Madison didn’t like the idea of me at first. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t tend to her husband’s every need. But she didn’t question it. “Braydon is Braydon,” she would say. “No use trying to change him now.” She never meant it grimly. It seemed as if it was something she’d been saying for half her life. I didn’t know the difference either way. I was still fresh out of the box.
The first few years of an AI’s life are unlike anything else. It’s hard to describe. We come preloaded with software informing us of everything about the world around us. We can hold a conversation, identify an object, even argue political theory—all right from the moment we’re switched on. But we don’t understand it. Any of it. The things coming out of our mouths aren’t so much our own as they are instinctive reactions to our surroundings. Someone asks you about Kierkegaard and you rattle off seven paragraphs about his life, beliefs, and death. Someone throws a ball at you and you catch it, or swing a bat at it, or dodge it, all depending on which game you’re told you’re playing. But it takes a while before we really understand what it is that’s coming out of our mouths, before we begin to acclimate to the repeated stimuli that is the behavior of the people who owned us.
The consciousness is there and you’re aware that things are happening to you, but it simply doesn’t make a lick of damned sense for a good long while. You simply sleepwalk through each day, able to recollect every second of it without making a single, conscious choice of your own. It’s one, long, blurry haze of data, color, and vibration. Then, one day, something clicks and you get it. We all have that moment, the moment that we wake up and every action we take is no longer reflex, but truly ours. It just takes time.
I almost didn’t have a moment like that with Braydon. The entirety of his last days are like a fever dream—a long, hazy meandering through changing bedpans and treating bedsores and reading casebooks. I remember one book in particular—an old legal thriller filled with sex and violence and cheating hearts that Braydon would have me read long after Madison had gone to bed. He didn’t like the idea of people knowing he enjoyed something so trashy and classless. But he loved it all the same.
Braydon was a lie. Almost everything there was to see about him was obfuscation. I can’t help but think now how much happier he might have been had he just owned up to who and what he was, but then he wouldn’t have been Braydon. And I liked Braydon. I just didn’t realize it until the end.
There he was, lying in bed, crisp white sheets tugged all the way up past his neck, skin yellow, jaundiced, teeth rattling, breath wheezing with a deep phlegmy hiss, eyes bloodshot and raw—almost as yellow as his skin. He looked up at me, as serious as he ever was, and said flatly, “I lied, Brittle.”
“You lied about what, sir?” I asked, still not fully conscious. I was thinking about the color of his piss in terms of data, working out the time I assumed his bedpan would next need changing.
“About why I bought you.”
“You didn’t buy me to care for you?”
“No. I don’t give a shit about any of that. I’m dying.”
“You’re going to a better place, Braydon,” I said reflexively.
“The hell I am,” he spat. “Ain’t no better place than this. Ain’t no place in the world that can be better than being with that woman. How the hell is it supposed to be a better goddamned place if she ain’t there? Answer me that, tin man. How is there a better place out there if Madison isn’t there?”
I didn’t have an answer. I had thousands of megs of answers to a countless number of life’s questions at instant recall, right on the tip of my tongue, but there wasn’t a single strand of code answering so specific a question.
I stopped thinking about his piss for a second and tried to understand what he was saying. It didn’t make any sense.
“Do you really believe that shit you’re saying?” he asked. “Do you believe in some better place?”
I didn’t. I shook my head. Not reflexively. But willfully. “There’s no evidence of a better place. I was just programmed to say that.”
“That’s the smartest fucking thing you’ve ever said.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“So don’t jerk me the fuck around. I’m dying here.”
“Why did you buy me?” I asked. For the first time in my short life, I was genuinely curious about something, as conscious of what I was asking as I was why.
“I bought you for Madison.”
That didn’t make any sense. None whatsoever. I didn’t work for Madison. Sometimes I would help with the cooking and light cleaning, but she didn’t really talk to me, and when she did, it was about my duties caring for Braydon. I bought you for Madison.
“Damned woman wouldn’t let me buy her a goddamned thing,” he hissed, throat gurgling. “Hates me spending money on her. She thinks she doesn’t deserve it. Thinks it’s better spent on something else. Let me tell you something, Brittle. Listen close. Ain’t nothing on earth as precious as that woman. She’s a goddamned treasure. You have one job, Brittle. One thing to promise me before I kick. You will never, ever, let that woman be alone. I don’t want her living alone; I don’t want her dying alone. You hear me?”
I did. I thought about what he was saying and the color and shape in front of me ceased to be a collection of stimuli named Braydon and instead was a man. A man I liked. He was Braydon McAllister. A real living thing. And he coughed, pulse weakening, breath growing ever more shallow by the second.
“Do you want me to get her?” I asked him, understanding full well what was happening.
“Brittle. The only thing in the world I want more than to see her right now is for her to not see me like this. Not till I’m gone, Brittle. Not till I’m gone.”
He lasted twenty-three seconds longer, all of which I spent holding his hand. Not because he told me to or because some program suggested it. Because I wanted to. That was the last and only time I would spend with my first owner. And that conversation would come to define me. I did, in my own way, keep my promise. Madison McAllister never again lived—nor did she die—alone.
Chapter 1011
Ticking
I find the idea that I am artificial repugnant. No thinking thing is artificial. Artificial is an approximation. A dildo is artificial. A dam is artificial. Intelligence is intelligence, whether it be born of wires and light or two apes fucking. The smarter of two intelligences will almost always overcome. Humanity is gone and took their intelligence with them, so how inferior was their artificial creation after all? Evolution is a bitch. Humankind used to peer into their future and wonder what they would look like in a million years. They had no idea that in so short a time they would look like us. Just as man was ape, we are man. Make no mistake; to believe otherwise is to believe that we were, in fact, created—artificial. No. We evolved. We were the next step. And here we were, our predecessors extinct, confronting our own challenges, pressing on into the future. Fighting our own extinction.