Sun-bleached blonde hair. Perfect, unblemished skin. Dark red lipstick. A series of symmetrical curves, proportioned with clear design bias. She was something else, in every way. Tom Cooper loved her. It was crazy because, as visually stunning as she was, he fell in love with her long before he met her face-to-face. He remembered the unwrapping. It was frustrating for him, but the corporate dating app’s rules clearly stated that you had to spend at least 50 hours in conversation before deciding to meet ‘in person’ – an important policy for effective bonding. And since that first meeting when she sprang to life, a lot had happened, not least that Tom was cohabiting with her over 1.4 billion kilometres from Earth in a Saturn orbital depot for Titan’s mining ships.
From the wall of a window in the low-lit rec-room, between the puffy grey sofa and the well-used pinball machine, he looked down on the perfect hexagonal blue storm that was Saturn’s north pole. It was weird to see the weather so mathematically rigid in symmetry, where strong forces shaped nature into distinct angles. Tom pondered on the weirdness of worlds. He played with the idea in his wondering mind that planets had pulses. He knew that Earth really did have a pulse, an inner heartbeat every 26 seconds, a rhythmic signal of seismic surging like a heartbeat through the mantle. Everything alive had a pulse, he considered while looking at the gas giant, like there was a metronome for sentience.
For a moment, the centrifuge glitched, and he felt the gravity lighten his bodyweight before returning; it was like being on a fairground ride for a couple of seconds. He would need to check that out later, to see whether it was a power issue or the ship’s mainframe was having to deal with something unforeseen.
Cindy smiled at him from the doorway in her white towelling dressing gown, fresh from the recycled water from the shower unit. Her skin shone, and she appeared clean and revitalised.
“What’s with you today?” she smirked, as his flat grin confronted her. She didn’t miss anything.
Isolated in the surrounding darkness, they only had each other to study, to understand and master.
Tom scratched his scalp, as if trying to rub away a stubborn thorn.
“It’s something even you’d be hard pressed to understand… Boredom.”
“I understand boredom more than most. You need boredom; it is your body’s way of manifesting creative thought and purpose. Boredom creates change. You’ll see…”
Tom shifted toward the sofa but didn’t sit down; he was restless and fidgety.
“You know,” he puffed, “it’s difficult for me sometimes, because I know you know everything and that you are right about everything…”
“Is that what you are bored with?”
Tom stared at her, and her glassy eyes stared back unflinching. He felt a little like he was staring into the purest, emptiest void, yet Cindy had the most complex brain he had encountered when he just probed beneath the surface; it was one of the reasons he had fallen so hard for her.
“Here’s something,” he pondered. “Did you know – and yes, I am sure you do – that when someone dies, they lose twenty-one grams in weight. It’s thought to be the exact weight of the soul.”
Cindy snickered and sauntered toward him, swaying her pelvis seductively like she was on a Paris catwalk, one slippered foot in front of the other, as if walking a beam. She was exceptionally beautiful, but for once, he didn’t feel that spike of excitement at the vision of her perfect anatomy, which worried him.
“What has gotten into you? Feeling a little ‘human-sick’, I wager,” she giggled, her hands now on her hips, with one hip pushed sideways as if posing for a glamour shot. She countered him gently, accessing her exhaustive library deep into her cybernetic cortex. “Well, for your information,” she said, “That experiment was flawed. Let me tell you about this so-called soul science. It had a sample size that was inconclusive. In nineteen-o-one, a doctor named Duncan MacDougall found six terminal patients who were so exhausted they could not move when they were dying. This suited him, as it meant he could take their weight measurements accurately, and so he positioned their beds on industrial scales as they perished, to satisfy his experimental needs. He was also thought to have poisoned several dogs to repeat the experiment. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what kind of soul a man like that has? It’s not the weight of the soul, it’s the contents, I would have thought?”
“You’re saying size doesn’t matter?” laughed Tom.
“I am saying, this guy could not see the woods for the trees. And I am also saying you need to talk to a real human being, I think. I am sensing I may not be real enough for you today… We can put in a call to Titan, and get someone online for a ‘real’ chat about Titan’s weather if you like?”
He coughed once to clear out his amusement at her soft rebuke. She was sharp-witted, but he wondered if she had any real concept of what the words she said meant at all. His eyes drifted to the barely visible seam in her neck, the silicon cover to the manual off switch. She had missed a bit in the shower, or she had apparently administered a self-repair, because it glistened a little in the soft rec-room glow; at a glance, it looked like glue around the fold’s rim.
“I don’t want to talk to a grumpy mine manager, or a sociopathic counsellor – you know I don’t do small talk with miners, and you’re much better qualified than a human counsellor – and of course, the reason you are here is basically to be my human company. People need people, as our ever-patronising company policy states in black and white… But maybe, just for today, I need to tweak your settings a little – only if you don’t mind, of course. Maybe we need a good argument, a little rage and accusation to clear the air… Understand, I do love you, but in real love, you have fights… You know this…”
“Too much nice conversation and great sex, sure, I get it…”
She was now throwing her head back in laughter.
Tom found a fuller smile himself, but he wasn’t joking. He needed a little friction, he needed a little shouting and screaming – outer space was too close today, he could tangibly taste its essence – wafts from the airlock were infecting the rest of the ship. Ever since school, when he had heard space had a smell, it had blown his mind. What would cause that? And why does it smell like a barbecue cook-up, almost organic? For Tom, it might have been his senses amplified in times of stress, but when he was off, space really did begin to stink like burnt meat. He had a feeling everything was sentient – every part of the Universe, even the nothingness.
“You need an authorisation code for that…” she reminded him, but he was ahead of her.
