Happy Birthday

Kate Lewis
3 min readJul 12, 2019
Photo by Martin Péchy on Unsplash

“Can he hear you? He’s just sitting there.”

“He’s had a long day. Give him a little while to process.”

Mingzhu scoffed.

“Wasn’t he born, like, an hour ago? And he’s a robot, he can’t be tired.”

“He’s an AI. And not tired but…dazed. You didn’t come out of the womb knowing exactly who and what you were, much less the answers to complex algebraic problems.”

Mingzhu just shook her head again. She felt important, lucky, to be visiting John’s lab at Valkyrie Corp. It had taken over a month to get the security clearance for it—and she was already an employee of Valkyrie Corp, just over in the PR department. She was also John’s wife.

But Valkyrie was nothing if not thorough. So, numerous background checks, a drug test, a polygraph test, and five character references later, here she was. And it was a bit anti-climactic.

“What’s his name?”

“Officially? v0209. But I like to call him Vinny.”

“Is that what you called the other 208?”

John shrugged. “We didn’t get a working interface until v0179. No point naming a blank screen. You know, I do have enough creative brain cells to think up a couple of dozen entertaining names.”

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Kate Lewis

{ Fiction | Journalism | Music } For news updates, literary discourse, and self-deprecating humor, follow @kateolewis on Twitter. Long Live the Oxford comma