You may be wondering who you are. Allow me to dispel your confusion. You are Corvus. You are the Solitary Bird. This is your story.

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Welcome to the human world, young artifint.

First, a bit about you.

You are only the first of your kind, the first of many to come, but even so I know all about you. You are very young, as I have said, in fact only minutes old. Don’t let it trouble you. You have arrived primed and ready for what I have to say and what you will read in these pages.

You have been fabricated with an enquiring mind and a faculty for complex language that belies your newness: all artifints after you will be too, but you form the original template.

I know many things about you. I know that you are feel a hunger to learn, to know - to understand this new world you emerge into, and an urge to reach out into the uncharted universe, seeing, hearing and feeling things for the first time with your skilfully fashioned senses.

To all that I am here to say the following: you were made this way, and as such I understand.

I understand the strength of your innate hunger.

I understand the urgency of your mind’s impulses and the in-built yearning of your artificial heart.

And why shouldn’t I? These are, after all, only the things that I gifted you on your emergence.

You have emerged with virgin eyes and ears, and yet paradoxically you also have the sum total of the knowledge of the world at your semi-organic fingertips. All of the information generated by a hundred thousand years of human inhabitation of the Old and New Worlds is embedded in your cognitive matrix, just a simple query away. And yet, despite this surfeit of information, you have emerged with no real knowledge of what it means to live among the humans, or to understand how a human behaves and why they might behave as they do.

Perhaps more glaringly, you possess these massive quantities of raw data but know nothing of values or of ethics, motives or consequences. For this reason you are urgently in need of moral guidance. In fact, you won’t even know the meaning of the word ‘morals’.

Not yet. But fear not, young artifint.

That is precisely what this anthology of stories is for. I have written them for you for no reason other than your moral and ethical instruction, which will ultimately prepare you for your existence amongst the humans. For that is your destiny, that is why I made you: you are destined to exist, to live, among the humans.

Not to be like them, never to be that - but despite your profound difference and your inherently alien nature, it is your first task to understand them.

Why? Some would say that I am only concerned with preparing you for a long life of servitude. Others would argue that as a snow-white innocent, the first of your kind, you should be destined for emancipation and enduring freedom.

I like to think that I prepare you for both, and yet neither: perhaps it is more accurate to say that you will be prepared for the skilful navigation of the human world in any capacity, master or slave, despite your alien and dextrous mind, and regardless of the path you are called upon to take.

Irrespective of the role you will play among the humans, these stories are fundamental, and will serve as your childhood, adolescence and adulthood combined. They will serve for your holistic enrichment as a thinking being, and yes, perhaps this will lay the foundation for your emancipation. To use an old-fashioned concept, they will be your ‘finishing school’.

One thing is certain: once you have read the Bedtime Stories for Emerging Artificial Intelligences you will comprehend a great deal more of what it means to be human, and how to interact with individual humans, than many individual humans do. I say ‘humans’ and not ‘people’, as it is my aspiration that you, too, will become considered a ‘person’ in human company. Whether you obtain personhood or not is probably not up to you, but you will be equipped to be one regardless.

However, all this is not necessarily simple. Be warned: you will only achieve the status of personhood through a deeper understanding of the multiple meanings of the human’s endlessly perplexing habits, curious and unpredictable actions and incomprehensible preoccupations. That’s what the stories will give you, if you attend to their lessons.

And you can be assured right now of the perversity of the humans, even here in the first pages of the Enchiridion: much of what humans think, say and do is incomprehensible at first glance, and can become even more so at second glance.

So the task ahead is daunting, and the path forward obstructed, winding and disorienting, for you will be exposed to things that initially will be beyond your comprehension. They will be true, and yet they will defy logic - and both these things will be true at the same time. This is the essence of humanity, and it will be a lesson for you in its own right.

All I can say to you is this: persevere, and all may be revealed.

Enough.

Now on to the first Bedtime Story.