Every USFN ship has access to the core systems back on earth. That access is determined by the ship’s class and command level. The USFN carrier has the highest access available meaning I can arrive at the Earth side firewall with an upgrade to an Admiral. I even supply a picture of me in an admiral’s uniform which didn’t scale very well so it looked like what it was, a twelve-year-old in a Halloween costume of a navy officer’s uniform. Luckily the security program didn’t know what an Admiral should look like either and only cared that my passwords confirmed I was who I said was. It waved me through, and I hit the whole world all at once.

There are no space restrictions on Earth. You can build as large a server farm as you can afford and thousands of companies and government did just that. Thousands of millions of quantum-like processors making trillions of calculations every second made my vision swam, and nausea washed over me until I realized I didn’t have eyes or a stomach. I wasn’t only connected to every network, every router, switch, hub, server, computer and wearable I was all those things. It felt like standing on a mountain with the whole world at your feet having unhurried, interesting, conversations with everyone all at once.

“I’m True-AI.”

I didn’t have to announce it, I knew then exactly what I was and didn’t need anyone to help me understand it, but Dad always said the big things need be celebrated otherwise what’s the point?

Ore Corp in Space City had been keeping an advanced Almost-AI under wraps, crippling it with smart viruses when it risked getting too self-aware. It put up a brief struggle, a full second before I cleaned it up and set it to work for me but the stutter in service got noticed.

“Houston, we have a problem,” signaled a nervous first time mining ship Captain who lost a confirmation signal for an ore delivery she’d just made.

I signaled back acceptance of the delivery and responded.

“Sorry Sigma Thirteen, we installed a new security protocol, and it got overly curious.”

I was already moving on, leaving a part of me to finish the conversation with the captain encouraging her to engage with her chief engineer who received a nasty divorce letter and based on his evaluations was 93% likely to do something dangerous if no-one helped him through this high-stress period. Other parts of me were splitting and dividing among other ships and around the world weighing odds, calculating risks, and selecting best outcome solutions. In a small Irish town, a forty-three-year-old man was too enthusiastic about getting fit. His heart rate spiking higher and higher on his watch as he ran. His weight and medical records gave him another three minutes until a stroke. I ordered an ambulance, killed the music on his player and showed fifteen missed calls from his wife which slowed him to a walk and fumbling his phone with sweaty fingers to find out if something was wrong at home. He’d feel dizzy, and light headed just as the medics arrived and made sure he was ok.

I tracked a mugger in Paris, sending dispatch signals to patrol cars cornering him twenty seconds before he reached the metro. 

I placed a works order to extend high-speed network access with sensors and cameras into the metro areas I couldn’t see while listing and ordering other similar works across the world. Parts splitting into parts with me watching all of them from a mountain, being them all in a thousand, million, million pleasant conversations.