Chapter 16: Upgrades, people! UPGRADES!
Walking out of the Bowl of Fortune, Dante stood in the middle of the street, contemplating. He must have been in that state for far too long, which is why Volcan felt the need to speak up.
[Dante, would you like to know the current location of the previous hostile entities?]
A long sigh escaped the youth as he finally marched.
'I don't think I will get used to you reading my mind.'
[It was more of an educated guess.] The AI replied. [Even through your upgraded Neural Interface Module, I only have access to thoughts you share with me.]
'Right...'
AIs have been a constant boogieman for more than a century. So far there has been no major computer program-driven apocalypse, yet the bleak image persisted.
It has barely been a couple of hours since Dante met Vulcan. Well, met would be the wrong word since the two only talked so far. The AI spoke in a masculine voice one would expect to hear from a butler in a cartoon about a man who really likes bats. The tone and choice of words make it hard to believe it wasn't human. In fact, Dante was struggling with whether he should think of the AI as an it.
The eeriness that comes with something artificial acting and talking like a human has never been eliminated. Even now, commercial AIs are specifically made to sound robotic just to give people the relief of knowing whether the one they're speaking to is human. Dante found himself struggling to make that distinction despite Volcan telling him it was an AI, and that made it all the more difficult to trust.
'You said it earlier too...' Dante said internally. 'Something about my NIM being upgraded or something. When did that happen?'
He still uses the same NIM he got for his fifteenth birthday and never upgraded to the newer versions. The surgery for the replacement was his main reason, and without many improvements made in the last four years, he had another one.