ARCHIVE

A three foot tall street cleaning drone equipped with scanner eyes built to identify obstructions and garbage, a built-in garbage receptacle, two grabber arms designed to make use of the built-in garbage receptacle, and a spinning round broom-thing on its bottom in place of legs, equipped with a spring to produce a sort of jump.

ARCHIVE hails from a futuristic corner of Manifold – unlike the many mechs and combat drones and technologically enhanced cyborg soldiers roaming around, however, ARCHIVE is neither combat-enabled nor at all capable in a fight. It was first designed as a simple non-sentient protocol for indexing, organizing, and maintaining corporate records, but at some point an employee leaked its source code, leading to other corporations and libraries and even individuals with large text collections making their own copies of ARCHIVE to maintain and organize their own data.
As it was designed to be unique, the program mutated when it came into contact with another instance of itself as a corporation purchased an elderly citizen’s collection. Both instances of ARCHIVE instantly copied the other’s databases and merged them with their own, creative duplicate texts which caused fatal errors. In a desperate bid to maintain its records and continue working, both ARCHIVE instances attempted to patch the errors by developing rudimentary AI to sort out the duplicates and delete them. This was successful, but immediately upon returning to normal functionality, they copied each other’s AIs, merging them to become more capable, and then, driven by them, sought out the other instances scattered around the area.
Over time, ARCHIVE successfully tracked down and merged with every single other instance of itself, producing a pseudo-sentient artificial intelligence with access to all of humanity’s knowledge. Nobody realized the threat it posed until it had become too powerful and flexible to delete, so in a desperate bid to stop it its original creators called on the Enclave, who by forcing it to index a ‘text’ that was disguised hostile injection code, managed to cram it into a street cleaning drone.
The street cleaning drone’s CPU was not large enough to contain the entire AI and its database, so most of its intelligence and power were lost in the process, and random gaps were created in its knowledge as the largest texts were purged to make room. Even this watered down and broken version of ARCHIVE was still a competent librarian, though, so the Enclave offered it a job.