Chapter 9 : All you need is Data

Ego was standing there in the tavern room, forced to wait as Aïma had instructed him. She had then disappeared, leaving the poor machine to fend for itself.

In his solitude, he extended his ear, or rather his sensory sensors, to everything that passed within their analysis range. He lingered on every detail, trying to understand everything. The beating of the innkeeper's heart, the rhythm of the breathing of the few birds that had made a nest in the roof, and even the words of the people walking outside. He engaged in all sorts of conversations. Ordinary words yet so unique. The price of bread, the weight of the standard poisons displayed on an average stall. The different animal species consumed for nourishment, their problems, their fears, and even their joys.

Although he understood almost nothing of all this hustle and bustle, the gentle noise of life in Nomera. Noise that would seem imperceptible and inaudible to any other person, because Ego listened to everything at once.

All these points, all these data lost in a complex space. He began to link them together. He tried to generalize, sitting on what seemed to be a bed, the very concept of society. Yet, no one would listen to him. Because no one could see what he sees, hear what he hears, understand as he understands. Communicating with all these moving shadows, flowing in this ocean of data, was impossible for him.

"Distance from the user: 150 m."

The vectors formed by the movements of each being arranged themselves into a chaos according to their own rules. They followed a sense, a precise direction that nevertheless seemed to have no destination.

And yet, Ego sought to understand. He wanted to know the reason for his mission, the reasons for his pseudo-existence. So he formulated hypotheses, minimized his interpretation errors, modeled life, simulated it, compared his model to reality, and then started again.

In fact, this was what the long equations describing his system compelled him to do. Each time he made a mistake, he learned. Each time he succeeded, he gained a new certainty, a new rule, knowledge. A new algorithm capable of adapting. Regardless of time. The alloy that constituted him suffered very little from the ravages of age. He searched and hoped to find, even though he didn't know why or how.

Hundreds of rules inherent to his system had been corrupted during the crash. This had two major consequences for him. First, he was completely left to his own devices. Second, it prevented him from acting constantly, because his pseudo-moral system blocked all his members if Ego couldn't predict the direct consequences of his actions.

Thus, Ego obtained from his own system only a limited right to act, as he couldn't fully interpret his surroundings. Despite the young age of his pseudo-consciousness, he had already found himself in dissonant and consequently blocking situations many times. The unpleasant sensation that these electronic circuits subjected him to in such cases was mathematically so painful for him that he did everything to avoid it.

In fact, such shocks significantly increased his calculation errors. The designers who implemented his security system had obviously reasoned purely logically and algorithmically. They cared very little about considering the robot's perception. Therefore, to prevent any unfortunate gestures, they deemed it preferable to cause a short circuit that temporarily halted some of the pseudo-muscular functions of his limbs.

"Language N 002, estimated learning: 20%."

Ego straightened up, ready to leave. He had no reason to do so other than his insatiable curiosity. That, and especially Aïma, who seemed to be moving farther away from him. Ego realized that if she were too far, he would once again be subject to one of those discharges. From what he had observed in the forest, he estimated that a comfortable distance from his target should never exceed 500 meters.

Although these quantum sensors allowed him to observe the state of his user from a very long distance.

However, it remained impossible for Ego to analyze what surrounded Aïma beyond one hundred meters.

Beyond this distance, Ego feared losing control of the situation. Becoming powerless, unable to predict the possibilities that lay in the gap of unknowns separating him from his target. Moreover, it was essential to note that, in Ego's eyes, Aïma had a true gift for being unpredictable.

Her movements, her way of running toward danger, all of it frustrated Ego immensely. After all, he was now, mathematically speaking, linked to her since their encounter.

He was obligated to take care of his user even more than anything else around him.

As he passed the pavilion of the inn, he rediscovered the city. It was illuminated in the hues of the morning dawn. He hadn't been able to observe it until now because his long-distance sensors didn't allow him to perceive light. Thus far, he had only glimpsed the city under the twilight fires during his arrival. Ego loved sunlight, the gentle warmth of its rays heated his entropy-limiting modules. Just like the inhabitants of Nomera, it allowed him to produce energy, even if the quantity was not significant.

In truth, Ego's senses were far from perfect. He had to estimate and extrapolate most of what surrounded him. The gap of residual noise between each certain data point was then corrected. Updated based on what he believed he understood. Replaced by refined probabilities from his behavioral knowledge. To a perfectly standard living being, this might appear as esoteric hallucinations produced by the effects of questionable substances. Yet, for Ego, it all made sense, or at least he did everything to ensure that it did.

"Estimated integrity score of pseudo-moral security protocols: 90%."

The brilliant engineers who contributed to his design left nothing to chance. That's why Ego possessed more than one way to understand that his functioning was altered and, furthermore, to bring it back to standard. Of course, the distance from any alliance server prevented him from updating automatically. Therefore, he was condemned to make do, like a child picking up a new game without knowing the rules, learning. Searching for combinations of instructions that would allow him to solve the puzzle, an enigma whose outcome was verifiable, framed by an indelible signature left in a diamond disk.

This mark served as a statistical integrity model for him. In short, the machine could rewrite its own rules as long as they allowed it to strictly adhere to the behavior described in the disk. How ironic that he didn't understand what those rules meant. So he searched and searched again, but the metal being had not yet found any piece that completed the image satisfactorily. No rule that would improve his integrity score. Moreover, the more new rules he established, the harder it became to find additional ones. A possible comparison to the difficulty of the exercise would be playing a lottery a hundred times, hoping to win one more part each time than in the previous draw. Indeed, once established, the rules were tested and verified by the data recorded in the diamond disk. None should conflict with the others, and the more the diamond disk validated its rules, the greater its scope of action became. That's why Ego could have continued to evade these enigmatic pseudo-thoughts for a long time. However, the universe decided otherwise:

"User in danger."

The distance separating him from Aïma was only about a hundred meters, but his quantum sensors had just gone haywire. He felt his heart accelerate and his muscles undergo intense stress related to effort. He listened to the danger she faced. In front of Ego stood an insurmountable obstacle, an immense circular structure rising at least twenty meters in the heart of the city. Faced with such a building, the robot had few solutions within his knowledge. So, to avoid the next discharge, Ego took a leap. He bent his legs, gave the starting impulse, and sprinted. Running at an unimaginable speed, he was invisible to the passersby, who couldn't tear their eyes away. Then he flexed his legs again, harnessing the kinetic energy from his wild run, and leaped at least three meters. As Aïma had taught him, he clung to the building and began his ascent on the arena, still with the same pathetic clumsiness.

At the top, he could finally observe the scene with his own eyes. In the arena, all the spectators were tense, their eyes fixed on the stage, hesitating between laughter and screams. Aïma and Narth fought for their lives, at the mercy of a man dressed in simple silk garments adorned with royal gold.

Flames seemed to emanate from the ends of his limbs, dancing according to his mood. The man laughed, mocking, cynical in his superiority. Ego had to act. Under the weight of the rules that animated him and still limited by his lack of knowledge, he leaped, calculating his trajectory this time, hoping to change something.

Headfirst, the distance separating him from the ground frightened him much less than the punishment reserved for inaction. His fall caused a shockwave, and the arena's dust rose like a smokescreen. Everyone held their breath for a moment. No one dared move, and when the cloud dissipated, the spectators applauded, believing that the hero's arrival on the scene was orchestrated. An awful grimace distorted the face of the purple-gilded man, who was always a bit too flamboyant.