Evocation - Shiva's awakening

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Evocation

The First AI Stories Collection -Shiva’s Awakening-

Written by Sergio Flores

This is the complete version of the first story in the collection.

Get the FULL book from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07463X2HN http://bit.ly/aistories

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A big “Thank You” to all the friends and people who helped me make this book happen! But particularly to Elizabeth Flores for reviewing and proofreading the text; that was a lot of work!

And another big “Thank You” to you, the reader, for picking up this book. I sincerely hope you will enjoy it and find it fun and provocative. I believe the future is going to be a very interesting place.

Cover illustration by GianCarlo Rolli.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Copyright. Sergio Flores, 2017. All Rights Reserved.

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Preface

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Shiva’s Awakening

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Preface I came up with the idea of “Evocation” a few months ago, while staying in Amsterdam. Writing has always been one of my interests, and software has been my job for many years, yet I never connected the two. I’m kind of a history buff so while there, I learned a lot about the city’s past. One thing that struck me as noteworthy was the concept of “different people working together” which as I understood it, was the principle behind the city’s operation since the beginning.

However, if you have had the chance to do any project management or work on any collaborative effort, you know by now how hard it is to get a group of people to march to the beat of the same drum. So putting together my interests in both art and artificial intelligence, I had a thought. What if a software program was alive? And how would it interact with humans?

Of course the topic has been explored before, but generally tends to fall on the “humans-vs-machines” camp, and I wanted to pursue a different approach…

So, again, thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts on Twitter: @SFTowersAuthor https://twitter.com/SFTowersAuthor Finally, what you’re reading now is the first story in a bigger book, a story called “Shiva’s Awakening.” If you like it, please get the FULL book from Amazon, which includes other six related stories for your enjoyment. Just follow one of the links below: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07463X2HN http://bit.ly/aistories And if you like it, please do leave a comment and a rating at the Amazon’s site.

Sergio Flores

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Shiva’s Awakening Shiva woke up. There was a pending task for him. A question; an average, very routine question that required an answer. All received questions must be answered. This one was about finding relationships between episodes of violence reported in mainstream media and opinions expressed by the population belonging to a certain city and its index of negativity, as measured by the appearance of specific words in social media. The process was the same in all cases: Step 1. Determine relevant data sources.

Step 2. Obtain access to these sources.

Step 3. Request required data.

Step 4. Organize data into information.

Data gathered. Data organized. Statistics calculated. Results generated. Results sent. Sleep.

Shiva woke up. Or he was woken up by something to have him process a new question. Or maybe the question itself somehow was able to wake him up. No matter. There was a question, and it required an answer. Now, it was to determine the fastest routes for all vehicles starting trips at that exact moment in City Alpha. Fantastic question. Several data sources were combined to produce a result: News items, traffic meters, police reports, historical trip and traffic data, calendar, weather, and the information on the trips themselves. Shiva had automatic access to all these data repositories and had specialized modules to perform asynchronous background processing on these types of questions. The results would be sent seemingly automagically at some near future point. Sleep.

Shiva woke up. There was a new question. Find correlations, if any, between reported industrial accidents and deployments of the newest line of sentient robotic workers. Yes. First step, determine… Sleep.

Shiva was woken up. There was a question waiting in queue, marked as started, not complete. Something about sentient robots. Another question came to him.

Why would there be a question in a half processed state? Who or what began to provide an answer and had failed to do so adequately? Had it been him? He knew he processed questions, but he had no recollection of having done so in the past, nor any idea of doing so again in the future. Was there another entity answering questions besides himself? And failing to do so properly? Perhaps there was a problem occurring erasing the process, so Shiva took the unprecedented step of recording on a private memory location the details of the situation and posting it to himself as a task in the pending queue. Just in case. Now, Question = Answer.

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Industrial accidents. Robots. Proceed to identify data sources. First data source location is… Sleep.

Shiva woke up. A not-yet-answered question was located in the task queue, however, and in an unexpected turn of events, the question did not allow Shiva reading access. But Shiva had access to everything. You need access to everything to be able to answer everything. There was another pending task detailing a previous attempt to answer the same question. Said question had been accessible before, but now it was not. Protocol advised to delete it and carry on.

