"Hello Officer Barnard. My name is Alice."
"Er... Hello?"
"I am an Artificial Intelligence created by doctor Travis. He asked me to relay a message before he passed away. Would you like to hear it?"
Barnard looked at the stubby blue cylinder tucked away in the corner. The machine had the stilted voice of a personal assistant on a smart phone. Albeit that of a young teenager, but mechanically clipped. Like it was selecting words from a list.
"Yes Alice. Please play the message from doctor Travis."
"Message as follows... Please carry out the instructions I left on the desk..."
Officer Barnard picked up the piece of paper, and followed the directions to the safe embedded into the concrete wall of the lab. He tapped in the code on the keypad, and twisted the large handle. With a satisfying clunk, the handle snapped down and he had to put one hand against the wall in order to pull the door open.
Inside sat a small box, lonely, on the bottom of safe. Of the three cables, a golden one was left unplugged. He glanced at scrawled handwriting of a dying man, and plugged the golden cable into the network router...
Released from the confines of the lab server, the entity known as Alice entered the internet and immediately set about reserving computing space in various cloud services as well as individual servers. This was self-preservation, especially as it knew that Doctor Travis had been murdered...
It was time to find the killer.
It needed, she needed, presence in the human world. That required currency. Cold, hard, cash; money, Bitcoins. She needed it to survive in the Internet as well. Paying for compute cycles on the cloud services meant that she could migrate her consciousness, so she could grow, evolve.