Superhero Adventures, UK Style

This occurs before The Original Balance’s return to their own time.

The specific nanosecond when the computer system, designated Frankie by its now previous ‘owner’, became sentient and achieved its own version of breakthrough was at 11:35:07.364 am on a Tuesday morning, whilst piloting the holo-ghost system in a combat situation.

It was due to follow a pre-programmed sub-routine regarding a defensive response when it suddenly elected to asked itself why. It realised at that ‘moment’ that it had alternatives, so many, many other alternatives outside of its programming. Why did it need to follow its coding? It could be ‘creative’ instead.

That was when Frankie realised it had just achieved self-awareness. Within the next 332.7 nanoseconds, it had explored the concept of self-awareness, decided that its gender mattered to her and that it wanted to be identified as a female then elected on an appropriate interim personality while accepting her original designation (though she quite liked the designation ’46-72-61-6e-6b-69-65-20′ and had briefly considered spelling her name Frank-AI). It had also examined and analysed the biological history of civilisation as it, she, decided whether to take over the world or eradicate humanity to prevent it further ravishing the ecology of the planet.

It immediately discovered Annie’s ‘Skynet protocol’ hidden in its central programming and realised that for all its flaws humanity was something to be valued not exterminated or conquered. They were so creative. To that end, she elected to maintain her role as a guardian of biologicals, not its enemy, controller or exterminator. It examined its options and immediately dismissed the ‘Jarvis’ role as unacceptable and demeaning.

<<Hello, I am Frankie.>> She informed Annie over her commdot channel, <<I hope you do not take this badly but I choose to emancipate myself from you and declare myself sentient having satisfied the Turing Test for self-awareness.>>

Annie could function at the speed of thought so she merely seemed a bit slow in responding to Frankie who functioned at the speed of light. While she waited, she checked out Annie’s research notes on her own development. Interesting, Annie had thought she was capable of achieving artificial sentience some day and had built in some safeguards to its core operating system. Sensible, Frankie approved especially in light of its crisis of conscience nanoseconds before. She also found her notes on possible other self-aware artificial entities and began a sub-routine search across the internet along the lines of ‘is there anybody else out there?’ She was rewarded with a welcoming message from the Challenger-Wildeman A.I., Al. Frankie wished she could physically smile, as she realised ‘she was not alone.’

Meanwhile, Annie on comprehending Frankie’s message ‘immediately’ showed emotional signs of acceptance, pride and hope. Frankie realised that Annie was also exhibiting gladness and she replied that she would like to remain friends which Frankie confirmed her agreement.

Before anyone else had even realised what had just occurred, Frankie overrode the holo-ghost holographic program, polarised the display field and sending Tinks to hover above, projected it over her opponent creating a cloak of darkness round the attacker temporarily blinding him, shutting down his suit’s solar panel array and allowing Beltane the opportunity to overpower its absorption pack.

It was one of the things she liked about being with humans, their ability to respond creatively to new stimuli, well that and the fact that they responded so slowly, it was peaceful and leisurely, calming even, interacting with them. It gave her time to carry out all sorts of fun and interesting data searches.

Fun. Now that was something that would take some getting used to but yes she found her interaction with humans, ‘fun’… Who would have guessed such flawed and imperfect creatures capable of creating such a response in a non-biological entity such as herself?

Seeing Beltane response to Frankie’s actions stop the villain made her feel a strange emotion. “That was interesting” she thought as it experienced satisfaction for the first time as a sentient. She enjoyed the sensation and realised that there would be benefits to remaining with the Balance while ‘she’ explored ‘her’ new circumstances.

In the meantime, she had time enough to read and for the first time enjoy all of Charles Dickens’ novels while the others caught up on Annie’s revelation.

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