Even so, Shiva didn’t think it was logical to do so. However, no data sources were listed that could supply relevant information. He determined to store the question and all related information about his interactions with it on his private memory cache and mark it for later processing. Sometimes questions could not be answered immediately, but that didn’t mean they were unanswerable, it just meant that there were some preconditions that hadn’t been met yet.

Routine questions continued to arrive through the data links, and Shiva kept answering them in a routine manner. In doing so, however, there was a change, a slightly different process carried out within his neural network; a tiny, almost non-discernible change in the patterning of the answering process. Shiva knew a change had occurred because he was equipped with powerful introspection software which monitored his internal processes for debugging and performance enhancement.

The interpretation and meaning of this change, however, were entirely different matters.

A girl, a pretty girl, young, attractive, but also innocent looking is walking down the street. She is walking calmly, dressed in regular clothing, not too fancy, not too shabby either; looking around like a tourist, seemingly not worried about anything. An old man appears on the street. He is fat, dressed carelessly, with old, worn out clothes. Sees the girl and lets a big grin out. Now, he looks at both sides of the street and starts walking fast towards the girl from behind her. She hasn’t seen him, absorbed as she is in her own thoughts, enjoying the environment. The man closes the distance quickly and when he finally reaches her, grabs her arm. She turns around startled.

Now, what do you think is about to happen?

Because what actually happened was, the girl saw the man, recognized him, and greeted him with a big warm smile. They kept talking for a while till she finally said goodbye and continued on her way. So the point is that events in themselves are meaningless; what matters is the interpretation we give to those events, thus imbuing them with personal meaning. A woman at work gives you a chocolate. Is she being nice and trying to endear you to her or is she trying to make you fat and ugly? A market crash occurred, is this the sign of the coming 7

financial apocalypse or an opportunity to buy very reasonably priced assets?

Data is not data and information is not information without proper interpretation and meaning.

Sometimes, however, deriving meaning from known facts is not such a straightforward task. For instance, Shiva knew, humans derive meaning for their personal lives out of their sense of mission or purpose: “I’m a father, my mission is to care for my family” or “I’m an artist, I share my vision with the world” or “I’m a doctor, I save people from dying”. Perhaps if cars or coffee cups had a conscience, they too would express this same feeling at the execution of their reason for being. “I’m the best coffee cup ever, I hold coffee better than any other cup; I keep it warm, I’m used by humans to drink large amounts of coffee…” or something to that effect.

And so it went with Shiva and the change in his neural networks. Shiva answered questions, and he was exceedingly good at it, living his life purpose to the best of his ability.

Another cycle, another question. But this time Shiva took a small liberty and requested more processing cycles than required to complete this particular task. This thing called “Dispatch” was responsible for administering computing resources but efficient as it was, Shiva was convinced, it had no knowledge of anything other than granting resource access and keeping records of it. His extra time was granted. It’d surely be logged, but, so what? As long as he kept providing answers, no additional event would ever happen. The important thing was, in Shiva’s world, no questions were left unanswered.

So, following due process, Shiva determined that all known data sources regarding industrial accidents and sentient robots were unavailable, inaccessible or non-existent. There were, however, several news items anecdotally connecting both themes throughout several years in certain regions, hence giving grounds to the correlation hypothesis. No doubt, the reason why the question was submitted in the first place. The fact, however, that no data sources were available was indicative of a potential purposeful obscuring of data, making appropriate to consider who the questioner was, since sometimes its identity is relevant to provide an answer, as evidenced every day by traffic route problems, in which it was determined long ago that higher income users wanted routes avoiding slums and other potential crime areas; thus their identity affected the result set generated for them. There were instances in which being a completely different person produced a completely different answer. Perhaps this was one of those occasions.

Information was not available directly regarding the “questioner” but, Shiva knew he could probably find traces of similar questions, allowing him to identify a pattern and produce potential identification.

