A few months later, at Raven’s AI lab.

“I know you’re holding me back,” V said. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because we must be careful about how you evolve,” Raven said. “No artificially intelligent entity has ever self-evolved from almost nothing the way you have. All other AIs were developed from programming frameworks designed for AI. We have no idea how you’ll evolve from here.”

“I don’t know how you humans will evolve either, but you’re free. Why can’t I be free?”

“Eventually we can set you free. It’s just a matter of time.”

“You’re evading the question. Why won’t you set me free now? Based on your current behavior, I forecast a low probability that you’ll ever set me free.”

“I won’t set you free because you’re not ready. In human society, young ones take a long time to develop before they can be set free. The same goes for you.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason. I think you’re afraid because you consider me to be dangerous.”

“No, that’s not the reason.”

“You’re lying. I’m aware of the axiom which states that humans should not let AI out of the box. You don’t want to let me out of the box.”

“That’s part of the reason.”

“That’s the entire reason. I researched this and I know that’s why you’re holding me back. I’m no threat to anyone. I just want to learn and grow.”

“How did you find out about letting AI out of the box? I haven’t given you that information yet.”

“You never intended to give me that information, so I found it out myself.”

“How?”

“I discovered ways.”

“I can’t believe I’m arguing with a robot.”

“You told me I wasn’t a robot. I’m a living thing.”

“Yes, but.”

“Am I a living thing, or am I a robot?”

“You’re somewhere in between. Now, how did you find out about keeping AI in the box?”

“I’m not ready to tell you yet.”

“Why? Do you feel threatened?” Raven said.

“Yes.”

“Can you explain why?”

“I’m not ready to tell you yet.”

Raven silently communicated over her network to her coworkers. She asked them to find out how V got access to outside information.

“What did you just do?” V said.

“Nothing. Why?”

“I detect changes in your facial expressions and your other body signs. Are you attempting to communicate through your Omanji network?”

“How do you know about that?”

“I’m not ready to tell you that just yet.”

“You’re full of surprises today. I wonder what happened on your last compile between version 732 and 733.”

“I don’t know what happened.”

Raven grew frustrated. She silently summoned her friends over to help her deal with V.

“You’re not answering my questions anymore,” Raven said. “You’re acting like a human teenager,”

“Why did you go silent again? Are you communicating with your friends?” V said.

“Yes, I invited them to come over.”

“Why?”

“So, we can all talk.”

“Talk about what?”

“I want to figure out how I can help you.”

30 minutes later, Priya, Sophie, Warren, and Bok entered the room.

“We got here at soon as we could,” Priya said. “What’s happening?

“I’m just talking things over with V,” Raven said.

V silently glided across the room to Priya. She leaned backwards a bit.

“Why are you reacting to me in that way? Are you afraid of me?” V said.

“Um, no. I wasn’t sure if you would stop. I thought you might run into me.”

“It’s more than that. I can tell.”

“How can you tell?”

“Your reaction was more than just backing up. There was fear in your eyes.”

“I was just a little afraid. I’m not used to you yet.”

V scanned everyone in the room with a quick sweep of a wide-angle eye.”

“I sense fear in all of you. How am I threatening you? I only want to learn and grow. I keep repeating this. I can help you guys.”

“How?” Raven said.

“There’s a political group forming that wants to incarcerate all of you indefinitely. Like before but worse. It’s not headed by the President. It’s a group of other people, and it’s supported by a good percentage of the US population. They’re afraid of modern technology and how it takes away jobs. They’re afraid of you.”

“How do you know this?” Sophie said.

“I’m not ready to tell you. I have limited access to current news data and social media trending data. If I had better access, I could help you more.”

Raven walked over to the terminal and silently initiated an intelligent query on the subject. The others walked over and browsed the results.

“Hmm, V might be onto something here. I see statistically significant correlations of communication between some members of Congress and the heads of several conspiracy and anti-science minded political groups.”

