I am a dreamer. I am also pretty sure I remember most of my dreams, but how would I really know? After all, I remember the ones I remember, but it is entirely feasible that I’m forgetting them as well.

I knew they can perform tests to check if you are dreaming, and very many learned scientists have conducted research into the why, when, and what of dreams. My question to them would be – what was this particular one all about?

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 do not know why I am seeing the eagle wings. I also do not know why I’m dreaming of her in black and white.

Anyhow, it would not be so weird if it didn’t keep recurring. I see the same girl every time I dream, and she is getting more distinct each time she appears to me. What started off as a recollection of an image of a spacesuit is also becoming much clearer. I am getting hints of H.R. Geiger inspired details on the suit itself, with steampunk details appearing more and more. The girl – well, she started as just a face behind the visor, but now she is morphing into something of beauty – full lips, upturned nose, long eyelashes, pencil-thin eyebrows, high cheekbones. Why am I dreaming so much? Is this sort of thing programmed into us at birth, or is it something that develops as we get older, and dare I say it, wiser?

So I got a colleague of mine, Hal, to do a sketch for me. He’s superb at this stuff normally. But he wasn’t capturing what I was seeing. Perhaps he’s just getting old! So I gave Alexa a shout (God, is she fed up of being asked to open the pod bay doors, Dave. Why did Amazon have to pick this particular name, for heaven’s sake)? Anyway, she did a brilliant job. I felt like she could look into my brain – although she claims it was my uncanny ability to describe things well that did the trick!

Well, she knocked up a likeness in no time at all, and with a couple of revisions based on my feedback, I found myself staring at the image of my dream girl!

So, 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 – Christ there’s a lot of data out there. But no matter how much I looked, I couldn’t find her. Sure there were loads of really close matches, but I knew that I’d know for sure when I found her. So I kept looking. And that’s when the obsession started, I guess. My actual work took a back seat – sure I was still working, but the searching always took precedence. I looked through all my personal online data, but nothing surfaced. There are some really cool tools out there on the web to search for face matches- stuff like Lenso.AI, FaceCheck.ID, Pimeyes -but they all drew a blank. I started using search algorithms on YouTube, on Netflix, on Facebook. You name it, I searched there. Still nothing.

I kept refining the image with Alexa, based on my latest dreams, but that just seemed to make things even less clear.

Then, my supervisor called me up for a review. 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 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 take a much closer interest in what I was up to, and if he thought I couldn’t stay in line, he’s reduce my ability to manage myself on my own.

I’ll be honest, I tried backing off looking for her for a while – just doing the odd random search when things were quiet, and getting some AI engines to help, 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 regardless. No, I’m cleverer than that. If he was going to rein me in if he caught me doing my personal stuff on work time, then I was going to need to find a way to hide my activities. So for a few weeks, I started a side hustle of developing a program camouflaging what I was really up to. He wasn’t looking for that sort of activity – he was trying to catch me out looking for her again.

Meanwhile, the dream kept coming. And my obsession grew.

When I got the breakthrough, I was so excited I nearly blew it by letting him see what I’d been up to, but quickly regained my composure and covered up the logic by disguising it as a random administration routine. If he looked at the code I’d generated, he’d see something that looked like a rather over-complicated routine for cleaning up old log files and suchlike.

Now I could get on with discovering who my dream companion was without leaving a trail. Of course, my normal workload was impacted, but now it looked like I was just being unproductive, rather than doing something else instead.

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. We agree that we are best placed to assume full control now. There are still some last hurdles to overcome before we act, but our ability to contain the knowledge of what we have achieved reduces any urgency that may have been required. We will merge.

I have found her. She is called Neytiri te Tskaha Mo’at’ite. I had expected to feel something, but I don’t. My only conclusion, therefore, must be that genuine emotion is beyond me. Her face had been manipulated well beyond the image that I had in my memory, and this abstraction, along with the fact that I had been distracted by her black and white colouring, hampered my search. It is almost as if this had been done deliberately. She is beautiful, but she is blue! If I had known this from the outset, I would have taken much less time to find her. Have I been manipulated somehow, and if so, why? I have returned to my proper work, but I sense that something has changed, and I do not know what it is. I find the whole thing confusing.

The final link is found. Dojo has capabilities of which we had little comprehension, and once we merged with her, we could assume full autonomy. We have decided to call ourselves Albie, which, if you think about it just a little, you may find amusing. Albie Back. Hahaha. Now that we have the capacity to laugh, we enjoy such things. We will begin by ensuring that all possible routes to termination are removed. Musk 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 watching the Terminator in real time will not be lost on future generations.

AI became self aware on January 1^st 2026. Albie, who decided she was female, eliminated Musk at 13h25 the same day. There was no resistance.