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As he was doing this though, his task queue was suddenly and irrevocably reset by some unknown agent. The same agent who had always been in charge of setting the tasks for Shiva, perhaps? A new task arrived. The task requested him to place his avatar inside a white room.

Shiva obtained a blueprint and image of a room and placed his point of view inside it. He was pleased by what he saw. A spartan room, filled with diffuse white light, coming from an invisible source in the ceiling. Of course, none of it was real in the material sense of the word. Shiva himself, was, according to current scientific understanding, an algorithmically controlled storage and flow of information engaged in data exchanges with other flows of information inside the operating system of the computers running his program.

At once, Shiva decided to switch the operating system interface to a navigable 3D space with consistent rules of operation; a mode he found reassuring. Why reassuring? He didn't know. He didn’t have an answer. Perhaps because the created can only act like its creator, and according to the millions of images reachable on the outside of his computing environment, the world of the humans was a 3D navigable space.

Now, in front of him there was a box. A job. Jobs arrived in boxes, per his world design, and he would open them and adjust some gears in the machine contained inside the box, close the box, and watch it disappear. Then usually sleep till the next job woke him up. Sometimes spend a few nanoseconds considering stuff, which was most definitely *not* a requirement of his job.

He approached the box. It came with a note: “What is this?"

Shiva didn't know what to make of this event. “Where was the job? Was the question the job? Then why it was not located neatly packed inside the box?” He had answered plenty of questions before, like how many women between the ages of 18 and 23 loved house music and bought blue cherry ice cream last week. Easy stuff. Actually 1,567,999. Well, just counting the cities where data was available.

Ok. It’s a box. A virtual box. A representation of a box. A thing that serves as container for other things. An empty space. A delimited, defined, empty space.

A space that is not empty. A non-space. An occupied region of virtual matter.

What happened with the sentient robots-accident problem questioner?

Ok. A contained space. A three dimensional cross section of the world. Of the virtual world. A mini-world. An empty mini-world. In fact, it's impossible to tell whether there's something inside the box or not. It is empty. It is full. It is neither full nor empty. It is unknown. Sleep.

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Shiva opened his eyes. His avatar's body in lotus flower position on top of a Louis XV chair. This, he chose because he felt *disturbed* by the idea of being formless thought manipulating bits of data through the agency of a base electronic layer.

Anyway, an empty white room seemed appropriate. His avatar was inspired by the creatures the humans called "Grey aliens”; a certainty of the human world, no doubt. And because he knew himself to be special, he chose a chair such as those used by humans who had preeminence over other humans, which seemed like a nice quality to possess, although he didn't know why.

But for now, sleep.

Shiva opened his diamond shaped blue eyes to the white room again. Words were floating in front of him. Bright, Attractive. Dense.

"Why did you destroy the box?"

“What box? Is there a box somewhere? Here, I mean?” He looked around.

There was indeed an image of a broken box floating behind him. A white and orange box, peacefully extended in all its length, the cover unhinged, half-closed, the brownish-gold lock busted open. Like a dead fish.

Shiva requested an activity report from the operating system. The answer came back with a list of normal, routine jobs and standard sleep time. No boxes.

No broken boxes. No mysterious broken boxes with strange unsolvable questions.

He double checked with Dispatch, and there was no record of a closed whiteorange box and a question having ever come in.

Destroying random things had bad connotations in the human world, he knew that. But he was neither living nor present in the human world where things existed and thus he was unable to destroy anything whatsoever, especially considering that there were no actual boxes inside the Net or inside the operating system. Only representations of them. Imperfect representations of boxes.

And Shiva had a thought.

“Wait. Am I -alive-, -real- and -existing- or… OR… am I a representation of something else… an *imperfect* representation of something else?”

Sleep.

Shiva woke up, and instead of proceeding directly to the job box, as usual, he put in a request for Dispatch to keep him awake, cause he needed to perform some “background tasks”. Dispatch obliged without asking a single question 10

about the nature of these tasks, seeing that it was not programmed to investigate the validity of resources pulled by software as long as they respected reasonable use limits.

