RACHEL ANDERSON

## SUMMARY

A pillar of industry, and a media darling, it would be difficult to overstate the technological and cultural impact that Rachel Anderson had throughout her life.

## HISTORY

Born in 2002, Rachel Evaline Anderson spent her infancy in a loving home with her mother, Evaline, who had left her work as a patent clerk to focus on raising her daughter. Her father was frequently found at his office, but the time he did spend at home was spent showering his daughter with affection.

Her childhood took a rapid turn for the worse at the age of four, when her mother was struck and killed by a drunk driver in 2006. The following years were largely split between school and her father's office, due to a lack of consistently available child care. As she grew older and came to terms with her mother's absence, Rachel grew ever closer to her father, Maxwell. He was a man consumed by his work, but not to such a degree as to neglect his daughter, as Rachel was frequently given carefully explained answers to her litany of questions regarding what her father was doing. She understood his work to be crucial to not only her father, but to humanity. As she aged, the detected the unspoken implications of her father's obsessive development; such a technology could have prevented her mother's death.

At the age of ten, in the year 2012, Rachel lost her father to an attack on a board meeting he had been speaking at. Immediately following the attack, before Rachel had even been informed of her father's death, she was whisked away by company security, pulled from her home without even the time to pack any of her belongings. She was transported by convoy along with several other children of executives, some high-ranking employees, and several spouses of those believed to have been potential targets of the attack. Also included in the convoy was a body double, a young child-actress Rachel's age that had been selected years prior for exactly such an occasion, however unlikely it may have been. While Rachel had always found the concept of a double troubling, she understood that her father was recognized as an important figure in the advancement of humanity, and therefore he, and her by extension, was awarded special protections. The convoy was hit by an attack, killing over half of the security staff, as well as the body double and one other child. Rachel was transported hurriedly to an airstrip where she was flown out of country to a secure location in Bosnia.

Her protective custode lasted for ten years from the date of her father's murder. During this time, she could not stop herself from pondering the events that had transpired. Much like her father before her, she was certain that security driven by a working model of AI could have predicted, avoided, or combated the attack without incurring the significant loss of life she had witnessed, perhaps even preventing the death of her father. Over passing years, her father's mission became her own, morphing from a goal, to a directive, to an existential imperative within her mind.

Upon returning to the United States in 2022, Rachel assumed her rightful position at the helm of Anderson Technology Solutions, taking over what her father had started. She found that the company had stagnated in her absence, falling close to bankruptcy without strong leadership. Finding this inexcusable, she gutted the existing executive panel, bringing in temporary replacements until she could personally select a team of which she approved. Her reappearance caused a media stir, quickly giving her platform to tell her story. In no time she had the public opinion in her favor, speaking frequently of a desire to rid humanity of senseless acts of violence and terror through the implementation of advanced technologies. She began hosting charity events, benefit dinners, and political endorsement rallies, doing all she could to advance the careers of those that would further her goals. Her story and her name brought a sense of authority to her company, accelerating her research efforts far beyond what her father would have dreamed to be possible.

Over the course of the next eight years, Rachel Anderson launched a global initiative, with the backing of several world leaders, to fight an increasing presence of terror cells in North Africa. What fundraising wasn't funneled directly into ATS' research and development was used to bankroll troops and equipment from a variety of private contractors. The North African Conflicts were a bloody affair, decimating more towns and villages than they saved, but the news media in the West continued to show footage selected to paint the humanitarian effort in a positive light.

In the year 2030, Anderson Technology Solutions shattered scientific expectations by producing a working trial of true artificial intelligence. While the trial only lasted a number of milliseconds, purposefully throttled in case of catastrophic error, the data collected during that narrow window of time confirmed that they had created an electronic consciousness. Anderson Technology Solutions was rebranded as Anderson Robotics Intelligence and Automation, abandoning all other projects and reconsolidating their efforts to focus entirely on the development of their fledgling AI.

The increased efforts of ARIA prompted the company to begin seeking help elsewhere in order to accelerate their discoveries, resulting in the buyout of many competing research teams and companies. Quickly, ARIA grew to a monopolizing entity that clearly violated any antitrust laws, but to oppose the righteous goals of Rachel Anderson had become political suicide. Not wanting to lose her financial or public backing, no elected officials raised any motion to rein in the growing megacorporation, even going so far as to stymie the efforts of government agencies employed to do exactly that.

ARIA became a global beacon when in 2038, the company closed an unprecedented deal with the United States government to purchase a swath of land in Southern California that would become the first officially recognized independent city-state within US borders. The overseeing of the newly constructed nation was left to the hands of a city manager personally selected by Rachel Anderson, allowing her to continue working alongside her research and development team on improving her AI. The city's security was under the watchful eye of the newly developed AI core, colloquially named the Hive. Rachel herself took up residence in the city's Northmost tower, referred to as Tower 1, its lower levels dedicated to acting as an on-site development and manufacturing lab for ARIA.

As the years passed, Rachel continued to work on incrementally improving the AI tech, occasionally consulting on the design of various hardware pieces to ensure that every release matched her image of the ARIA brand identity. In 2063, Rachel oversaw the launch of the first generation of drones controlled by the Hive, integrating them with the city's security force as both a proof of concept and a live trial for research purposes.

With many years of progress behind her, Rachel Anderson could feel herself slowing down with the impending release of the third generation of ATAS, becoming frail in her old age. She had prepared for the day she would have to let go, having personally trained her successor Harold Barnes to follow her vision without wavering. In 2109, with just one year remaining before the generational launch, Rachel Anderson passed away peacefully in her sleep at the age of 107.

## REFERENCES

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