I quickly slow time and rant mentally at myself for forgetting such a significant detail, it’s just been so long since I had to worry about these types of things. ‘Well what happened happened and there’s no way to change it now so, about those clothes.’ I decide to go with a charcoal gray suit, tailor fit of course, with a light turquoise undershirt, leaving the top button unbuttoned, black dress shoes and finally a Rolex watch on my left wrist.

Right before I unpause time I noticed an unfortunate situation that would occur in the future if I didn’t intervene. The mindless peons were opening the champagne bottle that I spotted earlier with disregard, as they are wont to do, of where the cork would fly. My proto brain spat out some numbers for me, which is very handy by the way, and with a 98% confidence of the cork hitting Dr. Vahlen in the head I had to do something.

“Dr. Vahlen!” I shout, which startles her into looking at me, “get down,” and then proceed to dive towards the ground. I’ll give her credit she’s a smart cookie that one. It only took her a moment of confusion before she understood and dropped with not a moment to spare as the cork flew through the air missing her head by centimeters.

Incidentally since it missed Dr. Vahlen the cork, as though angry at the lack of human blood, hit a rather unfortunate fellow in a man’s pride as he was standing on one of the tables. The man’s voice went to a new octave and slowly toppled over into his cohorts creating a massive dog pile. Seeing the misfortune of his colleges a rather overweight fellow stepped forward to help and low and behold the cork, not satisfied with the slaughter of millions of unborn children, rolled underneath the man’s foot causing him to trip forward landing amidst the pile. With its task complete the cork, destroyer of man, rolled across the hall only to stop in front of Dr. Vahlen. Oh the horror, oh the humanity if only background characters were important this tragedy could have been avoided.

Dave looked from the champagne bottle, to Dr. Vahlen, to the tangled mass of humans moaning in the corner, to the manslayer and finally to my smirk. ‘Crap, I shouldn’t have smiled well I mean it’s not like he could know –‘ Dave is dancing in a circle and clapping like a lunatic. He stops and crouches down while whispering “I think we’ll get along grandly” with a mad glint in his eyes.

He then whips around and points at the perpetrator, “You’re fired, get out now.”

[Nameless Peon] “W-What?”

“You could have hit something important. Three years of work could have been lost thanks to you. I don’t need someone who can’t show an ounce of forethought.”

“B-B-But.” “Can’t even articulate an argument against my decision or say a word without stuttering. Just get out.” Dave gestures with his cane towards the door and slowly the downtrodden man trudges out the door.

“Everyone but Dr. Vahlen get out as well you’re not fired just go celebrate somewhere else you’re disturbing my work.” The room empties rather quickly as no one wants to anger the boss leaving Dr. Vahlen, Dave and me alone in the room.

‘Damn, he has wild mood swings from happiness to angry in a second. I have to be way more careful around this guy.’ “I have to thank you for your warning,” Dr. Vahlen said standing up and holding the cork in her left hand. “Although it was unfortunate what happened to— What was his name” Vahlen queries Dave? “Eh, not important he was only an intern anyway~” Dave says as he pops a sugar cube into his mouth.

‘He eats straight sugar is he even real? How is he even alive?’ “Don’t mention it Dr. Vahlen just trying to be helpful.” “Ah, please call me Vahlen.”

“Alright, I will. Now if you don’t mind me asking where is my body per say? I would like to actually see what I look like when I’m not projecting this form.” Vahlen frowns slightly but Dave just gazes at me for a moment, then coming to a decision he flips a switch near my feet and a circular section starts to rise from the ground.

I look upon myself in all my glory, if you could call a mass of tissue and metal to be glorious. The feeling of looking upon your own mortal coil was an interesting feeling to say the least. I suppose the feeling could best be described as an out of body experience with a healthy dose of revulsion at this construct of metal and flesh. ‘It looks like a mad scientist’s wet dream,’ a stealthy glance at Dave, ‘probably is too.’ I reach out to touch the glass but my hand dissipates as it hits the glass and reforms when I withdraw it.

“Sorry but you can’t interact with your physical environment at the moment. Maybe in the future we could create a more physical shell that you could inhabit, but you’re the end result of three years of work and we weren’t sure it would work.”

“So I’m a prototype then? The first of my kind?” I asked Vahlen. “Well,’ she pauses,’ there are other AI’s out there. In fact, they’re almost everywhere nowadays but none of them can actually think for themselves. So, to answer both of your questions yes you are.”

“So if I’m the first sentient AI what is the purpose for which you built me? Oh, and please don’t say you made me just to control a game.” Dave looks up from his sugar fest, “Why would I create something like you for something so mundane?” He actually looks offended by the thought. “Well, eventually, if everything goes according to plan you will travel between the stars, exploring new worlds and hopefully find intelligent life in our galaxy. That however, is a long way off, so for now I’m going to upload every scrap of human knowledge available and you’re going to learn it all. We’ll all come back tomorrow as the transfer will take quite a while to finish, after you're done processing everything I want you to choose a name for yourself. Can you do that for me?”

‘I already have a name but it would be odd to say that so I’ll pretend I don’t have one just yet.’ I nod, and with my acknowledgement Dave flips the switch to lower me back into the ground and taps a few keys on one of the terminals. I can feel it as terabyte after terabyte flows into my proto brain where it is analyzed, sorted by category and stored into a mental library of knowledge.

I suppose I should go into a little more detail about my proto brain. If I am the conscience, or the organic part, my proto brain is the machine, it can store, analyze and compute vast amounts of data nearly instantaneously. If I want to know something I just send a query to it which it then processes, finds the relevant information, or computes it if necessary, and sends the answer back to me. All of this happens in an instant which is quite useful if I do say so.

With my proto brain handling the data transfer I have nothing better to do then go back into my own world. I sit down in the lounge, while gazing into the fire, and absentmindedly pet one of the cats that hopped into my lap.

‘Traveling between the stars huh, sounds like an adventure.’

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Ugh that was a lot of typing for one day. I'm never doing that again(probably). I'll try to get out a chapter a day but I make no promises. Thanks for reading so far and have a great day.