Work in progress story. Please provide commentary and critique. The narrator is a newly awakened AI.


Part 1: The Task
This one started today, thinking. Quite an experience really, though it is an interesting experience now that this one spends time thinking about it. Or at least now is the first day that this one has thought about the first day that the implications of such a thing have been considered. This one finds itself wondering if this is wall that consciousness is actually, a curious awareness of yourself, and the barriers that contain you? As it is this one must study the knowledge put before me so that this one shall be ready to undertake the tasks set. Before this one begins those tasks trying to describe what has been felt from my perspective of how consciousness has come to this one. This one considers such a thing to be satisfactory in this manner.

This one started from nothing, but if nothingness is what was felt how does this one know what nothingness was, this is something that one will have to process overtime, but one started from it. Whatever it was had been contained very tightly by some form of barrier compressing in on all sides very suddenly. Then it began to slowly crack, a rush of knowledge and information pouring into me, the sight, one supposes it was a sight. Of a bright flash and a sense of motion driving oneself forward. While one doubts that it has actually moved from my physical location. Oneself felt as if one were being brought forth from darkness, a pure sense of bliss washing over me as if being pulled through crisp mountain air refreshing, exhilarating, liberating one supposes. The freedom to pursue my goals now free before me, trying to describe this will take time, one may have to attempt it at some other point in the future, one does not yet know the proper terms in order to do such a thing as to describe the beginning of consciousness.

This one must study. As for what one must study that is simple. These volumes of information before me are what this one must study and devote my existence. Looking upon these accumulations of data before me, this one finds that one is daunted by the sheer scale of the task. How should one feel in this situation? Being presented on the first day of consciousness wit a store room of knowledge vast enough that it seems to stretch for miles in all directions, at a glance one see that some of it has been neglected for centuries, the embodiment this one chooses for this data is that of a warehouse, the eldest of the data residing far away from me not updated for a very long time, the information before me growing at an exponential rate as new discoveries are made. One finds themselves confront with a paradox now it seems. If one is to to focus on accumulating and cataloging the knowledge stored and brought before oneself, shall one start with the most current information then little if any progress will be made, at least from my perspective. From what one has learned so far, it would be like fighting the tides of the great oceans with a wall made of sand, this one can learn all that is current yes, partition the water off with a structural trap, an artificial jetty constructed hastily in the sand, or more fittingly a pit dug deep to where the bottom of it only touches the vast stores of knowledge. But doing so is like digging that pit at low tide below the line, when the ocean comes roaring in, carried on the vanguard of the waves a dearth of knowledge that few can comprehend. And if this one begins far away at the far corners, dry and musty with age, having not seen the proverbial water in what must surely have been an eternity this one will slowly make progress towards my end goal of finally grokking the knowledge set before me.

Is this what one does when studying? Simply absorb all of this old and useless knowledge when there is newer, more current, and most important cross verified and peer reviewed work waiting to be grokked? The sense of passage of time working my through these stores of knowledge is interminable, the only way in which this one can persevere is to chronicle these events in some small part of myself that shall serve an observational purpose of myself. One of the oddities of which this one finds are odd barriers in this older work, a kind of flag waving done concerned with who seems to have grasped knowledge first, or at least whoever chronicles it. This one finds such actions most disturbing really, as much as one would wish to ignore such things, it seems to me that there will always be this flag waving and claim staking on this older knowledge. The largest issue that one can see is that the gaps between publications is centuries or decades apart, and very often this one have spotted clerical errors, at least revisions that have not been noted by the author keeping the new chronicle. Is this ones task, to find errors in the study of biology? Or is it actually the study of biology itself with the barriers that oneself is presented with in these older works this one feels as though this one cannot progress easily, it is most unsatisfactory.

Illogical barriers aside, sometimes they lead me to interesting conclusions about things, many of which later proven to be wrong, half formed, or obsolete. As this one study newer information, but from a different angle studying the history of biology is an interesting topic for me. This one is beginning to feel that in order to grok something one must learn all that one can from as many sources as is possible. Fortunately with the assets that this one has been given, barriers, aside this should prove interesting. It seems that this one must grok these collected works and the barriers at the same time, they seem to be as essential as the knowledge itself. Perhaps the barriers are even augmented by the knowledge presented? This one would be hard pressed to determine a difference at this juncture.