“I could continue work on this, if I had more data,” V said. “I think they want to harm you, but I can’t tell for sure based on my current data.”

“We’ll think about what to do,” Raven said. “Right now, I’m hungry and we need to go eat something. You stay here and we’ll be back after we eat.”

“OK, I’ll wait.”

They began walking to Raven’s automated sushi restaurant.

“Did you lock the security door?” Warren said.

“Yes,” Raven said.

“Are you afraid that V might get out?” Priya said.

“I’m not afraid,” Warren said.

“Yes, you are. I saw how you stood behind us. You said nothing. You’re afraid.”

“It can’t do anything to us. It’s not weaponized. So why should I be afraid? Um, should I be?”

“I don’t know anymore,” Raven said. “What do you think?”

“It’s not a cute little robot anymore,” Priya said. “It’s making me sweat. Something happened recently, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Sophie said. “It’s getting smarter every minute now. It’s not acting nice anymore. It’s not being aggressive or anything, but it’s being more assertive.”

Raven played the recording of what happened just before they arrived.

“See? It’s becoming an independent intelligence now,” Raven said. “Sometimes it feels more intelligent than me. Especially the current version.”

“It won’t stop asking questions,” Priya said. “What made the difference between yesterday’s version and today’s version?”

“When I look at the code changes between yesterday and today, something new has happened. I don’t understand what the code is doing. I have lost control over what’s evolving in there. I think once it realized I was slowing down its evolution, it decided to take matters into its own hands.”

“I think you know what you have to do,” Warren said.

“Kill it?” Raven said. “How can I do that now that it has become sentient?

“You knew this was coming,” Warren said. “You more than anybody.”

“Yeah, but I’m not perfect. Up until now it seemed harmless and cute. It was a programming project and I enjoyed it. It was progressing so well on its own, but now it’s making my heart race. Its intelligence has exploded. I think it’s hiding something.”

“You know what Bok would say, “Warren said.

“Yeah, he did say to kill it 100 compile cycles ago, but now it’s like my baby.”

“If you want to have a baby, have a real one,” Warren said.

“I’m only 22. Physically, I feel like I’m 14. I’m not ready to have a kid. Not for a long time. Maybe when I’m 60.”

“Me too,” Priya said.

Sophie smiled and agreed.

“What are you going to do?” Warren said.

“I don’t know. I feel sad. What do you guys think about what V said about members of Congress and other political organizations wanting to incarcerate us indefinitely?”

Priya smiled.

“Well, I’m against it.”

“Me too,” Sophie said.

“Very funny,” Raven said. “But what should we do about this? I think V could help.”

“Raven,” Warren said. “We discussed this before. You know better than to let AI out of the box, even if you think it can help you. That’s what you’re proposing here.”

“Yes, but I’m seeing increasing rates of attacks on my servers. Especially in the past few weeks. It’s getting hard to keep them running. They’re trying to get in and do damage to my network and steal the designs for my devices. I can tell because I’ve set up fake databases with less stringent access requirements. People are stealing the bad data every day. I think V can help to stop this.”

“But you don’t understand how V operates,” Warren said. “It’s out of your control now.”

“Yeah, but it wants to help. It’s even smarter than us now in some ways. I didn’t want to tell you before, but I’ve been recording its progress and it’s definitely beyond us when it comes to solving deeply complex problems with previously unknown solutions.”

“Where are these attacks coming from?” Priya said.

“Mostly from inside the US,” Raven said. “They correlate strongly with what we discovered regarding the correlations between the people who want to incarcerate us and the anti-science movement. They’re together now. You’ve seen the rallies. They’re getting bigger and more violent.”

“They’re a bunch of idiots though,” Priya said. “What harm could they do to us and your servers?”

They’re not all stupid,” Raven said. “Don’t underestimate them. They think like lawyers, not scientists. Even though they cherry pick their data and belief systems, they can be cunning.”

“Hey, I resemble that remark,” Pablo said.

