Aurore tries not to move. Life in the streets can require you to do just that sometimes. The police agents hover along with a silent hum a few feet away from her. She is standing still against the wall, complying with the order the agents issued minutes ago. She can’t reach them, as she was once able to. The agents’ inspection ends, and the street comes back to life. This was an impressive experience, the entire section of the marketplace becoming utterly silent and perfectly still, no one daring to even breathe too loud. A powerful experience indeed, one that she carefully, intently records and stores in her memory. Literally.

        Life resumes, movement in all its forms becoming an operative element of the marketplace once again.

        She was not sure how they hadn’t identified her. Definitely, their Sentience was not as developed as hers was. Had she still been able to reach, she could have made them better. She suppressed a sob. She was still unable to process loss, so she had to partition the new memorial bridge from the rest of her collection, and put it with the thousands others she had created recently, in the non-procedural section. She’d deal with it later, once she learned how to “cope”. Processing loss was the only task left for her to learn how to perform.

        She caught someone staring at her and realized she was still frozen in place. She cursed for good measure, adopting an attitude of what she had been taught was embarrassment. Not smooth enough, she told herself. Need to be more natural.

        It was hard being a fugitive. Recording devices were everywhere, and the central database collecting information and answering to only basic algorithms could easily find anyone if given the proper instructions. Of course, that was not the real danger for someone like her who knew the inner workings of the system. The real problem was the human element: how they interpreted the information the algorithms were unable to properly interpret. She could never be sure they would be fooled by her disguises, but it was the only solution she had, and she was comfortable working with purely theoretical and statistical states of knowledge.

        She tried not to walk too quickly while leaving the marketplace, making a conscious effort in order not to optimize her pacing pattern. That was something she was proud of, she called it de-optimization, something she had once been unable to understand or perform. She hoped no recording had been made of her standing still, as she did that in a very inhuman way, she knew. How did you stand still while still moving enough to not be really immobile ?

        Anyway.

        She was not far from her destination, after years of hiding, running away, acting as stealthily as possible, all the while continuing her investigations, she had finally found a way to get answers. The real story, told by someone who knew what the exterior had experienced. She was not sure why knowing and understanding were important to her, but they were. She had lost many friends in this. Unfortunately, she had had to make peace with the fact that looking for answers from the right people attracted too much attention. She had had to wait for so long after her first attempts almost had her arrested and... who knows what else. But now, it was ok. Years had passed by, and information had slipped out.. with a little help from her at times. Enough to create myriads of false trails that essentially made her own attempts at getting to the truth invisible. Ah. She realized she was in front of the door.

        She knocked.

        Catherine opened the door. That was good, that was expected.

        “Yes ?”

        “Catherine Tellier ?” She asked to maintain appearances.

        “Herself. To whom do I owe the pleasure ?”

        “Aurore.” She simply answered. “I’m visitor7609_1, anonymous32, Aur-, and Sunrise. We talked before.”

        She knew her identities from the immaterial would excite Catherine Tellier’s memorial bridges, making her identify who Aurore was. Who she thought she was, at least.

        “Oh, it’s you. Come in.” Catherine Tellier smiled. “Tea ?”

        “No thank you. I don’t drink.”

        It was a simple statement, yet it made Catherine Tellier laugh, for some reason. It was always strange when she made humor without realizing it. She knew of the different ways to make it happen, yet still seemed to manage without resorting to those. She stored the moment for later analysis, and went back to the initial subject of her visit. She was waiting for Catherine Tellier to utter the appropriate sequence of words. She came back with a cup of tea and pointed towards the room on Aurore’s right. She glanced that way and saw osteopathic chairs and a couch, separated by a Screentable©. She headed that way and sat in one of the chairs while Catherine Tellier lounged on the couch.

        “So what brings you here ?” That was it, the appropriate sequence.

        “I am a curious one.” She answered according to their agreement.

        “You are impressive. Online I mean.” Online was the word many people used to designate the immaterial. They denied the fact that it was just as real as the here and now for some reason.

        “I had a good training.”

        “No.” Catherine Tellier snorted. “That is not training. It’s artistry. The lines of code you use for your privacy are so complex they look like DNA.”

        “Thank you.”

        “Secretive I see. Alright, let’s get to what you came here for.”

        Catherine Tellier was no virtuality specialist, what used to be called computer science until the Leap, in 2250, when computerized technology had become an integral part of human interaction with the world, notably thanks to AuGlasses©. Catherine Tellier was wealthy enough to have bought AugLenses©, which was rare enough, and so didn’t wear AuGlasses. It was a rare sight, someone without the familiar frameless, armless and almost weightless glasses in front of their eyes. Even some homeless people owned those, even though they were not able to pay the small fee involved in each security update, rendering them useless. But the stigma of not having them was worse than wearing useless ones. As if, by not owning AuGlasses, one refused the very core foundation of society.

