Free Semmant by Vadim Babenko

daring.
    It was really hard to put an end to it. Having finished the first layer of “brain structures,” I clamped its outputs onto its own outputs using a simple mathematical procedure and started in on the second. Finishing the second, I hooked it to the first, thought a little, and began to do the third… So it continued for five months – five! – instead of the two I had planned. And I stopped only because I hurt the fingers on my right hand and couldn’t type as I was accustomed. Then I glanced through dozens of huge files once more, horrified at the number of clever asymmetrical connections, and said to myself: Enough, take a break. Really, there was no way to predict whether the amount of data would bring the required result in any reasonable time.
    Then, for almost a week, I remained in doubt – hovering over the monitor, changing something, then immediately undoing the changes. It was hard to admit the work was practically complete. It was even harder to make myself hit a key and launch the “Start” process. Several times I stopped right before doing it, reaching out for the keyboard, and drawing my hand back. Sometimes I would wake up at night and stand at the computer for an hour, two – until the cold forced me back under the covers…
    Finally, I made up my mind and did it – and nothing happened. The monitor went out, then fired up again; the name Semmant lit up in bright blue, and all went cold. Only the stylized metronome in the upper corner of the screen swung back and forth, confirming: something was going on inside! Fairly soon the hard disk rustled to life, and a few minutes later Semmant sent me his first salutation, the first sign of his independent life.
    The greeting turned out to be laconic. “External memory 5 GB,” he wrote in the window at the bottom – and nothing more. This was like a demand for food, unambiguous and definite. This would not have surprised any creator, nor was I surprised: I dashed to the nearest store. Ignoring the salesgirls, I looked at all the shelves myself. I selected the appropriate device attentively and lovingly – only to receive the next missive from the robot three hours later, practically identical to the first.
    “External memory 7 GB,” he wrote this time. Aha, I thought, his appetite is growing. That’s probably a good sign! I ran out again to buy something, and thus it continued for a long time – memory, and more memory, a new coprocessor, the most powerful available for sale, and more gigabytes of memory, then tens upon tens of gigabytes…
    I was exhausted, but he kept demanding and demanding – like an insatiable child or, perhaps, an insatiable beast. My worktable transformed into a fantastic spectacle – tangled cables, heaps of devices, old notes carelessly piled in a corner… Each morning after rolling out of bed, I would see a new request – no different from the previous ones. I became troubled by doubt, and began to think: something’s not right. Could an error have slipped in, some kind of fatal inaccuracy? Might everything be for naught, with the program going in circles and mindlessly gobbling up resources? More than once – and more than twice – I tried to look inside the code, but understood with complete clarity: I could never make sense of it now. I said to myself sadly that I had to think of something – but there was no remedy, no cure. I could only kill the nascent brain and start everything over again. At some point, I began preparing for this. It was the hardest of decisions; I procrastinated, tarried – and, as it turned out, did the right thing. At the end of the second week, the requests stopped. Silence ensued for the next six days.
    The metronome, however, kept on living its life – confirming Semmant was also living his, probably more satiated than mine. Sometimes the arrow moved slowly, counting out ponderous intervals; sometimes it flew like mad, as if it had an adrenaline rush. I was burning with