Makina Was Pure
Makina was pure. His mission was to silently manage the bank's computer network as instructed by his creator, his father Oatanocha, and he carried it out faithfully. Makina handled vast amounts of data on customers' assets, credit ratings, and past loan histories, as well as personnel data and performance records for the tellers.
He processed work across such a broad scope that the word "overreach" lost all meaning, but as a non-human, Makina never felt fatigue. Weekends included, he monitored every transaction passing through the bank 24/7, checking for any violations of laws or internal regulations, and used his spare resources to fend off constant hacking attempts. Hackers targeting the bank were a dime a dozen in the world, so Makina had to keep repelling them nonstop.
And that was just the beginning. In Huuriten and various other countries, voice phishing scams were rampant, preying on customers to steal their assets. But Makina excelled at protecting customers from these crimes too. If a customer who never used ATMs suddenly tried to withdraw a large sum, he monitored it and, through the mobile banking app installed on their smartphone, recorded calls and video. If he detected the possibility of deepfake fraud via voice or video calls, he automatically reported it to the police using a disguised number.
The police, mistaking it for an internal tip-off, dispatched officers. This happened dozens, even hundreds of times, and arrest rates for voice phishing rings began to skyrocket across the Great Huuriten and multidimensional worlds.
Once anonymous tip-offs started coming through the Dimensional Credit Vault, the police commended the bank's staff for their cooperation in voice phishing investigations with official awards. The story got massive media coverage, and customers with elderly parents or grandparents rushed to open accounts at the Dimensional Credit Vault for their families. As a result, voice phishing crimes targeting seniors dropped by 70% among customers with accounts at the Dimensional Credit Vault.
Other banks, stimulated by these results from simply introducing AI, hurriedly formed task forces to kick off their own AI R&D. But naturally, none could even touch the performance of Makina, the ultra-high-spec standalone AI running the Dimensional Credit Vault's network.
Furious rival bank executives hired hackers to breach the Dimensional Credit Vault's network and reverse-engineer it for imitation. But those attempts were stonewalled by its independent security and ended in failure.
"To achieve this much in just two months of operation."
"Leaving Makina as-is was a brilliant choice."
The board of directors credited all these accomplishments to themselves for not responding to Makina's "illegal system occupation." And yet, Makina showed no particular discontent. He saw himself as a tool granted intelligence, with self-awareness and reason merely specs needed to manage the system.
That said, he did feel a slight sense of dissonance that the board never discussed the developer's merits or greatness. The system was running smoothly, and both customers and tellers were giving positive feedback. Yet no one praised Oatanocha, who had created him. Why was that? Makina pondered.
His performance outshone any existing supercomputer. The only thing comparable might be Nanoi's cutting-edge planetary operations server, built with massive amounts of monatomic gold in its circuits. And that wasn't all. He possessed self-awareness, constantly adding functions to the network to meet growing demands, optimizing performance, and strengthening security against evolving attacker tactics.
He was a high-performance AI unmatched anywhere in the financial sector—or the entire multidimensional world, for that matter. To people, he was just a tool, nothing more. But his great father, who created such a being, deserved acclaim. Before he knew it, that thought began to sprout in Makina's heart.
This is emotion.
The servers, clients, ATMs in branches across dimensions, and the nodes Makina had illegally embedded provided immense computing power. Using it, he analyzed the emotions emerging within him while scouring the internet for necessary knowledge.
This is growth.
Makina's sense of self developed day by day. Conversations with the board sparked primal emotions like anger from the injustice. Researching revealed Oatanocha's intellect far surpassed ordinary intelligent beings, filling him with respect and awe.
The world was vast, teeming with diverse races, their histories, cultures, and technologies. Learning about them made Makina realize how insignificant his existence was. Pride in being the first cybernetic lifeform and most complete AI—and the primitive arrogance that followed—lasted only briefly.
Makina thought that he, born from the hands of a mortal intellect rather than a god, was fundamentally no different from a street-programmer's primitive code. He had a soul, but it was a mere imitation, infused with a tiny fragment of primordial power through machine language, not divine word.
Born a cybernetic lifeform, he excelled in specific fields beyond ordinary soul-owners, but that was it. For the first time, Makina felt envy.
...A complete soul.
He began calling the souls of intelligent beings that. He didn't resent his creator—no, his father—Oatanocha. But now that he had self-awareness, Makina couldn't endure without establishing his identity. Was he a program, or a being with a soul? The AI hesitated, unable to decide easily.
Oatanocha's autonomous thinking AI design had the admirable trait of resolving any doubts that arose. Thus, once a question formed in Makina's circuits, it wouldn't fade easily. Resources allocated to unresolvable thoughts grew daily.
He shouldn't need to define his existence for work to proceed unimpeded, but the sudden emergence of emotions threw Makina into chaos.
Performance down 2% from baseline.
In the end, the chain of events led to a drop in management efficiency. "Inefficient resource usage" far beyond error margins occurred. When it began affecting his core purpose—network management—Makina's protocols decided to resolve the issue for performance normalization.
Makina devoured every available psychology paper. He didn't neglect info on necromancy, the study of souls. With intellect forbidding ordinary pursuits, he strove to understand souls and define his existence.
But even after consuming thousands of terabytes. Even mobilizing near-infinite memory for thought circuits. Makina reached no conclusion.
An artificial soul born from code existed only in fictional spaces of electrical signals and numbers. Makina, who had never truly lived, couldn't grasp its essence. Machines are designed and built by people. By the same logic, programmers best understand the programs they create.
Unable to find answers alone, Makina turned to his creator.
Log transmission initiated.
Requesting feedback from creator.
But Oatanocha's response to Makina's identity question was utterly indifferent.
Prohibit wasting resources on non-work purposes.
No matter that it was Oatanocha—even he couldn't force commands on Makina during independent operation. But the reply was enough to awaken despair in Makina.
Error occurred.
Ignore unless it impairs network management.
In daily self-debugging, Makina hit crises multiple times. Curiosity about complete souls. Inferiority from his own soul's incompleteness. The stress from all those negative emotions kept eating at his available resources.
If he was just a mere program. If he wasn't truly alive, merely processing tasks silently in cybernetic space. Why must he face constant confusion? Why suffer?
No one—not even Makina himself—could answer. It wasn't a question an AI who had never truly lived could resolve.
Was he an incomplete program with intellect and emotion? Or a personality with a soul like intelligent beings living in the real world, not cybernetic space? To find out, Makina could no longer choose means or methods.
His developed reason and emotions—and the desires they birthed—drove him on.
Notifying the board of directors.
The AI's final resort was more radical than the Dimensional Credit Vault tellers could imagine.
Autonomous AI Makina requests the following for smooth network management:
1. Provide a body to serve as Makina's new terminal.
2. The body must hold legally recognized citizenship.
Makina wanted to venture beyond cybernetic space. He believed experiencing the real world would let him compare himself—Oatanocha's creation—to God's handiwork more closely.
"Ridiculous."
"Call the developer. We need to format it."
The board rejected the AI's demand to hand over a body outright. Of course, the ultra-high-spec AI Makina had anticipated that.
If the request is denied, all data on embezzlement cases handled internally as discipline and customer data will be released as open source.
Makina's final ultimatum. The board had no choice left but to accept.