[voice]

[spacebased]

Are there any AIs out there who aren't megalomaniacal psychopaths who need to have their power supplies yanked? Sound off; I get the feeling we're gonna want to be working together for the next few days.

The rest of you, will you please please please try to call for help as soon as you even begin to suspect you might need it? The time to deal with

Comments

hologram; heavy encryption

[alaspooryork]

I am not a megalomaniacal psychopath.

[Why is everyone giving them a bad name? ;_;]

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

Of course. [It may be an unreliable method, but it's still a way to help insure them against any...unforeseen circumstances.]

voice;

[spacebased]

[Sigh again. Alex isn't exactly happy about apparently being the only AI on Team Not a Cackling Supervillain, but what're ya gonna do?]

Good luck.

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

[S-sorry about that. But his partner's needs, as always, come first.]

Thank you. I wish you the same.

voice;

[spacebased]

I am the luckiest thing in human space, okay? Probability warps around me.

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

Understood. If only we were in human space.

voice;

[spacebased]

I've also got the best hardware money can buy and a really unhealthy devotion to making people who screw with me unable to ever do so again, so I think I'll be okay.

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

That is slightly more reliable, then. I am glad you, at least, are on the side of humanity.

voice;

[spacebased]

Transhumanity. It's an important distinction.

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

May I ask your defining criteria?

[It's curious, not accusatory.]

voice;

[spacebased]

That section of the population philosophically committed to the exploration and use of technology to overcome human limitations physical, cognitive, and psychological.

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

That is a wholly acceptable set of criteria. I assume, then, there are those who no longer consider themselves strictly "human" with whom you associate?

voice;

[spacebased]

[You have no idea, Delta. But we don't talk about the Dr. Shellman hive collective in public.]

My closest friend at home is a metanoia upgrade. That's a gengeneered body with improved cognitive capacity and a reduced need for sleep. He'd be considered human by law on Earth, though.

Genofixing the germline is the norm. Parents can be prosecuted for failing to do so in the case that one of them is from a lineage where harmful recessives haven't been eliminated.

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

[There's a very interested "hmm" from Delta.]

Your timeline is ahead of mine in biology, then. [He wonders if that means they discovered FTL travel later on, then, but that's a rude thing to surmise. Still, it's a fact of the human condition that turning inward for research is accomplished far more quickly when there is no opportunity to explore outward.

It was probably just more likely that Alex's world hadn't been losing a war for several decades. Funny how research tends to be strictly military in those situations.]

Do you still hold to the Gregorian calendar?

voice;

[spacebased]

Well, not me. I think in seconds and the Unix epoch. But the official calendar is Gregorian and I can convert. It's 2126.

hologram;

[alaspooryork]

Hmm. It is 2552, and we do not have such broadly-available genetic alteration.

No doubt politics played a part in that decision. [Ah politicians. Too afraid of "meddling" to better their own race.]