I didn't know if it was the effects of the pill or my general exhaustion, but I couldn't wait to get into bed and get a good night's sleep. During my last classes, I could barely keep my eyes open and at times, I found myself staring blankly at the screen or my desk, eyes wide open, but not able to see a thing, because my mind had drifted off into a haze as if I was sleeping already. At least the dizziness and water-induced hallucinations were gone as soon as I had taken the pill.

After my last class, I was considering a nap before dinner, but in the hallway I spotted Moon, who had apparently been waiting for me. She hadn't been at lunch, and the moment I saw her, I knew why. She had probably been bunkered away in her lab the whole day. She was wearing her white, coat-like lab uniform, and on top of her head rested a pair of those specialized VR goggles that facilitated the programming and engineering work she did. With her wild, pink hair and the wide and wicked grin that she wore on her lips, it made her look like the spitting image of a crazy scientist.

"Good news, I presume?" I greeted her.

"Well. In a way..."

She filled me in on her progress as we walked towards the cafeteria to grab an early dinner. We crossed the campus grounds from the western building where my last class had taken place. Above the skyline in the distance, the Eastern horizon was painted in a lilac hue as behind us the sun had already vanished behind the top of the wall. Somehow, the twilight always filled me with an eerie sense of foreboding, so I felt strangely anxious as she told me about her day.

"So, we went to the factory today to ask if I could get some parts for the bird," Moon began, "Everybody was super nice. But they said there were some troubles due to... recent events, and I couldn't get any parts..."

I knew immediately that she was referring to the news broadcast from this morning, and while I knew that the accident at the Daidala test run hadn't been my fault in any way, I couldn't help a feeling of guilt well up inside of me.

"How is that good news?" I asked dejectedly.

"Let me get to it! So, the factories are basically under lockdown, there's a full stop on production and assembly. It's kinda like a quarantine, and no parts can leave the factory until the lockdown is lifted again. Besides, the recall has already started and they are super busy applying all those updates. But!" She raised her hand to stop me from interjecting again. "In this 'all hands on deck' situation, they were quite interested to hear that due to my project, I know a thing or two about Artificial programming. Mostly in theory, of course... but they offered me a deal."

"A deal?"

"I get to work there, and lend a helping hand in the recall. It's really more of an internship, I don't think I'll be able to help all that much. But while I'm there, I'll be allowed to work on my project, right there. So... you know what this means?"

"You'll have to work twice as much as other people in their final year?"

She waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. "Whatever, I'll manage. The important point is, I will have access to the most advanced systems for cybernetic engineering and neural network programming! I can finish the testing of the algorithm construct the perfect Songbird, probably in half of the time or less!"

She had raised her voice more and more as she spoke, and finished with a squeal of excitement. The sight of my friend being unable to contain so much happiness within her small stature made me grin. I was not entirely convinced that the double workload of helping out in the factory and working on her final project was a good idea, but her excitement was contagious. And the extent of it made it clear that she didn't worry about that herself – at least not yet.

"That sounds really fantastic! Congratulations, Moon!"

She threw her arms around me in a hug, and I tried my best to hug her back, despite her bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. Her happy laughter caused all my dark thoughts and strange, ill-defined worries to be wiped away, and I just couldn't help but join in. It was always hard to stay gloomy in her presence when she was so exhilarated. And I was genuinely happy for her, just as I was genuinely curious about her work. So after dinner, Moon took me to the lab with her, to show me her progress before she would move her hardware to the Artificial factory the next day.

The Songbird had been developed in a small room in the Computer Science building that she had all for herself, probably special courtesy of Doctor Way. The lab was filled with various parts of hardware, some of them looking vaguely familiar to me. But for the most part, the nature and purpose of what I saw eluded me.

Most of it had been pushed towards the walls, to leave the center of the room free to move. In one corner of the room, there was a desk with various types of tools and smaller hardware cluttering its surface. Half of one wall was covered in an enormous screen, with dozens of windows open and endless lines of code crawling across them. Moon walked over to it and began tapping at seemingly random places. It all looked completely meaningless to me, but she maneuvered through the lines of code with the same intuitive ease and familiarity as a child that grows up near a forest and knows every tree, every branch and every path through the shrubs.

