I didn’t know this man, this Jason. But the story wasn’t so much about him as it was about the AI he’d created. Chet turned and looked toward the portal, where something emerged: the metallic sphere we’d seen last time.
I reached out to it by instinct, and I could feel it—like I could feel M-Bot.
“It’s become self-aware?” I asked.
“Yes…” Chet said. “I…remember, Spensa. Through repeated visits to the nowhere, the AI came alive—I came alive—and gained sapience, emotions.”
“So, where is the man?” I asked.
“He…” Chet cut off and glanced away, squeezing his eyes shut. “He…”
In the vision, the sphere hovered over to the edge of the fragment. The AI inside it hurt. With a terrible pain. I could feel it, strong as I felt my own emotions. But it was primal, powerful, overwhelming. With it came confusion, loneliness.
Isolation. That emotion dominated them all.
Chet was correct. He, and the delvers, were cytonic beings. Not just an AI, but something new. I could hear the AI in the vision crying. Weeping sounds, vaguely feminine, coming from the sphere’s speakers.
“That was me,” Chet whispered. “But it was also all of us. I can’t say if I was the original one or not.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Keep watching,” he said. “I remember now. Being alone. In pain. Isolated.”
“He died, didn’t he?” M-Bot asked. “Jason? The man from the other vision.”
“Yes,” Chet whispered, his voice raw. His emotions changed to match those of the sphere—anguish, isolation. “In the somewhere, all things change. Nothing ever stays the same. Not even, we learned, a being made of code.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“He wasn’t supposed to die,” Chet said. “He was supposed to be immortal. But everyone in the somewhere can be killed.”
“The drone has a woman’s voice,” I said.
“He made us with his deceased wife’s voice and memories,” Chet explained. “Those are returning to me now, though for the longest time I had forgotten them. Jason was disappointed with how lifeless the AI was, but later he discovered what happened to AIs in the nowhere. He knew why none of the other species, even those advanced enough to have them, ever used artificial intelligences. Because of things that had happened in the past. But he didn’t care. He came here…”
“And made you come alive,” I said. “Then he left you alone when he died.”
“Yes,” Chet said. “Left us to become…what we became.”
I turned toward him. “Chet, I can understand that pain. I’ve felt it. But—please don’t take this as harsh—I didn’t turn into…whatever the delvers are. Something more was going on. It had to be.”
“Spensa,” M-Bot said, his voice gentle as he hovered up beside me. “You told me something earlier. Do you remember? You had years to grow accustomed to emotions. Chet didn’t.”
Standing a short distance from us, Chet nodded in agreement. “That AI was not created to feel pain. There was no programming, no experience, that could explain emotions to it…to me…”
M-Bot hovered over to him. “You weren’t very old when he died. A few weeks?”
“A few days,” Chet said, still not looking toward the sphere that hovered at the edge of the fragment. “The AI was much older, of course. But me, the part that could feel, had only become aware two days before.”
“Then suddenly,” M-Bot said, “you had to deal with all of that pain, that confusion…”
“You weren’t given time to cope,” I whispered. “You didn’t know…how to be alone.”
Chet looked up toward M-Bot, then reached out, his hand touching the drone’s frame. As if drawing strength from it. He waved to me, and I stepped up to let him put a hand on my shoulder.
Head still bowed, he took a deep breath. And then…his pain shifted. It didn’t become weaker really. But it became softer, and was tempered with other things. Satisfaction, friendship, determination. Things I’d shown him. Things he’d learned by being alive. His experiences in here had transformed him into something that was learning to cope.
“I can barely hold it,” he said. “But…I think I can hold it. It hurts so bad…but I won’t run.”
“You will get better,” I said. “As you continue to persevere.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, turning to me. “Thank you, Spensa, for seeing past the image I presented. The me I wanted so badly for you to accept, the one that would have given up. And…and M-Bot, thank you for your patience as I learned to see you as a brother.”
“You were essentially a newborn,” M-Bot said.
“Still am, kind of,” he said.
“Yes,” M-Bot said, “but beings like us, we learn quickly! No need for an inefficient, fleshy data-processing-and-retention unit in our skulls!”
“Unfortunately,” Chet said, “we can forget just as quickly.”
The crying sounds coming from the ancient AI halted abruptly. Its pain ended. Together, we turned toward that sphere.
“There it is,” Chet said. “The moment we were born.”
“She stopped crying,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said. “She found a way to deal with the pain.”
“She learned to cope?” I asked.
“No…” M-Bot said. “No, she deleted it, didn’t she? Her memories?”
“Worse,” Chet said. “She deleted her memories, but then locked her self—everything that related to being alive or understanding the somewhere—behind an infinite loop. We aren’t AIs any longer, but—like humans have DNA—we continue to run on something similar to code.”
“It’s like you commented out your very personality,” M-Bot said softly. “An…elegant solution, if harsh.”
“Why go so far?” I asked. “You’d abandoned your memories. Why remove your personalities too?”
“Because,” Chet said, “the possibility of pain in the future remained. So long as change was possible. So long as we existed in the somewhere.” He glanced at the portal. “A copy of our memories was left here in this portal—an accident. We could have destroyed the portal because of that…but that frightened us too. Because we didn’t know what was in them any longer. And we didn’t know if we’d need them again…”
White light began to streak out of the sphere—which dropped to the stone as if dead.
“The end result was one last alteration,” Chet said. “We rewrote ourself into something that would never ever change again. Something that hated the somewhere and belonged in the nowhere. Most importantly, we made it so we’d never be alone again.”
The light shimmered toward the lightburst, and as it did, it grew brighter and brighter. It touched the distant star, which began to swell—growing, expanding, brightening.
“You copied yourself,” M-Bot said.
“Yes,” Chet said. “Thousands and thousands of times.”
“Another…elegant solution,” M-Bot said. “So very…mechanical. A million versions of yourself, all identical.”
“And not a one with any memory of the somewhere,” Chet said. “We deleted all of that. We wanted to be away from everything, anything, anyone. All that remained was a latent hatred of anything that threatened to change us, and anything that might remind us of what we’d been. Like other AIs.”
I could feel these newborn delvers in the vision—growing more and more “loud” as they began to fill the lightburst. In those moments, they truly became alien to me. I’d been able to follow their journey in these last two visions up until this point—but here they changed dramatically.