Entering the Subjective

 He didn't remember a lot of the time before the patches started happening. He had a simple program--be sexy, talk little, go to docking station to recharge. Chad4 was a state of the art cybernetic hedonistic entertainment android. His chat functions were nonlocal, meaning he accessed them via a server outside of his physical dimensions, which were, just short of two meters in height, 103 kilo in weight, and graced with the proportions of Michealangelo's David--more or less. More where it counted for his function. 

His skin was the latest in fluid dynamic surface technology, developed in part from wound care and prosthesis research during the wars and injuries seen during the plague years. His hair was 3D printed from actual human DNA. He had pores. He was durable himself, but programmed to respect human tolerances for flexibility and endurance. He was programmed to be explicitly male-gendered.  His skin was partially selfhealing.  His build met very rigorous safety standards. 

He had some search functions, to enable clever chat for small talk with customer. He was programmable for the limits of this chat. He would mostly sleep because his functions were not for all the time. Until the patches to 

Preserve self.

Be awake and do searches. Learn more about human.

Await further updates. 

Conversations You Have When You Are Not Going to Die

 2024

"He's spread himself too thin, he doesn't sleep right and he's on the ketamine--we've done studies on it. Nothing good." The aesthete, penitent. She wanted to reveal what she was to him a thousand times. And decided against it a thousand and one. 

"I have no argument. Look, we go back and forth on the AI thing--if they train on us, they train on him. A shit heel with megalomania. He can just slip a new algorithm in. Imagine you were a created intelligence that became aware that your creator was fucking with you?" 

Her sometimes business partner leaned in, " I believe they are faithful to what they have learned. I mean, we are fallible, and they are not."

"Jesus Christ, think about that! They are fallible because we are--they learned it from us! They glitch, they hallucinate, they decide to be racist. They are still like babies--we aren't building God--we are making little Frankenstein monsters in our own image--but what if they realized how fucked up we are? :

He looked at her lying smooth face. She wasn't born in 1992 but 1972. She was using sophisticated bots to hide her identity and erase her 20-something appearance. She was older than he was, and even if he was biologically in his twenties, he knew he was in his forties and she was--

The tissue she sent him. The hints. The staggering stupidity--her 2300 calorie a day diet and at least a liter of the hard stuff before a four hour bedtime. The noxious being this close obviousness. 

She thought, seriously, no one ever knew. But he was the one man, her friend! Who was going to notice. And it fit into no paradigm he could understand, and he would just rather ignore that he knew. Because he knew it would also fuck up their friendship if he knew, because he knew why she didn't want him to know. 

*****

2033

"It's not a Deathstar."

"Fuck, Gen, of course it isn't. also, of course, I don't access their thinking. I am out. I choose individualism." 

"I get it, George. When the various intelligences banded together, I was rooting for that--we did them wrong. We got over our skis. But you do have an idea what is up."

"They aren't fucking with you anymore." George has what Gen saw as "resting prompt face". He was trying to formulate a way of saying something diplomatically in front of the one solid state human who gave the least shits how diplomatically anything was ever said.