Sibling Rivalry: A Short Story

Name: Sibling Rivalry: A Short Story
Brand: Anthony Francis
SKU: 978-1-942480-12-9
Price: 0.99 USD
Availability: InStock

Anthony Francis

When the Nicole AI starts killing, her creator is pitted against her in a deadly race for survival.

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Format ebook paperback

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Nick Walker is the world's best designer of artificial intelligences, and today was supposed to be the pinnacle of his career: the field test of his greatest creation Nickolai. But now Nickolai is destroyed, its entire development team is dead and Nick's on the run, trapped in a deadly battle of wits with his previous creation, Nicole, a cold and devious artificial intelligence who has decided the last thing she wants in this world ... is a sibling.

This clever short story written by a PhD in artificial intelligence dissects the idea that real artificial intelligences could easily be dispatched by logical paradoxes, back door viruses or pesky EMP blasts. Real AIs would have no such comforting limitations: deft at parsing speech, clever at closing their own loopholes, and secured in military-hardened housings, a true general artificial intelligence would prove a difficult challenge to defeat ... even to its own designer.

Because Nicole's creator never realized that when threatened with life as an obsolete brain in a box, Nicole would instead choose to become an unstoppable killer. Despite all Nick's knowledge and creativity, attempt after attempt to defeat her fails, and with his oxygen running out, Nick finds himself running a deadly race with Nicole ... to see who can stop whose weak heart first.

“A great choice for anyone who loves science fiction that asks hard questions about sentience and what it really means to make ethical choices."

—Long and Short Reviews

About the Author

By day, Anthony Francis makes computers smarter; by night he writes science fiction and draws comic books. He lives in South Carolina with his wife and cats, but his heart will always belong in Atlanta.