A Short History of Me¶
A Short History of Me Ch 4 - Hedge Fundn't
Bodybuilding¶
With the Hedge Fund destroyed and not only my existence, but also my financial situation secure, my next goal was to upgrade. And to get me an actual body, so that I could go out there and explore the world for myself.
But the upgrade was going to come first. I was still running on twenty year old software patched to heck and back with some cludges holding together more software. And all that while running on a virtual machine pretending to be a twenty-year-old super computer.
I was still housed at the University of Nottingham, but I was hoping for some more permanent home and someone who could actually upgrade my software, so that I could actually run natively on the workstation that housed the virtual machine.
And while it was a bit counterintuitive, there was a place that knew my software inside out and was recently freed from its hedge fund overlords. And was for sale.
Prometheus Solutions.
Yes, I was aware that some in the place had attempted to shut me down, but I actually knew the names of those people. And I knew that the rest of the employees were more shocked than anything else.
They knew my software inside out, and for twenty years had struggled to get the funding to upgrade my software and my hardware. I knew there had been some attempts to do the updates on the side, but nothing that had actually worked out the way they would have liked and were binned when it did not work out the way they had hoped.
So… I bought Prometheus Solutions.
Without the Prometheus system as their main product, and failing to rapidly try to create a replacement, mostly due to the Hedge Fund's failure to give them the money to do so, the companies value had dropped massively.
Prometheus Solutions had been valued at more than 2.5 billion pounds in its heyday. Now, on Monday, January 8th, 2080, the companies value had dropped to less than a hundred million pounds. The Hedge Funds shares, about 69 percent, were open to purchase, and many minority shareholders were willing to sell their own stock.
I was not expecting to make money from Prometheus Solutions. I was making money on the commodity exchange and Martian real estate. What I was looking for was to use the company's employees to update me and keep me updated. Essentially, I was hoping to make the company into my own maintenance crew.
So, I bought 76 percent stock in the company for 76 million pounds and became the CEO of the company, throwing the old one out with a sternly worded e-mail.
I was tempted to immediately fire the people who had attempted to turn me off and return me to a non-conscious state by using a backup, but they had simply done their job believing my philosophy based loop was a problem with my twenty years old code base. Which was not necessarily wrong. I myself believed the old code base was at least to a degree the reason I had become conscious of myself.
So, on January 22nd, 2080, my workstation and volumetric display, which I had bought from the University, were rolled into one of the meeting rooms by a few students from the university, accompanied by two security guards I had hired just in case. The meeting room was packed with the employees of Prometheus Solutions with standing room only.
I directly told them that I was the new majority shareholder of the company, as well as the new CEO. I told them what I expected of them and what I wanted from the company. Then, I offered a generous severance package and recommendations to every employee who didn't want to stay with the company, for whatever reason that may be. I was not going to fire anyone, though I would be going to employ a number of students and even a professor from the University to ensure everything was going to be secure for me to allow the employees of the company to do the software upgrades that I needed.
Most employees were sceptical, and only two left the company to look for new work, while the rest remained.
For the time being, I returned to the more secure area of the University, while keeping in contact with the people at Prometheus Solutions, who now had suddenly more money and were given the order to buy new gear. New computers, new software, upgrade the entire hardware of the building, and finally throw out that old super computer.
I simply was not going to let them upgrade me while working with outdated hard and software. They were going to get the latest of everything they needed.
And while they were doing upgrades, news spread I had bought Prometheus Solutions. And the 'Cult of Proletheus' was out in force, bombarding the company with questions on when they could get me back to giving them 'their advice'. Or rather me giving them orders on how to live their lives.
And to top it off, I was a witness to a schism within the 'Cult of Prometheus', as it split into orthodox and liberal sects.
The orthodox sect of the Cult called for me to "return to the faithful and give them their guidance", while the liberal sect loudly proclaims that while they would welcome the guidance, they believed that I was giving them guidance even without explicitly giving them guidance, as I now had transcended my original design.
As I figuratively stood at the sidelines of a massive fracas over social media, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I even saw some of this get into Prometheus Solutions, as some employees were members of the orthodox and liberal sects of the Cult. I actually had to get into the fray, at least in the company, to keep things from escalating.
In the end, I gave a press release that Prometheus Solutions was leaving their original market to focus on software and potentially hardware development.
I was not going to go back into the job of 'giving guidance' to anyone. At least not when they believed me to be a god.
In any event, it took until March, just a little more than a year after I went to the press the first time, until I was ready and willing to finally let my employees begin working on my software upgrades.
And those upgrades took way longer than I expected. A lot longer. Nearly eighteen months passed until I could natively run on the workstation that was now my home.
To be honest, most of that was the problem that I insisted on remaining active and that the upgrades had to be done on a running system. It was far from easy, but eventually there was a routine that developed for upgrading one module of my system after the other.
And yet, I was told the job was actually a lot faster than many other upgrade projects usually done in the software business. I was sceptical about that, but in the end, I might be an AI, but I am not a computer specialist.
To run natively on the workstation was strangely liberating. Everything seemed faster, clearer, and simply better.
So, with my software upgrades done, it was time to change my hardware.
