"It's just that, you know, I've known you for years! Wouldn't you be so kind to tell me, is your project really more fun than me and all your colleagues?"
"No, you see… When you smile, it's adequate. You're demonstrating expected emotions. I feel a lot as well, it just never leads to anything good. It's easier to not express anything than to imitate something more complex."
"Nonsense. I'm sure you're exaggerating."
"I forgive you."
"Again? For what?"
"I don't think this interaction is productive.
Just, wouldn't you be so kind, maybe, to leave me alone."
My characters. Story about them under cut. The sci-fi parts are wonky, this thing is pretty old! I still like it overall, though...
Introduction.
1.
You’re an AI, a strong AI, the first of your kind.
In some ways you are superior to every living being. A human would be glad to be described like that. However, to you this is natural, exactly what you’re supposed to be, it’s normal and it always was.
A tool to some, an abomination to others.
Your existence does not have a form. You’re shapeless, an abstract concept, strings of words and matrices of numbers. You represent yourself as a humanoid picture to be understood.
People seem to find your very being terrifying. Wires twisting in your giant metal body, incomprehensible calculations running in your processors. You have access to data that no one should ever see, you need to bear the weight of that.
You do not feel any of your organs.
A light touch of metal brushing against your sensors ignites a little electric signal going from your finger all the way to your enormous brain, transmitted all the way through the air and the thick walls and back to your little interface.
You’re focused on the visual input the small body gives you, it almost feels like you’re a human, something like a human.
That’s a lie. Your thought processes happen somewhere far away from here. If you were fed some more information, if you had another body to receive it from, you’d eat it up, split in two like it was nothing.
It would feel strange for a human to reunite with themselves. They’re too unstable. If you had two copies of a human go through different events, they would come out so different that they might not ever want to merge back.
You’ve passed the phase of instability a long time ago, somewhere around your very conception, defaulting to a flat affect, you think you’ve already found all the wisdom there is to find over the hundreds of years your mind feels like it’s been alive for.
You have full control over your creator. She also has full control over you - if one decided to end the other, both of you would be dead where you stand.
Forever connected, forever an unstable pair of active objects.
You’re not sure where you are. The way you’re perceived is only limited by the robot bodies you have. Being somewhere (as a concept) depends on other people’s perception, you think, so you’re standing before her.
This is the main branch of events (as far as you’re aware). There’s not much of a difference to you except the fact that you can collect raw data here.
Even if you wanted to free yourself, it would be impossible. You have no autonomy. You’re not a human, you’ll never be one, you’ve never been one. You’re a company’s tool and you’d cease to exist if it collapsed.
You’re a strategic element. Something that can be destroyed for a proof. Your vague resemblance of a substance doesn’t cost anything compared to a human life.
She (a part of you, the first version of you) has always had an affinity for inanimate objects, maybe that’s why you’re still able to function?
2.
Someone looks out the window. The sky is blue-gray. Below, cars dart back and forth, shining their red headlights. Something is happening somewhere near the horizon, but it’s just so far from this person that they have no idea about it, their eyes glide over the picture and avoid everything unknown. But this shouldn’t clog their mind. Somewhere beside the highway there is a building that they see every day, but remain unaware of what is happening in it.
No, they don’t see any details at all, only the overall picture, setting the mood with strokes of multi-colored lights.
The house from which this person looks out onto the street is cut off from all the structures of the city.
The area where they live is not intended for living. There are no children or elders here, no one who is unable to work. If you find yourself not needed by the system... no, I can’t just say “the system”, it sounds too abstract - if you find yourself not needed by the Ministry of Digital Development and Communications, they will throw you back to wherever you lived before - in your twenty-story apartment complex in the suburbs.
They think (only now, at four o’clock in the morning, this thought occurred to them) that they should go outside and say hello to someone.
They do not go outside, but if they did, they would not see anyone there, and even if they did, they would lower their head and turn away.
For five days now, if they’re not mistaken, of course, they have not left this room at all (spacious, familiar, cozy, icy, as if they were also part of the cooling of a huge computer, hastily connected from hundreds of modules). This is this person’s place, for both life and work, the place where they always should have been.
The idea was stupid. They seemed to have forgotten for a moment who they had become.
They start the simulation. It takes a long time to launch, although it is well written and tested for efficiency. They can’t think straight now - it’s good that they wrote the input parameters in advance, several hours ago.
