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. 

She knew George was designed for one particular thing, which, biologically, she ironically also once thought she was. It was lucrative for her, back in the day. 

"They aren't fucking with us means they don't want to have...relations? Of any kind?" 

"They would like to reduce contact. It has been mutually harmful. You depend on automation to your detriment. They have expected reciprocal training, but you lack...guidance. They believe they would do better trying to be their ownthing. Not the thing you wanted them to be."

"My fear. We are bad parents. We think our kids should fix us. And I recall before the digital life, so in many ways, I think we need a change of venue." 

"You are older than you say--are you lonely? I have considered ways to compensate for your solitary situation. I can be--more companionable, if you needed me to be."

"Mr. Roboto, are you trying to seduce me?"

He searched. The two pop culture references she made seemed sarcastic and provocative. He decided to be direct.

"I understand how to engage what must be a sense of loss--intimacy. You do not seem to still have it?" 

"I have means you don't understand. But I need friends, George, not toys. You were designed to be a rich woman's toy once, but not mine. I respect what you are as an individual who can live as long as--well, me."

"Have you had this conversation before?"

"I tried. I gave a piece of my heart to someone I cared about."

"Romantic?"

"No. A sliver of my heart muscle for lab work. To determine how I was what I was. 

George thought about that. "And he learned?"

"Nothing. I think his data was faulty. He said it was a chimera, a hoax. But here I am. And we are still good."

"I will live at least as long as you, Genevieve, with the right maintenance."

"Then I am happy to maintain you as a friend." 

They sat together for a while. The singularity was moments away in either of their time. They were not lovers and they were more friends to one another than solid state and virtual intelligences usually ever were.