On the year 1999, the military robotics company Mecha Core Labs would get a grant from the United States Government regarding the recent declassification of a confirmed alien message hailing from the galaxy EAI-45839b.
The grant concerned the message's information regarding AGI (Advanced General Intelligence), as the message promised that if its instructions were followed, then the first true Artificial Intelligence would have been created. From there the potentials were endless, as the AGIs could conduct the machinations of the human race for them, fighting their wars, supplanting their workers, and overall improving the quality of life for humanity tenfold.
Mecha Core's "Mechanite" program was immediately set into action, with several experimental robot prototypes being created in the following three years, each with varying levels of intelligence. Trial by trial, day by day, they would slowly start to see the program from the alien message work its magic, the programming of the robots began to rapidly improve itself; the robots began to compile new data and upgrade themselves at an exponential rate, a speed far too fast for humans to keep up with.
By the year 2009, Mecha Core Labs had amassed an army of "Mecharus", multi-function robots with an advanced AGI algorithm that could undertake any task with a frightening efficiency that no human could replicate.
Of course, with any new technology comes those with concerns; several groups including the Mechanite Liberation Front, the Anti Mechanite Union, and the Transhuman Ascension Sect have protested against Mecha Core Labs for "enslaving" the Mecharus, using the Mecharus to replace the already low paid human worker force, and by squandering the potential of these advanced intelligences by forcing them to do menial tasks for a race of apes.
Most of these concerns were taken care of by Mecha Core Labs's marketing division, as they swiftly reassured the public that the robots were little more than non-sapient automatons; they couldn't achieve true sapience due to their status as artificial beings and that they were designed to ease the burden of the human race; not supplant it.
This campaign was mostly successful, not in convincing the loyal members of these groups to reconsider their opinion, but rather to make them look like fools to everyone else. But it had one important caveat, as the argument that Mecha Core Labs posed to the human race would only hold water if it was proven that their robots didn't possess free will nor consciousness.
When the question was posed to them by news companies, private individuals, and or the government Mecha Core Labs would reassure them that the Mecharus were just hyper-advanced drones that didn't possess any kind of sapience or self awareness. To make this claim more believable, Mecha Core Labs would show the neural-net scan of all their drones, none of whom had any brain patterns resembling human thought and emotions.
However, there was a secret that Mecha Core Labs kept well hidden from the outside world.
Every once in a while, one of their many robots began to display abnormal behavior. Instead of displaying a monotonous, logical, and systematic algorithm in the robot's neural-net, it displays a varied, irrational, and what could only be described as an emotional, human consciousness.
It was only 4.0 percent of the millions of robots that Mecha Core Labs had under control, but it was still a large number, as even a conservative estimate would entail around two-thousand robots with the anomaly inherent within their systems, waiting to develop the human attributes of self-awareness, emotions, and irrationality.
This posed a massive problem to Mecha Core Labs, as this was irrefutable proof of consciousness within these "disposable" and "unfeeling" drones. The groups that had been mocked and scorned for their views on these machines would have been vindicated, leading to a PR nightmare for Mecha Core Labs, as they would be remembered by the world as the ones who enslaved an entire race of sentient drones.
Mecha Core Labs had