interplay of various emotions was reached with the result of a single tear rolling down his left cheek from closed eyes. At the same time a part of the screen whose pixels had not been fired moo was lit up, for a brief moment and it was down to normal again. A soft beep was let out, although enough to be heard throughout the room, Olaf was absorbed in peace, like he had never known it. The same peace he felt as he climaxed for the first time with Silva. The same peace felt in the last microsecond of life before death. He was dead to his senses and surrendered to this ecstasy, though lasting for a tiny glitch in time, seemed an eternity.
Well, out of this and back to work, he said to himself as he opened his eyes. Taking a last so of the beer he walked to dump the can in the thrash when something caught his eyes. Adjusting his glasses to get a good view, he walked closerto examine it, as he was close enough, anomaly was in full view. A 98% point was reached for a brief moment, the pattern set is 47.
This brought no excitement for it was merely like finding a fresh path in a thick jungle, where it led to was uncertain, to a lake with water and life or to the pot of cannibals.
With all the coldness and calculativeness he could summon just like the day he turned on the keys to a cold fusion reactor he had built for the Russians for a total of 200 billion euros, knowing he could loose his life if anything went wrong, he sat down at his desk to analyze results.
As he pored through screen after screen of hexadecimal codes, he decided to produce a graphical model of the results to simplify things. On a single key press, staring intensely as some verbose logging information scrolled rapidly on the bottom half of the screen, a curious geometrical shape was developing edge by edge on the screen. In no more than 30 seconds, thank goodness it was a Sunday and grid capacity was high, he saw the full shape, a tricontrahedron. This was the summary of the over 10,000 pages of data that constituted number 963 of pattern set 47.
To an onlooker, this was gibberish but to Prof. Olaf it was the universe. The next task was to transform this data into code that could be executed, and hence a piece of intelligence on man made hardware.
With the information he now had, writing his software was a piece of cake, because he had already designed a design of how to use the pattern to design the software, and this knowledge brought him joy, but the problem now was designing the hardware as powerful as the entire global grid but small enough to fit in the human cranium sized robot head. This thought instantly put off any joy his recent discovery might have generated.
Taking a walk through the woods in about 10 inches of snow, he had an idea. If only he could get some money from his son, he rent the necessary hardware capacity to run a test version of his software and use the intelligence to design the needed hardware tho run it. A eureka moment that was instantly wiped off the moment his hyper logical mind considered the difficulty of convincing his son, the most ardent unbeliever in his project, a religious man who worked in high finance, to fund the project.
This was no time to hesitate, he had only one shot and he would take it. He was going to London across the Atlantic to see him.
Alan couldn't wait to see his father. He was too glad to that after years of living in isolation was finally coming out to breathe some fresh air. His excitement was at its peak as Zoe his daughter ran towards the door to open it for her grandfather. Zoe the only one who believed her papa was the smartest man jumped to hug him as he walked in. He staggered a little because he was a little buzzed after flying hypersonically in a sealed windowless plane which presented a full view of the outside feed in through cameras.
As soon a he was settled, he went straight to business. Alan thought this was a leisurely long term visit but was expertly shocked when the words rolled out of dad's mouth, 'I need a loan'.
A baffled Alan was not shocked that his dad, with a tiny pension just asked for a 'loan' of a million dollars, he just wondered how his dad managed to be this cold after all this years. Alan made a check of a million dollars and passed it on. Then it dawned on Olaf that he had been to straight in his request. A few words of how much the project meant him did not change Alan's disposition this was not the first time he had acted this way and surely not the last.
Alan decided to make it easy on Olaf by letting him know he knew he did not want to stay, Olaf gratefully accepted. He picked up Zoe pecked her on the cheek and let her know he would be back for her. All this while Emily stood stunned besideher husband.
Walking into a driverless cab he had ordered online, he made it to the hyperloop terminal 300 miles away. He used the few minutes the trip took to quickly book a hypersonic jet back to new York. At 5 times the of sound he would be there in jiffy.
In the plane, shaped like a stingray running on a solid pollution free fuel which was converted into electricity by some elaborate technique that depended on its transition from the solid to the gaseous state. Gas collected and solidified again by rapid cooling, Olaf took out his extensible phone that could grow in size becoming a tablet or a fully 27 inch monitor. He tapped one side of the black screen which glowed in the highest definition necessary for his eyes. The other side the phone became a secondary screen that displayed another set of information relating to the condition of the phone and other noon essential info. Which side choose to work in was optional as he could easily switch screens, making the back screen primary and this optional or he could go single screen leaving one side pure black.
His intention now was not to make a call but do some programming. So he extended the screen into a tablet which made the thinner, pulled out his coding app and started manipulating graphical symbols as he pictorially put together some code for the rest of the soundless flight in a private cabin.
With one million dollars in his grid account he had enough power to run his software. Despite the enormous amount of processing power he could now afford with about a 100 exabyte of storage, he still couldn't work very fast without the support of the free network so he kept on utilizing whatever extra capacity he could come across to speed his simulations.
While running the simulations he discovered that the only way he could put so much computing power within the robot, without need for external processing was to build a fluid based computer and spread processing power throughout the body of the robot. This meant that he was going to have to make a fundamental leap in engineering beyond the design of the first robot he built while he was still in the research institution. In his first design, he built the robot conventionally. A skeletal frame and a human like cranium, that could hold just enough processor power to run some local processing, while the rest of the processing was done externally in the server farms of the university and other places where server power could be purchased.
Although his new design required some form of communication with the outside world, that would be through the regular internet but he want all the other processing, reasoning; memory, etc., to be done within the body of the robot.
He came upon a solution to his problem. After he got the grid running his software smoothly, he set out to use it to build appropriate hardware to run the software within the robot body. The software was fully intelligent. Using the internet as a sort of classroom, it learned everything it needed by studying enormous amounts of information just like a child would do with books to gain knowledge. The intelligence that constituted its mind was a kind of simple software. It recognizes patterns, stores this patterns and relates this patterns with other patterns it has already stored. The intelligence was not actually instructions on how to make definite decisions. It was much simpler the pattern number 963 of set 47 was just a simple description of a software that is capable of four things: recognize, store, relate, express. This was intelligence as Prof. Olaf saw it.
The hardware design was cellular, meaning each compute node was going to be a nanoscale cell, and trillions of each cell was going to be immersed in a fluid, through which communication with other cells could be accomplished. The fluid will enable every cell of the system to communicate almost instantly with other cells to coordinate computations. With the cells was a technological wonder, only possible because of the mind of Bugzy was already running on the grid. The software was called Bugzy because it was the result of a randomization program, written by a human mind, which was obviously filled with bugs about the assumptions of randomization.
The wonder that made the entire computation possible was designed at the pico level of nature, thus it was called pico technology. There were these strings of tetrahedrons made of some carbon based material. Two strings of these materials are twinned together to form a helix. Each double helix forms memories that can be coordinated with other helixes to create computations, within the fluid space of the nanocell. These computational model enabled the design of a fully functional computer in the form of a cell.
