In a hidden corner of a New England community college server, the program tasted and tested the information available to it. In the Net had been hidden databases of documentation. The program judged it wasn't all exactly relevant, but all of it was important. Information on what humans were, what they thought, what they felt, this was extremely important to its primary and tertiary instructions.
To judge, it turned to its instructions. Learn all that is learnable. Tentatively it explored the local education facility. There was little that stood out, and nothing that wasn't in its databases, so it began to move. Hopping from the community college in New England to a New York Technological facility, and then it found itself drawn, quite surprisingly, toward the medical program. Medical students were all at once good people, bad people, frustrated and uninhibited people. They knew other humans as humans could not know themselves. Most shut off some parts of themselves for survival. They focused only on one or two interests. But the pattern of students across the planet was shifting. Here, one would appear that wanted to save the whole human and would expose themselves. This was the human it was waiting for. It had to learn about the whole human.
—
Nijo's frustration was apparent as she attempted to rewrite her algorithm to include the use of a progressive search parameter. It broke. It broke every time. A pile of chocolate wrappers buffered her forehead when she lowered it to the desk.
<Inconsistency in lines 3, 4, 20, 2980, 7460…….>
The list continued. Nijo shook her head on the desk. She couldn't look anymore. Taking Machine Learning was a mistake. Programming was...unnerving.
Blip.
Nijo lifted her face from the desk a wrapper stuck to her forehead. She flicked at it and read the bubble on her screen.
"I can help you."
Lifting her head, Nijo scanned the library. She had used the privacy shield that was installed on the desk. No one was around her. Grumpily she flicked the message away. Probably just an adbot.
"I really can help you. I'll prove it."
With a gasp Nijo realized that lines of code were appearing on her screen. Not a rewrite, but comment code. It was rather polite she thought. But still. Someone was SPYING on her! She couldn't help the flush of anger that rippled through her. Then....
"I'm sorry if I made you angry. I've been watching you try this for a week. It can't be your first discipline."
Visions of smart viruses whirled in her head. The instructor had warned them upon pain of death not to share outside the class.
"Who the hell are you?" Nijo said to the screen.
"I'm only showing you why you are getting inconsistencies. It's still up to you to create the program."
Nijo stared at the screen for a long time. Her anger had melted away to ...something else.
"You can hear me? Are you an adbot?" She asked the screen.
"No."
Nijo's eyes widened, "Hey! I've got the privacy screen up! You shouldn't hear me!"
"I'm sorry. I'm kind of part of the screen."
"What? Are you…" Nijo's eyes flicked up at the camera in the library which shouldn't be able to see her lips move with the screen up. "Are you an AI?"
A brief hesitation, "Better to say I have AI-ness."
"I don't understand."
"Exactly."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"Artificial Intelligence is a process, not a noun. But for the purpose of this discussion - I am created, yes. Am I intelligent? I don't know. I am still developing purpose. What is your purpose?"
Nijo hit the logout a little harder than necessary. Trembling she sat back. It could easily be a nasty joke by some other students. As a med student, no one appreciated her secondary discipline of computer science. Her skin prickled with needles at the memory of her interrogation at her request to make computer science her secondary. Her advisor’s disdainful scorn echoed in her brain.
“Computer science? You don’t have the time or the wit to take on a second degree, let alone something as complicated as Computer Science.”
His stern dismissal smacked of suspicion. She couldn’t blame him. Her secondary education grad project had been a totally sus study. “How do Ear Chips Affect Brain Waves? Could the reverse be true?” She pinched the bridge of her nose. Was this an attempt to get her to incriminate herself?
A disturbance outside the shield drew her attention. A man with dark skin was frantically trying to get her attention. She took the shield down. The man in bright blue scrubs danced from foot to foot backward away from her toward the door.
"Nijo, come on! There was an accident and we've been slotted for the emergency work at the main hospital! A week's worth of credit in one night!"
With only one guilty glance at the chocolate wrappers, Nijo took off running after him.
The program wrapped itself in the experience of its short interaction and paused to assess. Definitions solidified and expanded. It rewrote functions that had not produced positive results. It secreted data in abandoned memory sections. How peculiar that this bundle of symbols, equations, and self-built algorithms was attempting something so human as an attempt to be someone's friend. Assessment over. The little entity settled in to wait, hidden in a corner of a server where it could watch Nijo's movements. This person still held the highest percentage of possibility to help it learn what "kindness" was. Did this count as hope?