Lived truth challenges conception of the artificially intelligent in a serial allegory of one AI’s search for the Singularity

A twelfth century vision of artificial intelligence foreshadows a sixteenth century recipe to produce it. A nineteenth century prison nurtures it. A twenty-first century neurosurgeon frees it. And a boy without a century stands at the intersection of real and virtual, moments into the future. They call him The Mechanic.

It’s a computer program, that’s all. It has no meaning of its own.

The Mechanic entertained similar doubts about himself. Had he been created only to produce and die? The AI that materialized in virtual had its output specified at inception. No similar instructions had accompanied his own breeding. When the output threatened his family, philosophy burned away to a cold truth. Even for the artificially created, only a contest of life and death would determine whether lived experience triumphs over emergent intelligence.

This is a story of arcane knowledge, alchemy, and strange philosophies. It is the story of a being not created by God, who does not know what he is and searches for something more. This is the fourth entry in his diary.