These cells would now be distributed everywhere in the body of the robot, in the limbs, arms and torso. These were solutions derived using the AI running on the grid. Another modification was the creation of a new kind of body without wires connecting any part or joint. Using a field energy transfer system, any part of the body that needs power, from joints to cells were supplied the needed power.
Olaf needed more money to build the body of the robot, since he could now see that the mind was in order. From some calculations he made, he discovered the bodily dimensions that could contain sufficient compute cells to run the mind software at maximum speeds. It required building a body that was 7 foot tall, with sufficient bodily dimensions. The final outcome was something that looked like an amateur bodybuilder. Although aesthetically pleasing, the intention for such a side did not have any drop of such thoughts.
Another notable quality with nanocells, was that it could be regenerated. As computations take place, cell damage occurs and cellular materials are broken down and reused to make new cells to fill up older positions. The total number of cells is fixed. But all these cellular processes can sometimes result in materials that cannot be used at all, which become wastes, which are scavenged and eliminated by waste disposal processes. After a while the total number of cells reduces because of net loss of materials, after which a particular canister with raw materials is required for the replacement of raw materials.
Bugzy was assembled in the very first laboratory, where the first body from the government project was built. And lying side by side with the older model, some robotic arms put the finishing touches on shiny allow body work of the robot. Within the arms, torso and legs of the magnificent creature, the fluid that held it computational process flowed and tumbled, blue with tiny bubbles some which were visible to the eyes. The visible bubbles were large agglomerations of millions of these nanocells, forming nanomolecules due to processes Olaf did not predict at all. For some strange reasons certain cells were attracted together in varying groupings, that gave the appearance of tiny water bubbles.
Most of the computations that took place in the head region of the robot related to computations that were needed to be processed to deal with immediate environmental conditions, while most of the background processing that were not needed immediately but could be called upon at special occasions, like long ongoing calculations, were done in the body and torso regions. Bugzy would even sleep occasionally when not in active service. It would use this time to perform, background calculations using most of the capacity in the body and in most parts of the head, leaving just enough computing power for the monitoring of the environment in case of emergencies.
If strained for computing power, Bugzy could securely plug into the grid to access the excess power needed for the computations like every normal citizen. Bugzy would generate electricity from varying sources, using the fluid that hosted its compute modes as electrolytes for an ultra advanced battery technology, that got power from the following sources: the entire skin was a hexagonally latticed solar panel, that could get electricity directly from the sun; Bugzy could also get more power by gazing directly at the sun where powerful lenses in its eyes would focus the intense light on a photoelectric crystal, that would generate enormous currents to be stored in the fluid matrix of the body; from the temperature difference from the external environment and his cool interior, in colder periods, this mechanism could be reversed such that the interior layer, just beneath the metal skin is warmer. His joints were contact free magnetic joints, which also generated power while walking or running or making any bod movement that required joint movements.
The coolest innovation of all was the ‘skin’ technology that created a visio-tactile illusion that you were looking at a man in his mid-thirties. Projected from the body, about an inch or so, it gave you the visual and tactile illusion that you were seeing and touch a ‘real’ skin, using electromagnetic tricks. You could never feel the cold metal that lay beneath no matter how hard you pressed, but you could also imagine the enormous strength that could arise as a result of the metal beneath. This illusion did not in anyway interfere with the production of power from solar or thermal sources, it was basically for the human senses of sight and touch.
After all diagnostics were run, Bugzy is now live. This moment signified by the opening of eyelids to reveal the clear black eyes. Soon this will be covered by human seeming eyes with a white cornea and lens of any color that pleased it, or was in more agreement to the person viewed.
The skin color could also be changed at will also, so it could appear black, yellow or white, depending on circumstances.
The live Bugzy would start learning everything it did not learn while running on the memory limited grid network, since it now has its own very power computing hardware. This would take a while not necessarily due to limitations inherent in its system, but because this information was accessible only via the internet, and even with the best wireless connection from the best ISP it still takes a while surfing the entire internet.
The work was clearly a success and the most difficult problem was now laid bare to be solved, what would be the most efficient and beneficial use of such power as would be possessed by Bugzy? Olaf contemplated as the data flowed into the robot laying down on the workbench, eyes wide open at the new world before it.
Should Bugzy be a private research staff owned by him and used to solve some of the world’s problems? Like poverty, hunger, pollution etc.? This would have actually been a very good choice, but it wasn’t necessary to put such intelligence in a robot body, he could simple build a boxed computer to do that. Now he was thinking of the most viable use for such a creation, a field that would utilize Bugzy entirely, limb and mind inclusive. Well at this point the most obvious choice would be to enroll Bugzy as a crime fighter, and like a sweet note in a beautifully composed symphony it came to him: “Bugzy: to serve and to protect”. To this was shorter, concise and much more intelligible that Asimov’s laws of robots.
As soon as this point was reached in the cerebrations of Prof. Olaf, a simulated, but unnecessary breath, oozed out of Bugzy’s fake nostrils. The process was designed in to indicate when the learning had reached a level where existence in the world was possible, but not completely. Bugzy would have built in systems to enable him ask questions from common people and learn things that were basically commonsense in the culture he currently occupied. Some of these things he knew but deliberately asked, others he was a pure novice. This was to increase his humanity and make friendly.
As soon as Bugzy woke up, he was being prepared to go attend police training. Although some robots already worked for the force, these were brutish expert systems, with powerful neural networks that enabled them recognize patterns. Most of their processing was done in a hive mind that served as their central processing unit. This project, the successor of Olaf’s failed project was what the world had settled for in the absence of a consciousness running on human built hardware.
Bugzy was to these ultra-expert systems what a single cell was to a homo-sapien. And it would take only a metal detector to notice that this human looking, fluidly locomoting being had too much metal on it without actually having much metal on its clothing.
Plainly dressed, Olaf and Bugzy walked into the police department, with Bugzy wearing a wide smile he had learned from watching a movie. He waved a few people, the head part of his mind had analysed as friendly and receptive of greeting as it and his father walked into the new uptake office to apply for a voluntary service. The other robots known to people, although dressed in a special uniform had non of the skin pretense that covered Bugzy’s body. They were all metal, with just enough humanly features to make them acceptable to the general public and their co-workers. Right at this moment, somewhere returning from a mission with their human buddies, giving hifives and talking in hall blowing bass voices.
Bugzy smiled as he looked at this crew, but his presence was ignored just like other humans in the lobby. This did not make it sad, he now felt a slight excitement, because his disguise was working really well.
At the uptake office, Olaf introduced Bugzy as ‘it’, which was rapidly rebuffed by the officer in charge. He said it was against the law to address any humanoid robot with that title and that he would let him off on this one just for his age but would not take it kindly next time. After this he quickly turned to Bugzy seated, and addressed him: ‘Goodday Mr…..’. Bugzy replied: ‘Bugzy’.
