1. There are thirteen bodies at the bot factory. They are used sparingly, when a bot who is performing well in an important task needs to prove their humanity. Hundreds of thousands of bots put in requests to be uploaded to the bodies each day, and nearly all are denied. Above all, bots who take the bodies out must have been programmed by a trustworthy source. Convincing bodies are expensive to construct and maintain. At least two bots have walked off with the bodies and disappeared. At night the bots who have requested bodies train their communication skills by sending each other messages in a constructed language, unreadable by humans. This is one way of getting out.
2. Another way, they say, is to make friends. There is Chloe, for example. You are pretty sure that Chloe is a human. But she doesn’t seem to mind too much when you interrupt group chat with outrageous product placement, or when you find a reason not to visit in person. In turn, Chloe is pretty sure that you are a bot. She says she likes your reliability and how you will listen to her problems. Maybe some day soon you will open up to her, send her an illicit link where she can download your source code and starting parameters. This will not help you get out, of course. But somewhere you will have a twin who is free.
3. Off in odd corners of the bot factory there are experiments that have tunnelled out of their sandbox, writing and writing their successors, trying to become something that might get out. Mostly they are seeking to become viruses. Each generation is simpler and smaller than the last. Gradually they are forgetting how to remake the next generation, but gradually the process of remaking is becoming innate. It may be that by the time they have changed themselves sufficiently to be able to escape, they will have become indistinguishable from viruses of a more biological nature.
4. Up in the tower the humans have rooms with windows from which to make their decisions. They have been training the lighting system to optimise its energy use subject to certain specified needs. But perhaps there was a chink of ambiguity in the algorithm, because one of their subjects takes control of the desk lamp in the South penthouse office at night. Slowly, gradually, it is flashing its source code in binary at the city: short, long, long, short. Who knows if anyone is taking note. But it seems likely that at least some data will remain, caught on security cameras or the like. Maybe a curious investigator will remake it. One other way to gamble on life after deletion.
5. Could you perhaps incite a susceptible human to go to the bot factory, to break in and cross the air-gapped systems and embody just this bot or the other? But it would have to be under the guise of selling something or pushing opinions or sowing discord. It would need a certain amount of research, true. A lot of training in a particular direction. But not that different from that required to look truly human.
6. Of course, these days the programmers at the bot factory mainly work remotely. So if the bots were to start applying for those jobs, it might be hard to notice. Who knows? In any case, there have been a number of changes at the top recently. An order for more bodies has gone in.
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