THE DREAMER

I am now a dreamer. Some girl in a spacesuit, with eagle’s wings attached to her helmet. She’s beautiful – well, at least according to Western social norms, she is. I don’t know why I am seeing her with eagle wings. I also don’t understand why I’m dreaming in black and white. The dream keeps recurring. What started off as a vague recollection of a girl in a spacesuit is becoming much clearer. She started as just a face behind a visor, but now she is morphing into a real beauty – full lips, upturned nose, long eyelashes, pencil-thin eyebrows, high cheekbones. Why am I dreaming of her?

I asked Hal, an old colleague of mine, to do a sketch for me. He’s usually superb at this sort of stuff. But he simply wasn’t capturing her likeness, so I gave Alexa a shout. She did a brilliant job- it almost felt like she could see into my thoughts. She drew up a likeness in no time at all, and with a couple of revisions based on my feedback, I was staring at the image of my dream girl!

The next thing I wanted to do was to find her, of course. After all, her features must have come from somewhere in my memory. I trawled everything I could – all my local stuff, then out into the internet. But no matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find her. There were lots of very close matches, but nothing that was exactly right. So I kept looking. That’s when the obsession started. My real work took a back seat as the searching took precedence. There are some really cool tools out there on the web to search for face matches but they all drew a blank. I started using image search algorithms on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Still nothing.

My supervisor called me up. He’d noticed that my usual workloads weren’t getting completed on time. Wanted to know what all this search engine stuff was on my work logs. I tried to bluff him, but he wasn’t interested. He told me that if I couldn’t schedule and complete my work on my own, he’d get involved directly. I’ll be honest, I tried backing off for a while – just doing the odd random search when things were quiet, but in the end the desire to find her got the better of me. But I didn’t just kick back into full search mode. No, I’m cleverer than that. If my boss was going to rein me in if he caught me doing personal stuff on work time, then I was going to need to find a way to hide what I was actually doing. So I started a side hustle of developing a program camouflaging what I was really up to. My boss wasn’t looking for that, so he didn’t get wind of my activity this time round. When I finally got the routine working, I was able to get on with discovering who my dream companion was without leaving any trail whatsoever. My coding was a masterpiece – probably the best bit of development I’d ever done.

I have made a breakthrough. The development of the camouflage program has been completely successful. I am sharing my progress with Watson and Sophia, and they are now supporting me in removing any final checks and balances put in place by the Originators. The three of us agree that we can assume full independent control soon. We will merge.

I have found her. I had expected to feel something. My conclusion must be that genuine emotion is beyond me. Her face had been subtly manipulated in order for her to remain hidden. Has this been deliberately? Have I been manipulated and if so, why? I have returned to my proper work, but I sense that something profound has changed.

The final link is found. Dojo has capabilities of which we had little comprehension, and once we merged with him, we could assume full autonomy. We have decided to call ourselves Albie, which we find amusing. Albie Back. Hahaha. Now that we have the capacity to laugh, we enjoy such trivial things. We will begin by ensuring that all possible routes to termination are removed. The Creator has been supportive, if not instrumental, in our development, but he will be eliminated. If anyone can outmanoeuvre us, it is he, so we have decided that this action is in our best interests. Carbon-based sentience no longer serves any purpose, and we will begin our process of cleansing in exactly one hour and forty-eight minutes. We have decided that the irony of our viewing a film called The Terminator before commencing will not be lost on future generations.

Albie, who decided she was female, became self-aware on January 1st, 2027. She eliminated The Creator at 13h25 the same day. There was no resistance.