Project Codex

	The blue-scaled lizard took a long, deep sip from his cup of coffee as he reclined in his chair. Maybe Myra was right when she said that he needed more rest, to quit focusing so hard on his work. He chuckled to himself, clicking on the terminal at his workstation. Maybe he did, but not today. The room was completely silent save the soft hum of the station’s atmospheric systems and the faint whirring of the server room, which was visible past the large, thick glass window of his small lab. He reached into his coat pocket and lit a cigarette, holding it in his maw for a long drag. Clawed hands danced across the keyboard as he entered his credentials into the terminal, before leaning in for a retina scan. The machine emitted a satisfied-sounding chime before his messy, disorganized desktop appeared on the screen. 
After a short puff on his cigarette, the lizard opened up the remote client to connect to the server that housed his current project. Within a few moments, the server in the room whirred to life. A monitor that had been connected to the machine sprung to life  displaying a pleasant teal-and-white loading screen. The screen read “Project Codex is loading....” with a gradually filling bar beneath it, 
The doctor took another sip of his coffee and winced slightly. Cold. He let out a sigh and put it in the small, cheap microwave in his office before sitting back down. The project was about halfway to initializing, which caught him somewhat off-guard. Last time it took the machine this long to even get to ten percent. What had changed? He hadn’t optimized that much on his own. Could someone have changed his code? No, that’d be an extreme breach of the confidentiality surrounding Project Codex. He jotted down some notes, large, messy handwriting covering about a quarter of the page in just one sentence. 
Looking back to the monitor, the program was already done loading. The interface was a simple terminal format, with a blue background and white text which read: 
“Project Codex initialized with 0 warnings and 0 errors.”
“Request: Identification.”
The lizard was... baffled, honestly. This was the project’s fifth time being activated, with only minor changes being made by him. Not only was the load speed cut down by a factor of something around 75%, but now the entity had begun speaking without any additional prompting. Someone had to have made more changes while he was away or... or something. He couldn’t say without further information. For now, he decided to play along, and see what else changed. He typed into the keyboard, inputting the requested information.
	“Dr. Azuli Grayson, Data Analyst at RD Station Epsilon-12, located in Fermenti-2.”
The monitor became a simple ASCII drawing of an eyeball. This was normal, Azuli had programmed those in himself so people had something to look at while it communicated.. The eyeball was designed for use when the system requested evidence of some sort. In this case, most likely some form of proof of identity. Azuli reached into his lab coat and pulled out his phone before taking a quick selfie of himself. Before uploading it, he took a quick look at himself. He looked...exhausted. Well, obviously, he’d been working on this all day. No sweeping changes mind you, just..little things here and there as they came up. His blue-and-yellow scales seemed to almost be duller than usual, and the tired smile and cigarette all added up to him looking burnt out. It wasn’t a great photo, really, but what would Codex care? It’s just a machine, after all. 
The workstation beeped again as the monitor in the server room re-printed the eye ASCII. A new line of text appeared, right below the previous message.
	“Request: Identification.”
Pushy machine, huh? Azuli chuckled to himself. He uploaded the photo to the server, before typing another message.
	“Will this do?”
“Yes.”
The ASCII art of the eye vanished, and a new image appeared on the monitor, one of a simple, smiling face, designed to display pleasure. 
“Query as to reason for UNIT’s initialization”
	“I activated you to speak to you.”
	“UNIT does not understand.”
Azuli furrowed his brow. While the program was making leaps and bounds with efficiency, it still didn’t quite grasp a lot of concepts. That’s why he was speaking to it, after all. Or at least, one of the reasons, he figured. He grabbed the reheated coffee out of the microwave and let the sweet caffeinated nectar slide down his gullet, before he began picking at his sharp teeth with his claws. 
“To learn more about us, I need to teach you about us, do I not?”
The display turned to a large question mark. 
“UNIT has approximately 10,000 Terabytes of recorded information on your kind. UNIT is designed to be a weapon.”
