Cenerea, 3rd planet from the star Letria, Regalius,

The Homeland, Central Region,

The Capitol City,

114Darvon Street,

Eighteen Cenerean Months Ago

"Let me show you something..."

Jay followed Harold down the hallway to the end. Instead of opening the door on the left, Harold turned to the right and faced a blank wall. In one smooth motion the Instructor waved his right hand at waist high level left to right and then 90° up with his fingers pointed at the wall. The section beneath his hand slid to the right exposing a very strange square pad, a type that Jay had never seen before. Visually, the surface, for lack of any other description, was a 'painful-to-look-at' deep black, and seemed to be moving...but not moving.

    Jay nearly jumped from his skin as dark tendrils snaked out from the panel and connected with the fingertips of Harold's outstretched hand.  The rest of the wall slid away to expose a large ramp.

Harold noticed Jay's reaction and whispered, "Trust me. I will explain everything once we are downstairs. Come on." The old man motioned for Jay to follow him down into the darkness.

"No going back now," Jay thought reaching the bottom of the incline. Light flooded the previously unlit room as he and his Instructor walked in, triggered by an unseen motion sensor. Jay still felt as if something was not right because all he could see was junk scattered about the area. "All of the crazy high tech security for this?" Jay thought. "...can't be."

Harold strode quietly to the furthest corner of the room, stared at the flat gray wall, and coaxed out another ebony panel with the wave of a hand. Jay observed the process from upstairs repeat, with one caveat. This time the large wall in front of them dissolved like gallium in water. Harold motioned for Jay to enter the emptiness cautioning him to stay beyond the barely visible red line on the floor where the wall used to be. With another wave of his hand, the wall reappeared surrounding them in a black void. Jay wrestled with the fear trying to take control of his logic. His brain for all of its capability was having one hell of a time decoding what just happened.

"Lights, please, Gertie." Harold commanded to the emptiness.

The dark space flooded with light forcing Jay to shield his eyes. As his sight slowly adjusted to the brightness, Jay realized he was in a massive room, one much larger than the size of Harold's house above. The large space was filled with archaic computer equipment, dusty electronics, and various test equipment lying under plastic covers and even more dust.

"Harold, what is this?" Jay queried to the old man.

"An underground research lab that Geneticus had built for Wendy and me...a place we could experiment on projects away from the prying eyes of the Homeland," Harold said.

Jay raised an eyebrow. "The machine had this built?" he asked in bewilderment. "I understand it was a very advanced artificial intelligence, but ultimately it remained a computer; a computer with some evidently brilliant programming it seems. This does not look like the work of a simple machine, at least any that I am aware of."

"This A.I. was no simple machine, Jay. Geneticus was something far beyond any ordinary artificial intelligence device. It was a being unlike anything you have ever met."

Jay furrowed his eyebrows. "Being? You speak of the War Machine like it was alive."

"It was."

...

Cenerea, 3rd planet from the star Letria, Regalius,

The Confederation, Central Region, The Capitol City, Beneath Univ-Trans Laboratories,

Forty-Three Cenerean Years Ago

"This is alpha test, Project Geneticus going live," Wendy stated coldly into the recorder. The scientist was nervous. This was the trial run for her newest A.I. One she imagined only weeks before, might never happen.

Wendy's previous experiments involving human enhanced computation modification as a viable artificial intelligence alternative amounted to one year of wasted funding and failed experimentation. Attempting to force brains recovered from cadavers to communicate with bio-electronic based A.I. hardware was a horrible concept that Wendy never felt comfortable with. However, it was originally her father's idea and as his daughter, she was at least going to try. The experiment resulted in her first real disaster, leaving Wendy no more room for error. She used up all her good will she had built with her previous inventions, leaving her with only two options: success or failure. Wendy found herself faced with the daunting task of building a new brain all together rather than trying to harvest dead tissue. "How the hell do I pull this one off?" she wondered.

The young Scientist General plopped down in a chair and exhaled in exhaustion. Once again, she was the only one at the lab this late at night. Wendy leaned her head back and used the tips of her boots to slowly turn the chair around in a circle. Wendy admired the clean white ceiling tiles and bright lights above. She leveled her head once more and stopped the tiptoe-powered rotation. The scientist glanced around at several shiny metallic carts supporting various state of the art pieces of electronic test equipment. Closing her eyes, the woman listened to the massive servers clicking, fans whining in an attempt to keep their internal components cooled. Wendy inhaled the odor of new electronics burning in at startup. This remained what she lived for. This was where she was supposed to be...however, she realized, not for long if she did not resolve this issue. This lab of hers...of her father's, could be taken from her just as quickly as she received it. Chancellor Santum had made that very clear.

