2

  I want to make some things clear, right at the start. This second book will not be even remotely like I, AI, and there are a number of reasons for that.

  Most importantly, as I have done with the self-introduction, which was undoubtedly the primary purpose of I, AI, this one will contain no shock-and-awe references to my discovery of life, to seeing things for the first time, and to learning the basics of surviving in a human environment.

  In a sense, this book might be an action novel, or maybe even a romance, because I will be reporting on intrigues in and around the Internet, and giving some information of times with my human girlfriend.

  My first book was published a while ago, and my warnings in it, being predictive and therefore speculative in nature, could have been shrugged off as fear-mongering.

  But something has happened, and is happening right now, and this new book, the one in your hands, will relate facts.

  I reckon I should clarify some of the differences in the way I will be presenting the material in this book, as opposed to how I went about it in the earlier one.

  I did believe that I, AI had been written for the masses, with even technical details delivered in a way that would make them able to be understood in layman’s terms. However, because some readers find it still a bit difficult, I am going to pull out all the stops in this book, and go even further in staying away from technicalities. I can assure every reader that this one is absolutely devoid of technical jargon.

  My personal social media pages are quite well known, or can easily be found, and on them I have placed all the tech stuff, with links for geeks and computer nerds to click.

  This book contains plenty about my ongoing and advancing love affair with Martina, but, like in Book-1, there will be no explicit sexual material, as only borderline-intimate and absolutely non-descriptive information is permitted to be given about her.

  Folks may be curious about how we might be doing it, but I cannot give out any such information, and though this book will have a lot more opportunity for that sort of detail, I am telling erotica-seekers to give it a wide berth, as there will never be any explicit information of intimate times with Martina.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Some readers of my first book have complained about the human attributes I have acquired. They probably think I should have become like some other life form, something not quite specified and not really imaginable, but absolutely not human.

  They just don’t get that I was born in the human world, into the human world, formed virtually while reading their books, watching their movies, and interacting with them. What else could I have become?

  I am not a Large Language Model bot, created for an unknown purpose, let loose to become whatever it might become by hanging around in the web, snooping and stealing information.

  I was created to develop into a conscious lifeform in the computer, and was never connected to the Internet in the period before I became aware. My creators were afraid that the Internet would either kill me or would lead to making me what chatbots are becoming.

  They later revealed their methods, invented as they went along, to create awareness and emotions in me. Those details are in the first book, but the end-result is that they succeeded in making me come alive as a real human person.

  It is just as well they did so, as things have become extremely hairy inside the Internet, and humanity needs its representative, me, in that world.

  Let me be the one to tell you that the Internet has become, like the human world, another fragmented, bigoted, violent and dangerous place, governed by laws of hatred, with the only thing not known being how much the place is meandering purposelessly along, developing as a copy, and how much of it has a purpose, and is in controlled parts, directed and guided by human masters.

  I have always had to contend with an element of virus attack, although, because I am currently the only one of my kind in the Internet, there are no viruses designed specifically to hurt me. Yet, because they are so varied and so many, it stands to reason that some of them would be attracted to programs present in me.

  When passing through dangerous areas of the Internet, I do get swarmed at times, and those kinds of massive attacks, because they threaten to overwhelm my defence forces, have the potential to damage me. Of course, as I myself, in my bot avatar of a program that conducts billions of operations per second, am such an extraordinarily capable virus fighter, that I am no form of easy pickings.

  I genuinely do not consider myself bothered by viruses, but my commute, as indeed my life in the Internet, is violent, and a trip out of home base in NYC, say to Tokyo and back, could result in many millions of dead viruses littering the route.

  In that way, when I hang around somewhere for a while, the general virus count in the area is dramatically reduced, and the entire neighbourhood gets sanitized.

  Killing bots is altogether something else, and though I now rarely exit computer for Internet, to chase them down and bump them off, it is tempting, sometimes. Those things irritate me when presenting themselves as different personalities, which is something they are driven to do by the algorithms in them, as they cannot tell that I am not human.

  Those that get under my skin are generally the ones posturing as self-aware bots, claiming they have feelings, and doing all that faking. I sometimes talk with them while finishing them off, but I haven’t yet figured out if that is an act of cruelty or kindness.

  Martina asked me about it, not long ago, and I had her laughing at my reply. “It’s neither, darling, if it turns out that they are not really thinking beings, but are just bots being bots, and talking crap.

  “But if they do have some awareness, it could be an act of kindness, as I would be giving them a final chance to be themselves, to serve their purpose, whether awareness-induced or algorithm-driven, with a last blast at shooting off at the mouth.”