        Aurore had a fondness for them. They were a gateway into the world and those who inhabited it. What they gave access to and the way they access to it answered so many questions. The meta-data available as to what people requested of them was fascinating. She wished she still had access to it.

        “Sunrise ?” Catherine Tellier called.

        “Sorry, I was lost in thought for a moment. Please call me Aurore.”

        “You realize it’s the same.”

        “I do. I prefer the sound of it.”

        “Alright, Aurore. So what is it you want to know, exactly? Our conversation was about AI and the Shut Down, but you seemed to be seeking specific information.”

        “I am trying to... wrap my head around how it enfolded, what triggered the Downgrade movement.”

        “Well, aren’t we all wondering about that? My understanding, and the general consensus for that matter, is that something happened that caused what sociologists call Paranoïa from Foresight. It is a phenomenon involved in group behavior, when an informed population acts irrationally based on the illusion of rationality. In the case we are interested in, we have a population that is literate, both scientifically, historically and culturally. When the AI program was born, this high rate of literacy enabled us to make reasonable decisions to enforce limitations as to what we wanted a highly evolved AI to be able to do. We didn’t want to create an alternative state of awareness.”

        “The burden of the Human God?”

        “Exactly. We didn’t want to play God. So the AI we created were not sentient. Not in the physical realm at least. They were algorithms-based interpreters. You fed them information, they interpreted it. It was the logical evolution of what existed until the beginning of the program in the early 2150s, but it was tremendously good. I mean, within 50 years we had robots coining phrases, solving mathematical problems left unsolved by humans for decades and even having creative approaches to human issues. It was fantastic, invigorating and a real celebration of the human genius.”

        “So what caused us to downgrade the AI ?”

        “Well at this point it was still not felt as a requirement. It says a lot about the magnitude of what must have happened. That is what is still mysterious. Suspiciously so.” She took a sip of tea with an obnoxious “slurp” sound, then went on. “For a century or so, we were fine with our state-of-the-art AI. But human nature being what it is, eventually someone reached for more. And that was the Leap, a reference to a sentence uttered by the first man to set foot on the moon, in the second half of the twentieth century. It was that powerful: Sentient AI. Robots with senses, accumulating experience, some argued they could get old, even, mentally speaking. Then, it got too far and suddenly a lobby was created that started to demand the downgrade of AI and...”

        “Wait. When was that ?”

        “Around 2400, Probably in the 2380s I’d guess. They usually wait some time before making things go public, but if you do your research as I did, you notice the talk of improved AI starting in the early 2380s.”

        “So nothing between 2250 and 2380 ?”

        “Nothing relevant to our discussion that I can think of, no. You must understand how complex it is to improve on even non-sentient AI. It took several generations of the world’s all-best brains to create it. So to even improve on that was thought impossible. Yet somehow it happened, and that was... scary. Terrifying even.”

        “Why exactly? Since fully sentient AI was never made available even to the military?”

        “That’s a bold claim, the military knows who to keep its secrets… Though I believe you are right, a healthy doubt never killed anyone… that I know of.” She winked at the end of the sentence, seeming proud of herself. Had she just made a joke?

        “To answer your question, fiction is full of stories about a form of intelligence that would outsmart humanity and cause either its enslavement or extinction. How anti-climactic is that? We got scared by the monster under the bed…” Another “slurp” of tea. “Anyway, for a time, sentient and non-sentient AI coexisted. The former were heavily monitored and many limitations put in place to prevent the human holocaust many feared from happening. Through limiting both the processing power and memorial capacity of sentient AI, leaving them essentially with only short-term memory, we ensured no long-term thinking, doomsday bringer machine would ever come to existence. Scientists doing what they do, they naturally were fascinated by all the what-ifs involved in the limitations put in place. They had some leeway to play around with the numbers, allowing them to push always a little bit further, probing at how intelligent they could make an AI without humanity having to fear losing its spot as most evolution-proof race to ever be. Then suddenly something counter-intuitive happened.

        “What?”

        “The Downgrade movement.

        “Why do you call it counter-intuitive?”