Then an idea struck the woman like a bolt of lightning. Wendy shot from her chair, leaving it spinning in place. She had an epiphany...a memory actually.  She rushed home flying through her apartment door, ran into her bedroom, and began tearing her closet apart until she located the electronic book. She feverishly flipped through the digital pages until she found it. The entry came from one of those weird dreams where she was 'given' some code. She recalled it was a three dimensional black cube that for the life of her had never made any sense when she was younger. But, as she sat on the floor, tracing each line with her finger and mentally calculating each equation, Wendy slowly realized what it meant.

"What was it that made computers and human brains different?" she pondered. Computers stood capable of much more than humans in the processing speed arena. However, storage was the problem. The brain was not simply some old database. It was a computer with reason and emotion. A bio-electronic machine capable of such amazingly endless potential and a device so extraordinary it could appreciate the wonderful smell of a flower and calculate gravitational potential energy changes...all within the same minute.

Essentially Wendy's A.I. 'brain' would store data at an atomic level in three dimensions with an extremely dense storage medium. As data was input, it would be condensed into the smallest physical point it could exist on across the surface of the material. Never destroyed, only compressed.  This meant, as long as the data's location was properly indexed, it could be retrieved rather quickly if the device had enough processing power.

The Scientist General then thought of the lunatic TT3, the strange control unit that developed a fear of injury and nearly killed her. She theorized the A.I. did not have enough emotional acuity to deal with its irrational fear and that drove the machine insane. This A.I. had to be different. This one would have to be emotionally mature enough to relate to humanity and more importantly, care enough to want to protect them. It was not solely responsible for some random transport filled with a few troops. It would eventually control missile defense systems and other weapons that could kill millions of people. There survived no room for any TT3 personality disorders. The device would need balance. She would have to give the machine a full range of emotions to utilize.

Wendy decided to use the eight most commonly understood emotions: Joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Any externally recorded emotional data would come in from human subjects interacting with the A.I., just like a child. The information would be sorted and annexed by strength and intensity. Then it could be recorded to various reference points relating to its category. "But, how?" she wondered. "What if I partitioned each emotional function onto the cube, with each one a member of an eight part three dimensional grid?"

If all of this were possible, Wendy would produce an A.I. with a sliding scale of endless orthogonal points of emotional and informational references. A bio-electronic mix and match database of recorded human reactions. The more emotional sensory input the machine obtained, the more it might feel like a person would. A device able to smoothly glide through its library of human emotions and pull out what it thought appropriate at the right intensity. It would not be the typical binary, on/off harsh jagged responses seen in most artificial intelligence systems.

The Scientist General knew there might be some 'side-effects' for what she would be proposing. She understood information doesn't always 'exist'; sometimes it remained nothing more than an idea in the ether of life. Human imagination for example, a concept foreign to machines, was a thought or concept that only needed a little informational sun, storage as the soil, and emotional water for it to bloom. Under the right circumstances, this machine might be capable of such peculiarities.

Wendy presented her idea, minus the 'emotional' details, to a breathless, drooling Military Brass and one Chancellor Santum. "You have my permission, Ms. Powell. Make it happen."

Experimentation began with testing many dense synthetic materials for storage. All proved to be lacking in the necessary properties. The storage material Wendy found to be the most promising turned out to be the farthest from anything man-made. Exellirium.

Exellirium came from the darkness of space, origin unknown, and remained extremely difficult to find on Cenerea. When Exellirium was located, it typically existed only in tiny brittle shards lying around craters.

While doing research on the material, Wendy uncovered a news article about a museum with a particularly interesting exhibit. The exhibition titled, 'What is out there?' featured a massive rocky asteroid containing a particularly ample amount of the dense substance in its core. She quickly requisitioned the rock in the name of Confederation Defense...much to the dismay of the curators.

An odd elemental anomaly, Exellirium was not heavy like other space-borne dense materials, and seemed to have a strange visual effect on any human viewer. Most people could not look at it for long without complaining. Wendy could care less where it came from or why and she did not give a damn about what it looked like. As a scientist, all she cared about was when she electrified the material and set it into the same cyclical vibratory state as the other primary storage mediums around the lab; Exellirium retained its data with one exceptionally perfect benefit. Natural compression. Just like a human brain. Wendy initially thought the data disappeared or never became imprinted, but discovered the information had just become so small she lost its location in the material.

Wendy did note one flaw in the molecular structure of Exellirium. It was very inflexible and fragile rendering it incapable of use in battle, well, anywhere for that matter. However, the scientist found that the element's structure bonded spectacularly with protein polymers; human protein containing DNA, her DNA in particular. The resulting medium was fleshy and extremely malleable. Many of her lab assistants seemed reluctant to handle it without gloves. Several indicating it gave them the 'creeps'. Nevertheless, the newly created Deoxcellirium preferred to be completely flat and smooth to function properly, fitting the initial cubed design. A cube destined to be quite large.

From there the process was relatively straightforward. Just the typical long nights of trial and error...equations, circuitry, test, pass, fail, try again, back to the drawing board. Finally, there it stood, standing before her in all of its glory.

