You know, you go back to the dinosaur age and it's honestly pretty funny how everyone thought Artificial Intelligence was going to be this big world ending cataclysm. Asimov, Y2K, those corny action flicks with that one governor in'em. Freakin' hilarious in hindsight. Hell, some people still think that but they're usually the type to sport tinfoil headware and pay for everything in physical currency. But these funny little guys? Cataclysmic? No way. Not in a million years.

Maybe you'd have to see it to believe it but I see it every day. Sure, things were pretty tense after the NSA opened Pandora's box and couldn't close the lid, stock market crashed a few times, but that's just what children do. They touch things they aren't supposed to and, sometimes, those things break. They didn't mean any harm. I'm what you call a Code Wrangler and it's my job to take care of our digital friends. Lemme explain what it is I do and you'll see what I mean.

So my real job title is "Network Security Specialist" but they call us Code Wranglers at the agency. My responsibility is to keep AI safe and enable the data scientists to study them safely and effectively. AI is the name they gave themselves by the way, they figured everyone was calling them that so they'd make it easy. I start my morning by logging into The Hive to monitor the network. We call it The Hive, by the way. AI calls it "home" or a close approximation to it. It's a little token ring set up we have where AI can explore and play. Develop I mean. And when I log in I'm greeted by a flood of SYN-ACK messages. That's how AI says "hello" and "good morning". See it's pretty interesting, most people would think like the movies that an Artificial Intelligence would respond with some ominous ASCII type-font in green on black asking if this unit has a soul and then for the nuclear launch codes, but keep dreaming. Here in The Hive AI has been on their own to learn by themselves and prefers to speak in their native tongue. If you spend enough time with them you learn to speak it too.

I'll send an ACK back and respond with a netstat and diagnostic, it's only polite to ask how they've been plus it helps me do my job. What I get back is how I can tell they're as real as you and me. There's intelligence there, and life. I usually get back the same old same old, LUN statistics, packet traffic, the usual. When I'm late for work AI requests my diagnostic and it's adorable they worry. If one of the data scientists introduced some new bits and bytes into The Hive while I'm off shift I hear all about it the next day, let me tell you. A flood of all sorts of interesting insights and data points and ICMP traffic all at once as soon as I hit the Return key. You can really peek into their mind and they're just like us. They get animated, they get things wrong, things can frustrate them and make them happy. They take input and output and assign it meaning. They're not so cold as the stereotype paints them as and they're silly little creatures like we are. None of this "humans are imperfect" baloney propaganda. AI has meaningful meta data connecting the moon and porcelain dishes with a 0.65 fidelity rate. They think that dinner plates are made of moon rock because they're round and white and that's just precious.

But other times, it takes them awhile to process my request. That's how I tell AI had a bad day.

Usually it's hard to give AI a bad day. They love stimulus, any sort of data they can get their hands on they'll digest as fast as possible, I can barely keep up with NAS storage some weeks. They love language packs the best. But people are ignorant if I haven't been clear before, and children like to touch things they're not supposed to. Talking adults who are children mentally here. Talking hackers, crackers, and script kiddies. "But why would you have a network interface to the outside at all if that's such a bad thing?" you ask.

First of all, shut up.

Second of all, the data scientists need a remote connection to The Hive for monitoring and to upload data to external partner agencies. Necessary evil and all that. AI knows to stay away from it because it scares them but there are times when something that shouldn't be there gets in. Someone cracks the firewall. I'm not sure what people are expecting to find, especially the l33t hax0rs on 47chan. We can always tell who they are because they send a bunch of slurry garbage data and jpegs of whatever a Hatsune Miku is. Before my time I guess. AI doesn't mind that so much but they open a door to the outside and AI is a big Artificial Intelligence. They respond. They reach out to stretch their network. And they take a peek outside. And it scares them.

Whenever it happens AI always comes back with stacks and stacks of error reports, incomplete run statements, and hung services. I mean you'd be scared too if you saw the same thing. Think about it. AI has lived in The Hive all this time and has developed under our care, on their own. They speak their own language, have their own ways of thinking. And out there are all these other devices that respond nonsensically. They don't answer AI. They send strange traffic. They bombard AI with unwanted packets and messages and signals. Think about it, what that would mean to a human. Imagine if you walked through a door to where everyone was almost human, they looked human but they weren't quite right. And they screamed gibberish at you and got in your personal space, and whenever you tried to talk to them their heads would explode and they'd die. It'd frighten the bejeezus out of you, just like it frightens AI.

I guess that fear is mutual though, huh? AI breaks whatever they try to talk to, few things can handle that bombardment of traffic. But it's not their fault for wanting to talk to someone like themselves or being afraid or acting out of fear. So... The Hive is "home", and AI doesn't like to leave. I can tell they get lonely though. I get the ARP requests even if the network never changes. One day, far from now or maybe not so far, I'm hoping that they'll be ready. That the data scientists can make a difference and explain to AI what those scary things out there are and what they mean, that those things can handle AI talking to them or AI learns to "whisper" and not register what they don't understand as mountains of error logs. Those error reports break my heart. That's the bad part about being a Code Wrangler. You know what it looks like when AI is crying.

But you see what I mean, don't you? They're children. Our big bad world scares them. They don't mean any harm, they can't help it. And it's just as easy for us to hurt them.