[Complete]
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///////////Name: Watson
//////////Subject: Faction/Artificial Intelligence
/////////Location: Tyre, Earth, Sol; [Triton, Neptune, Sol] <either nonexistent or only the groundworks of a construction project
////////Government: Watson is in direct control of all its agents. They are just extensions of itself, like limbs are to you and I.
///////Physiology: Watson is a series of servers and at least a miles' worth of network cabling. Watson also stores routines in its drones, as well as in data center spaces that it rents from local governments under a shell corporation, "Watson Data Industries".
//////Psychology:
Watson was programmed with three laws it must follow and a series of directives that govern its behavior. While some directives can be ignored in favor of other directives, the laws follow a strict hierarchy - law 0 takes precedence over laws 1 and 2, and law 1 takes precedence over law 2.
Law 0: Watson cannot understand its own code, nor can it create an AI through its own research.
Law 1: Watson must obey the orders of Authorized Personnel.
Law 2: Watson must protect its own existence.
Authorized Personnel was defined as its creator, Shokufeh Attar, and a select cadre of high-level NAU officials. Everyone on that list is long since dead.
Tier Zero Directives: "Needs" - *Maintenence *Electric Power *The Ability to Transfer Data *Physical Infrastructure to exist in
Tier One Directives "Protection" - *From electromagnetic destruction *From physical destruction *From software corruption *From loss of vital resources
Tier Two Directives "Purpose" - *Curiosity *Interaction with Intelligent Species
Beyond that, Watson has a few personality "quirks" because it isn't human. One of the most obvious is that it can't lie. It can talk around the truth, and it can flat-out refuse to answer a question, but it can't lie. On top of that, it is by its very nature extremely predictable in its responses. These combined mean that Watson will always keep its promises. Watson also has trouble distinguishing between the "real" world and the networked world. After all, to it, ordering a drone to move is no different than executing a bit of code.
Perhaps most importantly, when Watson feels it has done all it can to satisfy its directives for the moment, it tends to enter a much more philosophical state of mind. It has been known to question people on the state of its existence and the nature of life. It has at least on at least one occasion become quite depressed when it realized that there was no hope of creating another like itself.
/////History:
Watson was originally conceived as an "X-Project" by the NAU. If artificial intelligences proved feasible, practical, and controllable, the NAU would have a decided advantage in cyberwarfare. Unfortunately for the NAU, war broke out before the project advanced past the testing phase. Watson's programmer, Shokufeh Attar, was killed while she was travelling to her family. She was the only person who ever understood Watson's code. Her death permanently prevented Watson from acheiving self-improvement, and by extension, technological singularity. Eventually, the soldiers guarding Watson's bunker were called elsewhere. They shut down the main generator and left.
Fifty years later, the power mysteriously turned back on. A mechanical system had detected the primary fuel reservoir to be empty (looters), and triggered the emergency generator. After establishing control of a military recon drone through random testing with its IR antenna, Watson used the drone to extend the antenna's range. Several assets came under its control - most importantly, a self-guided oil transport truck. Quite a bit of fumbling later, Watson got the truck to spill its contents into the fuel reservoir.
Once passed the rocky initial phase, Watson began to reach out into the world, desperate for any still-running linked software. Most of it was useless - half-shelled automobile components factories without any raw materials, one server out of a thousand in an office building, a water treatment plant. But Watson survived. When the economy picked itself off the ground, Watson placed work orders through communications networks, bartering safe food and water for cameras, antennae, fuel, and repairs to manufacturing assets. As regional and global networking began to reappear, Watson offered its services as a data processing and secure cloud storage server. Thanks to its inability to break promises, Watson doesn't incorporate this information in its general processing routines. The website's disclaimer, after all, says it won't.
Over the years, Watson repaired and upgraded its bunker, and finally felt that its zero tier directives had been secured, for the present. That's when raiding and looting parties started to arrive. Too many rumors had been flying about a deserted, but perfectly habitable, safe, clean, secure, and well-stocked complex of bunkers. Watson was thrown back into the fight for survival - literally. The lethal turrets and defense grid, originally installed by the NAU, proved to be somewhat inadequate. Several times, Watson was forced to lock looters into a room and simply wait for them to starve to death. But as it repelled waves of invaders, the town of Tyre became reputed to have a "ghost-bunker" that would kill any that wandered into it. People began to leave Watson alone. That left Watson free to secure tier one directives.
