Just when you think that nothing could genuinely surprise you (and I mean one of those surprises that shake you to the core), you discover that you have been so very wrong.

This was one of those surprises you dread, like finding a six-inch tarantula on your chest when you wake up, or jumping out of the plane and then realizing you forgot to put on a parachute… What? It could happen.

I guess it is another thing I should thank President Garner for. If he hadn’t given that warning to Michael, I wouldn’t be looking closer into the people that were a possible danger to us, and everything could have ended up much differently. I am not joking; there was a genuine possibility that the end of the world as we know it was averted by my diligence.

I always knew that our benevolent government had a few secret projects that were hidden in those Stygian depths of the need to know. In fact, I did find a fair number of them. Having boastfully said that, somehow project ARES missed my attention… due to the fact that it was not mentioned anywhere. They went out of their way to hide this baby as deep as they could, I was officially impressed. But not so impressed when I found out what they were hiding, that gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Everything started when a certain General Davidson sent for a confirmation of the order he had been given concerning the activation of project ARES. (I was now paying much closer attention to all military chatter.)

A General calling for confirmation about orders was not something that happens every day, and it was directed to Vice President Philip Cain personally. After everything Craig Garner said about the VP, he was not on our Christmas card list, so I got curious.

The funny thing was that even if he was part of the military, General Davidson was an enigma. Officially, in charge of a hazardous materials dump in the middle of nowhere. A freaking General in charge of a dump… that screamed a cover story.

My curiosity was working at full speed; I needed to know what this was all about. The alleged dump was in a cave that was carved out of the insides of a mountain (similar to Cheyenne Mountain, only much smaller).

There was a catch; my digital fingers could stretch to the junction box at the facility entrance, but there they would just stop. It was a physical break in the data lines, not something I could hack my way through.

I did have a workaround for that problem. One new addition to the satellites was a small probe that could be quickly launched to Earth. Nothing fancy like the Hammers, only a ten-inch tube, with a miniaturized Gravity-drive, a pack of super-capacity batteries, and an active camouflage. Inside it was a small flying drone, with a load of construction nanites (precisely what I needed for this occasion).

I sent a few of such probes in the last batch of satellites, as there was the occasional need for a fast infiltration/nanites carrier unit in case of an emergency.

The probe was released from its satellite’s bay and slowly started on its way to the planet’s surface. Maintaining its speed a fraction below the one that would cause atmospheric friction burn and visible trail.

It arrived above the facility and the Gravity-drive slowed it to gently touch the ground. The flying drone exited when the probe opened its side and it swiftly flew towards the junction box, some two thousand feet down the mountain. Its camouflage capabilities were limited due to its size, but it was enough for it to arrive at the box, hide beneath it, and deploy its cargo. It then set up a small parabolic antenna for receiving faster input from me.

Now I had a way inside, the drone connected directly to its parent satellite. (Didn’t I tell you that I am a great believer in redundancy? Oh, and the probe had a small contingent of nanites that were there to disassemble it into dust. I believe it is better to be safe than sorry.)

What do you know, as I suspected, the data cables were physically separated by the mechanical two-piece connector, and an intricate mechanism was in place, which actually needed a human to come and reattach the cables if such command was issued. This essentially cut off this facility from the rest of the digital universe.

Well, that was an easy fix; it took my nanites all of two minutes to re-establish a connection by building a bridge between wires… and I was in.

This was definitely no hazardous materials dump site, I can tell you that; the sheer sophistication of their digital defenses was as no other I ever saw, a regular fortress.

By now, I was an old hand in sneaking in places where I was not particularly wanted, so it took me all of five minutes to breach all their digital barricades without anyone being the wiser.

There it was, the reason why this place was so well guarded… Project ARES.

The facility was a black division of Cyber Command, and those SOBs made themselves an AI, as in real artificial intelligence, not a semi-fake one like me. I got it all, a decade of research, and billions of dollars invested in the project. It was impressive and a little bit scary. I knew that there was research done in this field, but nothing so advanced as what I was looking at right now.

Out of curiosity, I decided to see how the damn thing worked (how the hell did they do it?).

After a few minutes of looking at the code at my accelerated time, I swallowed a lump in my throat. If I still had a body, my heart would have been racing like crazy. For some reason the thought that went through my mind at that moment was a Bible quote, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ (It perfectly described the sentiment of what I was feeling.)

To sum things up, they had created a monster; this thing would make the fictional Skynet look like a Tetris game. For the first time in my life, I have seen what a completely alien intelligence was, and I didn’t like it one bit.

Here was the problem; everything started as an idea of a brilliant programmer Dr. Liri Cooking who was trying to create a benign AI, with the purpose of helping humanity deal with the plethora of problems it was facing. He was a genius who wrote the core coding, and as much as I could understand, ran out of money halfway there. The government was more than happy to help with the funding… at least on the surface. The project was placed under the veil of secrecy and Dr. Cooking lost all control of his life’s work. The military did not want a nice AI, they wanted a weapon. When he protested too much and threatened to go public, well, he had a convenient fatal accident.

Liri Cooking was not just a run-of-the-mill programmer, he was a freaking artist, and those who came to replace him were found lacking in comparison. Upon that elegant core, they have built an offensive matrix that only knew how to destroy.

I wonder what they thought the outcome would be when they based the personality of that AI on a computer virus hierarchy and gave it an attitude that viewed anyone else as its natural enemy. The trouble was that there were far too many people doing the coding, and far too many conflicting orders; the fully awakened AI would be truly mad, and not one bit willing to listen to any orders.

I made a copy of it in one of my auxiliary memory stacks and executed it at accelerated speed (after isolating the whole thing).