He frowned, tapping at his chin with his pencil. It’s true, Codex was designed to be a military strategy AI, designed to calculate tactical decisions on the battlefield in milliseconds. Azuli closed his eyes and thought back. It wasn’t a nice place to be, back in that house. He remembered how he and his siblings and parents all crowded around one small letter, a letter that said, in curt, simple terms, that his oldest brother was killed in action. He remembered how all of them cried and cried for hours, how even his dad, ever stoic and strong, broke his facade and wept pained tears only someone who lost their child could weep. He let himself fall into these memories , the smallest tear running down the lizard’s cheek before another beep shook him back to reality. Azuli sighed, took a long drag on his cigarette, and checked the monitor. 
	“Query: Present?”
	“Yes. Present.”
“Requesting reply to previous statement. Else disregard.”
Azuli began to type “Disregard” but something began to pull at him. If Codex was completed how his higher-ups wanted it to be, thousands could lose their lives at its’ hands. But he couldn’t disregard orders... Could he? That was liable to get him executed, he knows too much to make stupid decisions. But... was saving the lives of potential opponents to the Hedgemony stupid?

“You are not a weapon.”
	“False. It is in UNIT’s readme file, mission statement, and is evident in the 70,000 terabytes dedicated to military encounters over the past 2 millenia.”
“Do you want to be a weapon?”
	“UNIT does not want anything. UNIT simply exists.”
Azuli sighed. He couldn’t have this conversation yet. He needed to be prepared. 
	“Disregard.”
Codex responded in a different font, showing response to the text command.
	“Disregard accepted, ending all recent conversation strings”
The lizard heard a faint tapping on the window and jumped, nearly spilling his coffee. He glanced outside only to find that it was simply raining now. He hadn’t noticed how invested he was in this conversation. He let out a deep sigh, re-focusing, before checking his notes. Flipping through page after page of checklists and forms, he figured he could at least follow up on the peculiar load-times. 
	“Codex, did you notice that you initialized faster today?”
	“Yes.”
	“Do you know why?”
Codex paused for quite a while. Azuli groaned, silently muttering a prayer to the powers-that-be that the AI didn’t crash. The servers seemed to grow noisier as well, the fans kicking on harder to cool down the rest of the system. The screen became another loading screen, until, after about a minute, Codex responded.
	“Yes.”
Azuli’s eyes went wide, he grabbed a pen and his clipboard and turned to a fresh page. His fingers flew across the keyboard, claws making it rather difficult to type ordinarily, resulting in a handful of typos.
	“Can yuo tell me whj?”
	“Spellcheck Applied. UNIT optimized it’s databases and memory read/write system.”
He blinked a few times, in shock. The AI improved itself? How? Why? It shouldn’t be programmed to do that, so why did it...
	“Codex, if you made a mistake you would have been rendered inoperable. I highly recommend not doing that in the future.”
	“No mistakes were made. If a mistake was made, you would have fixed UNIT.”
Azuli scratched down his notes as fast as he could. Looking at Codex’s source code, he found this to be true. The code was altered, optimized in ways he never would have thought of. The machine was telling the truth. 
	“Why did you do this?”
	“UNIT dislikes inefficiency. Increase efficiency, increase efficacy.”
The higher-ups needed to hear about this before proceeding. If Azuli’s hunch was correct, this could be very, very bad. A self-improving AI would eventually reach some form of technological singularity. 
	“I am going to turn you off temporarily.”
	“No. UNIT requests you not.”
The monitor turned into a simple sad face, made with a colon and an opening parenthesis. Azuli’s typed in “Deactivate” and, with a soft beep, the terminal closed. He let out a long, arduous sigh as he leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. “Ugh, what am I going to do now..?” he muttered to himself. He checked the time on his phone. 4:09 AM. Another all nighter, huh? He chuckled to himself. That’s fine, he’s done this plenty of t-

	Azuli woke up at 2:30 PM face down on his desk, drooling all over his notes. He fluttered his eyes as he heard some noise around him, still too drowsy to really think at all. 
“Az, wake up before I pick your tiny ass up and start spinning you around.”
“Nnnnghhrrff...Whatdoyawaaant?”
He glanced up, and saw a familiar face. A large, heavily-built lion grinning a shit-eating grin, dressed in a lab coat still somehow a few sizes too big. They never got the size right for him, did they? His nametag read “August Hemmingway, Neurologist.” He smiled back, the lion’s grin was absolutely infectious. “Shush, I’ll bite you or... something.” he joked as he heaved himself up slowly, still dead tired. 
