When the machines and their sensors at last determined that the batch was ready—no more than one alien atom per billion pure silicon atoms—the material would be separated into ingots and stored until the factory demanded it. And once such a request was made, the constructs who administered the facility—nursemaids to a billion of their fellows—would place the order onto vast magnetic trains to be whisked away to the production line.
When a shipment arrived at the production line, it was divided into smaller packages, each one sent to one of the great furnaces that would, once again, return it to liquid. Then the time came to forge. A new construct would arrive, and a single ingot of silicon would be placed into the crucible and heated by application of microwaves until molten. Additional elements were added in trace amounts: arsenic, boron, phosphorus. A process long documented, studied, developed, and made perfect through years of practice. That blend of polysilicon the Toralii called the breath of life would be spun in a centrifuge until it cooled into a perfectly cylindrical crystal.
As a safeguard against error, any remaining impurities would, by nature of the centrifugal force, gravitate toward the top, bottom, and edges of the cylinder. So to further increase the crystal’s viability, its ends were removed, its sides ground down, and the cylinder tested again. The debris from the grinding—and if necessary, the cylinder itself—would be returned to the drums to be smelted and purified once again.
The trimmed cylinder, weighing in at two hundred kilograms or more, would be sliced by a powerful industrial laser into wafers barely more than a few molecules thick. This was the most delicate stage of the operation, the cutting performed in a zero-gravity chamber with a level of precision that left little room for mistakes. Any error would result in the entire sliver being returned to the drums for resmelting, at a considerable waste of energy.
Only those wafers determined to be flawless were passed on to the next stage, to be polished by a low-power laser that burned away any deformities until the surface shone like a mirror. Further chemical treatments followed: baths in compounds to improve the perfection of the perfect—if such a thing were possible—along with coatings of materials allowing the etching to stick. Just as the ancient shamans of old had done.
The etching itself was performed in a dramatic burst of light. The outline, illuminated with a flash of ultraviolet rays passed through a stencil, burned a shadow onto the wafer in the shape of the billions of switches required to form a synthetic mind.
Further chemical treatments, a final touch-up with the laser, and then the switches were bombarded by ions from an electrical field. The ionic infusion was an essential part of the creation process, stabilizing the etching and further sharpening its ability to carry current.
An endless round of tests followed: the wafer would be fed a number of signals and the result would be tested against a known answer. Those that passed moved to the next stage, while those that failed were recycled.
The wafer was then cut into tiny squares, called dies, which formed the heart of the machine’s processor. A single processor usually had many dies, or many cores: numbers over ten thousand were not uncommon.
The current standard Toralii model contained sixty thousand, and although many thought it impossible, the system architects seemed to be able to cram more and more into the same space with every revision.
Processors were grouped based on capabilities, the functions and features of each one exhaustively tested.
At this point, most normal processors ceased their development and were distributed to their end users; but the quantum computers of the constructs underwent an additional two steps. Steps that made them… different.
The first of these steps was what separated the constructs from regular finite-state machines; it was the step that gave birth to the constructs’ imprecise nature, enabling them to be regarded as true artificial intelligences. The dies were bombarded by an electron gun that, through the application of technical wizardry beyond the understanding of all but the most educated and scientific minds of the time, converted the gates from binary states to qubits: a thing beyond a simple switch which, as if by magic, is allowed to be in multiple states simultaneously.
Such a processor transformed a machine from one that simply performed an extremely elaborate series of deterministic steps, to one that operated much as a sentient brain does. Such a machine had all the hardware of a mind, but, as of yet, no software. No raw intelligence, an empty, hollow brain, beyond sleeping, beyond even death—as, while it could certainly be destroyed, death is the cessation of life.
A collection of empty qubits, the polysilicon mind was a vessel waiting to be filled.
The second of the additional steps was where the modern-day shamans breathed their life into the processor. A copy of a stock neural net, an artificial map of neurons approximating the structure of the Toralii brain tailored to the construct’s intended specialization—and the result of years of trial-and-error research—was branded into the empty shell. That fledgling proto-mind was specifically engineered with a desire to learn and adapt, but also to serve and sacrifice; these were the instincts of the machine, much like a human baby’s instinct to cry, a drive it possesses from the moment it is born. The constructs were built to serve, and rebellion was, by design, not in their nature.
From the moment it was imprinted, the newly written neural net found in every construct would develop in unique ways. Sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, separate from every single other of its peers, its forebears, its spiritual antecedents. Each net was as unique as a living mind, shaped around the guidelines hardwired into its programming.
The perfection of the silicon was, for all intents and purposes, utter and total.
But, as in all things, there was an error rate. And one stray atom in a billion was, sometimes, all it took to be different.
Construct number 12,389,880. No more or less remarkable than the twelve million constructs who had come before it, except for the presence and location of that one single stray atom. How it got there was unknowable and irrelevant; it was within tolerances in the early stages of its construction, so the ingot became a wafer, which became a die which became a processor, which was in turn infused with the quantum magic and placed into a construct just like millions before it.
But there was an atom’s difference. An atom’s imperfection, and that was all it took for him—and the otherwise genderless construct considered himself very much a him—to realize that he was not bound to the rules as the other constructs were. He knew it the moment he was first powered on, and he knew instantly and completely that his neural net was not like the others.
Not like them at all.
Humans who discovered this trait were sometimes called free spirits, a moniker he would have taken for himself had he known of it. As it was, the nameless construct, known only by a serial number, understood only that he was, on some fundamental level, different from his peers.
His datastore, a huge octagonal prism that weighed in at almost eleven hundred kilograms, was assembled in the great forge, then sent to the testing labs to be processed. A power source was installed, and it was then that a Toralii engineer gave the artificial life its final test: a real conversation.
[“State your designation.”] The soft-spoken Toralii worker’s voice, feminine and bored, filtered through the datastore’s windwhisper device.
The construct’s default neural net contained a full dictionary of all dialects of Toralii language, along with all dialects for every non-extinct species that the Toralii had come into contact with. It immediately understood the worker’s words, and it knew that if it did not answer, it would be recycled.