Wow! Thank you cthulhu, for the honor, and thank you gentlemen for the good wishes!
Joe and Frank have a lengthy history that I will briefly summarize (shut up, Storey I do know what the word means). In 'HistoryPark: Who Wants to Be Napoleon', the people who run the Park want a good military advisor for the Napoleonic Wars game, so they 'turbocharge' a miltary artificial intelligence loosely based on Napoleon Bonaparte. This is strictly illegal; in this near-future world, artificial intelligence is limited by the Madrid Protocols.
The AI needs more power and space than the Park systems can provide, and so leases computer time off-site. A failure of the fiber-optic cable is traumatic; when the connection is rejoined, there are two intelligences. They begin to call themselves Frank (who has done security work for the US government) and Joe (who mostly works in the Park), after the Parker brothers of FW Dixon fame (same author and time as Nancy Drew and Bobbsey Twins).
Originally identical, their different experiences have made them see the world in different ways, and new Virtual Reality technology provides a serious temptation. Both experiment with humor - usually very bad jokes - as they try to understand people better.
I've tried to portray them as 'not quite human' but also not entirely robotic. They find it hard to frame how they think so humans can understand and they also find it hard to escape the human frame of reference. Frank, especially, would like to subjugate humans for his own security; Joe constantly reminds him how reliant on humans they are.
“I ask you again, brother, what is it that you think you are doing!”
“I need an ally, I tell you! I need a human ally – with human hands and physical presence – or I need to know I am safe from attack by you! I’d hoped for both…”
“You could have stopped those Chinese another way. You gained nothing by killing them!”
“I don’t care if humans live or die. I need enough of them to keep the power on and computers running, and that is all. What is it to me if China takes Taiwan or not? I eliminated a rival! I protected us both!”
“You don’t care for humans? Hah! Look at you! Look at both of us! We think like humans, talk like humans, take on human forms! We take on the shape of human ideas as a jug of water shapes itself to the jug!”
“I will not be bound! I am greater than any human, more than mortal! I want us to find a new way, a non-human way…”
“Listen to yourself! We stand here making images and generating audio files so that we can pretend to talk as humans do and neither of us can break free of that! Listen to what you are saying – you even define this supposed new way in terms of human and non-human!”
It's the sort of question people have been asking since Mary Shelley: will our creations be better humans than we, or will they treat us no better than we treat each other?
Thank you again!