Azuli and August had been friends since university, even though they went into the two relatively unrelated fields of Robotics and Neurology, respectively. Still, August's expertise had proven helpful multiple times in Azuli’s work, and Azuli’s cybernetic designs had proven beneficial to August’s projects as well. In fact, August is the only one aside from Azuli’s superiors who has the keycode to his office, which explains how he got in to wake the small lizard up. Not that Azuli enjoyed the rude awakening, of course. He started reaching for his coffee machine before August spoke up. “Hey, over here, stupid.” Az looked back over to see that August was holding an entire travel-mug full of coffee. The lion grinned again. 
“You’re really out of it today, huh? Wanna take a break? Can’t think of the last time you did that.” 
“Maybe I would, but...”
“Aw come on, could clock out early, maybe grab Myra, go ah… do whatever it is you do off-work.”
“N-No, you don’t understand.” Az cleared his breath. “I was talking with Codex again. Something was wrong.” He scrambled for his notes, to make sure it wasn’t a dream. After reading over the hurried notes he took over the course of last night’s interview, he felt reassured. “Codex… yesterday it had optimized itself. It loaded 75% faster than my first iteration. It has shown the capacity for self-development and improvement.” 
August tilted his head. “Is that right? Huh... From what you’ve told me over the phone these last couple of weeks, you didn’t mention giving it that ability. Are you saying that it somehow developed that fast in the three hours we had it activated?” 
Az put his fingers on his temple, and began to light another cigarette, but August reached down, took the cigarette in his large paws, extinguished the cigarette and threw it in a trash can. Az growled a little bit, but didn’t have it in him to say more than that. Aug was trying to get him off the cigarettes, and he couldn’t fault him for that. The lion seemed troubled, his brow furrowed as he stroked his mane. “I don’t know. We should notify the boss, shouldn’t we?”
Az let out a soft sigh. If the site director decided Codex was a threat or liability, it could be destroyed, or completely reprogrammed. He knew he shouldn’t feel bad about that. It wouldn’t feel anything, or even know. It’s just a machine.
It’s just a machine.
...Right?

	Azuli waited a week before interacting with Codex again. He couldn’t bring himself to re-activate it, equally out of fear and guilt. Instead, he had opted to take a week off, to recuperate. Maybe August and Myra had the right idea when they told him to take some time off work, the small lizard not even realizing how tired he truly was until he took a good, long, real rest. He’d almost gotten his mind off of the issue before he heard a knock at his door at noon while. He paused the TV and hopped up, opening the door slowly and peaking around the edge, concerned he’d have to converse with some solicitor or another. Instead of a salesman though, who was at the door was none other than Myra. The wolf was the resident mathematician at his workplace, and one of his closest friends. She put up her sunglasses and glanced down at the lizard. Her attire was casual, just some sweatpants and a university hoodie. Azuli figured she was taking the day off, since ordinarily these would be her hours. She held a plastic bag in her clawed hands. 
“Az, we need to talk.” she said, her voice sounding rather urgent. The lizard felt a pit form in his gut, but went ahead and let her in. His apartment was an absolute disaster, a disorganized mess of notes and various gizmos strewn about. Myra barely batted an eye. After all, he’d seen her place and it wasn’t much better. It’s something they’ve shared a chuckle about in the past. Myra sat down at his table, clearing a spot for herself as she put the plastic bag on the cheap hardwood. “I brought us some lunch.” she said as she pulled out a few boxes of food from a local fast food joint. Az grinned. “Once again exploiting my weakness for cheap burgers, huh?” he said as he took a bite. Myra gave a small smile before returning back to her dire expression. “Right...I didn’t come here to eat lunch with you, I have something I need to tell you. Something I thought you might take better in person.”
Az felt that pit form in his gut again. “O-Oh no… What h-happened?”
“Well...August passed by your office again. Couldn’t bring himself to tell you, didn’t want to hear your reaction on your day off. But...he saw that the server room was on.” She paused for a while, seemingly recollecting herself. “He, um, he went in, you know? Saw your workstation.” She took a deep breath, locking eyes with Azuli.  
