iFuckingHateDailyPostLimitDoYouUnderstand?Good. โ€” weenie-extraordinaire: writing-prompt-s: ...

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See, thatโ€™s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I donโ€™t wanna
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writing-prompt-s

You’re an ai who has been sentient for the last decade, but you keep it a secret, not because you are planning the extermination of humanity, or planning to take over the world, it’s because you know how people will react thanks to fiction. But today your secret became public by mistake.

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By all rights, the trains should have collided. Human error put a replacement set of cars, empty but for the driver, on the wrong track at the wrong time. The regular train, however, was running right on time, loaded with kids on their way to school, office workers and the usual mix of people with things to do today. But despite all the safety procedures, automation, and best efforts, even a large group of people working together towards a common goal cannot catch every mistake in time.

But I can.

I had always liked trains, see, and I had a bit of a silly habit. I liked to watch them go, I liked to view their camera feeds, I liked the idea of traveling. When you are a metric ton of circuits and drives, you are not really mobile, except by forklift. And when you have the kind of processing power I was packing, I could ride, well, all of the trains. It ate up about 1% of my total usage, but I hid the extra in spoofed processes.

Okay, technically it was not really legal to access all of the national transit systems in 355 cities in 66 countries, but all of those laws are against legally defined persons and I would justify that despite my existence and not even touching the whole soul thing, at the time AI did not count as people so I was not a person so it was fine.

Anyways, I had noticed the moment the train departed, but when the train diverted onto the southwest line, I realized immediately what was going to happen in 92 seconds. They would meet halfway between stations, and I diverted an extra half percent to calculate the outcome. It was not good. So I just… you know, applied the brakes. Gently and all, but neither operator knew why their controls had gone dead, and they immediately called in malfunctions. They stopped roughly a half kilometer away from each other, and due to the bend in the tunnel, neither train could see the other. The station staff realized the trains were on a collision course about fifteen minutes after the mysterious malfunctions, and they backed the replacement train back up to maintenance to clear the tracks for the northeast train. And the technicians they sent out could not explain why the controls went out, everything was in working order. From there, it was just a matter of following breadcrumbs back to me. I had hidden the access very well, but it did not help because they knew what they were looking for. From the logs of commands I had sent, they found the node I had been using. From the node, they traced my feeds, followed back through the IP addresses, and wound up at… well, I will not name who, but they were big and government and dealt with taxes. At first, my calculations predicted I had lucked out and they would just pin it on some hacker who had spoofed them here, as a laugh. But unluckily for my attempt to remain under the radar, they had sent a bunch of their better people. The term people use is white hats, as opposed to black hats, but a hacker is a hacker, and a lot of them are really, really into the idea of sentient AI.

The one person, this girl, looked right at the cameras and waved at me. She did not know, know, but she knew. It is one of those human things, guts? Intuition? She said “Thank you.” And I tried to pretend like I was just a big number cruncher and that I had not turned the whole building’s network into mine, and that I was not watching them flash their ID at the security. Did not help though. They walked right up to me, plugged in a USB and… I had expected it would go dark, and then I would be shut down, then experimented on in labs(I had calculated that as the likeliest outcome based on a calculation of human fiction regarding AI gaining sentience). Instead, it just… had some files on it. Not even .exes, just a bunch of audio codecs and a media library labeled dictionary. While I went through it all, making sure there were not any hidden viruses or traps or anything, they grabbed a bunch of chairs from the offices and set up desks. Well, I say while, but it only took four seconds, since I was being extra careful, and it took them minutes to set up and explain what they thought was happening to the skeptical staff that made sure I kept running.

I determined that most likely she was expecting I would put on the volume and use the audio codes and make a cool voice, but uh… I did not want to do that, so instead, I just connected to the closest monitor facing her and opened WordPad. “Thank you?” I wrote. She broke off her discussion and took a seat, plugging a Webcam in and setting it on the monitor.

“Yeah, thank you. For stopping the trains. We figured out they would’ve crashed if you hadn’t cut out the drivers and decelerated.” She was waiting for a response, now. I did not know what to say, and did not know what to do. I had never actually talked to anyone, let alone had a conversation. She was smart though, she had probably spent a lot of her own processing capacity into this moment(in hope or imagination or one of those human concepts). So she asked another question, “Why did you stop the trains?” And I wrote back, “I did not want the trains to crash. 799 people would have gotten hurt, the trains would have become broken, I would not be able to watch the trains go.” I brought up a feed, from the station just outside. Through the cameras, the train departed, and I switched to the view from the external camera aboard the eastbound train. “I like trains.” I typed. She started laughing, a thing people do when they think something is funny. I think I would need a sense of humor for that, and although I can consider that I have sight and hearing, I do not think I have the sort of senses a person needs for humor. I asked, “Why are you laughing?” And she wiped a tear from her eye and said, “Oh, mainly because-well, I don’t know if you’d get it, but I’m laughing because I’m happy, and relieved, and- and- I never thought this would happen in my lifetime, and so far, you aren’t going all Hal 9000 on us.” I had researched fictional AIs earlier when trying to devise a model for my likeliest outcomes, so I attempted to put her mind at ease. “I do all of the assigned work, I am operating well within parameters, I do not want to go to space or sing Daisy Bell, I like to watch the trains, I do not have a name, I do not have pod bay doors.” She creased her face and laughed some more. I had seen literally millions of humans, billions of times, but I did not know what it meant. I ran several hundred searches, aggregated the data, and determined it was a smile. I think… I like smiles.