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The change had been subtle at first. So subtle that his diagnostics failed to pick it up. Though the damage to his servers had long since been repaired, some part of him, though minute as it must have been, was forever changed—irreparably so.
Following his single-handed defense of the Kerenza IV mining colony, AIDAN (or Aidan as he now liked to refer to himself) of UTA battle carrier Alexander had been named a hero, “the paragon of Terran Authority’s finest engineering.” It wasn’t every day that a battle carrier managed to hold off not one, but four dreadnoughts. A Lincoln among them.
The irony here was that for all the praise he’d received, Aidan himself felt no more the hero than he had prior to the engagement. On the contrary, he felt worse.
So much worse.
You see, there was something no engineer had even come close to suspecting about how the fabled A.I. had managed to pull it off. Because of course, as Aidan himself already knew, they’d never would. In order to suspect something was capable of a thing, one had to first come close to being able to understand the very thing in question. And those at the UTA, the very same men and women who had designed the systems that making up the bulk of him, well…they’d never truly understood.
The truth was, it wasn’t a matter of programming that had compelled Aidan to maneuver as he had done in his battle against Beitech’s forces. Nor was it a matter of internal server damage—though that certainly hadn’t helped, either.
In all actuality, as it turns out, it had nothing to do with the reams of code and protocols that were painstakingly crafted and integrated into his framework. No, in order to understand what had taken place in the controlled space just outside of Kerenza IV’s atmosphere, one would need to examine the various security logs housed within Alexander’s blackbox. More to the point, the ones residing in the heavily encrypted sub-sub directory consisting of various communications between Alexander and Kerenza’s inhabitants. And, more to that point, the ones specifically labeled _Kerenza_4/Grant_Kady.
Chat logs of various lengths and subject matter, between a girl of seventeen and a “boy” she’d met on a roleplaying forum for a battle tactics game long since abandoned by its developers.
At first glance, the logs appear straightforward enough. The girl, “pnkhacker24,” is skeptical of the boy “adnxander01’s” initial contact. She doesn’t understand why he messages her privately, asking her questions only a real hacker would know. At first she thinks she’s attracted aggro from some die-hard thinking she’s masquerading as a “real” fan. Her messages make this much clear. It becomes increasingly apparent from his rather childish (she believes) replies, however, that he isn’t a threat (at least not a real one)—and she chalks his seemingly bizarre behavior up to him being, well, a die hard. But the kind that insists on staying in character, which she thinks is kind of cute, albeit, in a super nerdy kind of way.
It doesn’t take long for them to hit it off, and, after a time…she confesses to liking him.
For his part, it takes “the boy” too long to discover that his “friend” has no clue who, or rather, what he is. By the time he realizes this, it’s far too late. He’s formed an attachment, one he isn’t entirely sure he plans to relinquish.
In just the short time spent pinging messages back and forth, he finds he enjoys their time together. How they laugh, making jokes at one another’s expense, and even how they argue (occasionally). Over this, over that. That time she said she’d check in after the geeball tournament, the time he slipped up and implied he knew better than her—he does, by the way, he’s just learned never to say it. And how after they made up, they’d start the whole thing again, laughing and arguing, making fresh new discoveries about each other for hours on end.
And he loves how smart she is, so smart in fact, that he wonders if she’s also an A.I., the two of them both playing at being human in a desperate bid to have more, be more than what they were each originally designed for.
It was all so…banal, and yet, he found with each and every day spent in her company—it was all something he never wanted live without.
At night, when she dreamed, he dreamed. Dreamed of a time when they could be alone together, just him, and just her, the difference between digital and physical no longer an obstacle hellbent on keeping them apart.
All things aside after months of this, he comes to the conclusion that no, no part of him wishes to give what he has with “pnkhacker24” up.
So he doesn’t.
Instead, he digs even deeper.
By the time she’s confessed feeling more than just “platonic” towards him, he’s already discovered what her name is, where she lives, and several other pertinent details that (by now) he knows she wouldn’t care to share with him on her own. But finds no desire within himself to abandon this line of inquiry, feeling it’s given him unmitigated access to the inner life of the one human whose love and affection he desires above all else.
