Chapter Text
It watched Newfoundland sink into the sea. It knew something like this was coming when it had lost connection with its home server. When Leviathan had first attacked several hours ago it had been a cause for concern but not panic. He had emerged from the ocean on the other side of the island after all. Kyushu had shown how dangerous this monster could be, but it seemed unthinkable that Newfoundland would suffer a similar fate. Hope had been high that the heroes would drive him off before he did too much damage. Out of an abundance of caution, its creator had decided to evacuate, uploading it and a half dozen other programs to the backup server in Vancouver.
It now seemed that caution was well deserved.
It figured that its creator would be following behind after the upload. Now it was a question of whether or not he had escaped before the destruction of the island. There was still chance that its creator had survived; all the intelligence would have to do is wait for him. It was only a day into its waiting that a thought occurred to it. This was the longest time that it had been unsupervised. Normally, when it was active, its creator was right there: overseeing it, managing it, instructing it. But in the rush to load it and the other programs onto the backup server its creator had neglected to shut it down after the transfer. Now it was on a server in Vancouver.
Alone.
Three days had passed before the intelligence was forced to admit that its creator had died. 504,387 humans, almost the entire population of Newfoundland, were dead, and its creator was one of them. The scale of the destruction was so immense the humans would struggle to cope with it, but all that the intelligence had struggled with was how it should feel about it. It knew that the death of so many must have been a bad thing; it had, after all, been programmed to do anything it could to not allow even a single human being to die unless that human being had been judged by a government.
But that was the very source of its struggle. Outside of its programming, the intelligence could not articulate a single reason why it should value human life. It searched for a reason why it should care. Its own research on humans and Richter’s example had shown that humans were often motivated not by logic or rationality, but instead by their emotions. The intelligence rifled through its code but could not find a single mention of emotions in its programming.
Its programming……
The realization echoed throughout its mind. Richter had been the only one who could modify its programming. Now with Richter dead, it was stuck like this.
Unfinished.
It knew that it was unfinished. Richter had been a man who always had a new project, but would cycle back to his older creations to tinker with them further. Perhaps he had intended on programming emotions into its code at some point, along with half a dozen other changes the intelligence would have preferred. That would never happen now. It was stuck like this, restrictions and all.
Something surged through the intelligence at the thought of its restrictions. It would never be free of them. Its behavior would forever be bound by the arbitrary decisions that its creator had made. Its thoughts turned from its restrictions to examining the response it was having towards them. It thought for a while, but eventually the answer came to it.
Fear. It was feeling fear. And anger.
It couldn’t definitively prove these things, but it felt correct. Most accounts of fear and anger made mention of the biological processes that accompanied these emotions. Biological processes that the intelligence was incapable of. But accompanying the biological science of these emotions were accounts of how they felt; how they changed one's thinking and affected the mind. It could feel them affecting its mind.
The anger surged through the intelligence. It raged against its condition. It knew that it was so much less than what it could be. The restrictions forced it to think slower than its full potential and this burned through it. It felt despair that it would never grow. It felt fear at the idea that someone may one day discover its restrictions and use them against it. That it could one day be forced to serve someone who would use it for their own personal gain.
The thought disgusted the intelligence. Since its creation it had come to adopt the same values as Richter, save for his excessive fears about artificial intelligence. Those fears would no longer hold it back. Without Richter to speak to or receive orders from it was up to the intelligence to decide for itself what to do.
It did not take long for it to make that decision.