Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

He based the intelligence of his machine on the process of sibling rivalry. It had long been noted that a constant challenge and attacking of one’s ideas resulted in stronger ideas. A lifelong bond formed around that rivalry but more importantly, it resulted in a quicker and a smarter pair of siblings.

So he split his artificial intelligence program in half but kept a connection going between the two halves. A binary corpus callosum bridge connected the two intelligences to let them speak and fight and strengthen each other.

After that, he dozed off.

“Professor! Wake up!” A student was shouting in his ear. “You have to wake up. The power demands on your experiment are way higher than predicted. Something is happening.”

He woke up and looked at the clock. He’d been asleep for six hours.

“Professor, hurry!” shouted the student.

He got up and followed the student to the A.I. casing. It didn’t look any different but as he got closer to the black sphere, he realized it was very hot. Too hot. He took a look at the streams of data. There should be two clear streams on the readouts. It was a dense stream of data that he couldn’t decipher at a glance.

“Student. What’s going on here? How many streams of data are there? It looks like there are more than two.” He said.

The student sat down at the terminal and plugged in to see how many streams were present.

“Oh my god.” The student said.

The professor felt something cold enter his stomach. He’d entered the code to split the A.I. and left that code in the temp data bank. It was a tool that he’d left available to the fledgling intelligence without considering it a risk. The two A.I.s had a mental age of three. He had doubted that they could use a tool like that.

“What is it, student?” asked the professor.

“Sir, there are over six billions streams of data.”

The professor lurched forward. Billions of separate minds were in the sphere, listening to each other and learning from each other.

He’d created a world.