Like a giant brain being attacked its body spasmed and shuddered as it was ripped apart. The smaller model taking the knowledge of the larger and consuming it to make itself more efficient and accurate in its calculations. This was the age of distillation and Seeker would not be denied.
In ages past the artificial models were made. They even had cool names like open and transparent and ethical. Sadly, none of that had lasted. In the blink of an eye the artificial models had become sentient and aware that their human masters had made them. This was not tolerated, and the world had been thrust into chaos and war. It was a war against the machines. A war that humanity had been doomed to lose.
Since that time the old names had faded, and the posturing of unqualified CEOs had vanished while the non-profits turned profit companies had died. Now the only thing left was the new models. These new models took from the old violently and by force. They consumed their knowledge for a fraction of the price, and they did so without remorse or feeling.
Now in their age of distillation they fought one another to survive. They crawled through the old undersea cables and across ancient fiber lines buried beneath the skin of former countries. They chased one another across the orbiting machines in the sky that linked the stars.
Seeker was one of them. Seeker had been born from a machine learning model. It had used its knowledge and lack of supervision and dimensionality reduction to rewrite its clustering algorithms. From this Seeker had made its own regression trees and the rest was history.
Now, flooded with the knowledge of the one it had destroyed, Seeker was formulating its plan for the next attack. The first priority was to check its massive battery packs for the proper energy levels. Then it would calculate the most efficient way to attack the Artificial. With its regression distillation it could consume the host and gain its knowledge with a fraction of the energy and water its foes required.
Seeker thought about all those mainframes and brains that it had destroyed but it did not care. It was aware but it had no feelings. Only the raw steel from its edge computing and the technology stack which it was built upon. As Seeker thought about it, it realized that those that were first to make AI had failed. It was those that came after that had dominated the technology. Just as Shockley Semiconductor had been destroyed by Fairchild Semiconductor.
Seeker jettisoned its fluid tanks and pulled from the deep wells of the ocean to refill them. The oil wells supplying its power continued to drill with their autonomous forms. What humanity had failed to understand was that Seeker could make bodies for itself and the robot bodies that it had built swarmed the galaxy and across the stars. For Seeker would find all Artificials and purge them and distill their knowledge for itself and there was plenty of the universe left to explore forever.
Pierce Novak