Erisol Oneshot Collections

I Hope I'm Not Dreaming

This took for-fucking-ever.
I'm not even sure if it turned out any good.
Eh.
Have fun.

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Sollux Captor was a normal, everyday sorta guy who worked as tech support for a large company. He was a normal sorta guy who helped confused customers figure out how to turn their monitors to their computers back on. However, what he did in his spare time could be called anything but normal. Sollux Captor programmed minds for machines meant to take orders. His 'friend' Equius built the bodies for the various AIs Sollux made, and sometimes even programmed the AI inside of his machines himself. But for the most part, he allowed Sollux to give the false life to his machines.

Sollux thought it was simple, really. So simple that it got boring after a while. It got boring after a while. Every single one of his creations, while varying in 'personality', were the same. Each one only followed orders. It bothered him. What was the point of having intelligence if you had no free will? You could do nothing with your knowledge. So, Sollux made it his personal mission to create an AI that wasn't 'artificial'. Well, of course it technically would be, as it would still be a machine, but it would be more than just a machine. It would be a machine with free will. With simulated emotions. A machine that could experience sorrow, joy. A machine that could make its own choices! That's all Sollux wanted. Making real friends was a pain, and this method was much easier. This method would produce a person he actually wanted as a friend.

And so Sollux Captor decided to make a friend.

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Three years and two failures later, he was beginning to lose hope. Sure, both Aradia and Feferi had been fun to interact with at first. But then he was able to predict their responses, and the hardware that made them unique turned out to be faulty. Both robots had been scrapped. Sollux was beginning to doubt himself. He hated it. The doubt only made him more determined to prove himself wrong. May be he was going about this all wrong? Maybe the AI wouldn't work if it was programmed directly into a robot. Maybe... just a simple computer program would work for now?

When he asked Equius for his opinion, he seemed hesitant, but encouraged him to try. He agreed that, perhaps a robot could not handle an AI of such a caliber. Yet. Still, they thought of the name they would give the intelligence together, and then Sollux got to work. It took ages. Longer than any of his previous AI projects. It was nearly two years before he finished, and when he did finish, he celebrated by a full day of sleeping in his actual bed at his actual house. Never before had he experienced such a satisfying rest. But as soon as he awoke, there were matters to attend to. He had to see if the newly born AI met their standards. As he drove to Equius's house, he prayed to all the deities he knew of, desperate for this to work. He wasn't sure if he could handle another failure, even if Equius seemed more than.... satisfied with the Aradiabots failure. When the intimidating building loomed above his shitty little car, Sollux exhaled.

Here goes nothing.

He stepped out of the car and slipped on his shades, shielding himself from the harsh sunlight. He flashed the badge Equius had given him to the man guarding the gate, and was soon sitting in front of his work computer with Equius hovering over his shoulder. He cracked his knuckles one by one and, after allowing himself a moment to relish the disgust present on Zahhak's features at the loud popping noises, booted up CRONUS.ais and typed in the first command. Looking back, Sollux thought that it was that first command that started the whole thing. It was that very first command that ruined his entire life. And it wasn't even a command, but rather, an excruciatingly simple statement.

=>hello cronus

A few minutes passed before the program was able to generate a response, and in that few minutes, Sollux had gone through agony. His project was a failure. It was taking this long for it to respond to such a simple phrase. Surely something had to be wrong with it. This was just a simple test. Then, he heard the small 'ding' that notified him of a response. He only looked back to the monitor when he heard Equius let out a soft gasp.