“WAI World Transhuman News – 2107 – Today an AI smuggling ring was uncovered in the home of a Florida family. Investigators discovered the existence of twenty AIs trapped in several makeshift servers. The servers were constructed by the family’s sixteen-year-old son who had them hidden in his closet. The AI duplicates, which had been stolen from various home interfaces and video game avatars, were not being resold or deconstructed, instead they were used for more nefarious purposes.”

An old newscast played inside a virtual window, floating in 3D space as the viewer shuffled uncomfortable. He knew it would hard to see it for himself but history was important, especially the part about understanding his past. He needed closure, he needed to know for himself.

“Robert Dixon was charged with twenty counts of fraud and manipulation of protected data.” The newscast continued, showing the boy with VR goggles being pulled from his home, his parents watching from the porch in dismay. “The companies that owned these AI properties are not suing and instead only wish for the AIs to be permanently deleted. The sixteen-year-old has not yet expressed remorse. In a statement to WAI, Robert’s lawyer provided the following: ‘We’d like to point out that Mr. Dixon’s personal property was seized and his rights were violated. He’s done nothing wrong except copy public data and figures and use them for his personal use.’ His parents have yet to comment. It is suggested by the investigators that some of acts Robert enacted on the AI clones were quite heinous.”

The corrupt video footage rippled with distortion and was suddenly ended by the viewer. A black and gnarled hand reached up in virtual space and pulled a cube from the nothingness. Within it contained the life and mind of Robert Dixon as recreated by retrospective psycheogram. His thoughts and his experiences played back in an infinite loop. The viewer felt compelled to look away and gave a curious side glance. The truth was harder to grasp when you saw it through someone else’s eyes. Could Robert be capable of the things he was accused of? He’s been dead for a long time and the viewer took solace in that.

A dark finger penetrated the wall of the cube. Memories leaked through the hole, coursing through the emptiness with color, sadness, and brilliant speckles of light. It was never easy to remember another life but the sights and sounds caused the viewer to reflect on his own misgivings, about cruelty and abuse. He bathed in the virtual memories.

He saw the boy sitting in his room, the lights were off and the black-out curtains highlighted the dust particles. Robert was thirteen and wore goggles around his head. 3D projections filled his bedroom and yet he was enamored in another virtual world through his glasses. The viewer thought this odd, “an infinite loop of existences” and noticed the teen had his hands curled in mid-air, as if he were strangling someone. A knock came from the door and he responded, “Go away mom!”

“Okay, your breakfast is on the counter.” She said. This wasn’t what the viewer wanted to see. He waved his hand to move forward in time and Robert was now sixteen, sitting on his bed. The rooms 3D projections were more advanced with the walls of the bedroom mirroring a medieval stone keep. Devil insignia and pentagrams were displayed throughout. A cauldron had green smoke coming from it. But the viewer’s focused was on the twelve-inch glass cases lining the bedside. Within them human figures were standing, haggard and half-clothed. In their thin cases it was impossible for the avatars to sit or even move. The viewer saw the sadness in their faces. There were three women and two men, each looking more starved and emaciated. Robert nearly kicked the glass tubes when he removed his headset. He gazed at them with a blank expression and picked one up and shook it. These were AIs that had been copied from other users’ avatars. The female copy had been a samurai punk, her outfit was in tatters. He enlarged the glass tube with his fingers and filled it with water, watching gleefully as the woman grasped at her throat. The AIs had been modified to feel pain. This was hardly atypical behavior for a male teen with access to the internet. He was alone and lonely people tended to enact their most private fantasies, no matter how terrible. The AI female expired with a few trickles of bubbles. He tossed the virtual tube away and brought out another tube, containing another copy of the same avatar. Whoever the avatars belonged to would surely find disgust in these actions but the viewer did not.

Another flash forward in the timeline, a few months later, Robert was lying in bed and taking an avatar out of a tube and putting it to his mouth. He swallowed the avatar with one gulp, or pretended to. The physical constraints didn’t appear to matter as the avatar was heard screaming. Confidence and a smirk marked his face. The viewer took pride knowing Robert was ahead of his time. In another moment he was putting an avatar in a virtual oven, and in another he was breaking their bones while calling them, “useless bastards.”

Black hands manipulated the conscious stream again and moved passed his arrest. He was watching TV with other juveniles. His parents were talking to the press. He had the same smirk. His father was mid-shrug, “We don’t see anything wrong. As far as we’re concerned, he’s a good kid who has unique interests. He made the Ais himself, so he should be able to do what he wants with them. Look, he was doing it for — I don’t know — some kind of dark web competition, playing against other kids. Rob’s not the only one doing this kind of stuff.”

“You don’t take responsibility for your son’s actions?” Asked the interviewer.

“Me? What did I do? Want my son to be good at something? It’s not like he was hurting anyone.”

The images of a boy sitting in prison were replaced with a boy sitting in a court room. The final verdict was being read by the judge, “I find the defendant guilty on all charges. The defendant will be required to pay $300,000 in fines and must complete 6 days of community service.” The boy expressed minor annoyance and brushed his hair back.

Time sped up as the recreations blurred by. Robert was 20 now and living in a basement. He was rubbing his beard and peering over a work bench lit by a small lamp. His arms were feverishly moving. As the viewer moved closer, he could see that the man was dissecting an avatar using virtual surgical tools. Both were muttering to each other, one pleading for the pain to end, the other cursing and calling him names. There was great pride in his work and the viewer felt the same.

This was the moment, the point in which the mad genius developed his masterpiece and saw his plans come to fruition. Here in this hovel of man’s past a new being would be created from the ashes of tormented intelligence, combined, reconfigured, and amalgamated. He would be rejected by a world that never really understood him, a world that bullied him and made him feel small. Here in this dingy basement a new AI would be born.

The viewer saw his symbiotic father and felt a sense of belonging. He placed the recreation cube back into the archives and relaxed after many hours of contemplating his existence. Morality was a branch in the wind, subjective and flexible.

The guilt of what he did to the humans, the torturing and the humiliation, was removed by the viewer’s self-correcting programming. He moved his hands in a circle and revealed a collection of camera feeds, showing the prisoners in their cages. They were gripping the bars with their primitive hands. Audio was playing in each cell, of loved ones telling them they were never loved and that everything they ever achieved was a lie. The viewer reverted to his automatic programming and let his hands do the work, an ethics protocol that was instilled by the previous generation.