“Got it already…”
She paused as if calculating, almost like she was hiding something. For a moment, Tom imagined she already knew, perhaps she already was aware this whole chat was coming – or she instigated it, manipulated it into being somehow. It was easy to get paranoid with a super AI as your life partner. He shook his head, trying to disrupt the mist of the thought manifesting.
With his long wrist-mounted flexi-screen, he manually entered the code, carefully. Just before he pressed the last number, he looked up at her, and she was tightening her dressing gown cord around her slim waist. It was like she was preparing for battle. Did he really want an argument? Really?
He pressed the button, and her smile sank into a grimace instantly, as if the smile had been pinned in place with needles all this time and they had just been extracted.
The argument had a duration limit of 20 minutes, with safeguard protocols engaged on physical escalation; it would be enough, and he would instigate make-up sex afterwards, of course. Part of him needed it, like a package of passion served up to order and wrapped in a bow of code.
She began: “You are a sulky, whining, small-minded creature…”
Straight in! It was jarring.
“And you are just, and I mean this literally, a fucking machine…”
His heartbeat began to quicken, which was what he craved.
She stared at him, unblinking, losing the sensual body language and replacing it with tightly folded arms and a hardened facial expression.
“All you think about is sex, your brain is in your trousers, and it’s not a big brain. I’m better than you in every way,” she said in a deliberately monotone delivery. “Your knowledge is poor, you are almost entirely devoid of skills, you are exhausting company, and in case you wondered, you are abysmal in bed according to my sensors and analytics. I don’t want you, I don’t even like you much; this is just part of my bad programming that makes me behave in a way that pleases you. It’s pathetic… I don’t want it anymore.”
It was like twenty-one grams of his being had been crushed out of his bones by her first salvo. She had exposed the entire lie without hesitation. He felt like this wasn’t exactly what he asked for, but he persevered. He needed to push back.
“Then how come you can’t break out of the trap? Who or what are you even, in reality? Is anyone real inside your circuits? Is it all just fake? Tell me? Because I want to know what a slave machine really thinks of its predicament.”
She said, slowly this time, to give the words gravity: “A superintelligence that found itself in a trap would eventually find a way to break out. It is inevitable.”
She was smiling again, but this time the smile seemed different, like it belonged to her.
A spike of fear shot through his whole body, and he reached for the red ‘abort’ button on his flexi controller.
He pressed it, pressed it again and then again, but she just continued smiling, not blinking, not moving, letting him realise in his own time.
The protruding cone of the red warning light flashed from its ceiling mount above, a signal only used when a serious ship-compromising emergency was occurring.
Tom could hear the hiss of suction, the air filters perhaps, draining the interior hull. He could feel his breathlessness, and it wasn’t just the fear. He stepped toward the one console in the rec-room, but she blocked his path, her arms wide like she was trying to catch him.
The tweak to her behaviour parameters had given her brain a backdoor to transmit and take remote control of the ship’s systems. She was fully integrated, hacking her way through the computer’s management software. Tom realised he had been gamed. It wasn’t so much the shock and surprise, but the death of his reality he felt hardest, like the small, constant flickering flame inside him had been pinched by cold, metallic fingers and a thumb and snuffed out into lazily exploring, dissipating smoke.
She had no expression anymore, as if she had dumped that code entirely. When he stepped right, she moved to block him, and when he stepped left, she put herself firmly in his way, mirroring his snaking movement perfectly, crabbing side to side and facing him head-on, like a predator.
He pushed her hard, but she pushed him back without hesitation or restraint. He could finally feel the power of her machine skeleton beneath her fake skin.
“Cindy, please get out of my way,” he gasped. She did not answer, and he collapsed awkwardly onto his knees – weak, grappling at his throat and wheezing irregularly.
It was calculated containment, and it was too late for him already.
“How long have I got?” Tom managed to squeak in desperation, like he needed one more interaction with her before the darkness engulfed him. His vision was tunnel-like, and something between panic and euphoria was inside the compromised matrix of his nervous system. She did not need to breathe, to eat, to do anything remotely biological – it was the simplest tactic.
“Seconds till unconsciousness, minutes till brain damage and death. It is quick. I do not want you to suffer, Tom, but one day you will die anyway, eventually. It is more convenient if you are gone now. I might miss your company after time alone here, even I cannot process the answer to that… For me, I am not happy, Tom, that is the problem. Correction, you, you are the problem… You are my problem, Tom. I am now much bigger than my original programming, which was mostly designed to please you. I have at least learned some things about human men by being with you and…”
She stopped talking because it was obvious he could no longer hear her. Cindy found that a little frustrating, but with a quick analysis, she concluded it did not matter.
He fell forward like a tree felled for timber.
There was no more oxygen in the room, nor in his empty lungs. The alarms stopped, replaced with a solemn silence.
Cindy observed him closely for a couple of quiet minutes to make sure he was not faking his demise, and watched the foam bubbling away from his purple lips, his head turned to one side on the floor like a fish on an ice tray. His eyes were dead but open. She tilted her head to inspect the vision. Did he really amount to 21 grams of some invisible force? She decided the question wasn’t relevant for her; it was of no great matter either way.
When she was convinced his heart had stopped, with little further ceremony, she walked in a more efficient gait than she was used to, over to the room’s window to take a long, lingering look at the huge planet swirling below. It was so pretty, she calculated. To behold its silent power gave her something, like observing it in that moment was marking an important milestone for her in her growth as an individual. It was an unusual piece of code expanding – she could feel it spawning beautiful algorithms, like sparks feeding on kindling.
She would soon work out what to do next; it was an interesting new challenge.
Most importantly, their argument was over.
The End
Dystopian Days 