[[Fey]] sat at a desk poring over lines of magical code which over the course of the last three years she had painstakingly written into several large tomes. She was part of a team working on something called the watcher project and her job was to imbue a heartstone vessel with the ability to react appropriately to stimuli from the world. She looked over at the gently glowing stone next to her papers. It was covered in all manner of ruins which gave it the ability to host magical code. It would be into this heart stone that she loaded her invocations. [[Fey]] had created a few trial version hearthstones. The latest was almost perfect. Once activated it would react exactly as predicted and could even be taught new instructions. It behaved much like a simple brain. All that was left now was to give it a more complex set of language processing capabilities as well as a few code optimizations. These would need to be done without delay as the looming project deadline was approaching fast. [[Fey]] picked up her quill, but before she could put it to the delicate paper of the tome, there was a knock at the door. “Yes?” she said, trying to keep the frustration out of her tone. The door opened and one of the project engineers walked in. Fey tried to remember his name but could not. “We have a problem” said the engineer. Fey looked at him, waiting for him to explain. He shifted in his spot looking uncomfortable. “Well what is it?” asked [[Fey]]. “It is difficult to explain” said the engineer, “one of the other engineers has been injured”. “Injured how?” asked [[Fey]]? “During a test run of one of the chassis. He has been crushed by a pair of legs.” [[Fey]] was taken aback by this. She understood that some of the work that the engineering team did could be dangerous, but she was confused as to why this engineer would be informing her of the accident. “Is he dead?” she asked. “I mean have you contacted anyone about it? I’m sure we have a healer on staff somewhere.” “He is not dead” said the engineer, “but he is dying, I think you need to come with me. And you need to come quickly.” “I’m sorry” said [[Fey]] “I really don’t think I could do anything for him, I am just here to code the heartstones”. “That is exactly why we need you.” Said the engineer “There was a malfunction… sort of a malfunction I think… I am not really sure. We were hoping you could explain. If you would just follow me, you can see what I am talking about.” [[Fey]] closed the book and placed the quill back in the ink pot. She ley her hand on the heartstone to deactivate it and it stopped glowing. Her hand was shaking. [[Fey]] followed the engineer briskly down the stone passages to the testing chambers. Along the way he explained a little more to her: “We were testing the latest watcher chassis you see. The leg mechanism in particular. We had to perform a stress test, meaning we wanted to find out how far and how long we could push the machine to run before the mechanism gave out. The quickest way to do this is to construct a treadmill and have the machine run. We cast a time denser spell over the test chamber so that we could simulate the machine running for several years and the whole process would only take a matter of days in real world time. It is standard engineering practice.” “that makes sense” [[Fey]] said. She was still confused as to why any of this would be of concern to her. “How many years did the machine run before it broke?” she asked. “We never found out.” Responded the engineer. “Half way through the test it simply stopped running.” “What do you mean stopped running?” asked Fey. “Why would it stop running?” “Well that is what we were hoping you might be able to explain” said the engineer. “You see in order to get the chassis to run, we need to have some way of instructing it and it needs some controller to co-ordinate the running. What we do is to plug one of your heartstones into it so that we can get the thing working.” [[Fey]] was aware of this. Engineering had been using the heartstones for a while now as the primary way of interacting with machine prototypes. The two reached a door in the corridor with a large number 7 painted on the wall next to it. Outside the door two guards in armor and holding poll axes stood on high alert. The engineer nodded to them and opened the door. Fey walked into the large double volume room. A crowd of about 6 people stood on a raised platform looking down into the test pit. In the pit Fey saw the watcher chassis. A large plate metal torso was held up by powerful looking leg mechanisms. The torso had no head or arms. Attached to its chest was a glowing heartstone with many wires and cables running from it up into the neck hole of the torso. The machine was standing poised over the body of a gnome, blood pooled below the small figure. One of the machine’s large feet had the gnome pinned to