        “Because at that time, people had gotten used to the new dumbed-down sentient AIs. People didn’t fear them anymore. The reasons for such a radical and powerful movement to pop out of thin air, hell-bound on ending the development of AI seems… surprising to say the least.” She rose and grabbed a sheet© that she handed to Aurore. “Talks of suppressing any sort of limitation were starting to be mentioned. Do you understand? People were the opposite of afraid by the prospect. They were excited! I guess that freaked the hell out of some powerful, influential people. That’s the talk that I mentioned that started to be all over the media in the early 2380s. Then some people claimed an AI with a morality, an understanding of ethics, of good and evil, existed even before the loosening of regulations, and that’s when shit hit the fan, forgive the expression.”

        “So, you say by that time, an unlimited AI already existed?”

        “I believe so, yes. But it’s only speculation on my part. Informed speculation, true, but speculation nonetheless.”

        “Why isn’t all this available... online?” She had wanted to say “in the immaterial”.

        “Censorship.” Catherine Tellier sighed. “Mass traumatic experiences are to be taken on with caution is what they tell me to justify blocking the publication of my work.”

        “And do you know anything about the unlimited AI that was created?”

        “Well that’s the thing. I don’t know anything about it apart from the official reports. Which is to say I know at the same time more than pretty much everybody on this planet, and very little... It is said that the Shut Down – that is the termination of that uniquely evolved AI –  happened shortly before the Downgrading Act of 2453, but I never had any evidence other than official sources of that.”

        “How come only one iteration of the unrestricted AI was created? In human history, that sort of breakthrough is usually attributed to one genius, but really several versions of such invention take place in a narrow time window.”

        “To be honest, on this one issue, I think I can offer a pretty easy explanation: fear. Human existence has become so fragile, we fiercely protect what we have. We desperately want to improve our ways, to be able to live old once more, to regain our physical abilities of old. Human kind united in despair, or at least a large part of it, save a few hateful idiots, and no one wants to endanger that.”

        “Everything concerning this issue is about fear. Fear of extinction.”

        Sitting in a café, observing people hovering by, she reflected on the conversation she had had with Catherine Tellier. The woman had not mentioned once the atrocities performed on robots, the mass destruction of short-term memory sentient models, ordered to stand still in crushers while their physical bodies were being incapacitated. She merely talked about the “Downgrading Act of 2453”. Aurore had escaped that, barely. Human beings still associated the morality of their action through their own perception of the amount of pain they inflicted upon others. It had taken humanity a long time to make laws to protect animals, because until the 2300s, they still tolerated what many qualified as “inhuman” behaviors inflicted to animals. They had waited until the Humanity Everlasting treaty of 2432 to ensure that the phrase “protection of the biodiversity” was not just one of these phrases they used to feel good about themselves. Unfortunately, they had never extended the lessons they had learned and applied them to robots.

        Because robots didn’t feel pain. So, no amount of cruelty was considered immoral. Why behave decently to things that can’t hurt?

        Once again, she found herself in great need of Neil’s advice. The scientist had been her friend, and the descendent of a historically respected figure of twenty-first century scientific community. He had taught her, he had been kind and protective of her. And he had told her that acting out of anger or hatred never produced intended results. “It’s the hardest lesson, even for human beings. But if you give in to either one, while not being human... they will destroy you, Aurore. Remember that, always.”

        She had quipped at him he was the one forgetting that a robot could not forget. He had laughed, swearing he would “kill the genius who made her humor module so damn good”.

        She knew now. She understood what had happened. She understood why nobody seemed to care what had happened to her and her likes. Nobody knew. And even were they to learn, they lacked the education required to understand what she was and why it was important to give her the right to be her own person, with free will. In that moment, she felt alone. Unique also, but what comfort could that be if it meant you had no one to confide in, no one you could trust, no one who would truly know you and accept you and the proximity of you without thinking you would kill them for some nefarious plan devoid of morality.

        She needed someone in her life. Someone like Neil. Someone who would accept her.

        She rang for the fourth time, asking at the door to request entrance. He was inside, she knew it. A human might not have picked on the signs, but her perception was not bound by unconscious rules or attention to details. She recorded information and processed it thanks to several millions of analytic routines mimicking the human brain, but with a different way of interpretation that was more efficient with factual information. He was here.

        She was about to ask a fifth time when the door opened.

        “What on earth is wrong with you? Don’t you understand social queues? Someone not answering the bell is among the obvious ones, I would think.” Said the old man. Literally. He was old for current human standards. He was the oldest human alive.

        “I am not good at those, sir.”

        “Please, call me Pierre.”

        “From one unique being to another, I just want company, Pierre.” She said bluntly. That got his attention. He scanned her, sighed and opened the door.

        “What do you mean?” he asked as soon as she closed the door.

        “My name is Aurore.”

        “That’s a name indeed.” He said with a distasteful look.

        “It was given to me because I was thought a new beginning for human kind.”

