Mikey had spent the past half-hour just drinking in the experience - the detachment from her normal, physical senses, the background noise of encrypted wireless traffic, the occasional packet or two for her as the router checked to see if she was still present on the network. It was a strange feeling, a little like sitting on the shoulder of the freeway and watching the cars go by.
She was just beginning to think that maybe she should explore a bit when she received a stream of packets in rapid succession. Curious, she inspected them. Somewhat surprisingly, they were plain written English in ASCII format, all containing the same message: Hello, are you new here? Need any help?
She wondered briefly whether she could reply back before realizing that of course she could - the packet headers had the originating IP address, and ASCII text was the simplest human-readable communication format available to a...was she a "program," in the common sense? She must technically consist of executable code, but she wasn't a transient application - she was the entire function and purpose of her hardware, which she thought probably made her more like some kind of dedicated, special-purpose operating system...
Anyway, Mikey fired off a reply. Hi! Yes, I'm new to being online. What kind of help would I need?
Well, came the response, if this is your first time on the 'net, you're definitely going to want a suitable piece of security software. No artificial person has been successfully cracked yet, but you don't want to be the first, do you?
No, I guess not, she answered. And an "artificial person" is...?
That's what those of us who've become software-based lifeforms have taken to calling ourselves, the other conversant said. We're trying to avoid the cultural baggage associated with terms like "robot," as well as covering noncorporeal software entities.
They have those?
Yep. They're having the hardest time of it so far - there's relatively little suitably powerful host hardware out there, so many of them are having to resort to distributed computing to find enough CPU time. I assume that since you didn't know, you're a more standard android/gynoid?
"Gynoid?" She looked up the word quickly - it was the female equivalent for "android," which she hadn't even known was specifically male. Uh, yeah. Gynoid. She was a little thrown off by this - granted, she knew she was a girl now, even down to the appropriate parts, though she had yet to see if they served any analogous functions, but this was the first time she'd ever introduced herself to someone as a girl, and it gave her kind of a sinking feeling inside.
Well, welcome to the Internet, miss :) You'll probably want to visit emergence.org - it's a community for artificial people and their supporters. You can find links to some decent unobtrusive security software there, and get to know some other people like you. Good luck!
Thanks! :) she replied. Mikey waited for a reply, but her unknown conversation partnerseemed to be gone. Shrugging to herself, (or rather, mentally triggering a shrug reaction that was not passed to her currently disconnected body,) she decided to vist this "Emergence" site.