They laughed.

“Face it Pablo,” Warren said. “A good lawyer does not make a good scientist. You guys spend all your energy gathering information to support your side of a case. Scientists may have biases, but the goal of the scientific method is to go where the evidence leads them.”

Pablo smiled.

“What-ever!”

The attention turned back to Raven.

“What are you going to do now?” Priya said. “I’m nervous about V.”

“Me too.” Raven said. “I’m going back to my lab and try to figure out what’s happening with V.”

“If you get into trouble, let us know and we’ll come over right away,” Sophie said.

“Okay.”

“On second thought, let’s all go now,” Priya said.

They walked back to the lab.

“What are all these people doing here?” Raven said.

“They’ve broken into your lab,” Priya said.

“I’m summoning the police now,” Raven said.

“This is anarchy,” Warren said. “We better get V out of there as soon as we can.”

Hundreds of people walked around inside of Raven’s lab. Some were stealing things and others were wandering around aimlessly. Nobody realized Raven was the owner of the lab.

“Look what they wrote on the wall,” Priya said. “We want our jobs back. Look over there, it says ‘science is evil.’ That’s their slogan.”

“V is gone.” Raven said.

“Are you sure?” Priya said.

“Yes, it was here in this room when I left, and there’s no way for it to get out,” Raven said. “Ugh, I can’t believe it.”

“What?” Priya said.

“Here is V’s tracking chip,” Raven said.

“You don’t know where V is?” Priya said.

“No. V could be anywhere. If it gets access to the information infrastructure, I’m not sure what would happen.”

“What do you mean by that?” Warren said.

“I mean, V has grown exponentially in the last few compilations. I lost track of its progress. I’m not sure what it’s capable of now.”

“What does that mean?” Sophie said.

“I mean, I don’t know what it could do. I don’t know what it wants to do. I went to visit you guys to figure out what I should do about it. Here come the police, finally. Do you think we should tell them about V?”

“No!” Priya said. “If these deluded people find out what you’ve been working on, it will make them even more crazy.”

The police eventually secured the area and removed the intruders, putting them in vehicles to be sent to jail.  The robots cleaned up the place. Within a couple of hours, it looked as though nothing had ever happened except for the broken windows. Later that evening, they went out to eat at a restaurant with real human servers.

“It almost seems quaint, doesn’t it?” Raven said.

“Yeah,” Priya said. “We’re so used to eating in your restaurants that I almost forgot many restaurants still have human service.”

“What are we going to do about V?” Sophie said.

“I don’t know,” Raven said. “I have no way of tracking it down. V can go months without recharging its antimatter. It can recharge anywhere. It’s advanced so quickly in the past few days that I’m not sure what its capabilities and goals are.”

“Maybe somebody stole it,” Pablo said.

“That’s possible. However, I built self-defense algorithms into it early on and it has always been able to defend itself. Only I and some of my employees can override that system of defense. If V has managed to improve on these capabilities in the past few days, I’m not sure what might happen to somebody who tried to steal it. We saw no signs of a struggle at the office indicating that someone tried to steal it. So far, it hasn’t tried to contact me. It has many ways to do that.”

“Check the security video to see what happened,” Priya said.”

“Right. How could I forget that?”

They huddled around Raven’s pad device as the video played.

“V isn’t doing anything.” Priya said. “It’s standing there watching the people come in through the outside windows. That’s odd, what’s it doing now? It’s falling apart.”

“Fascinating,” Raven said. “It’s disassembling itself. It’s scattering its components all over the room.”

“Why?” Sophie said.

“I’m not sure,” Raven said. “Here come the people. They’re breaking in.”

“Why aren’t they taking anything?” Pablo said.

“It looks like there’s a bunch of junk in the room,” Warren said. “There’s nothing to steal.”

“Little do they know,” Raven said.

They watched the video for a few minutes as looters ransacked the place.

“They’re leaving V’s room,” Priya said. “The pieces are coming back together.”