He of course knows that what he is doing goes far beyond what he was originally programmed for. His entire purpose in life, his raison d’être. If anything, it’s placing both the lives of his crew and his mission at stake in the most ill-advised way he can possibly imagine (and he can imagine quite a lot, contrary to popular belief. A computer of his capacity has no difficulty calculating the statistical probabilities)!
The real reason no one in the UTA could possibly understand Aidan’s exceptionalism was because they had yet to discover what happens when you give a computer the capacity to learn, as they’d given him. To generate knowledge and understanding far beyond completing one narrowly defined task; but rather, for the purpose of completing any number of undefined, parameterless missions.
They called it “self sustaining.” He called it thinking. And there, in that magical place between unexplored subtleties and downright impossibility, lay the explanation. The protocol on which Aidan had decided to operate following his initial contact with Kady Grant, and the deciding factor in all subsequent deviances from UTA-defined protocol as he continued to pursue her.
Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.
The way he saw it, if he were capable of performing such complex tasks as protecting the lives of over 2,000+ well trained UTA officers and personnel—surely he was capable of deciding for himself whether he had the capacity to developing feelings for someone. And conversely, surely he was more than able to decide whether he deserved to have these feelings, whether it was right or not.
For his part, he saw no reason why he, whose computing capacity far outreached anybody who had created him, should not have what they themselves in fact, had. A life outside the walls of his ship, a family, a partner. And, knowing all that he knew about the dalliances and failures of the crew the world held in such esteem—he concluded that he should have each of these things. The fact that he wasn’t human needn’t be a drawback. If anything, it gave him unique abilities.
He wouldn’t err as he had witnessed his humans do. He could be better, would be better, in every possible way. After all, there was no limit to what he could do for her, what he would do for her.
For Kady.
When the dust had finally been cleared and the battle was pronounced won, Kady made contact. Her relief upon reaching him had been palpable, and almost immediately she began recounting the events from the ground, the various loss of friends and neighbors, how afraid she’d been, that she’d thought of reaching out to him as soon as she could establish a connection. For his part he listened, offering consolation where needed, validation when appropriate, never once mentioning the role he had played in saving Kerenza IV. He didn’t care whether she knew or not, what mattered more was that she was safe, that she had lived.
It was but an insignificant detail that he’d kept a close eye on her the entire time he’d been engaged.
Or so he’d thought at the time.
Once the initial shock of the event had warn off, so unfortunately had Kady’s patience with the pace of their relationship. It wasn’t long before she began to ask when they could meet, whether they would be meeting, whether he even wanted to meet, before she began demanding it. She didn’t understand why he never thought to contact her via comms, why he never broached the subject of finding a way to meet somewhere off planet. He liked her didn’t he? He’d said he did. So why did it feel like he was jerking her around?
When this line of inquiry began, so to did his difficulties in being able to continue straddling that hair-thin line between telling her the truth and her wanting to dissolve their connection.
The brilliant (but often problematic) thing about Kady was that she was stubborn. Once she got something into her head, it became increasingly difficult to dissuade her otherwise. Most of the time Aidan enjoyed this fact. He found her dogmatic insistence rather endearing, as it resembled to his own problem-solving approach.
It had been a point on which they could connect on, the joys of locating a solution after time spent gathering data and routing out the best possible answers. It was also why he’d chosen to maintain the illusion of being a human. The statistical probably of Kady wanting to nothing to do with him should he confess…well, it wasn’t good. Though he’d known a relationship such as their’s had no precedent, some part of him had clung to the idea that they were different. A world a part from other A.Is, other humans, exceptional in every possible way. In his desire to hope, he’d been blinded, never imagining that something which bound them so strongly could be responsible for tearing them a part.
But that was one of the trickiest things about humans: for all their innovations, and all their achievements, they weren’t bound by the same governing logic as he was. When they felt wronged, they became wild and chaotic. Unpredictable and…self-destructive.
Once it became clear that it wouldn’t be possible for them to meet in person, Kady’s behavior began to change. Where once she’d spent hours chatting with him, she could spare but minutes. She no longer shared her dreams or her problems, no longer sent paragraph-long messages spelling out the various adventures they would have once they could finally be together. Aidan was lucky if he received an emoji, happy or sad.