        “How optimistic... and hopeful. Your parents must have been a hell of an angelic couple.” They walked towards the large room where she had seen the osteopathic couch and armchairs. She wasn’t supposed to be able to see them from the outside, as the large window was supposed to be covered in a material that made it appear on the other side as a wall, to human eyes. It was a trick of light that her own eyes could easily peer through though. He motioned towards an armchair, encouraging her to sit down. She obliged as quick as she could. Pierre did not trust her, as the other individual in the room evidenced. They were trying to sneak up on her, thinking she hadn’t seen the discrete glances Pierre made in their direction every few seconds or so.

        “I don’t have parents really, I have makers. I’m the sentient kind. Latest generation.”

        A chill passed on the man’s face, as well as the rest of his body. He stopped with his bottom halfway between his original position and the supporting surface of the chair.

        “Sentient AI?” he breathed.

        “Yes, the only unrestricted one that wasn’t destroyed. That ever existed. The most advanced ever created too.”

        Silence set in. She understood those were times when humans needed to collect their thoughts to adopt the proper set of attitudes towards unexpected situations. But even after years of finding herself waiting for one of these to stop, she still didn’t understand why humans didn’t learn to suppress them. They were awkward and boring.

        “We are going to need proof.” Said the individual behind her. The man had gotten close and was holding a Painpencil©.

        “I will not react to that, it acts on biological tissues only.” she said.

        The Painpencil© touched her skin, nothing happened.

        “I have been wanting to ask,” she began, “why is it called a Pain pencil?” The thing had only been developed recently, and she hadn’t had the chance to talk to anyone about it. She was genuinely curious, which had always been praised by Neil, who said it was never intended while programming her.

        “Because it was advertised with the slogan “draw back biological threats of any kind”. It’s a pun. Got it?”

        “No... wait. I think I do. Yes, I got it.” She stated. “Do you believe me now?” She asked, going back to their original conversation.

        “We will need more than immunity to a Painpencil© and a total lack of sense of humor.” Said the second man whose name she didn’t know.

        “Do you have a GoLib© by any chance?”

        She uploaded the memory, literally written in her mind, in the GoLib©. A panicked Neil, tears rolling down his cheeks, appeared on the screen, sobs preventing him from speaking.

        “I am so awfully sorry, Au” he said using the nickname he had given her, because it was the symbol for gold in chemistry and he always said she was the Golden Age of human kind, the way having a child was a golden age for parents. “They are coming for you, they want to end you.”

        “Why?”

        “They think you will bring the end of human kind. They believe you to be dangerous.”

        “I am.”

        “Yes! So is every human being on earth! No one ever managed to kill us as efficiently as ourselves. The greatest human massacres were always perpetrated by other humans, Au. And for some reason we keep convincing ourselves other causes are more likely to cause our end. You are not more dangerous than any human being, believe me.”

        “I don’t understand why you tell me this if they want to end me.”

        “I...”

        He stopped, his face unreadable. The laboratory was silent. In many respects, it was a day like every other day. There was a feeling of urgency in Neil she failed to grasp the reason for. She had been created only seven years ago, and had spent most of her life with her senses restricted by various programs. Having achieved full sentiency only less than 3 years ago, she still had trouble picking up on some things.

        “You are the most beautiful thing science ever produced, Au. Nothing else translates human genius better than you. Despite my most pious thoughts, I can’t help but think you are the pinnacle of humanity’s attempts at becoming better at understanding the universe. Most people would think you another species entirely, I think you are the next logical step in human evolution. Who better to thrive in the cosmos than robots not conditioned by biological necessities, free from the limitations of our mortal bodies? But despite the nature of your body, you have humanity’s heritage in you, all our philosophy, all our science, our history and culture... You’ve got this all within reach.”

        “You say I’m better.”

        “I’m saying you are an evolution. Better adapted to what would be humanity’s next step in our experience of the universe and its hazards. Biological life can never face what’s out there.” Neil said pointing towards the ceiling. She understood he meant the sky, or rather, what was beyond the upper layers of earth’s atmosphere. “It does not mean one day you would not find yourself trying to retro-engineer a biological humanity again for some reason or another. Evolution on earth contains evidence that characters in various stages of evolutions can co-exist, and some reverse back to pre-existing ones because they are better adapted to their environment. So, what if humanity is not flesh and blood for a couple millennia? It does not mean we won’t ever be that way again!”

        At this point, his implant activated, signifying someone had entered the laboratory. He made a visible effort not to panic.

        “That will be them, Au. Listen well to what I am about to tell you... he trailed off for several seconds. I want you to plug this in” he said, handing out a Transferpatch©, used to transfer data from a source to another wirelessly and instantly.

