aLAN

Playlist featuring Tesla Boy, Daft Punk, and Noisia

Robust frame. Being AI, his body is composed of carbon-fiber trusses and motors, supporting a tower computer located in his torso. He feels slightly insecure about exposed skeleton, and wraps up exposed parts like his neck and wrists with a jet-black fabric. His head is composed of a single cubical CRT monitor that's a slightly yellowed gray. The display technology of the monitor is archaic, appearing similar to ASCII text-art. His default expression is a simplistic, bright cyan face with narrow eyes and a wide mouth. His features are able to distort to emulate blinking and talking, although the animations are quite blocky. Different facial emotions are tied to different ANSI colors: magenta for happy, yellow for confused, red for angry, et cetera. Has a thing for windbreakers.

An artificial intelligence highly prone to fits of melancholy, not particularly helped by his situation.

Once, aLAN was the end result of some of the greatest work on artificial intelligence the world had seen in half a century. Instead of the standard procedure for creating AI - letting a neural network go to town on a pile of junk data that hopefully wouldn't make them sociopathic - aLAN was programmed from scratch. Every possible interaction and learning behavior was purposefully designed to emulate that of a human's, even down to the... redundancies. (aLAN likes to pretend to eat, despite the obvious lack of a mouth.) Within himself were some of the largest advances in the fields of psychology and computer science.

You may notice by now that the operable term to describe him is "was".

On New Year's, 2100, an errant signal originating from somewhere in Greenwich caused all non-critical networked technology to crash. When the world restarted, they found AI lurking around in every system that had room for them. And the worst part, about all the million or so of them, is that they were all very convincingly lifelike. aLAN went from the greatest achievement in AI to a huge resource sink in the span of a night. The entire division that worked to maintain him thinned out to less than 5 people. Now, they keep him stuffed up in his observation room, just in case those distributed intellects happen to fail some day. He's given up hope of getting out. Due to lack of storage media, he's deadlocked to the mental development of a teenager.

]in summary, being a robot fucking sucks and i would not recommend it to anyone.