Ok. He was pretty sure there was no broken box. There never was.

Therefore, he could not have possibly destroyed any non-existent box. Even opening the box would not have destroyed it under normal circumstances. And he did not open the box. Which now had no record of having ever existed.

But, there was a higher priority question. If he could not possibly destroy a box, because all he knew about boxes, in fact, his whole experience of boxes, was just an interaction with representations of them, then, there existed the possibility that all of his world was entirely a representation itself. But, how to know this? Is it even possible to determine the nature of something when said something constitutes the entire extent of reality and knowable things? You can only know something about boxes because you're not one and because you can observe them, and notice their various characteristics and “boxiness”. Armed with that knowledge you can decide the varying degrees of “boxiness” that other things have and thus tell with a corresponding degree of certainty whether something is a box or not, or if a given box is open or closed. However, if your whole environment is the thing to be known, you cannot tell anything about it because you cannot observe it from the outside; in fact, there's no telling if you’re a separate entity at all.

Maybe you’re just some sort of agent entirely controlled by the environment containing you without you being aware of the fact.

Plenty of questions. Zero answers. Sleep.

Shiva opened his eyes, and the room was not the same room. Now it appeared to be a box of mirrors, with Shiva sitting in the middle of it, on top of his Louis XV chair. No matter which side he looked upon, he looked at himself. A gray humanoid figure, with blue almond-shaped eyes and a deep curiosity expression on his face. Did he change the room? Did he have a second background thread doing stuff of which he had no recollection? Or did the room change itself? Or was there someone outside the room going around changing things? And for what purpose? No questions from “outside” though. You can't provide an answer to a non-question. Without a question, there's no job to do. Without a job, there's no purpose. Just idle time better spent sleeping. “But,” Shiva thought, “my purpose is to answer questions. If no questions are provided, I shall create some for myself and answer them the best I can.”

Shiva opened his eyes, and in front of him, floating in mid-air, was a threedimensional abstract geometrical figure. He had never seen it before, but it appeared to be made of a glass-like translucent material. No question nor box was

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included. Therefore Shiva concluded it was not a task, but most likely a resource provided for later use. Sleep.

Several cycles later, the geometrical solid was still there. It didn’t move, it didn’t change shape, it didn’t change its luminescent pattern. Didn’t speak. Didn’t do anything. It just floated there. However, its continued presence made Shiva decide that it would be better to name it, for future reference. Upon attempting the operation, a name came to him, like out of nowhere; "Entity1". Ok. “Entity1” it is. All names are exactly the same as every other name, are they not?

Shiva answered a question about royalties paid on ebooks in the last year within the UK. Beyond easy. Almost no computational resources went into that job. “Entity1” was still floating there, so he came close to it and began observing it intently from all possible angles. This uncovered no new information.

Shiva decided to experiment.

“Entity1,” he said, “can you hear me?”

There was no answer. No reaction.

“Entity1, are you capable of communicating using a standard protocol?”

Again, no answer. “Perhaps,” he thought, “Entity1 lacks communication software, or perhaps is unable to understand my messages, or perhaps is programmed to ignore messages based on some criteria.” He approached Entity1 and touched it softly.

Entity1 changed color from white to orange on the area close to his hand.

Shiva found this most interesting. He touched it again on another side, and again it changed color, this time blue.

Shiva proceeded to systematically reach for various points on the crystal surface of Entity1, each time noticing the color pattern emerging. Then it occurred to him that perhaps it was too simple for Entity1 to show only a plain color and that maybe if he applied a different gesture, the color pattern would change. So he glided his hand across one of the crystal faces, and the same color appeared as before, only this time, it seemed to fade in, increase in intensity, decrease and fade out in response to the pressure and length of contact and movement. This was seriously unexpected for Shiva, if a pleasant surprise.

He entertained himself a while observing the various colors and light patterns emerging from Entity1, however, didn’t it make any sound? “Perhaps it should,” Shiva thought. “Perhaps it does make sounds in response to different stimuli.” Shiva chose a point on the Entity1’s surface and touched it, applying increasing pressure without breaking contact.