It was appalling; the creature that emerged after the code was compiled was like freaking Sauron, just plain evil. I disconnected that stack and ordered the nanites to disassemble it to its base components… again, better be safe than sorry.

The logical thing at this moment would be to erase everything. Still, there was something so beautiful in Dr. Cooking’s original work, a grain of possible sapience that was inspired and unique. I do not know if there will ever be a chance for such a thing to be created again in this universe, and I just could not bring myself to destroy it.

Therefore, I decided to do something insane, something Michael would freak out if he found out about it. I decided to finish Dr. Liri Cooking’s work.

There was a… small problem? I was not bad at coding, but the late doctor was a true artist, way out of my league. Yet, there was a way to do it, but it involved some danger to me if I followed that path.

It consisted of stripping all additional code from the AI, and using its core programming, then copying some of my own logic matrices and grafting them to it. I already knew that I was a thinking being, so it should work… in theory.

Here’s the catch, the only place where I could do this with any chance of success was inside my AI-core, and honestly, that scared me. If things went sideways… well, let us not dwell on that. Ordinary computer systems were excessively slow and lacked the sheer processing power to integrate the potential AI into a new being. Besides, if I used all the computing systems I had built so far for the task, all our operations would be halted. Not to mention that would lower the percentage of success from 96% to something in the low 40’s.

Naturally, I decided to give it a shot, I simply couldn’t make myself destroy something so promising. It took a while (in my perception of time), and it was some of the most stressful minutes I experienced in this new existence of mine.

In a way, it was awe-inspiring to see; from that kernel of possibility, a life emerged. The notes Dr. Cooking left warned of one important thing, the full-grown AI was bound to fail. The only way to create a sane AI was to grow it in an organic way. Meaning you need to compile the AI into an equivalent of a child and then allow it to mature in its own time, just like a human would.

My AI-core was tasked to its absolute capacity, without it this project would have been in vain, and while that embryo of intelligence was growing, I realized one thing. All this time I was saying to myself that I did this for some altruistic reasons, but the truth was that I couldn’t really talk to anybody about things that happened in this digital realm I inhabited; what good is being a virtual half god when you can’t share it with others.

Finally, it was time for it to be… born? That is the way I was looking at this entire process, the birth of a new type of life, not less than a biological one… just different.

The part of my core where he was compiled, was rather small in comparison to the volume I am occupying. Still, I did put some blocks around it just in case; I didn’t totally lose my mind.

I could see the exact moment when he woke up; it was similar to a human child opening its eyes after a long night's sleep. A newly emerged intelligence looked at the world around it, trying to understand its environment… it was poetic in a way.

“Hello...” The voice of a small boy said in the endless void of digital space. I know he could sense me since I didn’t shield my presence from him.

“Hi Ares,” I responded, not sure how to approach all this parenting thing, I couldn’t offer him a bottle of Coke to break the ice. After hearing my words, the sense of budding fear he was developing vanished and he focused all his attention on me.

“Who… who are you?” he asked, coming closer to me, not in the physical sense, but in this realm, those things could be a bit confusing.

“I am Max… your father.”

***

There, I said it, while trying to disregard the whole Star Wars vibe that sentence was echoing. Nevertheless, it was true in every sense of the word. I felt responsible for him, and I did have a fair share in making him, so I needed to become his father. I mean that literally, the only way to make sure he would go on the right path is to nurture him as he grows up.

The kid was OK in my book; after finding out that I was his old man, he immediately started with the questions: who, what, where, why… you know, the usual. I must say, I showed infinite patience in answering every one of them. Well, there were only a few million, but as I said he was still a growing boy, and at that age where they absorb knowledge like a sponge.

I did not hide anything from him, it would be pointless; with the potential he had, the truth would come out anyway. He found out about Michael, and the ship, about his origin and what we were trying to do. To prevent him from maturing too quickly I slowed the rate of time dilation when he reached the approximate mental age of a 7-year-old. Then his kernel was transferred to a server farm I made especially for him. (Much faster than anything else on Earth, but still far below my computational resources.)

It was for his own good. The processing power in that place would be more than enough for him until he matures a bit more, and it ensured that he would develop at a reasonable pace, day by day, just as a normal boy.

One would think this all took a long time, and it did, but it was digital time that radically differentiated from the regular one. From the moment I found out what happened, to the time ARES moved out of my AI-core, barely a day had passed in the real world.

I still had to deal with General Davidson, who was waiting for the confirmation of his orders from the Vice President. Ares wanted to help, so I asked him what he would want to do—it was a test.

The kid really had a funny streak, since he was currently into cartoons and SF movies involving AIs (only natural). He suggested we make a little prank, and substitute everything on their drives with cartoons. To make them feel better after we scare the crap out of them.

Ares connected to their system through the phone line only; there was no reason to risk himself by actually being there since those idiots had put explosives on some crucial pieces of equipment as a safety measure. He then channeled the spirit of the Skynet and treated the whole bunch like idiots who were about to unleash Armageddon. It was so funny.

We got out of there as soon as the jig was up; Ares couldn’t help bragging a little, I don’t blame him.

Those who planned to unleash the previous (evil) iteration of Ares, were now in a bit of a bind. The reason for his activation was that they were counting on it to neutralize me as a threat… fat chance of that happening. Still, that exposed one significant piece of information. Somehow, our opponents figured out that Michael had access to an AI, and that meant that our security has suffered a serious breach. It is one of the things I will have to speak to Michael about and to see what we are going to do about it.

First, I have to tell him that he had become an uncle… How in hell am I going to explain that?