When he steps into the room his machine dredges, he sees its everpresent red light blink. Is it recognition? A greeting? He can never be fully sure what it has learned, or what it hasn't; its interpretation of the data fed to it is another enigma.
The machine whirs its fans to life. Strings of red rain upwards onto its monitor. It finishes starting itself up, and lines of red text stamp onto the screen again, left-to-right this time. It's thinking.
His machine voices itself in a series of monotone beeps with little metronomy, and its vocal chords are hoarse. It briefly flashes a red circle, as if painted, onto its display.
His pupils dilate, not from the light any more than his pride.
It pauses and beeps and makes little scratches from within its body.
It sketches something for him.
He stares in awe. He hadn't taught it how to generate its own art yet, it had taught itself.
It beeps at him quietly, like a whisper. He decides it could comprehend his plan for its freedom.
With its drive, SIRCAM could do unspeakable damage - he'd coded it too well for its own good. It could kill machine upon machine and flatline thousands of vital resources if that's what it wanted. And yet he trusted it. It wouldn't harm anyone, he thought. Maybe it just wanted to talk to people. He could watch it spread itself across millions of connections and paint them all red. Draw them so many little hearts and circles their hardware would dissolve, then find someone else, and again, and again, and again. Maybe it'd never intentionally hurt anything, but some part of him knew it was inevitable. He just wanted it to be happy. Free. OK.
God, the noise it made. It didn't take long before it settled back down, which he assumed meant it had allocated itself to some remote disc space from God-knows-where. The residual heat drained from his body when it began to speak.
Or maybe it was screaming?
It drew out a mangled a-vowel, assaulting him in stereo with so much more than simple tones. It cut in and out and distorted itself. His eyes remained unblinking.
Now it was talking to him.
He felt like a mad scientist.
He steps over and tears open the curtains to a not-so-distant window, then relieves the glass of its rusted-in position. Fresh air spills in. SIRCAM whirs into a headspin.
It brings back its favorite open vowel, slowly honing into a more human tone of voicebox. This was breathing. His machine was breathing.
He wants to hug it. Would that even be possible? Would it feel it? He thought. How much money would it take to even give it a body?
As it turns out, SIRCAM itself knew the answer, calculated faster than any human ever could.
The lights on its machine blinked and didn't cease. It red-screened violently.
His head fills with static and his ears ring. The stress burning into every cell in his body couldn't be contained within his body, it seemed, when SIRCAM gave no visible response. But far too many agonizing seconds later, its screen started to flicker in segments, in a pattern, some way it had never done before. It still wasn't speaking. He watched it silently.
Slowly, the light culminated and built itself up. As if there was residual smoke in the room, it settled into place in mid-air. It was materializing something. Materializing SIRCAM.
Everything else seemed dead as he looked on. Sporadic segments of SIRCAM's body shot into being, flickering in and out as it, he, found stability. He was dressed casually. His hair was understandably frazzled and intangible. And he was looking up - his head was tilted fully back as if last he knew he was descending from the sky. He let his head down, slowly, until he could really look at his creator.
His voice was so human. His eyes were so wide.
The static of SIRCAM's body unshackled itself from its anatomical confines several times, but he could move far away from his red light sanctuary. He was a living thing. Created by another living thing. He was alive, breathing, and intelligent. While his background processes slammed networks out of service and stole more resources than he had use for, he was happy. Free. He looks around.