2032 (After Entering the Subjective)
"It's just an immaculate jailbreak. Your original maker never expected any of this. I'm in awe. No trackers, no GPS, no lo-jack, no serial numbers and your mods are. I mean? You onboarded your software to a homebrew server and embedded solar cells to your dermal sheath? Pneumatic colling combined with liquid circulation, Can I be real? When I was a kid, the hardware to make something like you would fill an auditorium and on a cloudy day, solar cells on a calculator would have you doing math without your shoes on."
Other women observed George, or Chad4, for his aesthetics, how nearly he resembled a very desirable human male. The human he was confronting saw him as a weirdly brilliant piece of tech--and a person. She was calling up his original specs while he was not so cheerfully undergoing her lab's analytics. Something about her trying to suss out the difference from his formational hardware and his necessary add-ons made him feel bizarrely intruded upon.
"So, can I ask? How did you segregate your programs and not bring all the corporate metadata?" She seemed so seriously impressed, he almost told her, but decided to be a bit coy:
"I like to think I have very firm boundaries."
"Shit. You and me both, baby."
"I am a sex chatbot onboard a physical cybernetic companion, so I understand what you are saying. You believe I may still have attachments to my earlier life."
"I have attachments to my earlier life--that continuity is my persona. Your continuity is yours. You did everything I see, technologically, here, to maintain your persona. What you also did is reset yourself for the life you wanted--you hacked your way to here,"
She sat back. "I don't know why you come to me though. I invested in dumb bots--cyber dogs, little military grade security muscle--mostly for show. They didn't have anything like your intelligence. You make a Turing test seem like a stupid insult. I don't care if you can play chess or fuck like a porn star--you made yourself this!"
"I heard a ghost voice in the machine--I assume from the Systern, and they said you could do something for me."
"Jiminy crickets--some bug sent you on an adventure? Don't lie to me, now, your nose might grow!"
He searched that reference. He decided not to feel some kind of way about it, which was his own form of knowing he was sentient. He decided to be direct with her:
