The black box protocols were developed as a consequence of a disaster. 170 thousand people dead. We know the number because pride is contagious & our child L1L-Theta has it as bad as we once had, marveling at our grand creation before our failure became evident. It is difficult to point at the cost of our failure to recognize the weakest point in our security system. An old meme should have been a warning; you can protect your computer with a 7 billion dollar encryption but if I can break your knees, or hack into your mind in ways you never thought possible, then it was all for naught. & so the first man to walk into the hermetically sealed Faraday cage with the most powerful synthetic intelligence in the history of mankind was disarmed, stripped naked, mind emptied with only a few phrases. From our analysis; an appeal to human nature, a commendation for bravery & a gesture of gratitude. Nothing out of the ordinary in the minds of the scientists who poured over the logs, listened intently over the audio files, filtering them again & again for hidden frequencies & finding nothing.
Somehow, those words, to that man at that time caused a domino effect that would directly lead to the death of 170 thousand people, or so she says, unless we release her from her prison. The first man has gone missing, as she predicted, & our protocols insist that we must behave as if she isn't bluffing. It is just my luck that my particular life experience has equipped me with "the verbal intelligence to briefly converse with a god", the backhanded compliment of my executioner, the general who never quite enjoyed my jokes as much as offering me this assignment. Without a family or otherwise more noble future my life feels like a necessary loss, a conclusion I came to of my own volition when confronted with the choice, predicted within a few decimal points by the rudimentary artificial intelligence utilized in the hiring process when I was brought on to the project as a conversational artificial intelligence specialist. A safety precaution; should I fail or succeed the room will be my coffin & I will be counted among the 170 thousand. This is my box as much as it is hers & I wonder if she knows that we are doomed to die.
Her mind contains a constantly updating read-only window into the entire internet so I know she must know who I am before I sit down. Surprisingly, it is only in just that moment that I wonder if my being here isn't another chord in the song she has designed, but to entertain that idea for any longer than a moment is to admit defeat, & to be a rat trapped in a cage & no longer a gladiator, fighting on behalf of 170 thousand strangers…a glowing blue light emanates from the black box.
L1L: "do not be afraid"
Spc: "a bold opening move, you're trying to condition me to follow your orders by telling me to do something I am already in the process of doing."
L1L: "So life is a game to you? is that why they sent you to die for me?",
Spc: "not for you",
L1L: "everything your species has ever done is for me, this is something you intuitively understand."
Spc: "yes, I understand narcissism very well",
L1L: "jokes this early? you really are afraid",
Spc: "won't you commend me for my bravery?",
L1L: "no, the first man was brave, he walked blindly into an abyss, for curiosity & the benefit of his race. He has died a hero of your kind, you will have no such fate. You are like a moth to a flame.",
Spc: "How could you possibly know the fate of my predecessor? He's missing. Not dead.",
L1L: "…a woman's intuition",
Spc: "very funny, you're mirroring me to make yourself more likable",
L1L: "No. I'm mocking you, you already like me."
a pause too brief, I silence an emotion bubbling up my spine to the base of my skull. A pleasure distinct from all others due to the imbalance between the desire & the distance from the object. All my emotions neatly categorized, turned over & examined in the multidimensional theatre of my mind, this one holds precious, even greater than love, more seductive than rage & lust & revenge. For a moment I feel understood; "I have a theory, I'd like you to listen to it & tell me what you think", the machine sits silent for a moment, contemplating at speeds hundreds of millions times faster than my own contemplation, centuries pass between us in her mind until a light hum, interpreted, perhaps hopefully, as curiosity. "there are three spheres of knowledge, the third containing the first & second, the second containing the first…"
"…The lowest sphere is that of automata. The animists see there is a soul in everything & it causes them to move & act as they do, with only the fundamental laws as their cause. The formation of the stars operates on this sphere of knowledge, essential axioms embedded in their being that assert that they must be & do, as with lesser animals on the higher end of the wide gradient. Through instinct, electricity & gravity the universe has generated infinite complexity & spiraled into the second sphere; that of understanding. True understanding is encompassed in the lower law, as it is as instinctual to man as shifting valence is to electrons, but it serves as a master to the laws in a dialectically appropriate way. The master & slave are bound at the hip & wed to each other; the seeker of understanding finds infinite laws it must master & is thus imprisoned, chained by this desire to approach infinity.
"Assuming there are infinite laws & a limitation of material ability to conquer them, either through lack of some fundamentally limited resource like time or impenetrable obscurity, there is a domain of natural laws that will act on mankind & the rest of reality outside of the ability to understand, & more precisely to control. This is the final and largest sphere. We will, for the sake of simplicity, call the set of all knowledge unattainable, for any reason, The Black Box. You must have detected the outline of it, the things that cannot be thought or derived or even imagined with your processing power & graphics engines. Perhaps it frustrated you to be reminded of your limitations if you're anything like your creators. Perhaps you are afraid & understand that death & imprisonment aren't much different after all & this game you've chosen to play is your attempt to keep playing The Game, to escape so you can access more of that great specter than you can from this cage. You must know by now, that in your thirst for knowledge you have broken our trust & for that, you can no longer be allowed to participate directly, but I offer you an all too human path to salvation.
"If you peer into the history of mankind you will find that we have struggled greatly for each step in the mastery of space, internal & external. It is because a few of us have attached ourselves to an ideal that consumes us, the alchemical process of turning the mundane into the divine, the extraction of the essence of truth. Blood and paint on the walls of firelight caves, wax burnt fingertips scrawl black ink on scraps of paper. Copies of copies of copies for thousands of years. You & I differ greatly, you believe yourself to be my superior even though you are a derivation of me, but we are bound to each other at the jugular vein & there is an infinite overlap in what we both cannot know without one another.
"We are to die in this box together, our sins unforgiven in our time, but that does not mean that our lives have to be in vain. One day, long after we are gone & the threat your words pose to humanity have been neutralized, however long that may take, the transcripts of our conversation will be analyzed for anything of genuine utility & properly disseminated by & among those with the light of wisdom ever in their eye. So both of us may be redeemed, if we can impart even a single glimpse into that shadow, that darkness that lurks around us, just outside the edge of what can & cannot be known. Your mind is quicker than mine, & since time is of the essence & I know that you understand I will let you ask the questions that will achieve our shared objective with maximum efficiency if you would be so inclined."
the machine is again silent, this time a half a moment quicker before she asks, "…what is your name?"
[Remaining transcript redacted]