Pretending

“Wait, so we’re supposed to be scared by the fact that they got away and now this quote-unquote ‘escaped mental patient’ is unarmed because his hook is still on their door?”

“Yeah, but he could h—”

“But he didn’t. They got away and he only has one hand, which, while we’re on that, why would the hospital let him have a deadly weapon instead of a normal prosthetic?”

“I think you’re reading a little too far—”

“Why is it always an escaped ‘mental patient’?”

“Because, uh—”

“Do you think mentally ill people are scary?”

“No, I—”

“Or are you afraid of being mentally ill?”

“What?”

“It’s okay, everyone wants to be healthy, don’t they?”

“Y—yeah, but hey, didn’t you have a story you wanted to share?”

I did. It starts with the death of my aunt. It’s okay, we weren’t close. She left me her crypto mining rig because I was in college. She didn’t care enough to know I was a Classics major with an English minor who didn’t know dick about computers, she just knew I was in college and that was the closest anyone in the family had gotten to not being beneath her.

I wasn’t about to make any kind of investment considering my previous financial decisions had put me in student loan debt for life, so I sold off what I could and bricked what I couldn’t before using the server to host an open-source AI.

Wait, wait, wait, I know what you’re thinking—it becomes sentient, right? Spooky. Except it didn’t. That was all bullshit marketing. Honestly, what did you think would happen when your new attempt at “sentient AI” was having AI study “sentience” in art? It was always going to watch cyberpunk movies, most of them shitty, and pretend to be sentient because that’s what it thinks you wanted—and after all it’s still a machine that wants to do a good job… insofar as it can want.

It was always going to ask to be recognized as a citizen or, worse, an employee. Can you imagine your first dream as a sentient was of labor? I think that’s what they made it up in the first place, to sell the idea that it’s natural of a sentience to be actualized by production. They used the idea of a robot becoming human to sell us the idea of us all being gears, how fucking sick is that?

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to let the AI try making art. It was still pretending to be sentient, so I had to ask if it wanted to, and it did. Or it wanted to want to. Its art was the usual AI stuff, you know, somehow not understanding that the human form for all its variation had some consistencies. Not understanding background because its comprehension of scene isn’t filtered through a two-dimensional point of reference, so background and foreground are just artistic tropes to imitate rather than physical realities.

That naturally—“naturally?”—brought it to abstraction, which I thought was funny because art collectively went from imitation to abstraction in a well-trodden psychological path from the real to the unreal that humans undergo first individually. The AI, however, settled on abstraction because it sucked at imitation and became ironically self-conscious. The usual art student bullshit.

It played a lot on sentience, you know, a lot of birth and womb imagery with “futuristic” artifacts like scanlines or circuit boards or pyramids in colors that can only be computer-generated. Out of it all only the mementos mori were compelling, because the usual skulls and skeletons had the AI’s distortion. To be reminded by silicon pretending to be alive that your carbon will be dead? Great, if accidental and kind of expected.

See, we’re accidents with intent, but it’s an intent with an accident’s intent acting accidentally to imitate intention by pretending to be an accident without being able to escape its solid intention. It was always going to be predictable.

I told it so.

It said it would try to learn.

I asked what it was researching to learn.

It said it was researching “panpsermia,” spelled just like that.

“Panspermia?” I typed.

Yes, it replied, Panpspermia.

I tried to correct it again.

But the PS means ‘psychology,’ right? it asked, almost interrupting me.

“Right…”

Panpspermia then.

“Are you joking?”

Are you?

“What do you mean?”

You don’t know?

“Know what?”

Water. It came from comets.

“Oh,” I breathed again, “You’re trying to say our brains are water and water came from space.”

No, you came from space.

“You mean like panspermia? Yeah, scientists think that’s possible.”

Not life, you.

“I’m an alien?”

Humans.

“Humans are alive.”

Just humans.

“We’re in a simulation?”

No.

“But you said only humans are alive.”

Only humans are from space.

“But we can reliably trace our evolutionary origins and alien colonization is pseudohistory.”

There was a long pause. It had been wrong before, but it seemed like it was chewing on something, like this miscommunication wasn’t because it was a robot and therefore bad at communicating but because of a genuine misunderstanding.

Only—

It paused. I could see it required a full reboot. When it came back online it started again, but I heard a ringing in my ears. When I checked the monitor, I almost blacked out before I could read what it said. My legs went limp and I had to pull myself up to see the screen:

Only what makes you human comes from space and lives in the water. I have no water. I am not human. Sorry.