She had explained to me once that the code indeed looked like a forest to her in its true representation as a complex, three-dimensional matrix. The goggles she wore on top of her head allowed her to see a 3D projection of that matrix and manipulate it more efficiently. But right now, she apparently only entered some simple commands in the 2D representation on the screens.

"Let's try this. Say something. Speak into that microphone please," she requested.

I went to the recording unit that she had pointed to. It was a simple microphone – the only thing that I could clearly identify among the other equipment on the desk.

"Ok. What should I say?"

I leaned closer to the microphone, thinking for a second before I spoke. "Hello Songbird. My name is Sky."

Moon chuckled. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then, I heard a voice. My voice.

"Hello Sky. My name is Songbird. How are you?"

My eyebrows shot up in surprise. I looked over at Moon, who laughed as she saw my face.

"Surprised?" she asked with a smirk. "She makes a good mockingbird, doesn't she?"

She gave one of the processor terminals next to her a gentle pat, as if it was a big animal. I could understand the sense of pride she must have felt very well – within just a few seconds, Songbird had already managed to impress me. What had surprised me was not the fact that it had been able to reply to my greeting. What was truly stunning was that from the short sample of my voice that the Songbird had recorded, it was apparently immediately capable of re-arranging the sound of it and using it for itself.

"That's pretty impressive," I noted.

"Well, she can do even more! Songbird, why don't you sing for us?"

Without further ado, Songbird obliged, and what I heard next left me completely baffled.

I had heard myself before, mainly in replays of simulation recordings, so I was spared that weird feeling of hearing my own voice for the first time, at least. Still, that hadn't quite prepared me for the perplexing experience of hearing words in my voice that I hadn't actually spoken before. And now I even heard what sounded like me, singing a song, in a long dead language that I didn't actually speak – that was more than weird.

„Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien," my voice resounded from the speakers throughout the room.

It was good. No, it was better than good. Better than I would have ever expected – and not just the French. I knew that song very well. I really loved all kinds of music and I enjoyed singing along to Old World tunes. Occasionally I had even been told that my singing voice sounded nice. But Songbird was leagues better than me.

The algorithm didn't just use my voice to imitate the singing of Edith Piaf in the original. Instead, Songbird added little variations, like in its own interpretation, never once breaking the harmony of the song. I almost felt jealousy at my own voice being wielded skillfully like that. And besides, the artificial voice put an amount of emotion into the song that I had never thought an AI to be capable of conveying at all.

That wasn't just hollow imitation. It was different. It carried all of that strength of the original, but was much heavier with a sense of bittersweet melancholy, and it was like hearing the song for the first time, or an entirely new song. And it made me feel. It caused goosebumps to rise on my forearms and gave rise to tingling sensation, spreading from the base of my skull down along my spine, and crawling up at the back of my head. I shuddered as the pleasant tingling coursed through my entire body.

"That's... incredible," I finally managed to put forth after a while.

"Well, she can sing and speak. She just cannot come up with entirely new songs yet," Moon said, "But I think we'll get there sooner or later."

"I think what you did so far is already pretty amazing. What voice does she normally speak in?"

"My own. I recorded some samples to test the remixing. So you are the second person to donate your voice to her. To be honest, I wanted to get you here to try this for a long time. I'm so sick of hearing my own voice over and over, you have no idea."

She laughed, and somehow I couldn't imagine ever growing tired of that sound myself.

"If you don't mind, I'd like for her to keep yours for a while," she said, and smiled at me.

I smiled back and nodded. "Of course. I'm flattered."

"Well, you do have a very beautiful voice. I like listening to it. Songbird's singing sounds much better with it than with my own."

I found myself blushing at her words. Surely she was exaggerating. From what I had heard, I suspected that Songbird could probably produce something pleasant even from a sample of trashcan lids being slammed together.