Officer: ‘Nice meeting you. So you are here to sign up for voluntary service?’
Bugzy: ‘yes sir’
…..
And so the conversation continued while Olaf was in the most pleasurable state of his life, watching his lifelong dream in the process of being accepted by the world at large. He knew that Bugzy would be an infinite force of good in the world, but one nagging problem, kept biting at the back of his brain. The world was advanced but not free of evil, the powers that be would like to utilize the potential of Bugzy for their own personal gain, and he would do everything within human powers to prevent that from ever happening.
Now in the police force, Bugzy had to go for training like every other police officer even if he knew everything he needed to know theoretically and could utilize his body to perform any motion he had studied perfectly the very first time he tried it. He still had a serious interest in the official training lesson of the force. He knew that there were several nuances of the Job he needed to experience from a human first hand, that he would never see in official publications.
In his training sessions, the training officer was Betty, who had been in the force for some time had a particular disgust towards him. Not that he did anything wrong or arrogant in anyway, but for the mere fact that he looked strikingly similar to her boyfriend who recently left her for some Bimbo.
Because of this emotion, she tended to be stricter with Bugzy and was increasingly annoyed at his ability to perform tasks perfectly the first time it was demonstrated to him, and in most cases he performed even better than her.
Bugzy was not oblivious to the mental states of his trainer. From her facial gestures, voice tonality and muscular representation, he could clearly decode her state when she directed attention to him. Sensing strongly that his perfect performance was hurting her, he decided to deliberately inject error into his acts, almost immediately he saw the pleasure this gave her, and continued to attenuate his actions to suit the response he was getting from her. But generally there was this state of unease which seemed to encapsulate her when anything concerning him entered her field of observation, even if it was his test scores, he could see how badly she felt. This one totally eluded him at first because nothing he could do would affect this general state. So he decided to research further. Checking her social media page and any other information he could get online. This of course was done directly in his mind. After comparing some trends and patterns he was able to decode, although with much difficulty that it could be lost love that made his trainer so sad at him.
But he couldn’t understand why. He could see nothing he did wrong that elicited this emotional response. From comparing all the information multidimensionally he could see that he had a striking resemblance to her lover, but could not see why that would sadden her. He was tempted to hack into her chats but his ethical nature was strong enough to repel such behavior, so he decided to go about it differently.
He would behave in such a way that would please her until she took him under her wings as a rookie partner. This way he could spend enough time with her to eventually decode her reasons. Although this sounded manipulative in his mind, he knew the benefits to her would outweigh his strong ethical nature. Without much hesitation he proceeded with the plan.
Olaf not only dropped off Bugzy at the academy, but also made sure he gave him some money to start life over as an individual. Bugzy’s mind constantly fed data to Olaf’s personal grid account, so he could monitor it. He wanted Bugzy to live an individual life free of his direct influence so he could obtain more data of how the artificial intelligence existed in the world as an individual. This was very valuable research data to the professor.
To manufacture a finger print for Bugzy, Olaf had to generate a pattern that was unique to Bugzy after scanning Billions of prints available in various databases, and with this print, he could secure a bank account for him.
Bugzy got an apartment in a low cost area of new York, complete with every human furnishing, although he did not need a bed and could exist without needing any rest, he did this to try to look as normal as possible, so visitors would not notice anything strange. There was even a kitchen with complete set of wares even though he never ate. His favorite appliance of all was an old analog radio set, from which he could listen to local radio, though his sound receptors (ears). Although he could listen to anything in his mind, listening to music from a radio was the ultimate human experience ever, he felt.
First day on the job, Bugzy gets into the cruiser with Betty and they begin their tour around the city. He constantly pokes questions at her, most of which he knew the answer, just to get her to feel his ignorance and bash him as much as she likes. The first day was a no-event. Nothing serious just routine issues. Bugzy came back after the hard day at work, went to his human looking bathroom, sat in the bath and deactivated his visio-tactile outfit, baring his solid allow body, while he turns on his auto-clean feature to remove all the particulates from his body, while also turning on the shower to wash out the ejected particles, simulating a bath. He got off the bath, completely dried out and turned on pajamas outfit, and settled in bed. While his background mind software constantly crunched information, his conscious mind was playing videos of Betty taken during his interactions with her for the past few weeks, and he made a smile of his face while he enjoyed the images. There would be no music tonight, he was in Betty’s world.
After a few weeks of routine activities, because they were cruising mostly through the high end neighborhoods of the city, apart from domestic disturbances and a few kids doing something mildly wrong on the streets, there was really not much crime to tackle, until the police boss decided to form a special team to tackle a particularly dangerous crime that was about to take place in some days’ time.
Huge amounts of gold was about to be transferred supersonically via undersea trains across the Atlantic to Europe, and intelligence information was around that there would be an attempt at it by high end terrorist. As a cautionary move, he wants to form a team of 6 officers, to escort this high value commodity.
A team was quickly put together to begin taking special instructions on the matter and start preparing on how to tackle the forseen attack. The team consisted of Bugzy, Betty, Arnold, Drake, Jerry, and Jeffery. Betty, Arnold and Drake were humans, while Bugzy, Jerry and Jeffery were robots. Bugzy could pass as a human, while Jerry and Jeffery where pieces of metal in police uniforms.
Inside the vacuum tube deep inside the Atlantic, the team were all seated as regular passengers, dressed in business suits with briefcases filled with 3d printed, automatic-assembly weapons. These weapons could be scattered into numerous pieces of shapeless plastics, which on command from an operator, and a cheek swipe with the finger, which will be placed on a sensor that reads DNA, be authorized to automatically configure into a full blow weapon that can fire electromagnetic pulses to disable a victim, from a shape less mass of use objects like plates, cutlery, water bottles, etc. stuff you could easily pass through security with.
The Gold was secure in the luggage compartment like every other luggage, and although its reading was high on the balance, it still was with the legal limits.
This operation was covert, so even airport officials were not briefed on the plan, because no one could be trusted. So the team went in like a normal set of traveling business people. Even the robots, who were identified as such by the scanners, were normal citizens too. The purpose of travel document stated that Jerry and Jeffery were own by a German Trillionaire and were on their way on an errand of his. Bugzy fooled the scanners with a complete human electromagnetic signature so he could not be detected. Purpose of travel, an art auction in London. Betty, Arnold and Drake were on similar phony business like their peers.
The team suspected that those who were trying to hijack the train would be inside it already, as it was known that no private enterprise could as yet reach the depths at which the supersonic trains traveled in vacuum tubes. The alloys used craft the container was beyond top-secret, a multinational effort by several governments, who don’t even know what alloys were used to manufacture it. There was a program of obfuscation, which the governments signed in agreement with each other. The program created a puzzle where all participating parties could contribute money to a plan and a design that was crafted by an Intelligent program, that had rewritten it source code in ways that even the designer could not foresee. This IP (intelligent program) now designed an alloy and set out to put robots to work at fabricating it, in a human free factory. Individual contractors would source materials that would be dumped outside the factory. And an army of robots would carry these package of basic materials into the factor for the fabrication of the alloy.
