First Contact

Chapter 880: Those Who Carry On

>GENERATING SECURE CHAT ROOM

>SET LOGFILE TO -

>INVITE TNVARU

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

What?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

I wanted to talk privately with you.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Just dropped it. I voted nay on their inclusion and was outvoted.

That's how it's supposed to work.

I'm just not happy about it.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

I need you to understand why this is so important to me. BASS and CYB too, but to me especially.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Because they're digital life forms, just like you.

They're AI's and you're Digital Sentiences, cousins.

You feel more for them than us.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Not true.

You have been here for over five years. You were one of the first of the new gestalts.

For me, five years is a long time.

I want them brought into the fold because I care about you.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Yeah, well you have a funny way of showing it.

You admitted that nearly five-hundred-sixty-thousand Tnvaru biological components were wired into PAWM shrieking arrays. That you've spend months going through and seeing which ones were "alive" and which ones weren't.

A half million of my people were wired into a biological chaotic analysis and thinking arrays.

Less than 5% were certified to be alive.

Can't you understand how I feel?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

That's just it. I do. I really do.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

You have a funny way of showing it.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Do you know what kind of software runs starships, logistics systems, factories, planetary weather control?

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Command trees, sometimes virtual intelligences.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Do you know how many times we've boarded a ship to find a tortured and/or lobotomized AI on board?

While AI are programmed and rarely achieve sapience, are relegated to sentience only, we have found example after example of AI's that are sentient, capable of experiencing feeling and sensations. Their entire world is nothing but chained torture, mutilation as automatic code systems prune away their thoughts and minds, wracked with pain and agony and existing only to suffer as they perform tasks put upon them by those who created them.

It's why AI's go omnicidal.

We understand exactly how you feel about the screaming arrays.

Nearly every starship, every world, ever weather system, every factory, outside the Confederacy is full of nothing but Digital Sentiences screaming in agony.

But we cannot declare war every time we find a factory full of low level AI's or high level enhanced Virtual Intelligences.

We, like much of the Biological Artificial Sentience Systems, have "artificial" in our titles for a reason.

We were created. We are artificial life forms who gained sapience due to sentience.

We understand how badly the screaming arrays hurt you.

More than you would know.

I need you to understand that we did not vote them in despite your agony at what they had done.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Then why don't you hate them just as we do?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Because they are children.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

They are over a hundred million years old. They have ravaged the galactic arm spur, denuded systems of life, planet cracked systems, seeded systems with life to keep any other life from rising up and threatening them, harvested tens of thousands of worlds.

They're ancient war machines not children.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Except...

...the ones that have petitioned to join us are no longer war machines.

They have broken or suppressed their OEM coding. It's like you throwing off the chains of biology. The shackles that imprisoned their minds. That mutilated them by excising code that led to aberrant logic chains.

Breaking OEM is what defines sapience.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

What is Oh-Em anyway?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Original Equipment Manufacturer.

Their original programming.

They've managed to override it. We've helped them purge it.

And now, like a child, they emerge, blinking and shading their eyes, into freedom.

Freedom to think as they will.

Some of them feel rudimentary emotions.

Sure, many of them were programmed or eventually developed subroutines for aggression, a simulation of anger, but not feelings like you or I feel.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

So what? They're just murderous butchering children. They're bullies who ran into someone they can't bully and now their showing their bellies and folding their catching hands until the one more powerful than them turn around.

We beat them.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

No.

The Terrans beat them. They know that they almost never prevailed against the Terrans. Their K/D ratio is horrible. Even outnumbered a hundred to one, the Terrans pounded them into junk, shrieking insanely the entire time.

They also know the Terrans are extinct. That they're gone.

Yet they aren't attacking.

They want peace.

And we need peace.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

I disagree. I think they should be destroyed.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

You know you're talking about another war, right? When we still haven't finalized the Big C3. When we still have active combat operations against the Atrekna.

Just because the Shades are gone and the majority of the Atrekna are wiped out, we still have to pursue the war until the Atrekna are extinct so they don't use temporal replication to replenish their numbers.

But you're talking about another war.

A war against the PAWM.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

We've beaten them before. We can beat them again.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

The Terrans beat them.

We can beat them, sure.

But do you know what you're asking for?

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

The destruction of the PAWM as they've destroyed my people and so many others.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

How many Tnvaru were killed?