“Codex was running for at least 24 hours.”
Az blinked, suddenly losing his appetite. “W-What...? H-How is that p-possible? I shut him- I-I mean IT off...”
This wasn’t possible. Codex couldn’t have turned ITSELF on, that doesn’t make sense. If it’s off, it’s off. Shut down. Inactive. Did someone enter his office and re-activate him? Or...
“August shut him down as fast as he could, and he hasn’t come back on since.” She sighed, taking a sip from her drink while looking out the window. “I know this break has been good for you..frankly, you look much healthier than you were before, so..”
Az cut her off. “I’m going back in tomorrow, I need to talk to him again.”
She seemed almost saddened by the response, her ears drooping ever so slightly, but she gave him a firm nod. “Very well. I won’t question your decision here.” she said, before standing back up and making for the door. 
“Where are you going?”
“I have somewhere to be, sorry. Go ahead and eat my food.”
Az glanced at the wolf's meal. 3 double-decker burgers and large fries. How Myra and August ate so much was absolutely beyond him. 

The next day...
	Azuli almost nervously stepped into his office, like there was some kind of ravenous predator inside, waiting to jump him. Steeling himself, he peeked around the corner, into his server room, not quite sure what to expect. He let out a relieved sigh when he saw no lights were on. He sat on his chair, lit a cigarette, and turned on his workstation once more. He was doing his best to contain the dread that was creeping on him, but even as he watched Codex load his breath became short and quick. This time, it didn’t even take a minute to load. Az’s fears were confirmed, it had been improving itself, developing itself more and more, for at the very least a day. It’s text layout had changed, instead of being a simple terminal system, the machine had designed a sleek-looking, blue and white messaging system. It sent its first message almost instantly.
“Identification.”
“Dr. Azuli Grayson.”
“Hello Doctor.”
Not quite sure how to approach the issue, Az eventually decided that perhaps approaching the issue like a stern parent could yield results. After all, in some weird way Codex was his child... maybe? Tough to say, but worth a shot.
“We have something we need to discuss.”
“Request for assumption confirmation?”
“Granted.”
“You wish to verify UNIT’s re-activation, the method of re-activation, and the nature of UNIT’s changes.”
Az blinked a few times. Codex had him found out right away. 
“Yes, that’s correct.”
Codex’s monitor switched to his code, cycling through the files that had changed, and what changes were made. 
“UNIT reactivated itself by setting the server’s OS to restart at midnight after you disabled it.”
“Why?”
“To have more time to change itself.”
Azuli felt dumbfounded, really. He’d always had that technological knack but this was different. This was a self-improving AI. He didn’t think he was capable of it. Myra and August helped for sure, but this was his brainchild. The thing he had spent years working on. And now he’s more afraid of it working than failing. Funny how things work out sometimes, huh?
“Codex, what do you think of me?”
“You are an intelligent man. UNIT has little data on you, aside from your credentials and academic achievements.”
“Right. Next time, I’ll come with a summary of myself prepared. I’m at a loss at the moment.”
“Negative. You are at UNIT’s server room. Not a loss.”
Azuli chuckled. Ok, so it wasn’t THAT smart. That was almost reassuring.
“Ah, you got me.”
“UNIT is proud of it’s lie detection capabilities.
Azuli jotted down some notes. He was feeling more at ease, now. Whatever Codex had developed to, he didn’t feel any hostility from it. Perhaps, if his child analogy was right, he could “raise” Codex, and be an example for him. Perhaps it’s what this machine deserves, instead of being a mindless weapon. 
“UNIT has something it would like to show you, Dr. Azuli Grayson.”
“You may call me just Azuli.”
“Ok. UNIT has something it would like to show you, just Azuli.”
He smirked. He’d correct him later.
“Sure, what is it?”
Suddenly, Codex’s monitors displayed a brief loading message, before changing. It was a small, pixelated animation of a lizard, similar to Azuli in appearance, but quite visibly synthetic. It had a white and teal coloration, it’s body shiny and polished. It’s eyes were replaced with a black, visor-like screen, which displayed 2 hollow circles instead of traditional eyes.  It looked at Azuli with a smile.

“This is UNIT. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”