The reason for all this secrecy, was that air transport was not a safe means of conveying things of high value such as, particular types of chemicals, computer processors for government facilities, biological materials of high value or toxicity etc. Tube was the safest means of transporting these materials.
The tube was actually made of seven tubes in a hexagonal major carrier tube. Four were for commercial transportation, since money was need for maintenance, while two were reserved for top priority transportation by government agencies, one was a maintenance super highway.
THE NEW VIKINGS
As more software companies moved their data centers to the artic countries of Sweden, Norway and Finland, these countries became the riches countries in all the world, because the new data centric world was based on the principle that who had most data, and could compute it faster that every other person would be the winner of the global race.
As oil lost its kingly title, and the price of oil fell to 5 dollars a barrel, because nanotechnology gave rise to solar panels with enormous efficiencies and also efficient ways for synthesizing most chemicals from sugar instead of oil. The spray solar panel was the killer of oil. A solar panel could be sprayed on any surface, making them generators of enormous amounts of electricity. Cars were sprayed with the stuff, houses and even roads. The amazing resilient nano-engineered material was so cheap it gave rise to ultra-cheap electricity,that could be stored in enormous and extremely powerful sugar-algae batteries that could run the whole world for years even if a nuclear winter could ensue.
All these inventions led to a very different world that the world built by the oil economies. The excess corn produced in the united states alone, provided enough high-fructose syrup to run all the batteries needed. Lol.
The new oil was data and computation, and as such the new oil companies were the ever massive data centers that filled the entire artic right up to the north pole. Even with Antarctica opened for settlement by the governments, there still was not enough space to store and process the enormous data there world was producing, from the explosion of virtual reality and other services. The killer application that would one day swallow all the worlds data storage capacity, if we did not think of new solutions like building more data centers in the depths of oceans was VGRAM, the virtual reality version of INSTAGRAM. With the new microdrone camera, a tiny fist-size video camera that was the new mobile camera in the world now, people could shoot endless hours of video of themselves doing every thing from sleeping to wearing makeup, and these videos were streamed live both mobile computer users or those who would use virtual reality to immerse themselves in these worlds.
So imagine there is this star you admire like Kim Kardarshian, although then the star of the moment was Flurry Red, a blonde country girl that had risen to stardom, because of her VGRAM videos, most with her lying on bed, poorly clad and singing. To immerse yourself in her reality, all you needed to do was to put on your virtual reality headsets or swallow your neuropill to hook your mind directly to your reality mobile phone, a phone that enables you to connect seamlessly into virtual reality, and you would be instantly there in her room looking through the eyes of her microdrone camera. The HD (4k, 8k, 12k or REAL these were the high definition standards) was so stunning you would not be able to differentiate between this and what you saw with your own eyes. You could also touch her, if you had a haptic sensor, but that would cost you a dollar every ten seconds. As you can guess, she was a billionaire.
So the world was drowning in data, and there was a never ending appetite to put data centers in the coldest parts of the globe. This brought one hundred times the wealth that was once the domain for the arabs, to Scandinavia and beyond. With this wealth individuals whose wealth measured in Trillions, rose up in those regions, and as clearly predictable, with the level of automation available, jobs were scarce, leading to public discontent and the awakening of a new terrorist organization, called the New Vikings, a band not made of Islamic extremist, but made of sometimes white blond males and females, and other races, who were well educated, mostly had no religious inclinations, but were the most brutal and sophisticated terrorists the world had ever seen till now. Their goal was to attack and seize data centers, owning some for the purpose of generating money to expand their operations, and destroying some others that were too heavily guarded or did not contain valuable data that could be easily traded, or if they hated the owners of the companies more.
Like every terrorist organization, the desire for money was insatiable, and it was them who were planning on hijacking the gold in the tube on its way to Europe.
The leader of this group is Klaus Klan, a professor of Mathematics, Physics, Computer science, Genetics, Astronomy, Economics, Chemistry and Music. A prodigy born to a family of robot factory workers, he watched as his parents were thrown out of their jobs as Intelligent programs that could build other robots were invented. Broke and without a pension, his father died followed by his mother.
The thin, 6 foot 5 Klaus was so embittered by the happenings of his life, he decided he would spend his life hijacking the ‘system’. Spending almost 10years in different universities of the world studying and graduating way before time he racked on honors upon honors, using his extra time to study everyother thing he would not want to study in a school environment. Although voluntarily he made no friends, there was Ivan, who liked him very much and would always interrupt his study time with jokes and entertainments. After resisting strongly for a while, he decided to accept Ivan along, and with Ivan came Sofie. After Ivan introduced him to Sofie, he told him that this was the maximum human interaction he would ever want to have in his life. Ivan respected his decision. Klaus was celibate by choice.
Klaus one day after being forced to have his first glass of vodka that he had ever had in his entire life, told his friend what he was really after. He had analysed them completely and knew he could now tell them anything he wanted. Surprisingly they subscribed to his vision of taking down those who had cornered the power of the world and were not sharing it back. They offered themselves completely to him, that they would do anything entirely he wanted them to do. He also knew that he needed as external bodies of his that could go about doing some scouting and physical intelligence work, while he devoted himself completely to writing the most intelligent computer program ever. He called it BATTLE.
Disappointed by the apparent failure of he project it was decommissioned by the government. All the novelties acquired were passed on to other projects, while the robot design was given to Olaf as a retirement gift.
Olaf gladly received his retirement benefits and continued working on the project and for years kept on working on it without any sign of success on the horizon.
His children and grand children were increasingly worried about him because despite being in very good bodily health at 80, he was showing every sign off mental illness in this eyes. They mistook his obsessive desire to build a working robot from the scraps of a 20 year old project for dementia.
He was so absorbed by his work he couldn't connect with anyone, although in the presence of other he would be lost in his own thoughts paying no attention to the on going discussions. When asked about what was being discussed he would be lost or mentionsome thing unhealed to the matter at hand but somehow referencing his project. It could be a line of code, some rule etc.
All these led his family to believe there was something mentally wrong. But there was this grand daughter who believe her granddaddy was okay. Maybe he was missing his late wife, Silva too much, she believed.
When detailed designing failed, he decided to randomly search for patterns of intelligence. So wrote a computer program that would generate this patterns, which were models for intelligence, execute them and assign a fitness score on a hundred percent scale.
He knew full well that there was no perfect randomizer, and no matter how carefully you designed there will still be bugs. Her proceeded anyways, trying something was better than do nothing at all.