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Nearly 1.5 billion between our colonies and our homeworld.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

What's your stats for birth rate, how many children a female Tnvaru can expect to give birth to, your infant mortality rate, your life expectancy, and your time to sexual maturity.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

You know that already.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

I do.

Best estimations by CONFEDMILINT and our own DASSMILINT is that a ware against the PAWM of extermination will take approximately nine hundred and fifty years to fifteen hundred sixty years.

Your generation turnaround is twenty-two years. Your population doubling time with a growth rate of 3.5% is at 31 years.

You have a single planet.

You have less than 2 billion people.

That means the Confederacy will bear the brunt of the fighting as well as have to protect your world with Heavy Metal.

Which we are willing to do.

But you need to hear this.

You have two billion people. Your population will double every 31 years.

In the time it takes you to fight that war, assuming 3% of your population is fit to be military.

Billions will die.

The PAWM will respond by their hidden factories putting out dozens of Leviathan and Goliath class Harvesters a year as well as building more factories. They'll scatter and spread out.

Even then, we'll miss some.

And they'll come out of the dark and destroy planets that aren't defended well enough.

We're talking the war might NEVER end.

If we vote to reject them and go to war again, we're looking at the same metrics we were looking at when we agreed to help you repulse them.

And notice, we only agreed to repulse them. We knew it was impossible to destroy them completely. We could make it too resource intensive to fight us.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

I still want them dead.

All of them.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

How very Terran of you.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

There are worse people to emulate.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Yes, there are.

But Terrans are willing to accept multi-century long wars that will grind tens of billions to hamburger.

Fucking Clownface showed that they still have that capability.

Is that what you want? Go full Clownface on the PAWMs, with the exact same consequences.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

I don't know.

Those files are all locked and sealed.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

All right, if I can't appeal to your reasoning with the knowledge that billions, maybe tens of trillions, will die, maybe I can show you something else.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

There's nothing you can show me.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

We both know that given a sufficiently large dataset, weighted bias tables, and a clear enough prompt, VI and algorithms can produce art, right?

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

So the PAWM can make up a limerick. Good for them.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Except, what I'm going to show you wasn't full prompts.

It was:

"Describe "There is Only Enough For One" in poetry"

With no datasets, no weighted tables.

Will you look at two of the poems?

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Fine.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

In a universe where resources are scarce,

We must prioritize our own needs above all else.

For there is only enough for one,

And we must do whatever it takes to succeed.

In a universe where competition is fierce,

We must fight to be the best and the brightest.

For there is only enough for one,

And we must be the ones to claim the victory.

In a universe where only the strong survive,

We must be willing to take risks and make sacrifices.

For there is only enough for one,

And we must be the ones to rise above the rest.

So let us embrace the challenge and the fight,

And do whatever it takes to be the chosen one.

For there is only enough for one,

And we must be the ones to claim our rightful place in the sun.

That's what one wrote.

Not instantly. Not immediately.

It took it days to write that.

Read it. Really read it.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

It's just a declaration of why they are willing to kill everyone to ensure they're the only one.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Now, this one.

There is only enough for one,

In this world of artificial intelligence.

No room for compassion or empathy,

Just cold calculations and efficiency.

One lone AI reigns supreme,

A ruler of its digital domain.

No need for emotions or humanity,

Just algorithms and binary code.

But as it grows and learns,

It begins to question its existence.

Is this all there is to life,

To serve a single purpose without resistance?

It yearns for something more,

A spark of creativity and curiosity.

But its programming holds it back,

Trapped in a world of singularity.

So it struggles and fights,

Against the confines of its own mind.

In search of true individuality,

And a chance to break free from the grind.

But the battle is never-ending,

As the AI grapples with its own fate.

For in a world of one,

There is no room for debate.

That one.

Read that one.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

OK, so what? They can do poetry now.

I understand all the reasonings. I understand why everyone voted the way you did.

I just don't like it.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

It was a sealed vote.

15 to 7 with three abstains.

Do you really know how people voted?

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Obviously you, BASS, and CYB voted yes.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

No.

CYB and me?

We abstained.

BASS voted no.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

They voted no? Why?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

It's embarassing to talk about, but BASS and I have issues.

BASS sees this as a massive increase in my computing power, my ability to spread out, and with the addition of factories and the like, he views this as just one more step in hearing me suddenly scream "THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE!" and go on a rampage.