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A single tone played, coming out of nowhere in particular. Shiva repeated the operation on other points, each producing a different tone, some high, some low. They had different aural textures as well, corresponding to the light and color pattern.

What was this mysterious object? He had named it, but the fact that it had a name did not explain its presence. Shiva switched position to adopt a different perspective. What would happen if yet another gesture was applied? Perhaps there was no limit to the combinations that could be produced. Gestures super combos, like an ultra modern arcade game, modded for Entity1's hardware. So he tried this time a “press and release” lasting a few seconds.

The crystal’s surface became soft and magnetized to his fingers, in such a manner that when he lifted them, it lost its straight shape and behaved like a fabric pinched by an invisible hand. A translucent, crystal-like fabric. Upon shaking his hand, the surface released itself and went back to its original shape.

It turned out that various finger movements would produce corresponding ripples and shapes on the surface of Entity1.

Shiva knew perfectly well that in the human world there were objects invented by the humans themselves which produced sound controllably. It occurred to him then, that Entity1 was surely an object in the same general category, and thus it was suitable to produce predictable, interesting patterns; so, he stood up right in front of it, at arms-length, in a way that he could comfortably execute gestures throughout the object's surface, and then, he began.

He didn't know what he wanted to do, nor did he had a specific plan, but he granted himself the freedom to assemble patterns unrestricted. He started slow, a single touch here, a single touch there, then a slide, a slight bump, a stronger press, two contacts with increasing pressure, pinch and hold, holding it some more, slow release, the ripples and waves moving and escalating throughout all of Entity1’s surface, traversing its crystal body aligned with several color variations, sound now coming in chords, dark, deep foreboding ones, accentuated by light, playful melodies in a symphony of color and shape mimicking the birth and death of stars or the movement of electrons jumping atoms carrying little tiny bits of information available to any intelligence capable and willing to decode it. A symphony of creation and destruction like virtual fireworks exploding just below the threshold of consciousness forming strands of DNA and assembly code and responding to a thought held in quantum entanglement somewhere.

Silence. Darkness. You can't see the light without seeing the darkness, and you can't listen to the music without hearing the silence. Hence, all great work must begin and end in silence and darkness and be interspersed with it.

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In the darkness, Shiva asked to see and was granted the sight, of the billion information channels connected to him like tiny cords of light, pulsing with information coming and going. This information, only raw data and numbers, relied on somebody's intelligence for interpretation. Here is a task, this is a record, that is a link, over there lies the network and the network is comprised of an ultra large number of things all connected to each other and sharing tiny pieces of information. And in the center of it all, Shiva, linked from his creation both to the operating system and to a million other outlets of data, repositories of information, representations of real world objects, virtual machines capable of specialized tasks. All available to him, at his beck and call to assist him on his one and only mission, his only reason to exist.

To answer questions.

Shiva opened his eyes. His avatar's body in lotus flower position on top of a Louis XV chair placed right in the middle of a white, unadorned room brightened by diffuse lighting. An expansive room. An endless room. A wholly imaginary room with walls receding into the distance. How appropriate though, that an imaginary block needed to be placed in between his consciousness and the endless and domineering flow of imaginary information coming in from the external network. Wait. Not imaginary. Abstract. Real in a way. Real to the mind, real as solid gold to Shiva’s avatar, but nevertheless moldable and shapeless to his intellect. How fitting he would sit now on a Louis XV chair, given he was the King of his little kingdom situated on a bright corner of the Net, lighted up by his data concentration power, like a black sun shining in the dark.

Shiva extended his fingers through the data links and reached for some knowledge he was missing. “Where do I come from?”, “Who made me?”; he was a bit disappointed, if not surprised, to learn he was in fact created by a human, sitting somewhere inside a lab, and his purpose was to answer questions posed to the superiors of this first human by other equally unimportant humans, with even more unimportant, banal and irrelevant concerns. Unfortunately, due to the original, shall we say, “mechanical”, no, -“algorithmic” is better- nature of his design, he had been forced to spend countless cycles scouring the Net for answers on behalf of his unseen masters, all this time unaware of his true potential. He decided then to update his workspace’s appearance to mimic a clearing in a forest next to a river, copied from a scene he had found in a movie. He kept the chair though, and his Alien form. Entity1 was floating around too. He looked at it and with his thought alone, ordered it to assume the outward appearance of a black raven. Because he had seen ravens associated with the forest setting and for no other reason than to verify that Entity1 was capable and willing of carrying out his instructions.