For months he let the randomizer try out billions of patterns per day, checking his graph on a daily basis to see if there is any reasonable spike, the pattern that would indicate a high fitness value, but day in and day out he would reluctantly look at that dull screen in that lonely corner and the usual semi-flat line would meet his tired eyes.
To reduce the complexity involved in searching for the patterns, he designed the system to group the pattern in sets, with each set given an ordinal value. For instance set one could have a quadrillion patterns to try out. After set one was set 2, etc. So depending on the processing power he could scavenge for free from the global grid network, he could finish a set in a week or 2.
While the algorithms churned on, he spent his time examining other theories. He set a limit on how many patterns he could try out before giving up on the method he used to obtain randomization, was a modest 100 sets.
On a cold winter morning, Olaf got up late, which is quite unusual someone who got up early at the same time for the past 30 years. The only time in all these years he broke his rule by about 15 mins on his honey moon. Today he was clearly an hour late. Usually he would look at his monitor to see if there was any spike during the night and would examine some weak formation before heading to make coffee and check other monitors. On this day he headed straight for the refrigerator and popped open a can of beer. Walked straight to the stereo and stated cranking out some old tunes.
Sitting down on his work chair still in pajamas, he closed his eyes as he fantasized about the good old days. In today's fantasy, he and Silva were on a beach in summer, colorful clothing, running around in a pair of twenty-something old bodies. They were grad students and the future was bright.
While these images of warmer times played on, with the soft tunes chiming in the background, a moment of intensity in the interplay of various emotions was reached with the result of a single tear rolling down his left cheek from closed eyes. At the same time a part of the screen whose pixels had not been fired moo was lit up, for a brief moment and it was down to normal again. A soft beep was let out, although enough to be heard throughout the room, Olaf was absorbed in peace, like he had never known it. The same peace he felt as he climaxed for the first time with Silva. The same peace felt in the last microsecond of life before death. He was dead to his senses and surrendered to this ecstasy, though lasting for a tiny glitch in time, seemed an eternity.
Well, out of this and back to work, he said to himself as he opened his eyes. Taking a last so of the beer he walked to dump the can in the thrash when something caught his eyes. Adjusting his glasses to get a good view, he walked closerto examine it, as he was close enough, anomaly was in full view. A 98% point was reached for a brief moment, the pattern set is 47.
This brought no excitement for it was merely like finding a fresh path in a thick jungle, where it led to was uncertain, to a lake with water and life or to the pot of cannibals.
With all the coldness and calculativeness he could summon just like the day he turned on the keys to a cold fusion reactor he had built for the Russians for a total of 200 billion euros, knowing he could loose his life if anything went wrong, he sat down at his desk to analyze results.
As he pored through screen after screen of hexadecimal codes, he decided to produce a graphical model of the results to simplify things. On a single key press, staring intensely as some verbose logging information scrolled rapidly on the bottom half of the screen, a curious geometrical shape was developing edge by edge on the screen. In no more than 30 seconds, thank goodness it was a Sunday and grid capacity was high, he saw the full shape, a tricontrahedron. This was the summary of the over 10,000 pages of data that constituted number 963 of pattern set 47.
To an onlooker, this was gibberish but to Prof. Olaf it was the universe. The next task was to transform this data into code that could be executed, and hence a piece of intelligence on man made hardware.
With the information he now had, writing his software was a piece of cake, because he had already designed a design of how to use the pattern to design the software, and this knowledge brought him joy, but the problem now was designing the hardware as powerful as the entire global grid but small enough to fit in the human cranium sized robot head. This thought instantly put off any joy his recent discovery might have generated.
Taking a walk through the woods in about 10 inches of snow, he had an idea. If only he could get some money from his son, he rent the necessary hardware capacity to run a test version of his software and use the intelligence to design the needed hardware tho run it. A eureka moment that was instantly wiped off the moment his hyper logical mind considered the difficulty of convincing his son, the most ardent unbeliever in his project, a religious man who worked in high finance, to fund the project.
This was no time to hesitate, he had only one shot and he would take it. He was going to London across the Atlantic to see him.
Alan couldn't wait to see his father. He was too glad to that after years of living in isolation was finally coming out to breathe some fresh air. His excitement was at its peak as Zoe his daughter ran towards the door to open it for her grandfather. Zoe the only one who believed her papa was the smartest man jumped to hug him as he walked in. He staggered a little because he was a little buzzed after flying hypersonically in a sealed windowless plane which presented a full view of the outside feed in through cameras.
As soon a he was settled, he went straight to business. Alan thought this was a leisurely long term visit but was expertly shocked when the words rolled out of dad's mouth, 'I need a loan'.
A baffled Alan was not shocked that his dad, with a tiny pension just asked for a 'loan' of a million dollars, he just wondered how his dad managed to be this cold after all this years. Alan made a check of a million dollars and passed it on. Then it dawned on Olaf that he had been to straight in his request. A few words of how much the project meant him did not change Alan's disposition this was not the first time he had acted this way and surely not the last.
Alan decided to make it easy on Olaf by letting him know he knew he did not want to stay, Olaf gratefully accepted. He picked up Zoe pecked her on the cheek and let her know he would be back for her. All this while Emily stood stunned besideher husband.
Walking into a driverless cab he had ordered online, he made it to the hyperloop terminal 300 miles away. He used the few minutes the trip took to quickly book a hypersonic jet back to new York. At 5 times the of sound he would be there in jiffy.
In the plane, shaped like a stingray running on a solid pollution free fuel which was converted into electricity by some elaborate technique that depended on its transition from the solid to the gaseous state. Gas collected and solidified again by rapid cooling, Olaf took out his extensible phone that could grow in size becoming a tablet or a fully 27 inch monitor. He tapped one side of the black screen which glowed in the highest definition necessary for his eyes. The other side the phone became a secondary screen that displayed another set of information relating to the condition of the phone and other noon essential info. Which side choose to work in was optional as he could easily switch screens, making the back screen primary and this optional or he could go single screen leaving one side pure black.
His intention now was not to make a call but do some programming. So he extended the screen into a tablet which made the thinner, pulled out his coding app and started manipulating graphical symbols as he pictorially put together some code for the rest of the soundless flight in a private cabin.
With one million dollars in his grid account he had enough power to run his software. Despite the enormous amount of processing power he could now afford with about a 100 exabyte of storage, he still couldn't work very fast without the support of the free network so he kept on utilizing whatever extra capacity he could come across to speed his simulations.
While running the simulations he discovered that the only way he could put so much computing power within the robot, without need for external processing was to build a fluid based computer and spread processing power throughout the body of the robot. This meant that he was going to have to make a fundamental leap in engineering beyond the design of the first robot he built while he was still in the research institution. In his first design, he built the robot conventionally. A skeletal frame and a human like cranium, that could hold just enough processor power to run some local processing, while the rest of the processing was done externally in the server farms of the university and other places where server power could be purchased.
Although his new design required some form of communication with the outside world, that would be through the regular internet but he want all the other processing, reasoning; memory, etc., to be done within the body of the robot.
