Forum: Author Hangout

My recollection is that they discovered it. I don't recall if they escaped or not. Considering we are talking about The Twilight Zone and/or Outer limits, probably not. Neither show was known for happy endings.

You'd need to focus on the characters involved, not what the AI is doing.

Consider the film the Matrix and specifically what happens when an agent takes over a body.

Is the original personality simply ejected and the body disposed of? Do other people in the Matrix see the agent or do they see their loved one go crazy? Does the original personality come back or just disappear, and if it comes back do they remember what the agent did?

Consider the final scene in the first film from the POV of people who don't realise the nature of the Matrix. How many people had their loved ones go crazy and drop dead as Neo was running from Agent Smith? How do you go on with your life after that happens, especially when you don't know why it happened.

That's horror. The fact that an AI can bounce in between bodies changing things is weird, but it's not scary except to the person being changed. You need to focus on what they are feeling, not what the AI is doing.

In the F2M case the AI has her father available so can generate an appropriate X chromosome.

The X chromosome is female, withe women being XX, while the Y chromosome is male, with men being XY. The X in a man's DNA comes from his mother, all ova are female. Sperm can be either X or Y. [Ignoring mutations and genetic errors.]

Not sure if that was just a typo on your part, but as written it makes no sense. The easy what to do an F>M transition would be to take a XX zygote and remove some of the DNA from one of the Xs.

The easy what to do an F>M transition would be to take a XX zygote and remove some of the DNA from one of the Xs.

Sounds reasonable, but wouldn't work too well - there have been a large number or mutations on the Y chromosome since its inception that have been assimilated into the genotype, so taking bits from a XX would give an individual with many genetic faults (missing genes) as these 'mutations' would be needed to help the development of the male traits. In the proposed scenario, the AI really would be replacing an X with a synthesised Y to keep all the required genes, even if it starts with an X and heavily edits it.

For interest, the sex-chromosomes in birds are different, called W and Z, where WW is male and WZ is female (again, the Z is a W which lost a bit a long while in the past). Crocodilians are different again - they don't have sex chromosomes, rather the sex is determined by the temperature that the eggs develop at. It's easy to hypothesise that from this environmentally-determined sex, that an individual of that species with a 'broken' chromosome could have a strong tendency to develop as one sex rather than the other, and provided they are not too disadvantaged by the missing genes, that this sex specificity would spread and become fixed in the genotype.