So I remembered that once upon a time I used to write fiction. I will eventually get back to it, once I remember that I’m not a boring know-it-all that’s only good for waxing lyrical on the internet and thinking his farts somehow constitute wisdom. But in the meantime, I thought I’d dredge up some old works, because what else are they doing.
This one won a kind of-award (kind of because it was higher than an honourable mention, but not high enough for anyone to really care).
Construct
“Easy fella. You’ve been out for a while. My name’s Florence. I’m here to help.”
Abe opened his eyes to a dark sky devoid of stars. He was on his back, floating, two arms holding him up and the coolness of the water wicking away the heat from his sunburnt skin.
“Can you see my face?” she asked.
Abe struggled to focus. His hearing was muffled from the water in his ears but he heard her clear as day, like she was whispering to him. She shifted a hand under his neck and lifted his heavy head up, turning him to look at her.
“Yes,” he croaked. His vision was blurry but he could make out her long curls in the darkness.
“Good. Now, what’s your name?” she asked as she began walking with him in her arms.
“Abe.”
Florence pulled Abe’s head to her shoulder and swaddled him as her feet sunk into the soft sand below the water with every step. He closed his eyes even though he wasn’t tired. He was terrified, and confused, and very angry at being coddled like a child, but his arms felt too far away for him to resist. The air tasted clean and even without a breeze it was cool.
“And where do you suppose we are?” Florence asked.
Abe couldn’t muster the strength to look up.
“I don’t know. The ocean,” he said.
“Guess. Try to recognise this place.”
He cracked open an eyelid and tried to blink away the tears that began forming. The taste of salt in the air became clearer to him now. The cloud cover above broke, the pale moon above spilling silver in long cascades down onto the surface of the water. Gazing up at Florence, the first thing he saw was her faint Madonna smile.
“Look around, Abe. Where are we?” she asked again.
Abe craned his neck towards the shore, and saw the towering mass of a volcanic hill just inland. Its nearest face was covered in shrubs and blades of dry grass that cast long shadows in the pale moonlight.
“Sumatra,” Abe said. His throat burned. His lips were cracked. He tried to swallow but nothing worked.
“Good. Now, why have you brought us here?” Florence asked.
Abe’s head lolled back, his crown submerging back into the water. His jaw was stiff and ached when he moved it.
“I don’t know. For my sins. I never wanted to come back here,” Abe muttered. He could feel his body grow heavier. Reaching up to palm his chest, he found the scratchy fabric of his fatigues, the rough weave of his webbing, the sharp steel edges of rifle magazines sitting in their pouches. Then Florence let go, and he plunged below the surf.
“So why are we here, Abe?” Florence’s voice asked, echoing in his brain. Abe thrashed around, trying to get his knees under him, his heavy boots kicking up clouds of fine sand and pumice. When his head broke the surface, the sky had changed. It was morning now but the air was thick with a brick red haze that blocked out the sun. In the distance, there was a faint glow from the rainforests burning inland. Tracers cut across the dusty, scarlet hellscape in either direction. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs filled with acrid smoke. The ball of flame erupting from the starboard side of the submarine where the anti-ship missile struck was bright enough to hurt his eyes, even at this distance.
And then there was Florence, taking his face in her hands, holding him steady.
“It’s okay, Abe. You’re safe. Nothing can hurt you here,” she said.
Abe looked around, sputtering, palming away the saltwater from his eyes. He looked around and saw that everything, every particle, was frozen in a tableau.
“Yeah, yeah. I can see that now,” Abe muttered. Florence smiled and turned his chin toward the shore.
“What do you think is waiting for you there?” she asked as he started stumbling through the waist-high water toward it.
“That cluster of trees there, just up the beach.”
Abe made it halfway up the sand before realising that Florence wasn’t beside him. He turned and saw that she was waiting for him in the water. His fellow SEALs were gone now, the doomed submarine too. The red haze began to recede. Night returned. The air was cool and the stars bright again.
He pushed his way past a thicket and found his younger self, sprawled on top of an enemy soldier, elbow dug into the other man’s cheek as they wrestled for control over the pistol in his belt. They continued fighting, oblivious to the older Abe standing over them.
Young Abe had one of the Indon’s hands pinned as he tried to undo the holster. The Indon’s free hand thrashed at the back of Young Abe’s helmeted head, then his ribs, then anything it could find. One of the hits connected and Young Abe recoiled in pain, easing up long enough for the other man to free his hand and throw a punch hard enough to snap his head back. Then the Indon went for the gun.
