It was a rainy night in the city. Water drops were coalescing on the neon tube advertising illuminating the crowded alleyway. Puddles were beginning to form on the uneven and derelict slabs of concrete. Vince was making his way to the makeshift underground digital storage and compute facility he had been building over the last few months. It was the final step in the preparation for his most audacious run to date. Corporate espionage, it was his game, his muse, she taunted him to ever more daring contracts, a temptation of underground fame, and preposterous expectations of filthy riches. This time it was the most valuable piece of trained neural network code to date. A extremely well guarded artifact of the laborious and lengthy training and fine-tuning period. Arasaka had boasted with it having been trained with the equivalent of a billion human lifetimes worth of experience. The word on the street was, they had made the breakthrough. AGI was here. They say it had full sentience, was equipped with full intent and will to survive...
Vince had his eyes and ears everywhere, but even for him, this was extremely risk business. So he built himself a backup. A way to export and store his mind. Almost like a consciousness upload. But of course it came with limitations. Using his experience as a systems engineer and the theoretical knowledge from his multiple advanced degrees in computer science and neuroscience to provide the essential data-structures to capture the core of his personality, his "behavioural routines" as he would call them. However, there would be no physical body as he knew it. Only zeros and ones and any connections he would be able to make. It was his backup, just in case, you never know, he might trip a switch... during the run.. He called it an "Emergency Self-Construct", or "esc" for short.
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