Zero of Queens

I was going to rent a condo. All my possessions were spread out among the homes of various friends, and I wanted to have a place of my own and move everything there. I found a place that I liked, but it was in a very fancy building and I wasn't sure I could afford it. I was going to buy it instead of renting. I would have to sell a lot of investments to make up the down payment, and then the monthly payments on the mortgage would be just barely affordable. I was concerned because the units didn't seem to be separate from each other; it was just one huge house and different people lived in different parts of it without even any doors in between. I wasn't sure just which part of it I was buying.

Down on the lower floors the building merged seamlessly with some kind of shopping mall. There were decorations up in preparation for Christmas or some other holiday. There was a little miniature train whose tracks wound through the halls. It stopped in front of me and I saw that balanced on top of one of the cars, near the back, was a flat object. I picked it up and looked at it.

It was a sheet of dense black plastic foam, about the size of a magazine. It was the anti-static foam used to protect electronic components. There were several long rows of DIP chips pressed into the surface. I pried one out and looked at it. As I did so a large spark jumped from my finger to one pin, and I worried that that had probably destroyed the chip. But I read the part number off the chip and saw the pinout - either on a piece of paper nearby or because I had it memorized - and saw that the pin hit by the spark was labelled "IC" - "Internally Connected" - and I knew that it wouldn't be static-sensitive. So it would probably be okay. ["Internally Connected" is not a standard term on pinout diagrams, nor would it actually confer static immunity, in my normal understanding of electronics.]

That chip and the others were decades past the state of the art for 2004; but, oddly, they were still through-hole components obviously designed for hand assembly, a technique already out of style even in 2004. They were familiar to me; I knew what each one did and its detailed specifications. They had part numbers starting with "74LS" and then five digits; evidently the 74LS series had been extended greatly. I knew that at this technology level, the series included complete advanced microcontrollers and other bigger-than-VLSI functions. The packages were not standard DIP circa 2004; they were the same 0.300" width as the smaller DIPs, but many of them were much longer, with enough pins that I'd expect them to be as wide as a 40-pin or 64-pin package - "SkinnyDIPs", except they had even more pins than that, and the pins were spaced closer together along the length dimension. Maybe 0.050" or maybe even 1mm.

At the time there didn't seem to be anything unusual or problematic about the physical aspects of these packages; they were just the standard packages for those chips. It only seemed mildly unusual that one of the chips, a microcontroller prototyping component with a "piggyback" socket for inserting the firmware on a separate chip, seemed able to accept a plugged-in ROM chip package just as wide as itself without needing any extra space on the sides. That was clever design. I looked around for the ROM chip that would plug into the microcontroller.

The rest of the surface of the piece of foam was covered with other things. There was a little toy police car, and some plastic boxes containing ball bearings. Most of the surface was marked out in a square grid, and there was a toy building on it with a removeable roof. I realised that this was part of a kit that had come included with a magazine like Radio-Electronics. It was a kit to build a board game. The magazine had an article explaining how, and these electronic and other components were the parts you'd piece together to make the game. It was a board game for several human players and an AI. A very advanced project, for skilled hobbyists.

I was reading the instructions article, or maybe it was being read to me, as I was inside the firmware encoded on the ROM chip. The code embodied a fully sentient AI, who believed herself to be a little girl, and for a short time I was seeing everything from her point of view. The article described one of the game pieces, which was a card described as "The Zero of Queens". The picture on the card was of a stylized mechanical-looking claw, very much like the Borg emblem from Star Trek. Above that, possibly grasped by the claw, was a realistic image of a daisy-like flower with bright orange-yellow petals. Two of the petals near the top of the image had been painted, or replaced, with a design that looked like the wings of a butterfly, and looking at them it was easy to ignore all the other petals, so that the flower looked like it had been on the receiving end of a game of She-loves-me, She-loves-me-not. It also looked like the butterfly was about to fly away from the flower. The AI picked up the card, which had been lying face-down on the floor of the toy building, and looked at it carefully. She understood exactly what it meant, but I only did for a brief moment as I was seeing things from her point of view.

The premise of the game was that this AI was actually the malfunctioning control system of an airplane. Possibly an armed military plane. She was lost, hurt, and confused, and flying from airport to airport endlessly while thinking herself to be a human girl with a complete and extremely disturbing set of imaginary childhood memories. She was causing mayhem everywhere she landed. The human players in the game would control different emergency services at each airport, trying to deal with the situation. It was a brilliant and beautiful game concept, and extremely popular. The game designer had won several awards for it - and sparked an intense controversy over ethical questions relating to the creation and use of a real insane AI in the game, let alone publishing it in kit form with a magazine so that hobbyists all over the world could not only construct their own, but make modifications.