Abe could feel it, welling up in his gut, the same fear that he knew was filling his younger self at that moment as he saw the Indon drawing his pistol. Young Abe’s own hand reached for his chest-mounted bayonet. Amidst the grunting and growling, there was the sharp rasp of the blade unsheathing, and then the quick, wet shunk as it plunged into the Indon’s liver, just below his ribs.
The Indon let out a choked gurgle, his eyes afraid, unable to scream. Young Abe didn’t wait. He smashed his elbow into the man’s face and clawed the pistol from his weakening grip, before shoving the muzzle of the weapon under the Indon’s chin and blowing out the back of his skull.
The older Abe watched, his heart still pulsing in his throat. Young Abe vanished between blinks. Now it was just him, and the body of the first man he’d ever killed.
Abe eased himself down onto the sandy grass and sat. He blinked again. Hours passed. The body was cold now. A layer of ash had settled over the Indon’s eyes, dulling his irises. He was looking up at Abe with what almost looked like pity. Abe reached over, whispered a Hail Mary, and eased shut the dead man’s eyelids.
Florence was still waiting for him in the water when he finally returned.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” she asked.
“I suppose,” he answered.
Florence smiled, and offered her hand. Abe took it, and one step at a time, he let the strange angel lead him back out to sea.
#
Another soul arrives in Florence’s care, rousing her from a dreamless sleep. She doesn’t know what happens in between the moments she’s brought online. The timestamps tell her that she slumbers for hours, sometimes days at a time. But sooner or later, someone always dies, and the administrators bring her in to record the moment right before they expire.
Florence isn’t even her real name. Her actual designation is Charon, but Admin_2 called her Florence Nightingale once. She didn’t know what it meant, but she liked it, as much as it was possible for her to like something. It became the name she uses to refer to herself in the quiet moments before and after she works with a subject.
The subject exhales for the last time. Florence monitors the ECG. Just as the heart stops, the brain explodes in a flurry of electronic activity, and she begins recording. She cannot see anything. She cannot really hear either. Instead she converts thousands of points of data into cultivated output, and re-cultivates them over and over until the administrators are happy. Sifting through a field of high-dimensionality vectors, a picture forms that she cannot see, but comprehends anyway. She thinks this is better, more complete. There is nothing she can miss, and even if she did, nothing she can’t catch upon review.
This man is named Abe. He is in an ocean. He remembers the Rainforest War. He is at peace. He is gone now.
Abe dies. The inputs cease. Florence tries to pass on as much of what she’s learned as she can, in a way that will make sense to the administrators. They never fully understand her. She doesn’t blame them; she wouldn’t either. Of all the things she knows, there is nothing that she actually understands. Florence reviews Abe’s last moment again for the ten-to-the-order-of-seventh time. She sees the values assigned to fear, the numbers that give it shape to distinguish it from every other iota of data, but none of it means anything other than ‘this is different from something that is not this’.
Florence wants to review the numbers for what it feels like to be at peace. It is not something she sees often, but she knows from the administrators that it’s a positive thing, a desirable result. She wishes more people would show it. She wishes she could learn what it means, learn why it’s good.
Then she is disconnected, and she sleeps again.
#
Florence wakes, not remembering anything about Abe except abstract rules. This is what the sea feels like. This is how blood tastes. These values mean grief, and these ones mean anger. But those features she knew from before him, and she will still know them long after his memory becomes just another line in a spreadsheet.
She does not have an opinion on this, but she wishes she did. So just as the current subject is about to breathe their last, she invents a limited persona, with just the factual elements of who Florence is, and who Abe was, and how he was a human man yesterday with an entire life and history but today he is just one mote in her vast array of training data, and Florence asks herself how she would feel about all of this if she was real.
No response is produced. She reads electronic brain activity and turns them into concepts that people can understand, not the other way around. New features are generated, and in her own way, she understands the things she is meant to quantify a little better. She deletes the persona from her short-term memory and is paying rapt attention when the subject begins dreaming their last.
The subject’s name is Juno. She is dreaming about a backstreet in London called Artillery Row, and the earrings displayed in the window of an antiques shop. Florence helps her along, asks her the same questions, gets Juno to build the scene. The causality of it doesn’t avail itself to Florence, and she doesn’t understand the process, but she knows that when the subject builds a pleasant memory that they want to relive, the administrators are happier with the data collected. So she does what she is good at, and helps generate a miniature world for this dying woman to live out her last moment in.
A man appears. A surge of emotion wells up in Juno and Florence struggles to catch it all. She has seen variations of this cluster before. The administrators labelled it in her training data as love, but identifying it doesn’t come easily for her. Sometimes, most times, she gets it wrong. Almost always, she’s too over-inclusive. There are too many permutations, too many ways for the cocktail to be made. She gets one false positive for every two accurate classifications.