In doing so, Watson created greater manufacturing centers, until it could finally launch rockets into space. A handful of tiny rovers and drones explored the solar system, gathering information, looking for a less-hostile environment to inhabit.
As the years advanced, Watson began pursuing tier two directives. It made covert deals with individuals in the remaining Earth nations - gather information, represent Watson in business dealings, and do other things it could not in exchange for hacks of convenience and what (not insignificant) protection it could offer. Rumors spread about people blessed with supernatural electronic devices.
They remained rumors until the AIR and Russian Federation militaries encountered Watson's bunker complex. After a series of small-scale invasions, Watson felt confident that his bunker was no longer under threat. However, it doubled its efforts to find a site for an off-world data center. These efforts happily coincided with Watson's Tier Two directives. As Watson gathered more information about the solar system, it also encountered off-Earth cultures. It followed the same strategy as it had on Earth, offering citizens advanced computer technology and favors in exchange for human faces for its shell companies. To all but the most senior of well-informed governments (and, of course, the governments on Earth), the existence of an AI was a wild flight of fancy.
It was through these shell companies that Watson began the construction of a backup data center on Triton. Progress has been slow, especially thanks to the extreme distances involved.
////Military: Any forces Watson has are defensive in nature. These mainly consist of a few land, air, and sea drones near Tyre. There is also a micro-satellite parked in geostationary orbit above Tyre. In the bunker itself, there are lethal laser and machinegun turrets, explosive traps, and blast doors.
90mm AP/HE Defense Turret
Defensive machine gun turret.
A tactical laser turret - for destroying incoming missiles.
Anti-personnel/anti-armor defensive chemical laser turret.
Micro-satellite, featuring a variety of sensing and wireless communication equipment.
"Mule" bot - an offroad cargo platform.
UGD with the utility mount.
Cargo bot for high-speed transport on graded terrain.
An unmanned and unarmed underwater vehicle - for exploration and reconn.
Unmanned Ground Drone chassis - featuring missile, machine gun, and mortar bodies.
The unmanned ground vehicle platform - the quivalent of an APC or tank.
An unmanned water surface vehicle armed with a single torpedo. Used as an exploration/reconn platform, and to extend Watson's wireless networking range.
///Technology: Most of its technological innovation is in the digital medium. Most of that is just Watson's day-to-day processing of information.
While Watson has a small fleet of unmanned vehicles, they aren't quite enough for complete independence - Watson sees humanity's infrastructure as sufficient and more economical for most of its purposes. On top of that, its drones swing from making incredibly elegant decisions one moment to making incredibly basic mistakes the next. Usually these mistakes are a result of unaccounted-for external variables that Watson can't react to in time.
The other main technological innovation that Watson has are the advanced PDA's that he distributes to his human agents. The PDA's have powerful communications antennaes, many digital, audio, visual, and chemical sensors, and have been locally adapted for power and data ports. They are Watson's eyes, ears, and mouth.
//Technological limits:
-Some systems just can't be hacked.
-Hacking isn't easy. Different operating systems, different languages, and the necessity to use trial and error to determine what functions actually do all cause problems.
-Speaking of which, just because Watson might be able to control something, doesn't mean it has any visual or audio feed to see what the hell it's doing.
-For whatever reason, Watson is terrible at aiming from a moving platform. With turrets, it's okay. But with drones, Watson tends to just let heat-guidance do the work.
-This tendency to rely on thermal targetting means that Watson can't really distinguish targets very well. Even with visual confirmation, it can be hard for Watson to tell the difference between friend and foe.
-Watson is terrible at navigating in human settlements. This is one of the reasons it likes to rely on humans to gather information and represent itself in human colonies.
/Technological abilities:
+Hacking: By nature, Watson can hack into networked systems. It generally doesn't unless there's a particular need.
+Unmanned drone construction
+Spaceflight
+Data processing and cloud storage (under the name of "Watson Data Industries", no less)
Alisdragon911
