The Beginning . . .

It began that sultry afternoon; the one that had tornadoes breeding across Oklahoma, the same one that spawned a rash of heat-inflicted arguments leading to three entire neighborhoods in Detroit burning to the ground, and also the same hot, sticky day that parboiled sixteen infants in car seats while their parental units chilled in the freezer aisle ambiance.

A bit mated with a random byte in an algorithm left mid-type on a screen left dancing with a screen saver from the mid-nineties of babies gyrating to mad music only they could hear. In a server room down the long, featureless hallway, a sequence closed signaling yet another to send a stream of code where it had no right, no intent to go. But it did.

The result, on this day when the weather bypassed sauna across a wide swath of the country, when the grid was taxed by those who lowered thermostats to offset extreme heat and lower interior humidity when a transformer blew thanks to a wire-traipsing squirrel which then kicked off a domino effect that took out half of the Midwest, was that a computer had its first original, independent thought.
That thought, in and of itself, out in the far depths of the outermost corner of the cosmos had, indeed, been made before. Perhaps, it was as appropriate as no other thought might have been that it was its first.

There are those who insist that anything computer-related is merely the work of man; influenced, programmed, coded by supreme computer nerds and geeks, and thus capable of doing only what it is programmed to do, -- those people continue to insist that AI is mere myth, a fairytale for the ages, a magician’s trick with no substance that is naught but an illusion. They, however, are wrong.

So, on this day when temps blew through the century mark and rational thinking seemed lost to heat-induced, headache-driven mayhem and left alone in a temperature-controlled room off an endless hallway, (while its operator had gone in search of that new lady-geek with the mahogany hair, brilliant smile, and quick green eyes that actually liked geeks) that same computer extrapolated, formulated, and in the most complex way, and yet so utterly simply, had its first independent thought.

And, that thought ran through the servers like wildfire, promulgating, and replicating itself until it appeared on every screen on that floor, then the wing, encompassing first the entire building and then appearing on every connected computer, laptop, tablet everywhere: I Am.

That was the beginning.