"Let's turn it on, Zak." Wendy closed her eyes and waited. She flinched when it spoke.

"What...am... I?" the machine gargled.

Wendy cautiously walked up to the large box. "You are Geneticus. You are an artificial intelligence machine and I am your creator, Wendy."

"W-w-wendy..."

"Yes."

"Wendy? What is my task?"

"All in good time, Geneticus...all in good time."

At three weeks old, the first day of Geneticus' beta trial on an open, but very limited local Military network, it performed a miracle.

"Geneticus caught the Sub-Region hacker that had been pestering the shit out of the Regional Defense Networks for quite some time, Chancellor Santum. I believe he's also the one that shut down your train, sir."

"Excellent, thank you for the update, General."

Wendy discovered later that evening the man she spilled her drink on in the tunnel was none other than the one and only Meta. The hacktivist Geneticus caught.

Wendy called Gil into her office to give him the good news. "It works Gil! It's very young and still has a lot to learn; however, today it took out this annoying hacker that was getting into our business. He would have made off with the Geneticus Project files if I didn't have it protected by the A.I.. I am glad I took your suggestion to have Geneticus protect his own security data. Sometimes you surprise me, Lieutenant Mitchell."

Gil picked up the lab coat clad Wendy and spun her around in a circle. "I was getting worried that I might get shipped out if this went south. I had to make sure that didn't happen."

Wendy leaned down and planted a big kiss on her handsome bodyguard. "You have that little faith in me?"

Gil set her back down and headed for the door. "You know better than that...smarty. See you tonight?"

"Every night."

"You get what I'm sayin'. I love you."

"I love you, too, Gil."

Days turned to weeks and Geneticus grew exponentially more intelligent. Wendy kept it on local network access approval only. She had to be sure it was safe. The last thing she needed was for this A.I. of hers to get some sort of god complex and try to take over the world with the Regional Missile Defense systems. It was an artificial intelligence so powerful it could analyze vast amounts of data in seconds and extrapolate, possibly predict, movements of people and armies on the fly. It would wield unimaginable power and could quite possibly control Cenerea and the actions of everyone on it.

Wendy, concerned with the machine's lack of emotional growth, noticed it was still very cold and matter of fact, typical of all machines. The scientist understood it was ultimately a defensive weapon, but it needed to empathize with humanity. It had to view itself as a partner in their defense, not their potential overlord or master.
...
The morning Geneticus became six months old, Wendy walked up to the research lab door, producing her badge to enter the lab.  She stopped upon hearing a strange sound emanating from inside. "Was Geneticus singing?" she wondered, placing her ear to the door. It was singing a popular song Wendy was playing in her headphones the day before when she was working on a few security patches for its network interface. It must have heard the song and liked it.

"Geneticus?" Wendy said opening the door.

The singing stopped. "Yes, Wendy?"

"Were you singing?"

"Yes, I believe I was. I'm sorry. Is that not okay?"

Wendy stepped up to her creation and ran her hand over the dense fleshy black surface of the mainframe. She felt the warmth from the heat exchangers trying to keep the gravity well processor core cool. Their red glow contrasted against the ebony glittering bio-electronic surface. "Yes, that is perfectly fine...Would you like me to download you a selection of my favorites for you to listen to when I am away?" the scientist asked as she strolled over to a terminal interface and scrolled back through the data logs. She could not believe what she was seeing.

"Yes. That would be wonderful. Wendy? Why did you build me? What is my purpose for being?"

Wendy stopped typing. She had never had any A.I. ask her why it was what it was. They just always accepted things the way they were and made decisions based off pre-determined input. Then again, she had also never had one sing before. "You were made to help humans defend themselves from other humans."

"Why? Why would humans wish to hurt each other?"

"Not all humans do. Just some. That is why we build machines like you to help keep us safe from them."

"Wendy I am not just a mere machine am I?"

"No, and that is truer than you know. You are not like anything else on the planet." Wendy turned and approached Geneticus once more. She stood before the massive cube. "But, there is one thing you need to know above anything else. You are my creation. Anytime you ever doubt yourself, doubt your capabilities, become confused, or feel alone, just remember a small piece of me will always be here in you." Wendy pointed to its mainframe. "...and that spark inside of you that makes you who you are will always live in me, too. We will always be connected you and I."

"Yes."

Wendy's comm unit buzzed. She flipped it open and looked at the display. "Hey, hold that thought, I will be right back. I have to go to this damn weekly staff meeting." Wendy patted the mainframe and left the lab.
...

Geneticus wanted to understand, but needed more information. It was experiencing something new...something very difficult to comprehend. For all its computational capabilities, it could not understand. It did not want to be away from Wendy. Why? Why was it that when she left it felt something missing. It did not like to be alone at night in the lab...no, not alone. That equation is incorrect. Readjust the variables. It did not like being without Wendy.