He came upon a solution to his problem. After he got the grid running his software smoothly, he set out to use it to build appropriate hardware to run the software within the robot body. The software was fully intelligent. Using the internet as a sort of classroom, it learned everything it needed by studying enormous amounts of information just like a child would do with books to gain knowledge. The intelligence that constituted its mind was a kind of simple software. It recognizes patterns, stores this patterns and relates this patterns with other patterns it has already stored. The intelligence was not actually instructions on how to make definite decisions. It was much simpler the pattern number 963 of set 47 was just a simple description of a software that is capable of four things: recognize, store, relate, express. This was intelligence as Prof. Olaf saw it.
The hardware design was cellular, meaning each compute node was going to be a nanoscale cell, and trillions of each cell was going to be immersed in a fluid, through which communication with other cells could be accomplished. The fluid will enable every cell of the system to communicate almost instantly with other cells to coordinate computations. With the cells was a technological wonder, only possible because of the mind of Bugzy was already running on the grid. The software was called Bugzy because it was the result of a randomization program, written by a human mind, which was obviously filled with bugs about the assumptions of randomization.
The wonder that made the entire computation possible was designed at the pico level of nature, thus it was called pico technology. There were these strings of tetrahedrons made of some carbon based material. Two strings of these materials are twinned together to form a helix. Each double helix forms memories that can be coordinated with other helixes to create computations, within the fluid space of the nanocell. These computational model enabled the design of a fully functional computer in the form of a cell.
These cells would now be distributed everywhere in the body of the robot, in the limbs, arms and torso. These were solutions derived using the AI running on the grid. Another modification was the creation of a new kind of body without wires connecting any part or joint. Using a field energy transfer system, any part of the body that needs power, from joints to cells were supplied the needed power.
Olaf needed more money to build the body of the robot, since he could now see that the mind was in order. From some calculations he made, he discovered the bodily dimensions that could contain sufficient compute cells to run the mind software at maximum speeds. It required building a body that was 7 foot tall, with sufficient bodily dimensions. The final outcome was something that looked like an amateur bodybuilder. Although aesthetically pleasing, the intention for such a side did not have any drop of such thoughts.
Another notable quality with nanocells, was that it could be regenerated. As computations take place, cell damage occurs and cellular materials are broken down and reused to make new cells to fill up older positions. The total number of cells is fixed. But all these cellular processes can sometimes result in materials that cannot be used at all, which become wastes, which are scavenged and eliminated by waste disposal processes. After a while the total number of cells reduces because of net loss of materials, after which a particular canister with raw materials is required for the replacement of raw materials.
Bugzy was assembled in the very first laboratory, where the first body from the government project was built. And lying side by side with the older model, some robotic arms put the finishing touches on shiny allow body work of the robot. Within the arms, torso and legs of the magnificent creature, the fluid that held it computational process flowed and tumbled, blue with tiny bubbles some which were visible to the eyes. The visible bubbles were large agglomerations of millions of these nanocells, forming nanomolecules due to processes Olaf did not predict at all. For some strange reasons certain cells were attracted together in varying groupings, that gave the appearance of tiny water bubbles.
Most of the computations that took place in the head region of the robot related to computations that were needed to be processed to deal with immediate environmental conditions, while most of the background processing that were not needed immediately but could be called upon at special occasions, like long ongoing calculations, were done in the body and torso regions. Bugzy would even sleep occasionally when not in active service. It would use this time to perform, background calculations using most of the capacity in the body and in most parts of the head, leaving just enough computing power for the monitoring of the environment in case of emergencies.
If strained for computing power, Bugzy could securely plug into the grid to access the excess power needed for the computations like every normal citizen. Bugzy would generate electricity from varying sources, using the fluid that hosted its compute modes as electrolytes for an ultra advanced battery technology, that got power from the following sources: the entire skin was a hexagonally latticed solar panel, that could get electricity directly from the sun; Bugzy could also get more power by gazing directly at the sun where powerful lenses in its eyes would focus the intense light on a photoelectric crystal, that would generate enormous currents to be stored in the fluid matrix of the body; from the temperature difference from the external environment and his cool interior, in colder periods, this mechanism could be reversed such that the interior layer, just beneath the metal skin is warmer. His joints were contact free magnetic joints, which also generated power while walking or running or making any bod movement that required joint movements.
The coolest innovation of all was the ‘skin’ technology that created a visio-tactile illusion that you were looking at a man in his mid-thirties. Projected from the body, about an inch or so, it gave you the visual and tactile illusion that you were seeing and touch a ‘real’ skin, using electromagnetic tricks. You could never feel the cold metal that lay beneath no matter how hard you pressed, but you could also imagine the enormous strength that could arise as a result of the metal beneath. This illusion did not in anyway interfere with the production of power from solar or thermal sources, it was basically for the human senses of sight and touch.
After all diagnostics were run, Bugzy is now live. This moment signified by the opening of eyelids to reveal the clear black eyes. Soon this will be covered by human seeming eyes with a white cornea and lens of any color that pleased it, or was in more agreement to the person viewed.
The skin color could also be changed at will also, so it could appear black, yellow or white, depending on circumstances.
The live Bugzy would start learning everything it did not learn while running on the memory limited grid network, since it now has its own very power computing hardware. This would take a while not necessarily due to limitations inherent in its system, but because this information was accessible only via the internet, and even with the best wireless connection from the best ISP it still takes a while surfing the entire internet.
The work was clearly a success and the most difficult problem was now laid bare to be solved, what would be the most efficient and beneficial use of such power as would be possessed by Bugzy? Olaf contemplated as the data flowed into the robot laying down on the workbench, eyes wide open at the new world before it.
Should Bugzy be a private research staff owned by him and used to solve some of the world’s problems? Like poverty, hunger, pollution etc.? This would have actually been a very good choice, but it wasn’t necessary to put such intelligence in a robot body, he could simple build a boxed computer to do that. Now he was thinking of the most viable use for such a creation, a field that would utilize Bugzy entirely, limb and mind inclusive. Well at this point the most obvious choice would be to enroll Bugzy as a crime fighter, and like a sweet note in a beautifully composed symphony it came to him: “Bugzy: to serve and to protect”. To this was shorter, concise and much more intelligible that Asimov’s laws of robots.
As soon as this point was reached in the cerebrations of Prof. Olaf, a simulated, but unnecessary breath, oozed out of Bugzy’s fake nostrils. The process was designed in to indicate when the learning had reached a level where existence in the world was possible, but not completely. Bugzy would have built in systems to enable him ask questions from common people and learn things that were basically commonsense in the culture he currently occupied. Some of these things he knew but deliberately asked, others he was a pure novice. This was to increase his humanity and make friendly.
