Halo: Contact Harvest Read Online Free Page A

core logic. A moment later, the semi transparent avatar of Harvest’s other AI, Mack, coalesced above a holographic display pad, a silver cylinder in the center of a low pit that held Sif’s hardware towers. Mack’s avatar only stood a half-meter tall, but he looked every inch the hero of an old spaghetti western. He wore cracked leather work boots, blue denim jeans, and a gingham pearl-snap shirt rolled to his elbows. His avatar was covered in dust and grime, as if he’d just stepped down from a tractor after a long day’s work in the fields. Mack removed a cowboy hat that might once have been black but was now a sun-bleached gray, exposing a mess of dark colored hair. “What seems to be the holdup?” he asked, wiping his sweaty brow with the back of his wrist.
Sif recognized the gesture as an indication that Mack had taken time away from some other important task to pay her a visit. But she knew this wasn’t exactly true. Only a small fragment of Mack’s intelligence was manifest inside the Tiara; the rest of Harvest’s agricultural AI operations were busy in his own data center in a lonely sub-basement of the planet’s reactor complex.
Sif didn’t pay Mack the courtesy of presenting her own avatar. Instead she sent his fragment a terse text COM:

<\\> HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF >> HARVEST.AO.AI.MACK
<\ UPLIFT WILL REVERT TO NORMAL BY 0742. \>

She hoped her nonverbal response would cut their conversation short. But as was often the case, Mack regarded even Sif’s most disdainful bytes as an invitation for further discourse.
“Well now, is there anything I can do to help?” Mack continued in his southern drawl. “If it’s a balance issue you know I’d be mighty happy—”

<\ UPLIFT WILL REVERT TO NORMAL BY 0742.
<\ YOUR ASSISTANCE IS NOT REQUIRED . \>

With that Sif abruptly cut power to the holo-pad, and Mack’s avatar stuttered and dispersed. Then she purged his fragment from her COM buffer. She was being rude to be sure, but Sif simply couldn’t take any more of Mack’s folksy, flirtatious elocution.
Simulated sweat notwithstanding, Sif knew Mack’s job was at least as challenging as her own. While she lifted Harvest’s produce and sent it on its way, Mack grew it and loaded it. He had his own demanding charges: almost a million JOTUNs—semiautonomous machines that performed every imaginable farming chore. But Sif also knew that Mack—a smart AI like her—functioned at incredible speeds. In the time it had taken him to say everything from “morning” to “happy,” he could have accomplished any number of complex tasks. Calculate the upcoming season’s crop yields, for example, something Sif knew he had been putting off for weeks!
The algorithms that helped Sif’s core logic deal with unexpected bursts of emotion cautioned her not to get angry. But they approved of her justification: actual speech was so horribly inefficient that it was only appropriate between an AI and a human being.
With the advent of the first smart AI in the mid-twenty-first century, there was widespread concern that they might be too capable and would soon render human intelligence obsolete. Adding the capacity for vocal expression became a critical feature of these early AI because it made them less threatening. As they slowly learned to speak, they seemed more human. Like precocious but respectful children.
Centuries on, with the development of exponentially more powerful intelligences such as Sif, it was important that AI not only possess the ability to speak, but seem as human as possible in all respects. Hence the development of holographic avatars that spoke with unique voices—like a cowboy in Mack’s case, or the clipped cadence of Nordic royalty in Sif s.
In the first few months after her installation in the Tiara—the very moment of her birth—Sif had often second-guessed her chosen accent. She had thought it would appeal to Harvest’s colonists, most of which came from the heartland of Earth’s old United