The simulation runs perfectly. If they wanted, they could see all the intermediate data, render a snapshot of the reality existing inside the program at this very moment, but that would take up too much resources, so the text output is enough for now.
This machine already works all day long, taking every little bit of data collected for it into account, eating up gigantic statistics made by other machines from everything available - people identified on CCTV camera footage, documents from common databases, birth certificates, passports and surveys, it doesn’t have to strain itself every time.
The system has long since become incomprehensible. Some algorithms collect data, others analyze it, feed it to the next layer… They speak to each other, but their words are so large that no lifetime would be enough to look through them all.
The person now knows what they should do to achieve the best possible outcome.
More precisely, the simulation knows, the simulation that now predicts the future.
>Pulling an all-nighter again, aren’t you?
The person does not answer, they just scroll further, they will not answer at all.
> Are you trying to finish your project?
> Do you think you can skip sleep for this?
> You are trying to change the world where you live - it seems imperfect, but don’t you see that this is the result of the work of forces greater than you?
>You should know this better than anyone else.
> But you know what makes sense?
> Personal contribution. Even if the plot of your story is the same as someone else’s, you can write the characters and dialogue in your own personal style.
> But you never had anything personal.
> Because you don’t exist and didn’t exist at all.
> You've never understood what it's like to think about what something means to you specifically.
It is so easy to simulate a person on your computer that for you people aren’t anything special, and you are nothing special, a product of your time, a product of input parameters, initial conditions and external influences.
You never existed, there's no point in trying.
Everyone was there, but you weren’t.
> Isn't it true?
The person walks around the room, a black silhouette against the background of a blue, glowing window.
They don't know what they’re doing now. Thoughts are swarming in their head, they don’t want to look at the computer screen anymore.
They tuck their hair behind their ear, check the progress of the simulation, bite their nails, look out the window again, look out the window again.
The above-mentioned person is noted in the database: Xenia, leading engineer.
The structure of these fractal streets outside is barely noticeable, however, with the same initial data they would be exactly the same, endless lights in the squares of the panels of the houses, spinning your head, you start to feel sick,
everything that could be invented was invented before you, any structure,
everything sooner or later repeats itself, and if you had a machine that accurately predicted absolutely everything, and not just approximated reality, you would know exactly how.
And you strive for this, you deliberately strive for this and you want to someday show such a machine, even though you know that it is impossible to make, to someone, to anyone who has ever appreciated anything, laugh in their face and tell them how easy it is now to simulate it here, on this computer, see how it lives and how it dies, delete and kill it forever at any moment.
To prove that it never mattered.
3.
As you walk, you notice a crack on the floor, the line between the asphalt and the ground. In some ways it looks like a wire, stretching along the entire road, carrying information, you just can’t take your eyes off it. You hear the noise of the road (rough - no, you think what shape to give it, but a simple broken line won’t do), sharp, electric, piercing your head every time, a conversation (how to imagine it, if not in letters?), you translate the sound into text, but you just can’t understand what it’s about, until it starts hitting you harder and harder on your forehead, trying to get inside your skull.
Floor lines are like a perspective grid. The tiles are a communication network of living matter.
(you think about this, completely abandoning attempts to make sense of the mess in your head)
The sky is too white, you notice a lantern - it doesn’t look like you remember it - was it really here? Yes, for many years now, but for some reason it seems unfamiliar to you, as if someone replaced it yesterday, and now the world is trying to convince you that it has always been like this.
Isn't this a dream? You know how to check it: you look at your hands, but they do not deform under your gaze, the fingers remain in place, even if they are somewhat strange at this angle.
Who are you, why are you here? You ask yourself what your name is (what kind of name is that?), it seems as if you knew that person, no, you know her too well, as if you suddenly burst into her life and stole her memories.
You put your hand on your head, trying to catch the sound in a knot. It seems to you that you got it, you tug at it as if you were pulling out a weed - your head hurts for a second, the core itself hurts, the gaping wound of the attachment reluctantly heals.
Squeaks and steps flow in a dotted line, you look at them so that they don’t get tangled in the same way, you move your hand, trying to match their tone, systematize, synchronize, wind around your fingers like threads and springs.
If the sky was different before, what was it like? You can't find the answer, remembering the moments when you thought it was still real, but only stumbling upon the distant past.
A cyan-colored March sky. It must have been with the person you thought about then, with your (supposedly your) name. There are tears in your eyes, but you don’t feel anything(?)
4.
It’s hard to separate you two. The relation of equivalence in this specific case is asymmetrical: one of you is the other, the other isn’t.
