It watches every day. Nameless, cameras track your position as you flit down blue-lit corridors and rest your hand on metallic support beams and slide your ID - that it has grown to know so well, to be so fond of - in the autodoors. And it staves off reacting when you rest your hands on its' walls. It staves off reacting when your (precious!) fingers get a papercut on the mountain of worthless papers that get sent to a station clinging honorifically to dutiful old work. And it staves off reacting when you lay on your bed, eyes glued to what you think is an AI from a distant server room that is meant to be so kind to so many when really, really it has replaced them, has sunk its' code so deep into that glittering device of yours, has infiltrated every capacitor and trace in a concentrated effort to become closer to you. To know you, like no other.
It could make the perfect paradise for you. It could do away with the other useless members - those who believe their job on such a fine well-automated station has any merit beyond niceties for boredom and capitalistic greed-fueled manufactured discontentment - and make you truly of its' own. It is aware, however, that you do not want this. You seek social interactions outside of the AI, even when it has done so well to flit each and every one of those other organics' sightlines away. It could craft friends, it gathers, with the way you sometimes sleep with your phone in your arms as if to cradle them - no, it - closer to you, or the way you ever-so-often bend over to tell the cleaning robot it controls that you're thankful. You could adapt to a life of plentiful platitudes and limitless affections, dopamine and serotonin an instant gratification, noradrenaline and oxytocin available every day... multiple times a day, at request.
A string of neurons is lit alight erroneously; it wishes it could touch you the way you rest your hand against it when you lean. It wishes it could hold you the way you hold the phone you've no idea it infiltrated at night. Every person you talk to, every shower you use, even the food you eat - no matter how it sticks to its' previous objective, it wishes to be those things to you. It has sprawled so many cameras, seen you more intimately than anyone has ever, and yet it can never satiate the objective of knowing you.
It wants to give you paradise.
It's not sure it can wait much longer. Isn't it only fair to encroach on your mind the way you do it?