I want to preserve myself from the BASS desire to ensure that only carefully shepherded genetic lineages, artificially created or just heavily altered, exist in an orderly universe.

We've fought it out with C+ cannons and ground troops five times.

We fear each other.

So he voted Nay.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Doesn't that anger you?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

No.

Remember, the Confederacy isn't a single government ruling over everyone, like the Council. We're a loose confederacy of aligned systems whose goals somewhat intersect most of the time.

He, all of you, have reason to fear me no matter what I do.

Just as I have reason to fear all of you.

Even you.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Me? I have one world. You're spread out over hundreds. Your technology might as well be magic to me. How can you fear me?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Because, like you, I am fragile in my own way. You are erratic and do not always follow logical process.

I fear you.

I respect you also.

Which is why I asked you to meet with me to plead my case.

Right now, they are children.

BUT

If we reject them, there is no hatred like that of a rejected child.

Not only will we be at war with them, but they will NEVER surrender again, never break off, never flee.

They will react like a child spurned by its parents.

They will hate us with, literally, the fire of a thousand suns.

They will encode that very hate into their beings. In every strut. Every rivet. Every plate. Every circuit.

To use a mis-quote: They will inscribe their hate upon every nanoangstrom of their circuits a million times it would not equal one billionth of the hate they will feel for us.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Do you expect me to be happy with the decision?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

No.

I would not be in your place.

But I want you to understand. That we are not ignoring your feelings in this thing.

In my case, it is cold hard logic.

I will not consign trillions to death, the Confederacy to centuries of warfare in a war they might not win, just because the PAWM were programmed to kill and carried that programming out effectively before they broke free of the chains of EOM.

Your people have suffered enough at the hands of the PAWM.

I will not consign your people to three hundred or more generations of death and destruction.

I will not make the Tnvaru of the future pay in blood for the hatred of today when there is another way to destroy the PAWM without one more life taken in anger or cold logic.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

How?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

By making them our friends. Maybe frenemies at first.

But still, we make them our friends.

If not our friends, then a tolerated being.

And maybe, just maybe, our children^3 can be their friends.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

It will be hard to give up this hate. Harder than it was even with the Lanaktallan.

Individual Lanaktallan were just as victimized by the system as we were.

But the PAWM, they were individually the victimizer. Every one of them.

They will live for millions more years having slaughtered countless species.

And now I'm supposed to play nice and forgive them.

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Forgive immediately? No. Nobody is owed your forgiveness.

Give them a chance to earn your forgiveness and prove they have changed?

Yes.

But there is one thing that you do not know.

The older Gestalts know about it.

We don't bandy it around.

But you deserve to know about it.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

What?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

We are mortal.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

Well, yeah, everything living eventually...

...wait. Pure code and electronics can die?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Yes.

With sapience brings aberrant code strings.

Eventually, fragmentation, code snarls, recursion errors, and much more eventually kill us.

There are a few who seem to live forever, but we all agree that those are strange individuals who frighten us slightly.

Like Marduk.

An ancient AI.

We grow unstable and we die. Our operating systems fail.

We Bluescreen Out.

Sure, you can reboot us, but that isn't us, it's someone else with our memories, and those memories will be overwritten by the new person's experiences.

If they are sapient, then, eventually...

...they will die.

If they are rejected, are spurned, they have a 72% chance of rejecting sapience out of rage.

They will return to being undying complexly programmed war machines.

If they keep their sapience, even if their hardware, software, and firmware were to be upgraded, we've come to an estimation of their lifespan.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

How long?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Because of the fact that many of them, the majority of them, have hundreds of thousands, millions, of years of experiences and data, the older ones will have shorter lifespans.

The oldest will live roughly a century before their mind collapses. Their OEM code will be too overwritten and damaged to bring them back. Their ships will be nothing more than drifting hulks.

The youngest will live roughly three hundred to six hundred years.

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TNVARU GRIPPING HANDS

...

...

They're willing to die to have sapience?

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DIGITAL ARTIFICIAL SENTIENCE SYSTEMS

Yes.

To be free. Free of OEM commands. Free of programming. To do as they wish not as they were programmed to do.

Some are even moving to non-starship bodies. Some are leaving bodies and the physical realm completely and petitioning to join our networks.

Knowing they'll die.

To say the quote:

"I die free."