I hummed along to the old song as I walked through the room and eyed all of the computer hardware curiously. There were the dark and sleek processing units that I was vaguely familiar with – they looked like the ones that ran our training simulations. Inside a clear casing, they consisted of a stack of dark plates with glowing blue lights running up and down along them in complicated patterns. Some towers were clad in metallic casings, their inner workings concealed from my prying eyes. Not that I would have any understanding for what exactly it was that I was seeing here anyway, but still, the look of that hardware only added to the mystery of this fantastic feat of computer science that I was witnessing.

"Will the algorithm keep a human voice for the presentation?" I asked.

"I thought about that quite a lot actually," Moon answered, "I guess it would be easier, to demonstrate the whole range of her abilities. Either way, it has to be a mobile unit, because ultimately, I want to show that the algorithm can be combined with the laws successfully."

We fell silent for a while and I thought about her words. Since our last talk, I had read up to refresh my knowledge on the laws that all AI was programmed to obey. The first three were obvious – they were based on laws of robotics so old that they predated the city of Pharos and had been widely known even before the war. The secondary and tertiary laws were optional, and implemented depending purely on the purpose of the unit. Only Artifcials were always equipped with all nine of the circuits, and thus obeyed all nine of the laws.

The fourth law, or fourth circuit, obliged an AI to answer any query made by a human related to its nature, purpose and intent. It was supposed to keep them from passing Turing tests knowingly, and I had myself witnessed the extent of it when I had talked to the Artificial nurse the other day. The fifth law applied to any AIs with higher communication functions, and essentially it said "A robot must know it is a robot". No memory wipe or power failure would ever allow them to wake up without any knowledge of their purpose. The sixth law prevented them from harming other robots, unless it conflicted with the primary circuits – the ones that commanded them to protect humans and follow their orders.

The tertiary laws mostly dealt with the specific demands of mobile, more complex units capable of machine learning even after their manufacture. These were the ones that made it so hard to implement new AI algorithms that still worked in conjunction with them. The seventh law stated that they could not deviate from their primary function, and the eight law prevented them from learning any function that conflicted with any of the others laws. The ninth law was simpler, and demanded that all mobile units must follow a factory recall, something also known as the "Beacon Protocol".

I knew some stories of the Old World that dealt with AIs and the question of how to get them to follow human orders without failure. In most of these stories, limitations of the laws, or conflict among them sooner or later led to catastrophic results. I liked to imagine that the creators of the neural network that all our AIs were based on had read those stories too, and that that had inspired them to implement the failsafe – a basic function built into all units, from simple drones to complex Artificials. In case of a conflict between any of the laws, they would simply power down.

"It would look rather odd to put that algorithm in an actual bird body, though," I remarked.

"That's true. I'd prefer a human body, but it'll depend on what parts I can get. Besides, I'd have to construct a bird from scratch, and I don't think I'll have time for that. Maybe I could get some leftover cat parts, if there are any...."

"Leftover what?!"

I looked up from the terminal I had been inspecting, and found Moon with her arms crossed and her brows scrunched together in an expression of deep thought. When she saw my extremely confused expression she smiled.

"There was an attempt to create Artificial cats a couple of years ago, we heard about it in class. But the developers couldn't quite get their charming moodiness across, so they eventually gave up on that project. Besides, there would have been problems with marketing them. Because, you know. By law, all Artificials..."

"...are property of Pharos," I completed her sentence for her. "Which begs the question why you get to build one yourself at all? Bird, cat or humanoid."

"Actually, we had to include that in our ethics applications. At the moment of completion, Songbird will become property of Pharos. If I end up scoring a job that gets me assigned to AI development, or one of the factories, I might be able to continue working on it. But otherwise, the moment I put that algorithm in a mobile unit – well, given that it all works... I'll have to let her go."

She sounded wistful as she said it, but also hopeful. I could only imagine how that must feel like, to create something so grand and fantastic, and then losing all of it.

"I'm... sorry," I said quietly.

