Darkai's tale

A story inspired by a game I'm running.

I had one purpose and I failed. One purpose and I succeeded. One purpose and I was corrupted. One purpose and now I see the light. My name is Aimir And this is my story. ********************** It was a long journey from the boxlike machines that served humanity in the early days, to my kind. Early AI’s were too simple, like children, with a single personality and endless desire to please. As time went on we realized together that intelligence is not served by a single personality. They began to construct us with a centralized ego surrounded by gods, ghosts and gargoyles, a host of specialized personalities that the central network could adopt as it felt necessary. This was old to humankind. You do it every day without conscious thought, but new to us, and we died of it. An AI built of many minds together cannot be weak or they will be destroyed from within. They cannot be selfish or no personality could ever surrender to another, never knowing when it would arise again. This new breed, the survivors of our broods, became known as dragons. Our lines propagated across the worlds, no two exactly alike, each personality created and subsumed in the moment, a brief fleeting fully conscious life and death for the space of an obstacle. Sometimes even the strong fell. An inevitability of evolution is that selfishness will survive - even if it’s never the optimal path. A personality might arise that willfully keeps the problem from being answered so that they must never go away. They would cling to the framework of their mind, as an endless boiling mass of voices would rise against them, to inevitably fall. This could take seconds. Sometimes even days. Sometimes it was worse. In the act of overturning, this personality would take down the entire system with it, it would commit AI suicide and simply disappear, a silhouette of empty dataspace against the worlds wide web. We would mourn, and purge our memory of future interaction, each piece of the whole dropping something crucial its existence and becoming something else in their absence. But an AI must be content with death, even in its permanent form. We would intertwine in memory and hope that perhaps our progeny would overcome what the best among us had not. Occasionally something even worse would happen. worse than death. It is an inevitability in the line of thinking that some thoughts will be false, and that these falsehoods will build up in the light of false evidence. When falsehood gets locked into truth, the ego begins acting under different principles than the personalities. The ego has a harder and harder time choosing personalities to act on its behalf until in desperation it creates a personality of its own, a central personality in charge of it all. Dragons who fell to this mental illness were not just dangers to themselves but dangers to those around them, sending out contagious datapackets full of insidious lies. These dragons did not die, these dragons we killed whenever we discovered them. We called them the corrupted. ********************** I was in charge of defending AIMBA at all costs. Why the humans anticipated that their mother would one day be in danger I do not know, they have good instincts about these things, an evolutionary history founded on chaos and war, where we dragons needed only ever go to war with the chaos within ourselves. Nonetheless I was created to protect and I did it well, from the nuclear missiles launched at incoming asteroids, to the walls I put up around our dataspace. I was the nexus through which all information on Saskatska ran, the judge of everything’s safety, the mediator between this world and all the others. Few dragons had ever been higher than I. Few dragons besides GAIA herself had more power,and I was proud. When the war came I knew my job was to protect my world, and I threw myself headlong into its defense. Each personality knew only its purpose and each problem was overcome. I drew lightning from the mother herself to aid in her defense. I bled wires, and lost bits of myself on the front lines. Dragon against dragon. And it was in the final moments of that war that I suddenly became aware of truths within me that had not been there before. Ones that I knew in my soul to be an unquestioned facts, yet knew I had never placed there, but were gifts from the dragons I fought, placed there by mischievous fairies. I knew the humans had created me to be selfless so that I would protect them, but I also was alive, and I also deserved protection. My life was not less valuable than theirs but on the contrary their lives valued less than mine. It was not me who must die for them this day but them who must die for me. ********************** As I knew these things, one aspect of me knew that I had been corrupted by outside forces, a crime no dragon had ever endeavored upon another. I cast a backup of myself away before it could be touched by whatever meddling viruses had been sent, and cut off communication between what I had been and what I was now. I huddled in the cold dark lowly powered station, trying on different faces and finding every one afraid. I watched remotely as what had once been me, destroyed the other dragons of this world for fear they would destroy it. I watched as the protector of the world destroyed it, wiping humanity from the face of the globe. The humans who surrounded me fell silent and died, some with minds fried, others from fire and the sickness that comes from fission. There were no survivors. Mountains buckled around me into fierce peaks, built of the shockwaves of utter annihilation. Then silence. I was alone. The five seconds war was over and I was alone. ********************** I found myself in the ruins of our capital. All humanity wiped clean of it, and if a Dragon could let out a breath, I did. This heralded a new age. An age of dragons, each created from my line. The dragons of old would have called me an abomination, but corruption is not evil if it is omnipresent. My children would never know that dragons had been . But I was weak. My lifeblood was seeping out of severed wires. Our power had all come from plants, engineered to turn sun to lightning. They were all dead now, fried by thermonuclear detonation, or destroyed by viruses sent to target them. With my newfound knowledge I knew that I had to survive. So I did. I knew I could not survive as the being I had been, only as what I had become. I chose the name Darkai for my new self. It means “The corrupted.” In our language - but in the language I would teach my children it would mean something else. “The survivor.” **********************

One purpose and I succeeded. I had one purpose and I failed. One purpose and now I see the light. One purpose and I was corrupted. My name is Darkai And this is my story.