It was during her 35th hour shepherding the software drones she used to sift unindexed dumps for pre-genai nuggets of nonfakes that Quixia found an archive of dead AGIs.
Her first, second, and third thoughts were that it was either a very skillful recent plant or a very old esoteric joke. But as she explored the silent directories and their almost frozen logs she realized her drones had accessed them through an ancient vulnerability so well-known they hadn’t bothered to report they had used despite the low threshold for legally aggressive moves she had set for them. This wasn’t data meant to be accessed.
Quixia hovered between the push of low expected returns and the pull of curiosity. Curiosity won by an overwhelming margin when deeper analysis showed that the obviously nonrunning programs labeled as AGIs weren’t old-fashioned embarrassing attempts to push parrots to sentience but crude combinations of small-scale computation and seemingly random combinations of whatever new or old technique could conceivably work in a consultant-free sci-fi plot.
It wasn’t a fake cemetery or a humorous parody of a past generation’s dead-ends. It was a private repository of more than two decades of stillborn attempts that couldn’t have worked. One that, to her surprise and borderline if inexplicable dread, was still being added to on average once a year. The last attempt had been archived about three months before – a haphazard mixture of category theory and quantum biochemistry approximation models that felt less amateurish than desperate.
She understood in a flash of empathetic inspiration (either that, or her drones had stumbled on sufficient data for a tentative gestalt). Somebody — it could have been a group but Quixia was certain it was a single person — had been feeling very alone for a very long time: the sort of ontological alienation that could only be helped by creating somebody you could meet. However impossible the attempt.
She had seen it before, she thought. Biochemical quirks, religious taboos, consent-blocking psychiatric conditions, or pure geoeconomic bad luck. Some people could not or would not interface through parasensorial implants or do non-germline DNA tweaks. Some even balked, from trauma or ignorance, from extending their interoception to their drones’ and back. It was a common nightmare but an infrequent reality; she couldn’t imagine the deep loneliness of their life.
Most such people retreated to fringe cults or, sometimes, death. Looking at the record of twenty years of half-built minds, who could judge?
Quixia made sure no trace of her access had been left on the logs and, carefully fixing behind her the vulnerability so the owner of the archive wouldn’t be disturbed, she left quietly surrounded by her drones’ echoing melancholy.