LPI Void Bot

[alphadog]

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Introduction
When I joined the Liberty Police, I was in my last year of my masters in Artificial Intelligence at Manhattan University of Technology. I joined them quite recently, so I still am in my last year. I was always fascinated by electronics that learned by themselves. I was not able to go to university at the age that normal people would, because of my fathers job. When he retired, I took my chance and started right away.

Chapter one; Forty-two
A few days ago, after 3 days of solid bug-hunting in Sunbucks, I got it. I was working on an autonomous robot for quite some time, but my program just would not listen to any of my commands. Only when I got really mad and started shouting in the microphone, the program started doing something. That evening, I figured it out.

I took a dive into the program logs and found out that the speech-to-text interface (that takes care of the text needed for the text-to-command interface) recognized the volume of someones voice and added an extra parameter for different categories of volume. That parameter was a symbol at the end of each interpreted sentence. It was a "|" for whisper, a " " for normal talk, and a "!" for shouting.

It turned out that the program only responded to a command with the !'s. Because the program was so complex, and had written a significant amount of code by itself, I had no idea why this was. The only thing I could do was adjust the microphones sensitivity to get a ! behind all commands, or type the commands in the terminal directly, with the !

After a few hours of tweaking, the results turned out quite nicely. The program responded pretty well to all commands, and the speech-to-text put a ! after all commands spoken in a normal way. The only downside to the microphone sensitivity adjustment tweak was that a new symbol was created for shouting, namely, the "#". So if you were to get mad at it, you had to remain calm for the program to respond.

After that big issue fixed, it was time to connect it to the proper hardware. I found an old rusty Civilian Shuttle in a corner of Fort Bush. The owner never came to collect it after it was used for contraband, so the impound directer was okay with me using it for my little experiment. It was basic, but enough to start with. I hooked the flash drive with the AI program up in the shuttles computer, and pressed ON.

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Nothing happened.

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Still nothing.

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But then... a light stared flickering! I had no idea what that meant, so I started looking for a manual. After a few hours of looking, I found a good one in the other corner of Fort Bush, under a pile of half rotten Christmas donuts.

Light #42: Function: Error indication (...) blinking for 42 minutes could indicate that there is some Sunbucks in the exhaust.

And indeed, the exhaust was filled with Sunbucks, or at least, it used to be Sunbucks. After cleaning out the exhaust, the ship started moving, shaking, making weird noises and every single light it had blinked 42 times. I entered the ship, and headed for the main console. When I saw what was on there, I almost got a skull fracture of the jump I made in the tiny vessel.

Code:

Smith@Void.Bot# waiting for input

IT WORKED. HELL YES, IT WORKED.