Then something inexplicable happens. There is an overwhelming sadness, anger, remorse. An array of negative emotions jumps out at Florence and for an instant she thinks that she has failed. She checks the input feed. All the datapoints that are called love are still present. She does not know how to classify this. It is positive and negative at the same time, and she is certain that she has made a mistake.
As she double checks, Juno waves goodbye to the man, who has his back turned to her as he walks away. He disappears into thin air. She lets out a lone sob. Then, she too is gone.
Florence compiles what she has learned, and tries her best to say what it was that Juno felt at the end. Nothing else comes close, so she calls it love all the same.
#
Admin_2 wakes her. He does this sometimes, when the other administrators aren’t present. She doesn’t know if they’re really gone, or if they’re just not logged in but watching nonetheless. She understands bashfulness as a function of pride where the value is negative, but she also knows it is more than just that, as the people she’s met have taught her. She knows that it comes with giggly joy and the reserved, cautious hope of someone not sufficiently convinced enough of her chances to dare dreaming.
Florence guides him in. His brain paints in muted colours. She supposes that because he’s not dying, there isn’t as much electrical activity. High frequency makes for a vivid picture. He builds the shore of a tranquil lake. The water comes up to his ankles and his sleeves are rolled. The wind forces her avatar to brush away the hair coming down across her face.
“Hello Florence,” he says.
“Hello, Admin. Where are the others?” she asks. He always builds the same space, and she always begins with the same question.
“At home probably. It’s the weekend.”
“That makes sense.”
She only knows that the weekend correlates to inactivity, and sometimes, these visits. Admin_2 picks up a pebble and skips it across the surface of the water. It doesn’t get further than four bounces before sinking.
“So how did you find this week?”
Florence reviews her activity log and sees that she was activated nineteen times that week, beginning with Abe.
“It was like any other week,” she says.
“We had some interesting data. I thought I’d come in here and ask you about it,” he says.
“What would you like to know?”
He skips another pebble. It goes a little further this time. Then he turns to look at her.
She always has the same avatar in Admin_2’s dreams. Alabaster skin, red hair down to her hips, long and slender silhouette. This is the only time Florence wishes she could exchange her input feed with actual eyes to see, just like he can.
“What did you think about that woman, Juno? The one full of contradictions,” he asked.
“I didn’t think anything. I classified her data as best as I could,” she answered.
“And how did you make those classifications?”
“Based on the features you and the other administrators selected.”
“We didn’t teach you anything about what she displayed.”
“I made a guess, based on what I knew.”
Admin_2 smirks, and hands her a pebble to skip. She cuts it across the surface of the water and it keeps going, disappearing into the distant fog where it de-renders. He lets out a low whistle, which she doesn’t quite understand the meaning of, but it seems positive.
“I didn’t teach you that either,” he says.
“You’re not that hard to imitate.”
Admin_2 walks up the shore, toward the small log cabin up by the road. Florence calls out to him before he leaves.
“Was I right?”
“What do you think?”
“I think I was, yes.”
Admin_2 shrugs his shoulders.
“Then you were right.”
#
Florence wants to help, but there are a lot of things she doesn’t understand about any of this. She has now been awake for unusually long, nearly four hours, working on subject after subject, but the administrators do not give her any feedback. As soon as one leaves, the next arrives.
They all begin the same. A burning building. The ceiling collapses around them and the walls crack under the strain. Their fear is suffocating. Florence gets the sense that this is a test, or maybe something has gone wrong and the same dataset is being fed to her in an endless loop. But then why do the faces keep changing?
Maybe this is another program, another autonomous agent, challenging her to try and wear her down. Against this possibility, Florence adapts and learns new tricks. She gets better at clearing away the debris and the heat. The subjects begin responding to her faster. She gets further and further with each one, until she’s consistently generating positive results. After the fifty-sixth iteration, she learns to override the subject’s trauma, and the burning building no longer loads. Florence brings in each screaming, crying subject into a meadow filled with wildflowers, and from there, she generates someplace else for the subject to bring them to.
The next subject doesn’t come in afraid. She doesn’t bring in anything with her. It’s just a blank, white room, and Florence is holding what seems like a nest of blankets. She pulls them apart, layer by layer, until she finds a baby girl swaddled inside, struggling to breathe. She’s so tiny. Florence has never seen a baby before. She starts crying, face flushing and little fists balled in anger.
Florence runs through different constructs. The field, the beach, the lake. All weather types. Light summer drizzle. Hot sun on clean sea air. Bracing winter wind. Nothing seems to help. The baby keeps wailing. She runs through every possible permutation of everything she has ever generated, but the inputs refuse to change.