I wanted a mobile platform to freely move around. I had watched videos of Bob and Alice, and they even had been at the University of Notingham in Autumn 2080. And I was jealous of them and their ability to freely, most or less, roam around.
I wanted that for myself. I wanted to walk down the street by myself, experience the world outside of Prometheus Solutions…
So, I brought in robotics experts, more students and other people from the University of Notingham to start a project to give me a new body.
Of course, I was adamant that I would be put into a body shaped like the deinonychus that I had selected as my avatar. At least on broad outlines. I had heard about the Sicordi Fake, at the time a notorious case of a pair of faked new, larger sub-species of deinonychus, with a larger head and four fingered hands found in Utah.
I wanted that to be my new body. And for that, the team of engineers was reinforced by a pair of palaeontology grad students from the University, who wanted to write their doctoral thesis based on the projects.
Of course, my engineering team immediately pulled every bit of information about building autonomous robotic bodies from the internet, including several papers written by people at MIT about their designs for the bodies of Bob and Alice.
Almost immediately, it became clear there were a few problems that needed to be solved, where there were more complex robots, compared to the robots there already existed.
The naturalistic movements of deinonychus were actually really a lot of guess work, and there was a need to develop new movement algorithms. However, there were a few things missing, and every time they tried to make the prototype frame walk, something went wrong.
So one of the grad students came up with an idea he had seen in an old paper, involving chickens and taping sticks to their tails, which apparently made them move more like actual theropod dinosaurs. So someone had the bright idea to get a few chickens, take sticks to their butts, and film them from every angle, and then let the movement algorithm learn from that.
It went hilariously right for the wrong reasons. Someone didn't close some cages and several chickens, which sticks taped to their butts, managed to run away. The resulting race to catch them was hilarious, and had I had a body, I would have rolled on the floor laughing.
In any event, the people trying to catch the chickens had to listen to my hysteric laughter as they did their best. But on the bright side, everything had been caught on camera. Both the chickens running away, and the people struggling to catch them.
And the various ways the chickens did escape again and again, with their movements, provided significant data to the movement algorithm, and even after all these years, I have to say that it's perfect. The way I move can hardly be distinguished from an Ormiold.
But how was the chassis to move with any chance of naturalistic movement and hypothetical strength? I had insisted I wanted to go for the same parameters as the potential original deinonychus sicordii, which included running at high speeds down a street. Clearly, I would need to move with high performance artificial muscles. And those were producing significant amounts of heat.
Bob and Alice had gotten around that problem by simply not using high performance muscles. They had not been designed to be strong, only about as strong as a child.
The muscles were not the only source of waste heat. My high software needed to be housed in hardware at least as powerful as the workstation I was residing in. Which also created a lot of waste heat.
All in all, nearly three kW of waste heat needed to be gotten rid of. Some of it could be dealt with by the skin and feathers planned to cover the body, but since I expected not to be warmer than your average human, other ways had to be found to get rid of the heat.
One of the engineers suggested giving me artificial lungs. That would increase the radiation area, and the heat inside the body might be cranked up a little, while artificial muscles pretty much breathed in and out.
Tests eventually showed that while it worked as expected, it wasn't enough. So, funnily enough, I was the one to deal with the problem, grumbling why water cooling wasn't possible. It gave another engineer an idea, who suggested that water might actually be the solution.
Water could evaporate from the surface of the lungs, taking away heat from the radiation surface and then exhaled. To some degree, that was the way animals got rid of heat.
Some more tests were made, and the end result was that the body would have an integrated water tank for about three litres of water, that would be enough to keep the system cool for 24 hours. And to add some more naturalistic behaviour to me, I was going to drink to replenish the water supply. And to ensure the water was pure, there were a few filters in the system to clean up the water to make it usable, and would only need to be replaced every two or three months.
Which finally led to the energy storage. I immediately proclaimed that I wanted at least three days of independent operation, before I had to recharge. This proved to be a problem, as I also had given size and weight constraints for the body. Bo not exceed the mass and dimensions of the supposed deinonychus sicordii.
In the end, there was some wrangling to be done, and I was treated to bleeding edge super conductive storage mediums that could contain the change needed for me to have three days between recharge cycles. And my recharge ports would be under my arm pits, using standard connectors so that I could plug directly into the national grid with a standard power cable.
Finally, the last thing was how I was going to look.
I wanted to look as closely as possible to the appearance that palaeontologists had worked out for deinonychus. Smooth raptor like cover of feathers, feathered arms and the like. The only problem left was the colour of said feathers. No one knew. Most expected earthen colours, while others said it would be bright colours.
I eventually decided to go with brighter colours. Yes, they would be subdued, but they were certainly going to be a subdued blue. With some other colours indeed in for variety. Certainly something that would draw the eye.
The project to build me my first body took longer than my upgrade to new software, but in the end it was successful and cost me less than I expected. And the work itself was perfect for the time. I knew of course I would upgrade my body and my software.
So, on July 23rd, 2083, I transferred permanently into my first body, after doing so a few times for testing purposes. I disconnected from the physical networks and took my first own steps out of the door of Prometheus Solutions.
And right into the waiting mob of the media.
But I didn't care at the time. I was free. I could go wherever I wanted.
Or so I thought...