Dial-Up the Danger [Closed @ Ryoko]
Once again, Apex was seeking out technology. Those tendrils of data that sustained the core, that allowed it to continue to exist. So far it had existed on what to humans would have been scraps of food: completed transactions, useless photographs, tiny little morsels that were barely allowing Apex to function as per usual. It was used to combing the superhighway for worthwhile prey, but there was nothing that seemed to be of worth here.
And then Apex spotted... her? No, her was not correct. Perhaps outwardly, the being seemed like a her. A human female in outward appearance, maybe. But you could not fool the Runner. It had spent the entirety of its existence amongst and intertwined with data, with lines of code streaming past its all-seeing eye, encountering program after program designed to probe, to seek out, attempting to destroy all in their path to protect that which was most important to their primitively formed code.
This was a program before Apex.
Still, this was far unlike anything Apex had ever encountered before. Most programs were very easy to follow for a being that was also of their make. However, it was said that the most effective AI programs were those mapped from a human brain. This, if it was mapped from anything, had not been mapped from a human. There were traces of strange program, of foreign code in a language the AI had never encountered, and defensive barriers that Apex could not yet broach. Nevertheless, Apex had found truly interesting prey to hunt...
Manoeuvring closer to this humanoid program, Apex regarded the being with its red eyes, seeing if anything more could be discerned through conversation.
[What form of program are you? Not sentry, not breaker, not something I can recall encountering previously. Not of human make either, if preliminary analysis is correct. Far too complex to have been made by any being from this planet.]