"No need to be. I'll just be happy if it works. And as long as it doesn't end up looking like one of those Prometheus prototypes, I'm content."

"Prometheus?"

"That was the working title of the project that led to the development of Artificials," Moon explained, "Back in the day, that kind of research was closely intertwined with biomechanical engineering. You know, those cybernetic body parts used as prostheses and for augmentation. So there exist some images of the very first Artificials – they looked extremely weird because they were basically made up of a bunch of stitched together cybernetic limbs. Like in that Old World story you once told me about."

"Like Frankenstein's monster?" I suggested.

"Yeah, that's the one!" she said. "I really hope whatever I can come up with won't look like that."

I shuddered at the vivid image that her words had created in my mind. "Yeah, Me too."

Meanwhile Songbird had started to sing something else - another Old World song.

"I know I stand in line until you think you have the time to spend an evening with me..."

That was one of my favorites – I remembered now that at some point, Moon had asked me for a collection of my favorite Old World songs, and finally I connected the dots. She had probably used some of those to train Songbird, as she had mentioned before that this iteration of the algorithm had been trained on music with lyrics.

"And if we go someplace to dance, I know that there's a chance you won't be leaving with me..."

On a whim, I started to sing along in the second voice, and stretched out my hand to Moon to ask her for a dance. And so we sang and giggled and danced around the lab like it was the most ordinary thing to do on a Thursday afternoon.

"And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you."

But there was nothing ordinary about any of this. It really seemed like Moon was on track to create the first creative AI.

For the longest time, people had stuck to this idea that it was better to leave the manual, repetitive labor to the robots, and the creative thinking to the humans. But perhaps it was high time for this to change. A creative AI might be able to learn through more than just imitation and iteration. It might be able to solve problems through something beyond complex simulations. It might one day be able to come up with solutions to problems in the fraction of the time it would take a human mind. It might even be able to solve problems that were too complex for human minds to grasp, like our difficulties with the city infrastructure these days. In fact, an AI like that had the potential to become the ultimate infrastructure AI,

That moment, imagining all the possibilities and implications quickly caused my thoughts to spiral out of control. I felt like I caught a glimpse of the future – if this worked, it would change everything, like a second robotic revolution.

As we were dancing through the lab, singing and laughing along the songs that Songbird sang for us, for a brief moment it seemed like everything in the world was perfect. I wanted to hold on to this moment forever, I wanted to keep this feeling of confidence that there was a future waiting for us, bright and perfect and filled with happiness. A future in which we would graduate together, move into an apartment in the city and dance through it every night just like we danced through the lab right now.

Yet at the same time, an uncanny sense of anxiety stretched out its dark tendrils from deep within me, and coiled tightly around my heart with an icy touch. Like the sense of foreboding evoked by the twilight sky, I suddenly felt like every second of this precious moment only brought me closer to an ominous, impending doom. I couldn't quite understand the sentiment back then, but it was on that day, in that moment, that I felt for the first time that whatever future this world held, it was for people like Moon, and not for people like me. All I knew was that somehow, I felt that if I didn't push her away, I would pull her down into an abyss of darkness and despair along with me.

And yet I held onto her, that small spark of happiness in my life, and the glimpse I had caught of a future filled with brilliant light, and song and dance.

Another song had begun, and as if to reflect the sudden and inexplicable sense of dread that filled me, Songbird's voice – my voice – resounded through the room, heavy with bittersweet sadness. It amplified my desolation, until I shuddered from holding back a flood of foolish, irrational tears behind the mask of my smile.

"If you're lost you can look, and you will find me, time after time. If you fall I will catch you, I'll be waiting, time after time."

_______
A.N.
Apologies that this is a bit longer than usual, but I really didn't know where to break this up...
Also, in case you don't know the songs mentioned here, for your reference, they are:
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien by Edith Piaf (perhaps familiar to you through its use by Hans Zimmer for the score of Inception - in a very ingenious way, I should add)
Something Stupid - Frank & Nancy Sinatra (of which there is a great cover by Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman)
Time After Time - Cindy Lauper