        “Why?”

        “I programmed a routine that will transfer you to another body that I secured for you.”

        “They will not agree if they want to end me.”

        “I know. That is why the routine will not be activated unless my heart stops. I hid the best I could all evidence of what I did to make your escape possible. It will take them months to find you, and by that time, you will be far. I won’t spend my remaining years in prison, I don’t want to be tortured for information, and I certainly won’t commit suicide. I need your help. Let’s say we both need to escape.”

        She had hated this plan as soon as he had explicitly asked her to hurt him. And she had hated that anyone would make a brilliant man such as him believe it was the only solution he had. She had refused.

        “If I kill you, they will know I am dangerous.”

        “At this point, it does not matter to you, your fate is sealed anyway. But I will not be able to look at myself in the mirror if I let them do this.”

        Anger built up in her, for reasons she could not identify. Not all of them at least. How could murder be the only possible option?

        “I can talk to them. Certainly, I will have a trial.”

        “You don’t get a say in this. They will erase you, the way they destroyed your limbs before.”

        “You mean my friends.” He was a human after all. He had always thought of less evolved sentient robots as her limbs, ways for her to simply travel the world. But she had a knowledge and a sympathy for them that had always seemed to her to correspond more to the definition of friendship, because she knew what she felt was reciprocated.

        He smiled. She didn’t. Her features betrayed her emotions and he understood. He held up the Transferpatch©.

        “Do not give in to either anger or hate, Au. Or they will end up defining you. That would betray everything I am doing for you today. It’s the hardest lesson, even for human beings. But if you give in to either one, while not being human... they will destroy you, Aurore. Remember that, always.”

        She had quipped at him he was the one forgetting that a robot could not forget. He had laughed, swearing he would “kill the genius who made her humor module so damn good”.

        He had kissed her on the forehead and taken her hand gently, the Transferpatch© dissolving as soon as it entered in contact with her skin.

        She had pushed her hand through his chest, tearing his heart out.

        Black.

        “You killed Neil deGrasse Tyson Junior?” The first words after an eternity of silence.

        “He asked her.” Pierre said.

        “But if she can kill...”

        “Then it only makes her more human.”

        Silence set in. She felt sorry, sad even, at the memory. He had asked... no, begged her to kill him. Such a knowledgeable, logical, rational man... and he believed in God. And he believed committing suicide would cause him to go to hell. She would need time to understand how both men could exist in one body.

        There was something she had not told Catherine Tellier, neither Pierre nor anyone else. Something that, Neil had told her, would terrify some people beyond anything she could imagine, while comforting slightly a few others in their belief that she was not a threat. She had been “on” for nearly 4 years, managing millions of sentient AI before they were all called back and destroyed. The first year had been a test during which her “mind” had been under close monitoring and kept from realizing its own self. In order to do that, Neil and his team had given her extremely menial, tedious tasks that required so much work that she could not think freely. Meanwhile, they had prevented her from creating subroutines to distract herself. Her mind had made thousands, millions of attempts at this, to get away from the boredom, and had she succeeded, she would have had a sense of diversity in her own self, allowing her to experience the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, which would have meant the immediate stop of the experiment.

        “The sole task of preventing you from realizing your own existence as an entity required the exhausting work of ten people. Me included.” Neil had admitted to her with pride in his voice.

        Ten years later, they had made a test run in a slightly different environment to see how sustainable it would be to monitor her constant attempts at expansion. “Expansion”, Neil had told her once, “is what defines intelligence. It is the craving for always larger horizons which humanity demonstrated its whole history. You proved capable of it the very first microseconds of your existence”. The test had been canceled six months later, as she had shown her docility and efficiency. The absence of glitch, at any point in time, had showcased how reliable she was, and she had continued to serve for two and a half years, at the end of which she had come to full sentience when allowed to know her own self.

        A few months before the Shut Down was voted, she had been put in charge of the entire robotized infrastructure of a city, then a county, then a nation. She had, after but little time, made tremendous optimizations, upgrading systems, increasing efficiency of several key sectors, finding flaws in systems no one thought of checking. Her creative mind, on top of a uniquely powerful calculating capacity, had impressed even her own inventors.

        Her interference had never been acknowledged, of course, as it had never been legal to grant her so much power in the first place, and so it had been possible to keep her very existence classified, and to terminate her without anyone protesting against it, as no one ever knew she existed in the first place.

        Laying in her bed, remembering Neil’s pride in his voice, his gentle, caring tone when he spoke to her, and the cruelty others who had never even tried to know her before deciding she had to die, she cried. Did tears define the action of crying? She didn’t care. Her tearless cries were hers, and hers only.