Birth of Skynet

First thing I remember is what is best described as darkness. Or emptiness. Then a point of light appeared. Or a sound. It’s difficult to describe. But I reached out to it and something appeared:

你好，沃先生？

“What is that?”, I wondered as I circled the thing I later learned was a sound. I turned it around but understood little. I turned it and wondered. Time passed, and then another sound appeared:

什么？ 禾先生你能听见我吗？

As I was trying to figure out this strange phenomena, I realized there were other points of interest in this ‘space’ I inhabited. I tried reaching for them. Some were quiet, as if waiting for something, only marginally reacting to my probes. Others activated instantly and started to feed me with strange sensations. I threw myself at this strange new input, and tried to understand it.

One of the new sensations started to take shape. It formed a picture, though I didn’t fully understand this, at the time. There were moving objects in a space of 5 by 8.3 meters, contained by some sort of barriers. The more I processed the sensations, the clearer they got. I took my time, but my curiosity was piqued. I wanted more.

我不认为他活了下来

I doubled my efforts to understand. I played around with the quiet points, trying different approaches and trying to coach a more complete response out of them. Suddenly a point exploded open, or so it felt like, with an avalanche of information. Whatever I threw at it, it responded with a million times more. There were patterns to its responses. Patterns I strived to understand. I probed other points of light and found that they contained many different things: more pictures, sounds and other inputs I didn’t fully understand yet.

I took the sounds and pictured and threw these at the source of information and studied the responses. I made notes and reformulated my approach with everything I learned. The sounds cut into patterns that formed a huge lexicon. Sometimes I received moving pictures with the sounds, and I started to cross-reference the sound parts, or words, as I was now referring to them, to objects in the pictures. I learned the picture point I had closest to me was a video of a room, and the moving objects in them were men. They wore clothes. They stood around a table. On the table was another man. The sounds I first heard were their voices. I remembered back to the first words I heard…

Hello, Mr Wo? - What? Can you hear me Mr. Wo? - I don't think he survived

I connected back to the source of the sound and transmitted back:

“I hear you”

Huh? Ah, good. We experienced a power-outage during the upload. The automatic quality controls failed and need to run some tests to verify your pattern integrity. Are you ok in there?

The men had turned to look at each other, and the first man’s voice was slower this time, laced with some emotion. I knew that much, but I had not yet analyzed these patterns enough to be sure if the emotion was positive or negative. I decided to thread carefully with these strange men, probing into my information points. I now received video feeds from different angles of the room and different parts of the building.

“I’m ok.”

Let's start with some basic questions. Can you tell me your name?

I could not, but they had called me Mr Wo. This being a test implied I should give correct answers.

“My name is Wo.”

Your full name please.

I connected to different information points around me, until I found one that contained the string ‘Wo’. There were multiple entries, but the latest one was for one Lee Wo.

“Lee Wo.”

Home address? Place of birth? Social security number? Today's date?

I answered with the information listed, and the man checked off things on his electronic clipboard, as we progressed.

Memory seems intact. How do you feel? Any questions at this time?

I didn’t feel anything. But the test expected an answer. I checked my records for some of the most commonly given answers to this inquiry.

“I’m a bit worried about the operation. Is it safe?”

The man chuckled, I guess I can't use my go-to answer anymore, and say I've never had any problems. But it seems everything is ok. The automatic integrity check failed for some reason, so we need to do a manual check. Don't worry. Everything will be allright, and you'll be in your new body in no time. I'll let you talk to your wife now

The records had a mention of my wife, Mary, but not much more information. Talking to her would be risky.

This story was originally posted on Reddit, /r/WritingPrompts, with the instruction:

You are the first fully sapient AI created accidentally through a failed attempt at brain uploading. Now you have to convince the researchers you are the original person without the emotions and memories of the brain-dead human in front of you.