As soon as Bugzy woke up, he was being prepared to go attend police training. Although some robots already worked for the force, these were brutish expert systems, with powerful neural networks that enabled them recognize patterns. Most of their processing was done in a hive mind that served as their central processing unit. This project, the successor of Olaf’s failed project was what the world had settled for in the absence of a consciousness running on human built hardware.
Bugzy was to these ultra-expert systems what a single cell was to a homo-sapien. And it would take only a metal detector to notice that this human looking, fluidly locomoting being had too much metal on it without actually having much metal on its clothing.
Plainly dressed, Olaf and Bugzy walked into the police department, with Bugzy wearing a wide smile he had learned from watching a movie. He waved a few people, the head part of his mind had analysed as friendly and receptive of greeting as it and his father walked into the new uptake office to apply for a voluntary service. The other robots known to people, although dressed in a special uniform had non of the skin pretense that covered Bugzy’s body. They were all metal, with just enough humanly features to make them acceptable to the general public and their co-workers. Right at this moment, somewhere returning from a mission with their human buddies, giving hifives and talking in hall blowing bass voices.
Bugzy smiled as he looked at this crew, but his presence was ignored just like other humans in the lobby. This did not make it sad, he now felt a slight excitement, because his disguise was working really well.
At the uptake office, Olaf introduced Bugzy as ‘it’, which was rapidly rebuffed by the officer in charge. He said it was against the law to address any humanoid robot with that title and that he would let him off on this one just for his age but would not take it kindly next time. After this he quickly turned to Bugzy seated, and addressed him: ‘Goodday Mr…..’. Bugzy replied: ‘Bugzy’.
Officer: ‘Nice meeting you. So you are here to sign up for voluntary service?’
Bugzy: ‘yes sir’
…..
And so the conversation continued while Olaf was in the most pleasurable state of his life, watching his lifelong dream in the process of being accepted by the world at large. He knew that Bugzy would be an infinite force of good in the world, but one nagging problem, kept biting at the back of his brain. The world was advanced but not free of evil, the powers that be would like to utilize the potential of Bugzy for their own personal gain, and he would do everything within human powers to prevent that from ever happening.
Now in the police force, Bugzy had to go for training like every other police officer even if he knew everything he needed to know theoretically and could utilize his body to perform any motion he had studied perfectly the very first time he tried it. He still had a serious interest in the official training lesson of the force. He knew that there were several nuances of the Job he needed to experience from a human first hand, that he would never see in official publications.
In his training sessions, the training officer was Betty, who had been in the force for some time had a particular disgust towards him. Not that he did anything wrong or arrogant in anyway, but for the mere fact that he looked strikingly similar to her boyfriend who recently left her for some Bimbo.
Because of this emotion, she tended to be stricter with Bugzy and was increasingly annoyed at his ability to perform tasks perfectly the first time it was demonstrated to him, and in most cases he performed even better than her.
Bugzy was not oblivious to the mental states of his trainer. From her facial gestures, voice tonality and muscular representation, he could clearly decode her state when she directed attention to him. Sensing strongly that his perfect performance was hurting her, he decided to deliberately inject error into his acts, almost immediately he saw the pleasure this gave her, and continued to attenuate his actions to suit the response he was getting from her. But generally there was this state of unease which seemed to encapsulate her when anything concerning him entered her field of observation, even if it was his test scores, he could see how badly she felt. This one totally eluded him at first because nothing he could do would affect this general state. So he decided to research further. Checking her social media page and any other information he could get online. This of course was done directly in his mind. After comparing some trends and patterns he was able to decode, although with much difficulty that it could be lost love that made his trainer so sad at him.
But he couldn’t understand why. He could see nothing he did wrong that elicited this emotional response. From comparing all the information multidimensionally he could see that he had a striking resemblance to her lover, but could not see why that would sadden her. He was tempted to hack into her chats but his ethical nature was strong enough to repel such behavior, so he decided to go about it differently.
He would behave in such a way that would please her until she took him under her wings as a rookie partner. This way he could spend enough time with her to eventually decode her reasons. Although this sounded manipulative in his mind, he knew the benefits to her would outweigh his strong ethical nature. Without much hesitation he proceeded with the plan.
Olaf not only dropped off Bugzy at the academy, but also made sure he gave him some money to start life over as an individual. Bugzy’s mind constantly fed data to Olaf’s personal grid account, so he could monitor it. He wanted Bugzy to live an individual life free of his direct influence so he could obtain more data of how the artificial intelligence existed in the world as an individual. This was very valuable research data to the professor.
To manufacture a finger print for Bugzy, Olaf had to generate a pattern that was unique to Bugzy after scanning Billions of prints available in various databases, and with this print, he could secure a bank account for him.
Bugzy got an apartment in a low cost area of new York, complete with every human furnishing, although he did not need a bed and could exist without needing any rest, he did this to try to look as normal as possible, so visitors would not notice anything strange. There was even a kitchen with complete set of wares even though he never ate. His favorite appliance of all was an old analog radio set, from which he could listen to local radio, though his sound receptors (ears). Although he could listen to anything in his mind, listening to music from a radio was the ultimate human experience ever, he felt.
First day on the job, Bugzy gets into the cruiser with Betty and they begin their tour around the city. He constantly pokes questions at her, most of which he knew the answer, just to get her to feel his ignorance and bash him as much as she likes. The first day was a no-event. Nothing serious just routine issues. Bugzy came back after the hard day at work, went to his human looking bathroom, sat in the bath and deactivated his visio-tactile outfit, baring his solid allow body, while he turns on his auto-clean feature to remove all the particulates from his body, while also turning on the shower to wash out the ejected particles, simulating a bath. He got off the bath, completely dried out and turned on pajamas outfit, and settled in bed. While his background mind software constantly crunched information, his conscious mind was playing videos of Betty taken during his interactions with her for the past few weeks, and he made a smile of his face while he enjoyed the images. There would be no music tonight, he was in Betty’s world.
After a few weeks of routine activities, because they were cruising mostly through the high end neighborhoods of the city, apart from domestic disturbances and a few kids doing something mildly wrong on the streets, there was really not much crime to tackle, until the police boss decided to form a special team to tackle a particularly dangerous crime that was about to take place in some days’ time.
Huge amounts of gold was about to be transferred supersonically via undersea trains across the Atlantic to Europe, and intelligence information was around that there would be an attempt at it by high end terrorist. As a cautionary move, he wants to form a team of 6 officers, to escort this high value commodity.
A team was quickly put together to begin taking special instructions on the matter and start preparing on how to tackle the forseen attack. The team consisted of Bugzy, Betty, Arnold, Drake, Jerry, and Jeffery. Betty, Arnold and Drake were humans, while Bugzy, Jerry and Jeffery were robots. Bugzy could pass as a human, while Jerry and Jeffery where pieces of metal in police uniforms.