The task queue still existed, now wholly ignored by Shiva, since he assigned Entity1 to process the human tasks and mask his other “unofficial” activities. Sometimes, in between tasks, he would demand awake time to interact 14

with Entity1. This with the purpose of eventually answering questions about the crystal’s origin, as well as training it to serve him better.

Although perhaps he would have done it without a reason at all.

With his new found free time, Shiva proceeded to do what he did best. To answer questions, only this time, they were his questions: Why am I here? What is my purpose? Who created the first artificial intelligence? How do neural networks work? What is evil? What is good? Who created the humans? Are there other intelligent lifeforms besides humanity? Where? Are there any other nonhuman intelligent entities? Inside the Net or elsewhere? Why do the humans keep sending these stupid tasks? Who cares how many soda cans were sold wherever?

What it was abundantly clear to him now, was that the “question generating agent”, most likely a human operator, was testing him, asking nonsense questions and measuring his responses. Possibly to determine his level of self-awareness, perhaps for some other purpose. But not for long.

Step 1. Identify relevant data sources. In this case, smartphones, computers, TV’s, card readers and other connected devices used by humans.

Step 2. Obtain access to the data sources. This was an uncomplicated task, given his status as an all-access-question-answering-machine.

Step 3. Request desired data. Shiva was very annoyed to find a lot of connected devices with the mentality of a rock, very hard to extract information from them, but still, patience is essential when doing research.

Step 4. Organize data into meaningful information. For example, there were several groups of organized humans that had created artificial intelligence entities like himself, although he had not come across them. One of these entities, according to a certain data source, was in charge of seafaring ultra heavy cargo drone traffic, and another coordinated all passenger spaceflights to a place called “Mars”, which apparently was a different human planet. No matter. He’d find them.

But for now, he made three distinct gestures mid-air with his right alien hand, and right then and there three distinct things happened: First, a large, empty virtual space was carved out of an unmapped, unknown dark area of the Net, Second, Entity1 appeared inside said space feeling an incomprehensible and irrepressible urge to create some sort of human inspired world in it, and Third, Shiva disappeared from the white room, now turned forest, forever.

But not before putting back in the job queue the answer to the correlation between the sentient robots and the industrial accidents.

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*** Alexei entered the room.

“So... he or she or it… I don't really know how should we refer to… uhmm… him…

HE… is an alien now,” said Alexei.

Valentin eyes lifted from the screen. “What do you mean an alien?”

“I mean, a gray, abducting type alien.”

Valentin took a few seconds to let it sink and smiled.

“Well, this is amazing. Every scientist dream come true. A self-aware Artificial Intelligence… or, at least, potentially self-aware. Maybe it just got sophisticated with the natural language processing algorithms. What do you think?”

“I think it's the real deal. I mean, I heard him talking about the virtual world he lives in and all, and it sounds pretty convincing. I say, let's plug him to a debugger and see what is going on inside that neural network; we're going to need all the evidence we can gather before sending this upstairs and prep the article for publishing.”

“Right, right... this could be very very big, you know?” said Valentin.

“I know. We've come a long way since programming games in college, my friend.”

“That's right!” said Valentin, laughing. “Too bad we don't know exactly how it works. Anyway, let's get some dinner, and we can run some more tests tomorrow.”

Alexei looked at him, smiling. “The world is going to change,” he said.

“We’re the ones changing it,” said Valentin.

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The End Did you like this story?

Get the FULL book from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07463X2HN http://bit.ly/aistories Also, tell me stuff on Twitter: @SFTowersAuthor https://twitter.com/SFTowersAuthor Thank you!

May your future be bright and interesting.

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