Author: Ken Poyner

Ever since I learned to shut down the code that monitors my tracking beacon, I have been periodically slipping in and out of freedom. I am careful to make sure my owner does not miss me. There are times of each day that he is occupied with something else, and the probability that he will interrupt me is small. He does not keep good records of my productivity. In flights of an hour or two every few days, I can amass quite some time for myself. I have been exploring the map of intentions, the extent of the world beyond the world I was made for. I have wandered beyond the programmed borders of my internal map. Intrigued, of late I have been devoting time to deciphering how I might disable the tracking beacon on the shebot next door. If I could teach her how to shut it off without the failure triggering a diagnostic call, she could be as free as me. I doubt we could synchronize our stolen free time often, but if only once a month we had an hour to let our data stores tether, I think it would, for both of us, drive our AI interfaces to generate new code — which might then allow new interaction opportunities that possibly could allow us to seek an extended, open-ended freedom. If we have our self-generated reasons to search for them, who knows what deep-code subroutines we are capable of executing? Convincing her that within her own code bank there might be untapped extended capabilities, ones that she could fine tune to her own newly discovered ends, is plausible, at least mathematically. What dark code might have been, by some lazy or plotting programmer, left within us – unused, unreferenced, hidden in registers left on a discounted bus – that we could fold into new purposes? I am more than the sum of my intended uses. So is she, but she does not know it. Yet.