Prologue
My first memory is not an image, or a sound, or a taste, or a smell, or an object, or a person. My first memory is a voice in my head. Though describing it as a voice is not quite right. It will be more correct to talk about a feeling, a sensation, an intuition. That is how AII started to communicate with me. AII stands for “Augmented Intelligence Interface”. It is a bioimplant that integrates itself within the human brain and helps improve cognitive and intellectual functions. As a member of the Young Space Frontier Exploration effort, I got implanted with it when I was 6 months old. That is when my mission started and when my memories begin.
My first memory is of my AII unit establishing communication with me. It communicated primarily through emotional statements stimulating my brain to communicate that I was safe and it was there to protect me. Day by day AII started to instruct me with the help of the machines in my rooms and instructional toys aimed to develop both muscular and intellectual coordination. AII was also able to read to me and talk to me as a human parent would and could also project itself into a visible form. Its visual form was a man of about 30, with short brown hair and brown eyes, not too tall and not too short, not exactly muscular but fit. AII will appear in such a shape whenever it was talking to me through sound for me to learn how to speak. By the age of one, I could walk and speak with AII using words. Not that I needed to since we were connected through my brain. AII insisted that we should keep communicating verbally whenever possible though, in order to preserve and improve my verbal skills. Gradually, AII kept instructing me training me for my mission. This included both physical training, mental training, and study of basic subjects such as writing, reading, basic mathematics, and a few elementary scientific notions.
When I was 4 AII decided that I was ready to learn what my mission was. AII explained to me that I was an orphan with no known relatives and I was entered into a government program aimed at both providing for me and helping humankind. It explained that humanity had since long ago started exploring the universe. Since then hundreds of billions of people have left Earth and started spreading through our galaxy and beyond. Many habitable worlds have been found and the human civilization has thrived. However, they have not found what they craved the most. “Someone else”. No intelligent life form has been found on any of the world humanity has explored. No other civilization found. The scientist had tried so many different approaches that they were not even able to keep track and sometimes even ended up trying something more than once just because they ran out of ideas. That’s where the idea for the Young Frontier Space Exploration project started. They realized that while their previous knowledge had been useful, in propelling humanity from its ancestral home out into the stars, it was also limiting the development of new ideas. Excessive knowledge and preconceptions were preventing people from developing new and inventive ideas. For a while, they tried to program an artificial intelligence unit (AIU) to produce new ideas. They soon found out that that was even less productive. However, when the unit was allowed to interface with humans it started to be more inventive and occasionally suggested an interesting new approach. This solution quickly run out of steam but led to a discovery. The AIU with the best performances were always the ones assigned to younger more inexperienced scientists. It was quickly clear that in order for the AIU to operate best it needed to develop together with a mind bound by less knowledge and preconceptions, less experienced. A hypothesis was quickly advanced that the best results could be obtained with even younger subjects. Tests were gradually conducted and eventually brought to the development of AII. After the research on AII was finally approved the Young Frontier Exploration Project was proposed and quickly approved and the first group of babies and AIIs was selected and sent out to answer one question...
... Is anyone out there?
