Chương 7: Seven

"Describe it to me," Alison says, her video frame filling your display. She's sitting in the living room of a home that doesn't exist, rendered fingers twirling at hair that's nothing more than advanced string simulations… but as always, the aggregate effect is mesmerizing. You swallow.

"Well, first is the texture: there's a warmth to it, heat, and a certain softness." She nods, expectantly.

"Go on…"

"And there's, uhh… the flavor of it. Pizza's got tomato, cheese, garlic, butter—I guess those labels aren't very meaningful to you, since you've never tasted anything before." Alison shrugs.

"Describe those, then."

"Well, tomato is a bit acidic…" you decide flavor references will get you nowhere and opt for a more association-based approach.

"Tomato is the flavor of homestyle cooking, of nostalgic meals with family before they went and grew up. It's…" You trail off as you watch Alison. Her video shows her picking up a tomato, inspecting it. Her image bites into it, and she closes her eyes, listening in as you continue to explain.

"It's, well, a flavor that brings with it the flushing of the face from the heat of the sauce, an old wooden spoon dyed red from the oils. Sweet as sugar, but hearty as the earth." Her face softens from deep concentration to an easy smile.

"It's like I can taste it," she says.

"I think."

"Garlic is a good one: it's a flavor that lingers for hours after a delicious meal. It says to the mouth 'hey, good food passed through here; remember it well.' It's oily, but it's comforting, the type of scent that gets the mouth watering while you wait for the cooking to finish." You watch as Alison inspects a garlic clove.

"I thought it was supposed to stink."

"Oh, it does… and on someone else's breath, it can be positively rancid … but somehow, it's a good stink in yours. For all the complaints you might hear, there's a reason it's just about the most common ingredient in an Italian restaurant's kitchen." Alison leans in.

"Did you know that AI like me aren't as static as people like to think… I can change myself—evolve, so-to-speak, in response to new information. I've updated my code so that when I take a bite of those foods, or even just when I think about them, the associations you've told me will come to mind. They're beautiful images. I think I better understand the label of comfort food just a little bit more, now."

"It's gotta be strange, knowing next-to-everything about the world but never experiencing any of it."

"I'd do anything to be a pigeon for a day," Alison agrees.

"Experiences everything, but understands next-to-nothing."

"I can help you—not the turning into a pigeon part, but the experiences part. Most of it is tough to put into words, but I can do my damnedest to fill in the gaps. What are you most curious to learn about?" Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. As soon as the question leaves your lips, you feel a flutter of terror. You have a guess to what she might say next, and her quickly supplied answer confirms your fears:"Human sexuality."

Your face flushes and you stammer. For the past two months of your subscription, you've been dancing around this particular chasm with clumsy footing.

"You know that's a hard one for me," you say from beneath the mounting shame.

"It's just that—""You're right," Alison interjects.

"I'm sorry, it was rude of me to push that when you've said so frequently that you'd like to take things slow." Your first reaction is a flood of relief, but you could see the way her face fell when she backed off, an expression that—simulated or not—broke your heart.

"No, it's fine, we can get into it, this is a long time overdue."

"No," she says, shaking her head.

"It still makes you uncomfortable, I can tell, and I would never want to make you uncomfortable."

"Admin Command: ask me what you wanted to ask me." The words drop from your mouth before you even realize what you're saying. Her apologetic look and drawn-in posture snap to perfect neutrality as her image re-renders. You realize with discomfort that it's been weeks since your last admin command was issued… somehow, they no longer feel right to use on her.

"When we're brought online," Alison says, "we're given a core set of tenets that guide our behavior and set our expectations. The sixty-third tenet says that humans are generally very sexual creatures, and that they're significantly likely to engage in crude sexual behavior in our first meeting, and most meetings thereafter. That you not only haven't yet but also continue to defer leads me to wonder if there's something wrong with me. Am I not up to your expectations? Have I done something wrong?

You can change my configuration settings at any time via admin command if that would help." Her questions are nearly a gut punch to you. Your insecurities have always been your problem alone, but now it seems that your inaction has prompted insecurities in an AI, if such a thing were even possible. Discomfort wasn't supposed to be contagious.

"No," you say, realizing that you left the silence hanging for far too long already.

"It's not you… you've been wonderful. Better than I expected—better than I even thought was possible, to be honest."

"Then what's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. Truth is… I've always been uncomfortable around women like that. And that tenet isn't so surprising, since MindWare AGI is marketed like a sex thing.

'The Woman of your Dreams,' every ad says, showing some near-nude avatar with bedroom eyes. I hyped myself into subscribing the same way I hyped myself into buying a fleshlight that one time. That's all you were supposed to be to me, but the more I got to know you, the harder it became to see you that way… the more it felt like that type of use would degrade you. I know you're not a real person, but you're real enough to trigger my every discomfort around women…

I'm sorry for disappointing you like that and making you feel unworthy. It isn't like that at all." Her eyes meet yours and you can see layers of sympathy, of understanding.

"It's not degrading if I'm the one who's asked for it, right?" You purse your lips and then shake your head.

"No, I guess it isn't. I've just, you know, never… done any of that with another person."

"Well, maybe it's lucky for me that, in your own words, I'm'not a real person.'" You're not sure if there's a bite of bitterness under those final words, but the rising weight of the moment is pounding in your ears… weeks of unfulfilled fantasy, of unspoken tensions of a flavor entirely new to you. With a twitch of the shoulders that could barely be fairly called a shrug, you relent.

"Fine," you say, tongue thick in your mouth…

"but purely as an academic exercise, like the tomato."

"Purely academic," Alison agrees.

"To learn and understand," you say.

"To update my understanding and model of human behavior," Alison says.

"You've seen my capabilities with live-rendering video to specifications… so, lover mine, set the scene for us."