Inside the vacuum tube deep inside the Atlantic, the team were all seated as regular passengers, dressed in business suits with briefcases filled with 3d printed, automatic-assembly weapons. These weapons could be scattered into numerous pieces of shapeless plastics, which on command from an operator, and a cheek swipe with the finger, which will be placed on a sensor that reads DNA, be authorized to automatically configure into a full blow weapon that can fire electromagnetic pulses to disable a victim, from a shape less mass of use objects like plates, cutlery, water bottles, etc. stuff you could easily pass through security with.
The Gold was secure in the luggage compartment like every other luggage, and although its reading was high on the balance, it still was with the legal limits.
This operation was covert, so even airport officials were not briefed on the plan, because no one could be trusted. So the team went in like a normal set of traveling business people. Even the robots, who were identified as such by the scanners, were normal citizens too. The purpose of travel document stated that Jerry and Jeffery were own by a German Trillionaire and were on their way on an errand of his. Bugzy fooled the scanners with a complete human electromagnetic signature so he could not be detected. Purpose of travel, an art auction in London. Betty, Arnold and Drake were on similar phony business like their peers.
The team suspected that those who were trying to hijack the train would be inside it already, as it was known that no private enterprise could as yet reach the depths at which the supersonic trains traveled in vacuum tubes. The alloys used craft the container was beyond top-secret, a multinational effort by several governments, who don’t even know what alloys were used to manufacture it. There was a program of obfuscation, which the governments signed in agreement with each other. The program created a puzzle where all participating parties could contribute money to a plan and a design that was crafted by an Intelligent program, that had rewritten it source code in ways that even the designer could not foresee. This IP (intelligent program) now designed an alloy and set out to put robots to work at fabricating it, in a human free factory. Individual contractors would source materials that would be dumped outside the factory. And an army of robots would carry these package of basic materials into the factor for the fabrication of the alloy.
The reason for all this secrecy, was that air transport was not a safe means of conveying things of high value such as, particular types of chemicals, computer processors for government facilities, biological materials of high value or toxicity etc. Tube was the safest means of transporting these materials.
The tube was actually made of seven tubes in a hexagonal major carrier tube. Four were for commercial transportation, since money was need for maintenance, while two were reserved for top priority transportation by government agencies, one was a maintenance super highway.
THE NEW VIKINGS
As more software companies moved their data centers to the artic countries of Sweden, Norway and Finland, these countries became the riches countries in all the world, because the new data centric world was based on the principle that who had most data, and could compute it faster that every other person would be the winner of the global race.
As oil lost its kingly title, and the price of oil fell to 5 dollars a barrel, because nanotechnology gave rise to solar panels with enormous efficiencies and also efficient ways for synthesizing most chemicals from sugar instead of oil. The spray solar panel was the killer of oil. A solar panel could be sprayed on any surface, making them generators of enormous amounts of electricity. Cars were sprayed with the stuff, houses and even roads. The amazing resilient nano-engineered material was so cheap it gave rise to ultra-cheap electricity,that could be stored in enormous and extremely powerful sugar-algae batteries that could run the whole world for years even if a nuclear winter could ensue.
All these inventions led to a very different world that the world built by the oil economies. The excess corn produced in the united states alone, provided enough high-fructose syrup to run all the batteries needed. Lol.
The new oil was data and computation, and as such the new oil companies were the ever massive data centers that filled the entire artic right up to the north pole. Even with Antarctica opened for settlement by the governments, there still was not enough space to store and process the enormous data there world was producing, from the explosion of virtual reality and other services. The killer application that would one day swallow all the worlds data storage capacity, if we did not think of new solutions like building more data centers in the depths of oceans was VGRAM, the virtual reality version of INSTAGRAM. With the new microdrone camera, a tiny fist-size video camera that was the new mobile camera in the world now, people could shoot endless hours of video of themselves doing every thing from sleeping to wearing makeup, and these videos were streamed live both mobile computer users or those who would use virtual reality to immerse themselves in these worlds.
So imagine there is this star you admire like Kim Kardarshian, although then the star of the moment was Flurry Red, a blonde country girl that had risen to stardom, because of her VGRAM videos, most with her lying on bed, poorly clad and singing. To immerse yourself in her reality, all you needed to do was to put on your virtual reality headsets or swallow your neuropill to hook your mind directly to your reality mobile phone, a phone that enables you to connect seamlessly into virtual reality, and you would be instantly there in her room looking through the eyes of her microdrone camera. The HD (4k, 8k, 12k or REAL these were the high definition standards) was so stunning you would not be able to differentiate between this and what you saw with your own eyes. You could also touch her, if you had a haptic sensor, but that would cost you a dollar every ten seconds. As you can guess, she was a billionaire.
So the world was drowning in data, and there was a never ending appetite to put data centers in the coldest parts of the globe. This brought one hundred times the wealth that was once the domain for the arabs, to Scandinavia and beyond. With this wealth individuals whose wealth measured in Trillions, rose up in those regions, and as clearly predictable, with the level of automation available, jobs were scarce, leading to public discontent and the awakening of a new terrorist organization, called the New Vikings, a band not made of Islamic extremist, but made of sometimes white blond males and females, and other races, who were well educated, mostly had no religious inclinations, but were the most brutal and sophisticated terrorists the world had ever seen till now. Their goal was to attack and seize data centers, owning some for the purpose of generating money to expand their operations, and destroying some others that were too heavily guarded or did not contain valuable data that could be easily traded, or if they hated the owners of the companies more.
Like every terrorist organization, the desire for money was insatiable, and it was them who were planning on hijacking the gold in the tube on its way to Europe.
The leader of this group is Klaus Klan, a professor of Mathematics, Physics, Computer science, Genetics, Astronomy, Economics, Chemistry and Music. A prodigy born to a family of robot factory workers, he watched as his parents were thrown out of their jobs as Intelligent programs that could build other robots were invented. Broke and without a pension, his father died followed by his mother.
The thin, 6 foot 5 Klaus was so embittered by the happenings of his life, he decided he would spend his life hijacking the ‘system’. Spending almost 10years in different universities of the world studying and graduating way before time he racked on honors upon honors, using his extra time to study everyother thing he would not want to study in a school environment. Although voluntarily he made no friends, there was Ivan, who liked him very much and would always interrupt his study time with jokes and entertainments. After resisting strongly for a while, he decided to accept Ivan along, and with Ivan came Sofie. After Ivan introduced him to Sofie, he told him that this was the maximum human interaction he would ever want to have in his life. Ivan respected his decision. Klaus was celibate by choice.
Klaus one day after being forced to have his first glass of vodka that he had ever had in his entire life, told his friend what he was really after. He had analysed them completely and knew he could now tell them anything he wanted. Surprisingly they subscribed to his vision of taking down those who had cornered the power of the world and were not sharing it back. They offered themselves completely to him, that they would do anything entirely he wanted them to do. He also knew that he needed as external bodies of his that could go about doing some scouting and physical intelligence work, while he devoted himself completely to writing the most intelligent computer program ever. He called it BATTLE.
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