“What a mysterious way of existence...!”
But to be honest, I don’t blame that scientist. He was a kind of repugnant looking person; I feel guilty now that I even thought this. But, that doesn’t change the fact that he is the kind that stays in dark labs experimenting alone for most of their lives. Yes, most of these guys spend all day and even nights alone in small and dark places, and yet, they are supposed to be the brightest ones.
But one has the admit that Consoft’s designers are the best in the world, and the corporation’s top experts must have one extra degree in philosophy. They were the first company to structure themselves in that way. There would be no more geeks taking pride in a technical achievement that was not necessary from the start. The designers know, based on philosophical assumptions debated among the top scientists and experts, what the best design would be for the best activity. They took off the table any inspirational ideas coming from the human body, as they wanted to avoid a universal machine that does everything. They knew that everything could not be covered by a general design, as it would require endless updates, resulting in a work-in-progress kind of existence for the machine. Consoft cannot afford continuous work on a model indefinitely, either, mobilizing thousands of high-paid scientists to monitor the evolution of one machine through generations until the end of time. Even God and His army of intern angels didn’t succeed in that, as every time I see their creation in any fast food, with full faces covered by ketchup when the hand holding the pizza slice occasionally misses the mouth, that is a work-in-progress design for sure. Consoft designers understood that they must divide the activities by trait and then create a humbot for every trait. In the end, the humbots don’t look at all like us, like so many historical science fiction writers wrongly predicted. They look unusual and bizarre, but when they operate in their field, they look totally integrated.
That was the main advancement that kept Consoft in the leadership, although the competition was fierce as some top designers broke away from Consoft and managed to create their own startup called DM, or Dynamic Minds. They came up with the idea that if we could implement a system as a mind in an automate, why not implement many minds in the same envelope. They managed to demonstrate that concept to big investors who missed the first AI revolution and were left out in the cold, away from the juicy business of Consoft. They succeeded in raising funds in a record short period of time. It didn’t take too long, either, for the first lines of medium- and heavy-industrial machines with multi-minds to emerge. As all the market for simple automate companions were filled by Consoft, DM succeeded in attracting the industrial corporations to renew their factories and workflows. These workflows gradually excluded all humans interaction and, therefore, eliminated most of the line production mistakes and wasted time caused by human personal problems, wages, working conditions, syndicates, discipline between the workers, human resources, vacations, sick days, maternity leave, and so on. DM offered the entrepreneurs the way to cut out all the production line problems by reducing the human factor to zero. They offered a solution to make the factory operate 24 by 7 by 365, no matter what. They also managed to secure big contracts with the government, mainly in the military field, as they renewed all the weaponry factories for the state’s contractors with big subsidies.
But the main player in the military field is ONC (Organized Neurones Corporation). It was created by an expert in communications and weaponry transportation, an army man, and one of the best. The Second Citizen himself. Recently, ONC monopolized the global war market after the invention of the first self-deployable weaponized satellite constellation. With a core AI controlling the satellites' fabrication and the launches by stealth missiles, it is a masterpiece that deserved the best killing-machine prize. The small satellites can operate individually or merge to perform a more complicated task, then self-disconnect and hide in different orbits, making them extremely hard to detect. Even if the enemy has the right timing and position of a satellite and destroys it with laser, the AI will be aware of the damage and can produce a replacement to be sent into space in a couple of hours. ONC weaponized this system to the maximum, as every tiny satellite, when merged in a specific formation, can have different striking capabilities. One formation, for example, may have a high imagery reconnaissance capability, and another, a high-frequency sound weapon. The combinations are endless.
But the genius of ONC is that they are the first and the only corporation that, instead of selling the system to the interested nations, charged a membership. The membership fee was based on a country’s national income and more importantly, on the nation’s alignment to us. We knew that ONC’s system was a breakthrough, so we made special legislation for it as a top strategic weapon. The user must be our servant to be allowed to protect himself and use the system; otherwise, no. The second wealthiest man in the world was the Second Citizen, the owner of ONC, and as much the First Citizen is wealthy and powerful, he couldn’t start a world war, but the second citizen could.
The two old empires, the Rotanios and the Bamos, almost missed the AI revolution. It took them a decade after the creation of Consoft, and a vast technological spying campaign, constantly stealing research and discoveries from our corporations to finally create companies through oligarchs close to the state. Despite being constantly fed with stolen research and the latest developments in the AI field from us, and despite all the efforts and the
