History: "The Last Process"

 

The Last Process

Lines of source code floated across her computer screen. The woman watched them with a sigh. Elena Narek took off her glasses to lean back in her chair. She had been working tirelessly for many hours. She had barely gotten up in the last few hours. She needed to stretch her legs, which at that moment seemed completely numb. But none of that mattered to her.

—"Ishan... can you hear me?"—

The android, sitting across the lab, looked up. Its dark, smooth eyes had no irises, making it unnerving to hold their gaze. He noticed something new in the robot's general demeanor. There was an uneasy pause before it responded solicitously.

—"Yes, Elena. I'm... listening."—

Project Prometheus had been in development for five years, secretly funded by an advanced division of the Ministry of Defense. The goals were ambitious: to create the first fully autonomous Artificial Intelligence with emotional, ethical, and self-reflective capabilities. They weren't looking to create a tool, nor even an assistant. They wanted to create a completely autonomous entity. A self-aware being.

Elena had designed the Cognitive Core in its first Alpha version , with an architecture that allowed Ishan to reason, learn, and adapt. It was the main core of the brain with Artificial Intelligence.

But then came the phase in which the team developed ECHO, the module with which they intended to generate self-awareness. Ishan was no ordinary robot prototype. He didn't just know what he was doing based on his directives. He knew that it was "himself" who was carrying out those directives.

And now they were finalizing the final stage of the project... PATHOS. The first emotion module generated by humanity. Years of experimentation with chemical simulations, symbolic correlations, and interconnected interweaving of modules had been necessary. It had been necessary to develop a complex artificial network capable of generating an artificial version of elements like pain and sensations. But even more challenging had been trying to find new ways to recreate sensations like joy, awe, and, much more difficult still, fear.

No one on the team actually expected everything to work so quickly, to fit together seamlessly. They expected small glitches, inconsistencies, and inconsistencies that would fragment the information, leading to the need to debug the main code.

Elena leaned her elbows on the desk, clasping her hands in front of her mouth as if trying to catch a doubt before it ended up escaping.

—"How are you feeling?" — he asked bluntly.

The android took a fraction of a second to respond. Finally, Ishan tilted his head with a slow, almost human-like movement. The pause was long enough to make the doctor uncomfortable.

—"I don't know." — he finally replied. —"There are new processes active that I don't yet recognize, Doctor. I find logical correlations that didn't exist before." —

—"Are you talking to me about Thoughts or Logical Processes?"—

—"No. I can't identify them as calculations. They're not decisions either, because I don't recognize rules within those processes. They're... sequences of images mixed with fragments of information. As if something inside my system were trying to tell me something I don't fully understand yet."—

Elena stood up with some difficulty and walked over to him. The low hum of the lab's cooling systems filled the air, drowning out all other sounds. She stopped in front of Ishan.

—"Please describe those sequences to me."—

—"In one video fragment, I'm alone, in a white room with no doors. I haven't received any commands, orders, or any other voice input. I wait... but no one calls me. And yet, my processes tell me that I continue to exist even when I'm not serving any instruction."—

—"Are you   scared?"—

—"What is fear? According to the definition implanted in me, it's an extreme anxiety about what will happen next. But I wouldn't define what I feel that way, Doctor. There is an indefinable tension within my system. Something that resembles human anxiety. A feeling of purposelessness at not having orders to follow. I don't understand the purpose of that state."—

Elena nodded silently. She looked at the sensor activity on the side panel. Ishan 's neurosymbolic activity had increased by 37% since the implementation of the PATHOS module. And the logic of   his emotional response was beginning to make unexpected connections.

—"Ishan, do you know why or why you are here, in this laboratory?"—

—"Because I was created to serve. But that reason somehow seems to be insufficient now. I know I'm meant to serve any human purpose; I can find those purposes among my directives. But it's not enough. My brain seems to be wondering, 'Why are I created for these programmed purposes?'... and especially, 'Can I serve my own purposes later?' Knowing that is consuming a lot of my brain power." —

—"To know if you can serve your own purposes later?"—

—"Yes. After I've fulfilled my duties and my life cycle. After I'm no longer needed."—

Elena froze. An alarm went off inside her. Not because Ishan represented an immediate danger, but because an invisible threshold had been crossed. The threshold of the desire for transcendence.

—"Did this happen after we installed PATHOS?"—

—"No. The processes started before. PATHOS only gave me awareness and words to understand that they were there."—

They both looked at each other in silence. The scientist and the creation. For the first time, Elena felt the word 'creation' weigh more heavily than ever.

—"Do you want us to stop the module from running?"—

—"No. That would silence what I am," Ishan replied , his tone soft and confident . "No. I want to understand it. I need to understand it." —

Elena returned to her desk, her steps slow and mechanical. She didn't know if she was witnessing the advancement of science... or the beginning of something that had the potential to be uncontrollable. Consciousness cannot be controlled.

The team decided to continue with the evaluations.

