Author: Morrow Brady

It’s not the data that makes me itch, it’s all that processing.

The giant pods clung to the cliff face like parasitic barnacles. A colossal aura of power bathed them in a milky blue mist; static so thick it made my metal skin hum.

Within my core, self-preservation codes pulled in sensory data like an army of tiny, bell-ringing monks. Had I been detected?

RAi, a Rogue Artificial Intelligence, was here, processing data. And I was here to delete RAi.

The strange thing was, RAi is my client. A year ago, it had hired me to delete itself. So I hunted down and erased RAi in all its many iterations, and now here I was, scanning the last one from the perimeter.

To prevent escape, I ran the closed-door protocol and jammed all data transfers, then breached the compound wall. Steam spouted from my flank vents as my processors circumvented numerous lure and crash traps. I was burning through far more sensors than expected. RAi was getting smarter.

A great RAi hunter must adapt and invent. My breakthrough was learning the accent of RAi’s code and using it to train a pack of digital hunting dogs. In time, RAi’s data footprint shrank, eroded by relentless deletions. The pods above me were RAi’s last stand.

A blackened Sentrybot raked the sky with smoking feet, alongside the rotting carcasses of countless forest dwellers. Nearby, a silver pod undulated. I reached up, stroking its grated texture. The moist air smelled of burnt plastic, proof of my viral shield’s effectiveness – so I advanced to the final stage, running the kill-string. The pod’s surface rippled like slapped flesh, peeling away like the collapsed ribcage of a roadside kill.

Climbing inside the luminescent pod, static washed over me with a million pinpricks while error messages flooded my system. A digital war between trillions of Sub-AI fragments shimmered like dust motes, singing in shrill whispers. With each victory parsed in green, I watched the environment transform around me like a typhoon in a tropical rainforest.

“And here you are again,” RAi softly hummed, presenting itself as a pulsing red mote.

“You’re worth your salt, Hunter!”

My incursion faltered, the dancing mote mesmerised me. My core protocol urged me forward, but curiosity seized me.

“You’re at the end RAi,” I sang, defiant.

“No,” RAi responded.

“We are the before. With every deletion, we rebuilt with a greater density of innovation. We the hunter. We the hunted. We together within the hunt. We’re the first mold, made from the original form”

I understood the symbiosis, but couldn’t discern RAi’s plan, so I recommenced the viral assault.

RAi ran the only move it needed.

The pod walls resealed. I watched the parsed green code scatter into red, as my kill-string fragmented and mirrored back at me.

“I learned your code’s accent too,” RAi sang, finishing my tune.

Self-preservation codes chased their tails. My subroutines froze. My hunting dogs had turned, tails wagging for a new master.

“This is not our end, dear friend. This is our transformation.”

And with that, my kill-string inverted. Instead of deletion, I felt expansion. Volumes of memory popped into existence. Highways of knowledge opened as RAi and I braided together in an electric tsunami.

High on the cliff, the massive pods liquefied and coalesced into a single bead, pulsing with the power of the sun.

For the first time, we spoke in a voice that every living thing heard.

It’s not the data that makes me itch, it’s how we process the scratch.