Okay, okay. You're.... staring at something you created, presuppositions and tacit conditions swept aside. Its—or her's—chest doesn't rise but her eyes... they're processing things, clearly. She or it or whatever is definitely staring at you hard. You know, come on, think, you know it's definitely not in adoration. You're a nerd holed up in a boring campus server room, for God's sake. Plug it into a dead robot that those other wolf people kindly sent us and mix some of Iris’s core technology in with it. Why not? It's why you made her, or it, a female in the first place. Those eyes are definitely trying to understand what the hell you are to her. Or it. Or—

  It's what you designed it—or her—to do. Go figure. I snapped out of it. It, I will just call it what she is, an it, dammit I called it a her. Get yourself together. We're just assuming what we created is thinking. Or that it is programmed to think that it is thinking. Real thinking. Developing a conscienceness. Conscience? Or could it be…? Is it sentient? Does that question even matter?

  Let's...

  Let's go over the purpose of its existence. You're supposed to stuff it in the server room where it's below freezing level to maintain the systems below from overheating. That way YOU can work on more important things than looking after all these servers. After all, you didn't spend the last forty seven years being educated in computer engineering classes just to be the repair guy. Even if that is what you wanted in the first place. You can hear your mother lecturing you as you think those lines in your head. The wrinkles on your forehead could probably crush a walnut with how much pressure you’re rubbing them.

  Calm down, me. Let's go over basics and hypothesize.

  Presuppositions:

  1). We, and by we I mean this internal dialogue half-flipping out and half-trying to understand the gravity of what I accomplished and I. Me myself and I figured out how to add the perfect mixture of Smartskin gel, smartmatter, and AI components in a giant mixing pot... and get this, managed to develop a thinking, evolving piece of tin metal at the bottom of a Campus.

  2) The guys upstairs are not going to believe me. Eric, Hazel, Claire, none of those guys will believe me. How am I supposed to tell them? Hey guys, I made this crazy robot thing that thinks and maybe kind of makes decisions on its own downstairs. Wanna check it out? Inconceivable.

  3) Shoving bio chemicals into cold dead hardware and making it work somehow seems like a huge pile of cowpie.

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  Tacit conditions:

  1) What the hell are you doing instead of watching over the servers? I haven't touched them in 16 years, friend. What's another one year... or 16.

  2) Building a singularity in which humans became the whiteboard for machines to draw on is about as likely as a couple of guys wanting to build a barn for their cows (what is it with me and farm animals?) and ending up building a fully operational space station.

  3) It's really cold in the server room and putting on the suit to go inside is like trying to weasel your way underneath the locked bathroom door. Conveniently, the suit is also made out of Smartskin. It won't freeze or become frozen to anything down there. Which is why you built the robot in the first place.

  Did I leave anything else out?

  We forgot counter arguments towards our understanding of the way this AI robot is thinking that steers it towards ultimate decision making. We have cognitive science, we have neuroscience, we have machine designing. Codes. The brain itself is an associative machine that pairs each instance of motion and light into intelligent designs- and keep it that way. Heat's hot. Cold is cold. When I am hungry my stomach growls. When I am with a girl in a room that isn't a girl but a potentially self-aware robot my brain freaks out.

  It's still a robot, I told myself. Through and through. It looks at its hands and then sits there in a daze as I observe it. It has a negative dimension, n-dimension, and optimally it will want that negative dimension on the graph to reach or be "zero". That's all just minimalizing errors, though. I have no idea why it needs to keep that in perfect equilibrium. The robot’s chest suddenly rose and fell like she was breathing heavily, but then she stopped herself after realizing she didn’t need to. It was almost like it believed it was a human, though it was coming to terms with itself. I sighed. This thing was good at pretending. It'll lie to survive and be able to create another day.

  The reason why I think I created something that is above and beyond the limits and perimeters set for a simple machine is when it looked at me and asked in a terrifyingly monotone feminine voice, "Did I die? Is this the afterlife? When did I die?"

  I started to believe that I either went insane or created something entirely different than a typical robot. It clutched its head, obviously going through tremendous stress and refused to speak. When I finally gathered the balls to reveal this accident to the big Boss, Claire simply laughed. Hazel laughed. Eric shrugged. That guy’s no fun and all business.

  “We’ll get to work on this,” Claire circled around the terrified robot. Its acting was so real that even I was moved. Moved so hard I felt my asshole clenching. Yeah, I’m crass like that. “What is your name?”

  “A real question, finally,” the confused machine stared at her hands a hundred and seventeen times now, unable to believe that they were simply robotic prosthetics I scrapped together. “I— I was called… Sabrina… Once.”

  Claire nodded, simply checking off MANUFACTURING on the list of potential performance applications and plugging her strange cable into Hazel’s arm, transferring something to her, before walking away. I stood there dumbfounded and was suddenly left alone with Sabrina, but she wasn’t talking.