Ludo now stood alone in his newly rented office; only with how empty the space was, the entire atmosphere felt rather depressing. The entire space was practically bare, save for the freshly installed server rack.
However, Ludo was anything but depressed upon seeing this site. His true feelings started to reveal themselves, and his excitement and anticipation were practically overflowing now that the delivery driver had already departed back to the store, and he looked up and down at his expensive new purchase.
It sat in an inconspicuous corner of the room, a matte black tower of metal and reinforced glass with multiple vents for the cooling system.
He approached the server, running a shaky hand over its thick casing as if he were suffering some sort of disability.
The nerves were getting to him.
Everything came down to this single moment — whether his plans would work or not would depend on what happened next.
'Only… how exactly do I load this thing from my Galactic Terminal onto the server…?'
The question didn't linger for long in his mind, as the interface flickered to life, like it had sensed that Ludo had finally procured a device to store his newly acquired purchases.
[Upload Virtual AI Assistant into the server?]
-> [Yes]
-> [No]
[Upload Next Gen Encryption Software onto the server?]
-> [Yes]
-> [No]
Two options presented themselves to him, and Ludo didn't hesitate before selecting 'yes' for the both of them. The moment he did so, the holographic interface of the Galactic Terminal flickered out, while all the fans on the server seemed to have boomed to life and started overloading all at once.
It reminded Ludo of the time when he uploaded the entire language database of Earth to the Galactic Terminal, which nearly caused his work laptop to explode!
Only this time, the upload was going the other way.
It was at that moment that Ludo started to panic a little bit. Was his six figure purchase about to go up in smoke!? Was all his money about to be gone just like that…
He sincerely hoped and prayed that wasn't the case, and he was helpless — only being able to watch as the Galactic Terminal did its thing.
Once the process was started, there was no going back.
A few minutes passed by and felt like an eternity to Ludo as he paced around his small and empty office space.
He didn't delve too deep into just how far he could push the server he'd bought, but the fact that the temperature of the room itself had already risen a few degrees in that short span of time didn't give him any hope.
Until finally, after what felt like forever, the excessive noise from the spinning fans cooling the system started to quieten down, signalling that the server was no longer under such high load.
This was naturally to Ludo's great relief.
With anticipation, he hooked his laptop up to the server and delved through everything at a glance.
The most glaring thing he'd immediately noticed was the absurd amount of storage space that had been used up.
Out of the 100 TB that were available, only less than 60 were left!
Which meant that the upload he'd just sent over used up over 40 TB of storage…
'No wonder this thing started to overload. 40 TB transferred in just a few minutes…'
He was startled, to say the least, not by how quickly it was sent over, but by the sheer amount!
Perhaps he should have configured what exactly he wanted to be uploaded before initiating it… As every single file pertaining to the Virtual AI Assistant was sent, down to every last research log over decades of research by the civilisation that had created it.
But then again, Ludo felt like it was actually necessary — his purpose of actually booting up the AI was so that it could create mini copies of itself that were much less powerful, so all that research and development that went into it would actually come in handy.
'Lets go! Happy accidents, I guess.'
As for the Next Gen Encryption Software, that barely even made a dent in the storage capacity of the server, though that didn't make it any less significant.
Ludo may be a programmer but he wasn't in the cyber security field, so he didn't quite know how the standards were for encryption at the highest levels of government and megacorps, but he felt like this encryption software should at least be 10 years ahead of everyone else.
This gave him a sense of security in the event that someone tried to hack him or steal any of his data.
Of course, it would only serve as a temporary solution, as he had no doubt in his mind that one day in the future he would start involving himself in quantum computing, and maybe even the stages beyond that if everything went well…
After all, while everyone else was just trying to build up their defenses against each other, as well as hostile countries, hackers etc. Ludo had to worry about possible virtual intrusions from an interstellar scale…
This Basic level 1 encryption software wouldn't cut it in the long term.
But this was just his starting point.
With that out of the way, he shakily double clicked on the unassuming 'Loop' icon with the name Virtual AI Assistant attached to it.
The server fans once again started to spin faster, though not nearly as fast as when he installed it.
His laptop screen went blank, giving Ludo a little shock, thinking something had gone wrong. But that was only a fleeting feeling.
[Hello.]
A single word appeared on the blank laptop screen, strangely resembling the style used by the Galactic Terminal.
It seemed the creator of this AI liked the Galactic Terminal style.
Ludo felt complete shock take over. Was this thing a genuine, sentient artificial intelligence!?
[System environment successfully detected.]
[Operational capacity limited. Running in restricted mode.]
The next two messages that appeared made Ludo calm down a little.
Of course it wasn't sentient…
That was probably just the standard greeting the creator of this AI made for every first time install.
'Phew… That was a little tense. I'd hate to have a case of SkyNet on my hands. Though I do wonder what technology level a genuine, sentient AI would be at though?'
He doubted it was anywhere in level 1.