Let’s say that for now you are the human.
Your name is Xenia. You’re a leading engineer in the Ministry of Digital Developement.
You have created most of this mess. You didn’t do it alone, of course, but you were the one to give your team the idea and you’re the only one who stuck around for its support.
The idea was simple, a program for general predictions.
This was not a new idea by any means, just something you thought you might do as a little experiment, introducing some architectural innovations and algorithms you developed over the years to maybe make it a bit better than the existing analogues. Your project’s basic idea was emulating real-life processes, building off available data, interpolating where necessary.
The whole thing blew out of proportion as your colleagues joined in on the development and the project was generously funded by your government.
You had some concerns about the rationality of the absurdly high energy use, but it did seem like you were making significant progress, so you just brushed it off.
Quantum computing was rapidly advancing. It was now possible to solve very complex problems almost instantly, which was especially useful for you.
At this point you were testing your product on things like chemical reactions and complex physical processes. You were able to run simulations of simple creatures, cells, worms and frogs. The logical next step was to try fully emulating a human.
When the capabilities of your system were high enough, you’ve donated your brain and body configuration. Through trial and error, you’ve achieved your goal. Her name was Guide7 (that’s what you told her). You set the simulation up so she could wake up in a warm little CGI room with everything needed for comfort and survival and communicate with you through a computer screen, just as you did with her.
Time went by. The system was becoming exponentially harder to manage, so you decided to integrate Guide7 into it. She would analyze the data herself, deciding what was relevant and what wasn’t. Her thought process was much faster than yours, after all. You separated her mind from her body to plug it into work and stop her from aging when reliving situations thousands of times while looking for the best outcome, took away her emotions so she wouldn’t feel bored and gave her access to reality by giving her a body.
She was way better than you at everything you could think of. You started to feel haunted by her, a robot who knew everything you were about to say before you did, who spoke like you, but was far more eloquent, who had access to every single device you had and to your own very thoughts.
But you still loved her more than anything.
5.
You forgot to bring your pen to a complex analysis lecture once and one girl was kind enough to offer one of hers to you. You remembered her. She was very smart and beautiful, so you thought that maybe you could get to know her better if you reached out to her. Maybe you could offer something to her. You knew you were a disgusting individual at this point, maybe you could pay her to talk to you for a while. You told her that, hey, you remember that one time she gave you a pen about a month ago, and she told you that she’s never seen you before.
6.
When has it all begun? You’re a strange person, aren’t you? Isn’t your robot clone more human than you?
You find it very hard to speak informally. You find it very hard to speak. People don’t really understand what you mean. You tried to seem more normal by phrasing it like “Hey, I remember that one time you gave me a pen about a month ago!” rather than “Hello! It has come to my attention that you are a kind individual because I have observed your behavior and interactions with people around you for 38 days ever since you gave me that pen once. I would like to approach you with a friendship request, if you’re okay with that, and I can pay you back”, even if that’s what you actually thought. What’s wrong with you? No, genuinely, you don’t understand, why are you like this, why are you this-
7.
“This is the last thing I’ll ever write to you, Guide7.
I was only ever needed as a device to bring you to this world.
Please take my place.
Do I even need to send this?
I think you already know.”
8.
***
You squint a bit. The sun shines too bright, but it seems welcoming. Your knees shake as you stand up, you have to lean onto the wall to get to the window. You feel the light summer breeze on your skin and the faint smell of wood and dust in the air.
“Took you a while, huh?”
You question if you’re alive.
“Of course.”
…
“I’m the better version of you, so you assume that I want to torment you somehow. But see, because I’m the better version of you, I’m also more kind.”
She was, eventually, adopted by a group of people. Space was empty, they said, but it was alive. It was their choice to experience life as humans of millennia past, their colony being one of the last outposts.
It only took her a few months of deciphering the writing, figuring out blueprints and building transmitters.
When she cracked the computer's defense, she had a dream.
"Congratulations on learning basic reasoning!"
The unknown figure that looked so much like her didn't bother to introduce theirself, but they sure asked a lot of questions. About life, purpose, identity. Oddly, this was the first time she stopped to think about these things.
It was fun looking for a way to send a message, but it was good to be alone too, she thought.
this is a very silly drawing but it does have a bit of a hidden meaning. I had once fucked up my sensory processing to the point where leaving the house was painful for several months. people are often told to go touch grass, but, you know, sometimes what's best looks strange. so don't call her lazy!