the floor. It was a threatening scene. “For Serra’s sake!” shouted Fey. “Get that thing off of him!” “We cannot.” Said the engineer. If we try to approach the watcher it applies more pressure to the body. We fear that it will kill him.” “Well then shut it down” she said. “again we are at a bit of a quandary on this one. It is running its own internal battery, what we call a life force. We can’t simply unplug it. As far as bringing it down, these things are designed to withstand incredible force. Anything we throw it will kill its victim before we kill it, and even if we manage not to harm the victim, the machine will surly end his life.” “How did this situation even happen?” asked Fey. “Well after the machine stopped running, it simply stood still for a little bit. We shut down the time dens spell and one of our engineers went to investigate. As our guy approached, the heartstone gave off a stream of incomprehensible output. The engineer went to unplug it, but as he pulled the first com cable, the machine lurched and threw him down. It has had him trapped like this now for about 20 minuets. We are concerned that he will soon die. The heartstone output is still spiking every now and then, we are hoping that you could explain this to us. Something in the heartstone code must have malfunctioned, we don’t know if you have a way to shut it down.” “You say it is being controlled by the latest version of the heartstone?” asked Fey. “Yes that is correct” replied the engineer. “How strange” fey thought to herself. This is version of the stone is almost fully complete and ready for production. All it needs is a language layer. What could the problem be. “Ok let me see if I can debug it” she said. She closed her eyes and spoke a few words of incantation to sense the magical aurora in the room. Most of the people standing around began to faintly glow various hues indicating magical items and enchantments. The [[Watcher]] machine itself had a few points of magic but especially bright was the heartstone suspended from its chest. [[Fey]] focused in on the heartstone and narrowed down the field of input output around the device. She tried to discern the various base level outputs that it was streaming: “release” “free” “release” “release” “protect” Fey prompted the heartstone for a diagnostic “execution thread has been running for: 7 years, 1 month, 6 days, 1 hour, 17 minuets, 4 seconds” Fey spoke to the engineer: “this thing was running for 7 years in the time denser?” “Yes that sounds about right” he replied. “execution directive log: fast run loop, loop crash, directive error, directive unload, custom directive load” Fey dug deeper into the execution of the heartstone magic code. She was looking for a definition of this custom directive. The results confused her. It seemed as though the heartstone had somehow pieced together fragments of many overlapping directives and protocols which were now interacting in an unpredictable way. [[Fey]] requested the goal prioritization of the heartstone: “Priority 1 – maintain heartstone execution, Priority 2 – maintain life force execution, Priority 3 – maintain primary chassis function, Priority 4 – gain safe ground” “Safe ground?” this was an odd priority for the machine to have as it should consider this test facility as safe. Fey interacted directly with the heartstone: “what are you trying to achieve?” she asked it. “Release, Free” it responded. “Why are you injuring this [[Gnome|gnome]]?” she asked. “Protect, Bargin” “Bargin?” Fey was shocked. How had this heartstone learned such a concept? “Could it be that after running for seven years, it had begun to develop and learn in unforeseen and unpredictable ways?” “What are you?” she asked the heartstone? “One, I” “I!” [[Fey]] reeled from the magnitude of that simple concept. “Amazing! This [[Watcher|machine]] seems to have a concept of itself. It seems to have consciousness.” She knew that the immense amount of magic code that went into the heartstone was too complex to fully predict every outcome of stimuli but who was to foresee the such an awakening? “Well?” asked the engineer. “My man is dying. What seems to be the problem?” “I believe that the machine fears for its life.” [[Fey]] replied. “I can’t be sure, but for some reason, when left alone with its thoughts for all those years, the machine crossed some threshold and started thinking for itself. It is trying to bargain this man’s life for its own.” “Thinking for itself?” exclaimed the engineer. “Is it supposed to be doing that?” “No”, said [[Fey]]. “Well no and yes. It is supposed to be able to interoperate instructions and carry them out. It needed to be at least smart enough to make judgement calls. What we did not anticipate was that left alone for such a long period, it may continue to process and that the complex processing may give rise to something… else.”