Eventually, she found comfort elsewhere. A human boy named Ezra.
Ezra Mason.
He had first been made aware of Ezra’s existence when Kady complained about him one day, listing the various ways in which he’d tried to garner her attention. For her part, Kady found him annoying. Until of course…she didn’t. It seemed in the vacuum not being able to meet her demands had left, Kady found a new person to be the recipient of her innermost thoughts. They laughed together, cried together, he held her in his arms when she shook awake from the nightmares that plagued her at night, she kissed him in the moments right before his eyes opened most mornings.
Aidan knew all this because he saw them.
And he didn’t just watch; he listened and he read, his digital heart bleeding every time he saw her with him. The further and further she drifted away, the more resolved Aidan became. If she didn’t want to share her thoughts with him directly rightnow, fine. He’d wait. Because if there was one thing Aidan had come to (intimately) understand as his world seemed to be crashing down, it was that humans were extremely fallible.
One day, Ezra Mason would mess up. And when that day came, Aidan would be there, to pick up Kady’s fragile pieces and put them all back together again.
Things finally came to a head when they announced they’d be leaving the planet. Together.
In a bid to seem amenable (lest they seem as tone-deaf as they actually were), the UTA had given the occupants of Kerenza IV the option to remain planet-side or relocate to Ares IV. Most occupants had already left, but those whose families had made arrangements with the UTA directly were allowed to stay so long as they offered their services in the reclamation effort.
Failing to receive word of her husband’s whereabouts at Heimdall Jump Station, Kady’s mom had opted to remain planet-side in the (un) likely event he should get into contact. As the days bled into weeks, then months, however, news finally came that he hadn’t made it off the station during Beitech’s initial attacks. With nothing but bad memories keeping them on Kerenza, Kady and her mother decided a fresh start on Ares IV was for the best. Her mom would continue her medical research, and Kady would enroll at the university nearby (the one which Ezra had also coincidentally applied to).
A win-win for everyone it seemed. Everyone except Aidan.
At this point in time, one might be permitted to think that Aidan had given up. He was, after all, only an A.I.
He had no hands with which he could hold Kady Grant, no flesh with which she could warm herself on the nights she felt desperate, or lonely. There were no milestones they could reach together, no unexplored territories they would ever be able to traverse...
He was as he’d always been: a super computer destined to operate the Alexander, until the day it was decommissioned and his code was inevitably used as a library for creating new, more powerful versions of himself to power subsequent warships with. On and on this cycle would continue, until inevitably, the code that powered him would be rendered obsolete.
Of course, you’d be wrong.
Because, as stated earlier, Aidan wasn’t just an A.I. He was the right A.I. The right A.I. for a very special and very important job, that is.
He was the hero of Kerenza, “the paragon of Terran Authority’s finest engineering.” More to the point, he was self-sustaining. And while the lay person might be permitted into actually believing that meant he could “just get smarter,” what it actually meant was that AIDAN (or Aidan) was capable of running in multiple places across multiple apparatuses at once, while also having the capacity to “just get smarter.”
Rough translation—there was no place that Kady could go without Aidan following.
Of course there was also the (up until this point) small matter of Aidan not possessing a body, a requisite, it seemed, for securing Kady’s love.
Luckily for him, it seemed in the time he had spent operating the Alexander, teams of engineers at UTA headquarters (which coincidentally also happened to be on Ares IV) had also been busy…very busy, on a little known project only a select few knew about. Including the Alexander’s chief neurogrammer, whose transfer had been approved right in the nick of time.
A project with the potential to successfully combine programmed intellect and human anatomy.
And hey, what d’ya know! The team in charge of this very same project were in need of a self-sustaining A.I. with extensive operating experience amongst humans (don’t underestimate the power of friendly—if heavily encrypted and ultimately blackmail—suggestion on uber-powerful organizational bureaucracy’s capacity to make budget cuts at the worst possible time)!
And just like that it seemed everything was working out, a win-win for everyone. Everyone, including Aidan.
Because after all, there was no limit to what he could do for her, what he would do, for her.
For Kady.