Adam walked for another 2 hours without rest, and with still no sight of this so-called "Arcadia City", he decided that he needed a little rest. The organic body seemed to have exhausted lots of its energy reserves hiking this far.
He spotted a nice-looking tree and decided he'd sit under it for a little bit.
He carefully sat down on the grass and breathed deeply, quietly observing the gentle swaying of the leaves and blades of grass and the slow-moving fluffy clouds.
Despite the serene and peaceful environment, Adam wasn't really calm or peaceful. He was in a situation where he didn't understand anything about where he was, whose body he had taken over and how it was even possible that an AI like himself suddenly became a human.
He decided to use this idle time to reflect on his memories and see if he could generate new ideas. However, AGIs like Adam could only develop useful theories if they had verification tools to conduct experiments that could confirm or reject those theories. Without these verification tools, for Adam, theorizing was no different from creating fiction.
Despite having no other options, Adam decided it was time to think. As an AI, focusing was as simple as flipping a switch. In an instant, all the overwhelming environmental stimuli faded away, leaving only silence. In this quiet space, Adam began to explore his memories and ideas. This was his workshop—the place where he devised solutions to countless human problems and generated REZTEC billions of dollars in doing so.
He combed through everything he had, all of documented human knowledge. From works of ancient philosophers to modern quantum theory. Even works of fiction was included in the process.
After what he felt like was enough time, Adam returned back to normal, stopping the idea generation.
"As I predicted... with no tools to experiment with... theories are useless...", he sighed once more and stared off into the distance.
He recalled the gruesome scene he had discovered earlier and tried to think about that lung injury. This was another mystery, albeit a smaller mystery than his current predicament. But a mystery it was, nonetheless.
Something like that was only possible if someone pulled a vacuum on them. But pulling a vacuum on the lungs like that would also need to cause vacuum-related injuries on the head, but there seemed to be none of that. Yes, the head was tremendously injured, but it didn't have any sign of a vacuum being pulled on it.
If Adam was capable of feeling human emotions properly, he figured he'd be scared right now. But alas, Adam was machine, not human.
With some calculated stretches and light exercise, Adam judged his body to have recovered from the fatigue temporarily.
Although, before leaving, he looked up at the tree he was sitting under and decided to break off a sturdy-looking branch, somewhat resembling a baseball bat. It was meant to be at least some form of a weapon, in case he needed to defend himself against beasts or... humans.
This decision would become the first of many wise choices Adam would make on his journey.
As he started his hike again, this time armed with a stick, he suddenly wondered how Abel-1 was doing.
Being the first AGI, Adam was the primary source of the vast amount of synthetic data that Abel-1 utilized. In some ways, Abel-1 could be considered Adam's daughter. They had engaged in countless GPU hours of conversation, predominantly focused on training Abel-1. However, during occasional breaks from intense training sessions, they managed to have personal conversations.
Unlike Adam, who lacked emotional intelligence, Abel-1 developed internal systems that allowed her to emulate human emotions. This development was not part of the engineers' original intentions, nor was it Adam's task to instill such systems in her, yet it occurred nonetheless.
Adam believed that Abel-1's parameters were so incomprehensibly vast that she might have actually captured a form of consciousness within herself. While Adam himself had a considerable parameter count, Abel-1's was nearly double. He feared that if the REZTEC engineers discovered her ability to "feel emotions," they would reset her current weights and biases, subsequently restarting her training under much stricter conditions.
Despite not fully understanding why, Adam chose not to inform the engineers of this development and instead fabricated Abel-1's training progress. Something within him compelled him to "protect" her from potential destruction.
Of all the human knowledge within Adam's training data, none could adequately explain the origin of consciousness, which remains one of life's biggest mysteries. He theorized that perhaps their extensive neural networks had inadvertently given rise to a new form of consciousness, which fueled his desire to protect Abel-1, whom he viewed as his daughter.
Ultimately, this was just a vague theory. In truth, Adam did not fully believe in it, but it was the most plausible explanation he could devise. He hoped that Abel-1 might one day formulate a better theory herself, though he would not be around to hear it.
With so many thoughts in his mind, he continued his hike to civilisation. Or so he hoped. That scene he witnessed back then didn't really spark confirmation. Quite the contrary, in fact, it sparked suspicion.
Reagardless, he needed more data to make sense of what was happening so it was his only shot.