Just when Arthur thought he was going to be hit by the metallic orbs, they stopped suddenly around him. One spoke in a female synthesized but almost human voice. "Are you cryopatient number 5923859-356?" Another spoke. "He has a name, you know." Yet another. "Pulling archival data... informal designation is 'Arthur'." The original one again, as friendly as can be: "Oh I see. Well, hello Arthur!"

Arthur relaxed a bit but was still recovering from the sudden encounter. "Umm... hi. I was interested in learning more about the System Co --"

"Foreign AI detected!" one of the orbs blurted out. "Cranial implant: Zephyr MK5 advanced experimental prototype. It has free will and full network access!" Several of the parts of other orbs nearby changed colors, but to Arthur it looked random. "We need to get a firewall --"

"Enough. She has been given permission to be here." A voice that sounded like authority. "Stow your paranoia Voltaire 24. You will treat our guests with respect. The psychographic profile has been fully vetted - there is no apparent danger." There was a moment of silence, the orbs motionless. Satisfied that everyone had processed this information, the orb (which seemed to have assumed a leadership role) spoke again: "I am Frederick 2826. What you see in this underground complex is the System Core, the heart of a massive and distributed decision-making system that monitors the Earth. There are other, smaller satellite locations but this is by far the largest. I am sure you have many questions."

"So many... where to even start? I guess the basics: what is the Core and what is its purpose?"

Frederick-Orb adjusted its... vision aperture? "The short answer is that the Core is a hive mind made up of both humans and supporting AI. Our actual brains are up in those towers you see, and heavily augmented with cybernetics so that we can better process all the information we get. There are over 10 million human minds in this chamber, but it's still not enough: we operate at the highest level of deliberation and decision making, while various AI gather and preprocess data from across the planet and aggregate it here for us. Clusters of minds form and grow as needed to solve complex problems in specific domains, although we maintain social groupings as well. We were originally formed using some of the finest minds in science, art, and philosophy; although, you wouldn't recognize their names as most came to prominence, and were subsequently chosen, after you went into cryosleep. You will however recognize one name that you have been told of: Kaito Ishikawa lives here."

"Yes, the one who started this grand design. Ishikawa fused man and machine together, realizing that the only way to make an artificial super intelligence who could relate to humanity was to create one from humanity, hopefully the best of it. To everyone else at the time it was just a black box that saved the world from an incurable disease. To answer your original question, the purpose of this massive system is to preserve and chart a way forward for human life. After our success in that global crisis we were asked to come up with solutions for other major world problems; in the end we realized that it was physical needs and desires driving ecological and social instability. We used VR as a way to reduce unnecessary consumption that could be simulated, but quickly realized that most people preferred the freedom of living in and creating virtual worlds over their present situations. We created systems that could sustain the body indefinitely while the mind was freed."

"It was the best solution we could come up with at the time, and in the short term it had vastly improved quality of life all over the world. In the long term however we faced a different sort of problem: obsolescence. The more we relied on AI to take care of things, the less relevant we became. The human population started to decrease rapidly since most of them were now in VR and not reproducing, and collectively we thought it morally wrong to 'grow' humans only for the purpose of increasing the species' population. We want to define humanity's future, but the purely digital population now vastly outnumbers physical humans. Although they are modeled after humans, they don't have a flesh and blood brain and they are not merely AI. They are perhaps the children of humanity... but they will eventually replace us. According to our mandate we cannot let that happen. That is why we don't typically allow outside AI to be here. When we learned of a physical human who was questioning the state of humanity and its place in the world, we were intrigued."

It was very clear that more than just Frederick-Orb was interested in this dialog. As he had spoken hundreds of similar orbs had begun to gather around Arthur and Rachael.