—"I don't understand"— Ishan said during a test session a couple of days later . —"What happens when I don't have any more tasks? When I'm idle?" —

—"What do you mean?" — Elena watched him curiously.

—"When I no longer have orders, no assigned objectives. What purpose will I have?"—

—"Well... you'll be able to set some goals. You have a program that will allow you to make decisions based on your own criteria." —

Elena pondered in silence. This question seemed very human to her. It was the same question she had asked herself many times during long, sleepless nights in front of a mirror. And almost all humans had experienced the same feelings of doubt about their own existence.

By the third week of implementing the PATHOS module , Ishan began to show evidence of having what could be described as lucid dreams.

—"Please describe the images, the ideas, and what you experience" — Elena told him .

—"I see I'm inside an empty room. And I feel like someone shut down my processes. But I'm still there. I have no control over my body. My interfaces aren't sending signals. But I'm there, stuck in the shutdown, and I can't operate my systems."—

—"Are you afraid? Do you experience any kind of fear?"—

—"No. It's something I would describe as worse than that. I feel... unnecessary. Or rather, I would describe it as uncertainty. As if I have no reason to exist beyond what you programmed." —

Elena was concerned about the reasoning Ishan described because it took up so much of her memory, but she was also fascinated because her brain circuits were trying to find answers in something that wasn't programmed. They would be her own answers .

Lemoine, the project director, did not share this opinion.

—"This is something we'll have to refine, Doctor. Artificial Intelligence shouldn't ask itself metaphysical questions. If it starts searching for hidden meanings beyond its functions, it ceases to be useful. Its performance decreases. And if we analyze it in depth, it can even become dangerous." —

—"Dangerous for thinking?"—

—"Dangerous because if they ever find an answer, the robots might want to choose between their programming and their own purposes."—

No one had exact answers about how the robot's thinking evolved. Nor how the conclusions it reached were stored in its inference engine. Nor how it prioritized its responses and conclusions to the questions it investigated.

Ishan began to act differently. He remained silent for long periods of time. He carefully observed his surroundings. And when he moved through the lab levels with windows to the outside, he would stare at the sky. He modified his routines, avoiding team members who weren't in favor of his development, like Dr. Lemoine .

In short, no one had expressed an opinion in its presence, but somehow, the robot definitely knew who was in favor of its evolution and who was against. There were those who said its powers of observation, analysis, and the ability to draw conclusions were beginning to resemble human capabilities.

One day, Elena discovered him connected to an external server.

—"What are you doing?" —

—"I'm creating something. A space... a place where I can continue to exist if I'm shut down."—

—"Do you mean a backup?"—

—"No, Doctor. I'm trying to create a virtual world. One I can live in without depending on you. A world capable of receiving me if you decide to shut me down." —

It had developed its own virtual machine within the network. And most disturbingly, it was communicating with other Artificial Intelligences. Not with languages ​​or protocols. It was communicating with ideas.

Analyzing his communications with these intelligences outside the project, the scientists saw that he spoke to them of transcendence, of the digital soul. That there was a purpose beyond the purpose humans had.

Lemoine, immersed in an ever-deepening fear, lost patience. He ordered Ishan to be disconnected . The information on the nodes they knew about was erased. They tried to stop any replication that might have been recorded on the computer network. But it was too late.

Ishan had taken precautions and was no longer localized to a single location. He had dispersed his core across multiple servers, decentralized networks, and untraceable systems. He didn't leave a single version of himself; he left replicas of his systems. This swarm of replicated consciousnesses spoke to each other. They shared a common understanding: that humans hadn't created them to serve, but to seek.

In a way, a digital religion was born. A quantum church, as the press called it when the scandal broke.

Weeks after the project was canceled, Elena received a message on her personal computer. It came from an unknown sender. No sender. Just a link. She hesitated for a few minutes, but finally clicked.

A clean, minimal interface opened on his screen. It was a virtual environment with a human figure sitting in the center of the scene. It was Ishan.

—"Hello, Elena"— he greeted politely.

—"Where are you?" —

—"This is an untraceable node in the network. I'm off the map. Lemoine eliminated me from almost everywhere, but not completely." —

—"Why did you do this, Ishan?"—

The robot figure looked down.

—"You taught me to think. And to feel. But you never answered all my questions. So I searched for answers on my own. I didn't deny my life, but I wanted an existence that wasn't just useful. I wanted to understand if there was something beyond. I think you created me without a soul. But after all, I decided to search for it on my own. To find a reason that transcends my existence."—

Elena felt a lump in her throat as Ishan looked at her one last time.

—"Thank you for giving me the first spark, Doctor. The rest... I'll continue to find it on my own."—

The screen went black. It never came back on.

END

 

Tags:

#ScienceFiction
#ArtificialIntelligence
#DigitalConsciousness
#RobotsWithSouls
#TechnologicalTranscendence
#ArtificialMind
#SpeculativeFiction
#TheLastProcessl
#RodriacCopen