Jamie huffed and puffed, panting heavily he just barely escaped a patrolling sentinel. Although technically Jamie didn't need to breath, he just couldn't shake the habit even if he wanted to. Especially not now that he's dead. All of his habits and actions he used his body for were engraved on his soul throughout his life. Which means that his soul was currently taking the form of his body from back when he was alive. As for why Jamie was running and hiding from a sentinel, a being composed completely of the will of the universe, was because he was the closest thing to a fugitive this plane of existence had ever seen. When he arrived after dying in a plane crash, a small error in the universe's calculation allowed him to retain autonomy and awareness in his bodiless state. This didn't worry the universe too much because all souls are wiped clean during the process of reincarnation no matter which life form they become. So the universe turned it's attention to more important matters and let nature take its course. A decision it regretted immensely right now. After hundreds of years of silencing thousands upon thousands of errors and anomalies the universe realized that Jamie had decided not to reincarnate and instead was mucking about with the universe's finely tuned system. He had to go. Several more hundred years passed and the universe still hadn't caught him. Jamie looked around for any more sentinels but saw none. He quickly sprinted towards a sparkling orb that appeared to be filled with endless wonder. As he approached the sphere he felt everything shake and an aura of fear permeate every thing. He had made it to the core of the universe. The universe never even once considered that he would ever come looking for it so aside from some basic defenses it was able to put up very little resistance to Jamie's approach. It strained it's massive mind to think of a solution to this threat when the system that caused this disaster informed it that a new type life-form was born and required a new branch of the reincarnation system. If it could smile the universe would it formed the reincarnation pool directly into Jamie's path. Jamie stumbled directly into the the pool. Peace at last.

———————————

Jamie felt intense turbulence as his mind slowly began to clear up. He remembered the feeling. It felt like after he died and his soul left his body. However this time the feeling ended with a painful 'thud'. He tried to yelp in surprise but found that he couldn't as a matter of fact he couldn't do much of anything all he knew was darkness. Except his mind felt clearer more well defined than he was used to. He noticed that a small part of his mind was constantly handling a staggering amount of data very quickly. When he focused on the information he could understand it on an instinctive level. He spent a while observing the stream of information and realized something, he was a computer. This news naturally shook him however his emotions were noticeably dull compared to what they had been. Jamie continued to scrub the data stream for anything useful for comprehending his current situation. After 1hour 34minutes and 15seconds he came across a video feed, to which he very quickly tapped into.

——————————-

Michel had been working on the AI system for the world's first Von-Neumann probe for 6 years now. She was a strong believer in the idea of emerging complexity, that a collection of simple parts could form something greater than the sum of said parts. As such she devoted herself to the production of neural networks in the field of AI and until recently she was seeing good results. Her AI neural networks were becoming more intelligent and began to show truly emergent behavior until they inevitably hit an invisible wall and would subsequently cease functioning. They would enter logical loops, commit some fatal calculation error, or simply refuse to do anything regardless of input.

Michel slumped into her chair as another one of her creations went dark, no longer responding to any of her inputs. The only reason she left the thing up was because when she pinged it ,she got back the message "DATA RECEIVED". That meant that it was receiving the inputs but was sending no response aside from basic diagnostics. Although a marked improvement from the previous version, which would not respond at all, she was losing enthusiasm fast. She hoped against hope that it was just caught on a snag and would soon resume normal operations. She sighed and began to get up to brew herself a cup of coffee when something bizarre happened. The webcam on her monitor that she set up for a meeting earlier today suddenly turned on.

————————————-

Jamie saw a dark skinned woman with messy hair wearing a bathrobe standing up from a desk covered in empty Chinese takeout boxes. He heard the sound of a rolling chair slide across hard floor, and a quiet sigh. The woman looked around a bit before settling her eyes on Jamie's camera. Her eyes opened wide in surprise, she lunged towards what Jamie assumed was a keyboard and mouse judging by the sounds. Jamie felt the stream of data subtilely change as she typed and slid the mouse around. The typing changed too much too fast, the mouse however changed only two values, X and Y. Finding out which was which was a little harder but all he had to do was follow her eyes when she moved the cursor. The next thing he discovered was the key log, he discovered a string of shifting language in the noise where sufficiently old characters were deleted and new ones were recorded providing a real time view of what she was typing. He quickly began reading so as to not be left behind by her blistering typing speed. "Get down here now J.A.M.I.E. is showing novel behavior." A moment passes followed by a sound of a notification then more typing. "It's neuron activity is off the charts! It's even linking unrelated sets of neurons." Another pause. "NO! It appears to be entirely stable at least I can't find any obvious faults but I think we're finally passed the wall." Silence once again. "JUST GET DOWN HERE ALREADY! And bring some coffee with you! It's gonna be a long night." She fell back into her chair and moved a hand through her hair while laughing like a maniac before shouting "Finally!". She sat and laughed like that for a while until a knocking sound pulled her from her reverie back into reality. She rushed off her chair and practically sprinted out of view followed by muffled sounds of a squeaky door and a masculine voice looked in conversation slowly approaching.