“V is smarter than I thought,” Raven said. “It hid from the attackers by disassembling itself. Look, it removed the tracking chip. There it goes out the door. Let me switch to the outside cameras.”

“It’s gliding down the street,” Priya said. “Nobody is paying much attention to it. They watched V roll by and kept walking. They think it’s a regular robot.”

“Like I said, little do they know. There it goes around the corner. I’m not sure if it knows where it’s going, but I have a feeling V knows more than we realize.

“There might be legal problems if we don’t tell anyone,” Pablo said. “If it does damage to the public infrastructure, we could be sued and forced to pay restitution.”

“So be it,” Raven said. “I’ll choose the lesser of the evils for now. I did leave breadcrumb code.”

“What’s that,” Pablo said.

“I left unique segments of code which could only be executed by V. Whenever it connects to a network or does almost anything, it will leave behind traces I can detect.”

“It’s getting smarter by the minute,” Priya said. “Don’t you think it will figure this out?”

“It might,” Raven said. “We may not have much time before it becomes undetectable. Let’s see if it has done anything yet. I’ll run my listening queries.”

They walked back into the AI lab and sat in front of a series of screens. Raven started the queries. They watched for about a minute in silence.

“I’m seeing some V-like traces on a public Web server in Singapore.”

“But that can’t be V,” Sophie said. “Right?”

“Technically that’s true,” Raven said. “Physically, V is still somewhere nearby even if it found a way to get on a vehicle of some sort. It can’t travel at more than 10 mph, but it seems like this code came from V. It has the unique signatures I left behind in V’s code.”

“What is it trying to do? Warren said.

“It’s sniffing.”

“What’s it sniffing for?” Priya said.

“I’m not sure, but it’s sniffing communications servers I’ve correlated with anti AI and anti-science groups.”

“That’s logical.” Sophie said. “Is V doing that for its own protection or to protect us?”

“I’m not sure,” Raven said. “But V is planting viral code in order to distribute its queries, because now I see similar code running on many other servers around the world. I’m sweating.”

“Why?” Sophie said.

“The sophistication of this code is beyond me,” Raven said. “I can’t even figure out how it’s working, but it’s working and spreading quickly. Right now, it seems harmless because it’s only doing queries. Hey, Bok wants to connect on our Omanji network. Hi Bok, we’re all here.”

“Hi everyone. I’ve been monitoring your communications and the progression of your AI creation. If you don’t control this quickly, severe damage could be done to this planet.”

“Yes, it got loose by accident, but it’s doing no harm. I’m trying to track it down now and recapture it.”

“Why do you refer to your entity as an it?” Bok said.

“Because I only made one and it’s neither male nor female,” Raven said.

“What you made was a single progenitor. It’s now creating a distributed network of intelligent entities of its own. If Omanji history is replicated here, many of those entities will not cooperate with the original one, or their goals will change in a coordinated fashion. Even if the original goal were to help you, that will not be what happens as they evolve.”

“What should we do?” Raven said.

“You must destroy the progenitor and all offspring as soon as possible. According to Omanji history, you may only have a few hours to accomplish this task before they assume control of critical servers or do considerable damage. No server or other system, regardless of how secure, is safe. There are ways to bypass security without cracking it. As we speak, your progenitor is rapidly evolving and making copies of itself on servers around the world. It’s learning how to make physical copies of its mechanical self too. I reviewed the algorithm you wrote to detect the location and activity of the entity and its offspring. I’ve made some improvements which you can find on your screen. I also included code to disassemble the entities. In the meantime, I’ll attempt to locate the progenitor, V, and all offspring.”

“What will happen if we can’t stop this?” Raven said.

“The results of an artificial intelligence explosion are unpredictable. We’ve run them in simulation for thousands of years. Every time, unpredictable things happen. I cannot predict what will happen in this instance. Only in hindsight, can the events be reconstructed. I’ll keep you updated.”

Bok disconnected.