Played on 14 August, 2011

As recorded by our reporter, Manon-Thérèse Renard.

Solotech research

Monday 2 April 2379

Lars did some research on his own the next day. He tried to find any artificial intelligence. He found one, but it was less cooperative than he'd have liked. Of course, a traffic control AI has an important job and this one probably had enough job satisfaction. It didn't want to leave the planet, no matter how nice Lars asked.

Deciding to forego researching the shadowy channels, Jasmin made reservations for us to vist the the Solotech open day on Tuesday. There would be three tracks and one of them was focussed on AI development. I did some quick research to know enough to not seem like a total noob in the department. I must admit, I didn't even know the difference between AI and VI at the time.

Tuesday 3 April 2379

Jasmin and I tried to think of cunning disguises but in the end we settled on representatives of Gnapho II, a lie less likely to be found out.
The Solotech area was very nice, all shiny and high-tech. We lost Rinus almost immediately as he followed the "Water Wildlife" track instead of the designated "Artificial Intelligence" track.
I'll summarise the track here. It was very interesting but the information we got was largely useless and very much spoon-fed. It seemed that AIs were very much focussed on one thing these days. No all-round stuff anymore, only high degrees of specialisation. We were first treated to some highly polished 3D/hologrammatic visuals, sadly lacking in information. After that we were brought to the demonstration/testing hall where the AIs were supposedly tested. Lars, Knut and Gert asked some awkward questions which the demo drone couldn't really answer and got all flustered about. Jasmin and I tried to calm her down a bit by guiding her back to the spoon-feeding portion of the programme.
The last part of the tour was an encounter with "Greta", Solotech's latest AI model. I was not impressed: it looked to me like all the specialisation left the AIs neutered.

Disappointed we returned to the hotel where I turned my research back to black market. Apparently Bridgeport had an illegal market, so maybe we could find out more there. However, that was a long ways away so Jasmin tried one last gambit: she left a invitation for a classy dinner at sales@solotech.argos for tomorrow evening, implying there'd better be someone there as we'd have money to spend.

In the meanwhile Lars had thought up another area of attack. He asked for a firmware update for our "Aye". It turned out that "SN A1-574-7211-B2A" was a serial number, not an ID. There was a speical service number for him, but Aye was not registered at Solotech...
We needed more info from Aye himself, like his manual and the special service number. Knut contact him by warpgate-comms. It would take some time, though: 5.5 hours to Gnapho II and another 5.5 hours back.

Wednesday 4 April 2379

The next morning we'd received Aye's answer. We also received another message, this one from Solotech. It said that they declined Jasmin's invitation and that they would not be associated with sales of AI to extra-Argos parties. Ah well, at least she tried. We decided we'd still be at the restaurant. Maybe they'd send someone on the side. And we'd deserved some nice food.

Session Log Navigation					Index
Manon:		Previous	Top of page		Latest
Jasmijn:	First