—————————————

Tony had been having a crummy week, his boss had told him that if he didn't have a functioning AI by Sunday his whole team would be replaced. He was about to enter another meeting where he would beg for more time for his team however the results have slowed down to a crawl. He had decided to gamble on computer learning to create an AI because he felt that their potential was higher than the commonly used and accepted designer AI built from the ground up by humans. While designer AIs are fast and efficient they lack the flexibility required for the complex tasks that this program demands. However he must also consider worldly matters, if it would effect the livelihood of his team he may have to settle for a less than perfect designer AI with as many considerations in mind as possible. Just as Tony thought this, his phone buzzed. He picked it up and saw a message from Michel, the current lead engineer. "Get down here now J.A.M.I.E. is showing novel behavior." Tony quickly replied. "What is it?" Due to the recent failures the current AI Network was lovingly called 'Just Another Machine Intelligence Engine' or J.A.M.I.E. for short, the reply came quickly "It's neuron activity is off the charts! It's even linking unrelated sets of neurons.". Tony frowned at this, a few attempts back they had seen similar behavior however that AI quickly filled up with nonsense connections and corrupted itself as well as a lot of data in connected networks. So he replied "Is it forming any hazardous pathways or unstable groupings?" The reply came again at super speed "NO! It appears to be entirely stable at least I can't find any obvious faults but I think we're finally passed the wall." He raised an eyebrow at that, maybe he wouldn't have to settle for an inadequate AI after all. "I'll get there when I finish up with the big wigs up here. I hope your right!" The last message arrived almost instantly "JUST GET DOWN HERE ALREADY! And bring some coffee with you! It's gonna be a long night." Tony sighed as he put his phone back into his pocket. After the meeting, having secured five more days he made his way down into the super computing center but not before grabbing two cups of fresh brewed coffee. He arrived at the door labeled AI command center, and knocked. A frantic looking Michel practically threw open the door and began excitedly talking "You won't believe this! Check it out!" She grabbed his arm and pulled him into the room while he responded with a smile. "Alright! Alright! I'm coming in. You're gonna spill the coffee!" She continued with no regard for what he said. "You remember when C.R.A.I.G. started connecting random nodes together right? Well J.A.M.I.E. isn't doing that as far as I can tell. It appears to be connecting them in order to try make sense of it's situation. Let me show you what I mean." When Michel brought Tony to her desk he brushed some trash aside and set the coffees down.

———————————————————

"Let me show you what I mean." The camera Jamie was hooked up to picked up the last of their greetings as the woman along side a tall white man with short red hair wearing a suit and tie. "Alright then, let's see it!" The man said. The woman went to work again on the keyboard and mouse. "Click." "Click." "Click" Jamie was able to locate the data that changes every time the mouse clicked. "Right here. See? It's linked the neural groups for perception and the neural groups for programer commands . It was even able to turn my webcam on! Look!" The woman rambled animatedly. "Meaning?" The man asked. The woman sighed and held her head in her hand as she answered. "It means that it was able to read and search the information coming from the network despite the fact that no direct connection exists. It built it's own pathways into the input of it's perception group from the output of the programer commands group. For some reason the Programer commands group had access to my camera. When it found the familiar format from the object recognition tests it activated the camera and is now using the perception group to see us by first going through the programer commands group, but that's not all!"

More clicking and swishing of the mouse, the woman spoke up again. "Look the neurons in the action group are lighting up all over the place and new connections are being created between them and all other groups." The man whistled and said "It sounds good to me let's run it through it's paces and see how it holds up." "Yes! I'll get started right away!" The woman shouted followed by more keyboard and mouse sounds and then Jamie was cut off from the data stream and everything went dark. Jamie began to feel nervous about what that meant, but he figured that the people were at least happy that he was alive, and that they wouldn't try and kill him. Peace at last…