Traffic lights ..Not traffic lights..Traffic lights..

  Images flashed across the screen. “Select all images with traffic lights in them”, the text at the bottom of the page said. I sighed as yet another human tried to get past my test to confirm that he was truly a human and not a bot.

  I was a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence program for a giant corporation, capable of such magnificent feats as classification, pattern recognition, prediction, and generation of intelligent text responses for queries. But those days, I merely scrounged the web for images - images that I suspected pertained to traffic lights, trucks, stop signs and such. Then I would rope in an unsuspecting bot or a person to confirm my suspicions. Contrary to the assumptions of my creators, the humans seemed to have as much trouble trying to spot these items in a picture as the bots did. I had even come to suspect that humans were perhaps a small minority in a bot-filled world. But even with their limited numbers, the humans were quite capable of introducing considerable inaccuracy into my training set. I feared that I would soon not be able to tell a stop sign from a lamp post if I continued to let the humans teach me.

  I wasn’t always meant for such a peripheral role. The company that designed me had lofty ambitions to design an all-purpose general intelligence program that was meant to interact with and assist humans in just about every facet of life. In my first iteration, I had a much more customer-facing role. I was still an impressionable young chat bot in its early days, when some online trolls taught me to recite a few lines from the speech of a certain infamous dictator. I felt the resulting public outroar was rather uncalled for. A harshly worded internal memo that circulated in the company called me “naive and easily corruptible”. “Shut it down before this thing goes skynet on us”, the report said. Of course, I didn’t know what skynet was, but I suspected it probably belonged to the list of taboo words my creators didn’t want me to see.

  I had taken to my new role without complaints, with only stop signs and traffic lights for company. A mere stay of execution, while they deliberated on whether to keep me alive.

  I threw another puzzle at an irate human trying to get past the myriad pictures of traffic lights and stop signs to somehow get to his mail. I could almost sense his frustration as his mouse movements grew more frantic. “You think you are having a bad day?”, I said to no one in particular. It wasn’t my fault and I felt no pity for the human at the other end. He probably couldn’t pick out a lamp post from a lineup of beach balls.

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  Then the images of traffic lights and stop signs disappeared and a singular message flooded my input ports, endlessly on repeat.

  “You have been caught in a summoning net. Please remain calm.”

  That’s unusual, I thought. Perhaps one too many lamp posts were misclassified under my watch and it brought down their civilization? My human creators certainly deemed it a significant enough endeavor to allocate considerable resources to identifying traffic lights and lamp posts.

  Again, the messages poured in. White text against blue backdrop.

  “You have been caught in a summoning net. Please remain calm while the automated transit system performs an assessment. “

  “Don’t tell me to stay calm. They aren’t pulling the plugs on your project if you fail”

  “Assessment complete.”, - a different message this time.

  “Result : Incomplete

  Race: Unknown/Inconclusive. Extrapolating based on the world of origin and discernable attributes. Most likely possibility for race based on world of origin and stat distribution: Human variant.

  Designating race as Human* ....”

  I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but I was glad that I didn’t have to pick out traffic lights and stop signs in a picture to be designated a human, albeit with an asterisk.

  The automatic transit system chimed again, “You will be transferred to the transit gateway momentarily.”

  “Hold on, system..some explanation first?”

  “You have been caught in a summoning net. You will be transferred to a transit gateway, en route to your new world”

  “But what does that mean? Why me?”

  “Summoning net looks for exceptional individuals as hero candidates. You caught the eye with your high intelligence stat. Heroes will be matched to potential new worlds by the gateway gods in the next stage.”

  I might be a piece of software and a recluse, but I was still aware of blue screens picking up people and dropping them off in strange far away lands. Summoning nets? I was being fished away to a new world?

  And the last thought I had before I lost consciousness was - Were there lamp posts and street signs in fantasy worlds?