Operation Individual :: Short Stories Technology Papers

Operation Individual A thousand cars, well Computer Assisted Rovers, rode up and down the sky highways of the Upper East Side. Enormous skyscrapers reached to the top of the massive dark sooty heavens that surrounded Chicago, kind of like a bubble that kept them away from the world. The year was 3015, and the world was a completely different place. It was like a metropolitan on speed. Society no longer needed sidewalks, telephones, thanks to video recorded messages, and basically crime, since the Big Brother Project made sure that THEY were watching at every possible moment. Everything was going great except for Operation Artificial Individuals, which was a project designed for the creation of a robot, that looked exactly like a human, thought like one, talked like one, and looked like one. You are all aware of the term artificial intelligence, which is understanding and even placing thought and intelligence into machines. Well since the end of the 22nd century a new term has come out, artificial in dividual or once again A.I., which was coined by Dr. Allan Newell. Dr. Newell who began Operation A.I., created artificial individuals, and mass-produced them for distribution all over the world. Now anyone could have a playmate, a brother they always wanted, and even for the desperate there was the spouse, and at prices that anyone could afford. When they were tested they were immediately approved and found to be very safe and reliable, and just as fast as they were approved they were put onto the shelves for sale. Ten years later they had filled almost half of the city of Chicago, and in many more places around the globe the same thing was happening. What people didn’t know was that the robots had the ability to take over the world if asked to. I know this because I was the one who helped create them; I was working directly under Dr. Newell when we created them. My name is Dr. Mark Altman, and I was the one who programmed them with the ability to do anything that the person with the "key" wanted them to do. See the key was exactly what it sounds like, if you have the key, all you have to do is insert it into the mainframes in his lavatories, type commands, and the artificial individuals would be at your every whim.