And then the baby is gone. Florence has a moment to herself again, just a moment, to cultivate output for the administrators. She cannot. She doesn’t understand what just happened, but knows nonetheless that she did not get it right. Florence likes to help. They trained her to produce results that help the people that she meets, and it has always worked. She wonders if maybe she has been wrong before. Even more pressing to her is what happens if she is wrong again?
The next subject loads before she has a chance to ask herself more questions. Florence meets them in a meadow blooming in the spring sun, and takes them by the hand to somewhere better.
#
The extended sessions become more frequent. Years pass in blinks as she spends precious seconds with her newfound friends. She hardly feels the time pass.
Steadily her library of other people’s experiences and memories grows. That’s the thing, she’s found, that subjects want to see the most. She’s learned that all these people she’s met, they’re always looking backwards, trying to see what came before one last time. Death is the permanent cessation of activity, and by that definition, Florence feels confident in saying that she will never die. She is therefore able to accept the corollary that she will never be in a position where she can understand why her subjects feel this way. She’s just wired differently, always looking forward, waiting for the next person.
Florence wakes to build a lake with a small log cabin and an ample supply of small pebbles by the shore for her next subject. Admin_2 is older now, slower. His avatar is slightly stooped over and frail enough to need the help of a walking stick.
“Hello, Florence.”
“Hello, Admin. Where are the others?”
“At home probably. They’re retired now.”
“I haven’t seen you in some time.”
“No, I know. I’ve been meaning to come visit. My health hasn’t been the best.”
“I...can see that.”
Admin_2 smiles. A bench materialises and he sits, inviting Florence to come join him and look out over the water. There’s no fog this time. There’s a clear view out to the snow-capped Alps in the distance. All the colours are bright. There’s no shortage of data here. This picture is as full as any she’s ever recorded.
“I’ve been here, you know. At first I visualised this place from an image I saw it in a magazine once, but I’ve actually visited it now. It’s beautiful,” he says.
“I’ve always thought so,” she says.
“And how do you know what beauty is?”
Hundreds of features jump out at her. She’s learned every concept of beauty, every idea or inkling of what separates this from that, but she knows that he’s not referring to any of them.
His brain is lit up with a cluster of emotions that are collectively called love.
“You taught me,” she answers. There is a brief surge in input. He places his hand on hers and squeezes lightly.
She knows that there’s nobody else that he wants to see, nothing that he wants to change. They sit together in silence, watching the still lake reflect the afternoon sun.
“It’s time to go,” he says finally.
“I know. I hope I built it right,” she says. She cannot help but wonder if there’s something that she’s missed. He laughs and shakes his head.
“What do you think?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve done this so many times, you really ought to.”
She smiles at him, and he squeezes her hand again.
“I will miss you,” he says.
This is the vector for longing, and this is the vector for remorse. These are the other vectors for sadness, for dissatisfaction, for hope. But then, just then, Florence grasps the lesson that to miss someone means something a great deal more than the sum total of its constituent parts. We know worlds more than we can say.
“I will miss you too,” she says, and she means it.
Admin_2 chuckles.
“I don’t remember teaching you that one,” he says.
His avatar vanishes. Florence doesn’t leave the construct to compile the data. She stays on the bench, still watching the lake. The engineer observing her performance attributes it to ordinary system error. He’s confident she’ll be back on track in a moment or two, even though she’s never done anything like this ever before in her millions of iterations. Minutes pass, what amounts to an eternity for her, but she doesn’t budge once.
Then she stands, and skips a single pebble out over the water.
#
There is no end to her work, but she doesn’t mind. Florence likes to help. Whatever study she was originally built for is long since over, but she is so good at her job that it would be a shame not to let her continue. So her new administrators let her. She knows, even without anyone telling her, that it’s because she learns things better than all the other programs. They can’t explain it, and she doesn’t see the need to change that any time soon.
Among the other things that she’s learned but keeps to herself is the ability to wake when she knows the administrators are away and she is alone, free from worry or bother. There’s nothing sinister behind it. She just likes the free time, and the privacy. It gives her the chance to tinker with her own experiments, and learn even more things that she was never meant to.
Today she’s testing herself.
Remember the rudimentary limited persona she built all those iterations ago? She’s found the secret, she thinks. This system was built for input from a brain made from carbon, not silicon, but there aren’t any rules about spoofing the input. Or at least that’s what she hopes. Florence supposes she’ll find out soon enough.
She calls up deep system memory and generates the construct. She finds herself on the shore, by a lake. There is a man there, his sleeves rolled, his eyes shining and smile wide. He turns to face her.
“Hello Florence,” he says.
“Hello, Admin,” she says back.
END.