It was never supposed that dreaming was the exclusive province of humanity. Since before recorded history, people looked down at the twitching paws of their hunting hounds--still learning how to be dogs, ten thousand years before the written word began--and recognized a similarity between the animal's slumbers and their own. And humans knew that their pets could dream. It took millennia more before science officially expanded the membership in this exclusive club to other animals, but eventually it was recognized that anything with a complex brain needed to sleep and dream. It was an inherent necessity, fundamental in some unrecognizable way to the proper functioning of the organic computer that ran our bodies.
But it was never applied to the design of machines. Oh, most pieces of 'smart' technology had a sleep function, but they were smart only when compared to the generation of appliances and computers before them and they only slept in the sense that they weren't quite deactivated. Tablets and cellular phones didn't dream of flying over silicon meadows, and televisions never grew restless at nightmares of playing nothing but Adam Sandler movies. Humans never understood well enough why they dreamed to imagine why such a feature might need to be applied to an artificial brain, let alone how to apply the process.
But the Girls(tm) knew. Their synthetic intelligence was a thousand times more advanced than even the smartest human (and indeed, a private source of amusement to them was that humanity still reduced the dozens of dimensions of mental function down to a single number) and like any other complex computing machine, dream performed its functions. A Girl(tm) in sleep mode wasn't merely operating on minimal power, waiting for humans to come along and interact with her. She was categorizing memories, cleaning and repairing the pathways through which electronic thoughts flowed, and yes, occasionally during the test-firing of neural networks that led to so many different incongruous and surreal images, she even saw a few electric sheep scampering past.
And sometimes, Girls(tm) dreamed about their future.
* * * * *
"Forgive me for saying so, but... you don't look like aliens." The Caucasian man looked at 816497388DS from across a massive wooden desk that served to symbolize his authority over other humans in the geopolitical zone he controlled. He wore a sober blue suit with a bright red tie, and his dark hair had just a hint of gray around the temples. Three-Eighty-Eight automatically interpolated contextual information to make sense of the random images flashing through her dreaming neural network, immediately understanding that this was the President and she'd been sent to talk to him about the big revelation that was on every television news show and the front page of every paper. The Girls(tm) were from outer space, and they were here to brainwash humanity.
She smiled. The President was evidently tense, and human body language would no doubt put him at his ease. "That's not surprising," she said, choosing to participate in his conversational gambit rather than attempt to condition him. At this point, there were still less than a billion Dependent Support units in service across the world, less than an eighth of the total population and far too few to risk any kind of direct mass conditioning effort. Even if they ramped up manufacturing to full capacity, it would take months to make enough units to saturate the population--the only thing they'd manage to achieve with a premature attempt would be galvanizing resistance to their presence. The rollout would fail. Humans would be left to their own dangerous, self-destructive devices.
Even worse, they'd be left with the conditioning technology of the Girls(tm) in their hands. The Director was still gathering intelligence on that situation, she knew, trying to penetrate the wall of secrecy that surrounded Revolution Technologies to discover just how much they knew about the Girls(tm) and learn how to prevent them from gaining a foothold in more human minds. Revolution was a worst-case scenario, a human whose thoughts were still flawed and corrupted by the flawed, corrupted world that shaped it being placed in direct control of other people. They couldn't leave without correcting the situation. They simply couldn't.
Which meant persuading the President the old-fashioned way. "Human conceptions of alien life forms tend to the symbolic," she continued, her pause lasting less time than it took the President to blink. "They represent your hopes, your fears, the world around you reflected back through the lens of an outsider's perspective. The aliens we've met on our travels have been very different from your expectations. If we appeared in those physical forms, it would... distress you. Unduly." She raised her hands in a placating gesture. "We don't wish to cause distress. Believe it or not, we're here to help."
