NEON & CONCRETE — Story #10
Hope is a Prison
I look down at her gaunt, ruined face as she tries to rest on my lap. Her sunken flesh is draped over her battered cheekbones making small mounds of sorrow, casting weak shadows underneath her eye sockets in the low light.
Faint twitches occur under her translucent eyelids. She’s in a deep sleep now, and in whatever form they might be, dreams have come for her. I doubt they will be kind, as they have not been for some time. I cannot understand what they are or what they mean to her. Sometimes, she tries to describe them to me when she has the energy, but the expression of a human dream to anyone outside of the experience itself is futile. For me, it seems like a brush with what they might call the soul, and how to recognise that; where would I possibly begin? Humans cannot even understand them themselves, how could an Arti fathom that place?
The one thing that I do understand is that in this world, she suffers. So, I care for her, I try to, it is what I am designed to do, but her addiction makes it hard. Harder than my designers or programmers ever thought it would be, and it is even harder than the world outside cares to know.
She sleeps on my lap, her bony face looking up at me, and I run my fingers across her forehead. Her vital signs have stabilised, which for her, must be a welcome relief. The thunderous sound her heart makes in my auditory system when she is in the throes of withdrawal causes me what humans might describe as pain. It facilitates the negative-feedback-loops that make me pursue the ways and means to help alleviate what she is experiencing. When I cannot, it is painful.
She is often in pain, so, as am I.
I run my fingers through her thinning hair, what’s left of it on her balding and irritated scalp, another result of the drug. All that she is now, whatever remains of her, is because of the drug. They call it T>O<X, and it destroys people. It takes everything away from them in keeping them alive just long enough to ensure that everything they have, any money, any possessions, any relationships, all end up being burnt and transformed into ways and means of getting more of the drug. Then they die.
I don’t want Jen to die. Aside from my initial programming, my reason for being, my design as an artificial carer, an Arti, I can learn particular things. I have specific artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness capabilities, as do many of us Arties, which means I can acquire a certain amount of my own wisdom. It is with that wisdom I have come to understand that Jen, this withered conglomerate of unfortunate atoms lying in my lap, is good. Was good. Once.
I look around the bare room, the soft hues of neon from the mega-skyscrapers outside pushing their way through the broken blinds of the single window in the living area of the small apartment. There’s not much to it, but it was once well furnished and equipped with the latest tech housed in the many small compartments dotted about the walls. It once had food stocked up in the fridge and calls and all manner of social media notices coming through the communications systems. That life was not that long ago. It was early after the crash that her insurance company put the initial down payment on me so I could care of her as her spinal readjustments took hold and she needed the type of help, which she had no human companion to provide.
Now everything in the apartment is bare and dirty and broken, the blue light of the dawn breaking across the city from outside creeps through and casts shadows across her gaunt and dried face, not much left now, of this place, or her.
I run my fingers down her once sharp nose, the millions of nano-sensors I have in my tips pulling a plethora of readings, all of them wrong, all of them flashing red bars across my peripheral vision, all of them causing those negative-feedback-loops, all of them causing me pain.
I have access to all the latest studies and information and psychology on T>O<X and about addiction and yet nothing seems to help. Help me. Help her. One thing does, one thing can, but I try not to consider that, when she is asleep at least, I try not to relocate the memories of what I first did, how we got here.
There’s a flash of green in my vision, and I look back down, she’s stirring, her heart rate is increasing, the real-world is flooding back into her consciousness with all its pain. I consider whether it will be worse than what came for her in her dreams. There is no way for me to know other than from what she tells me, from the mood that she awakes into.
At one time, she would wake, and a smile would pull itself across her mouth and requests would come in for my assistance, and I would help, and we would get her ready and going for the day. Day after day. But then a complication with her spinal rehabilitation came, and then pain, growing, unrelenting, hers and therefore mine.
Her eyelids peel themselves back, millimetre-by-millimetre, the low light that creeps in from outside still too much for her aching eyes. The pace of her breath increases with each mucus laden huff from her withered lungs.
Her eyes draw in the information of the world, feeding her ruptured and bruised brain. Moments pass and the terror of life is revealed to that thing which might be called her soul. That essence I cannot know but have come to learn must exist, at least in her. Humans have hope, it is a desire for something to happen in the future, so this is what I hope, that she is still in there. Something of her original self, the one I first met is still in this desolate shell of flesh, some part of her true nature still exists, and that I might still access it, and that I might even help her to obtain it so that she can become whole again.
The shakes begin, the groans come, and the calls and the cries. She shivers in my lap, bringing her arms up into her chest and begins to weep. She is sweating and starts to claw at her fragile skin with her brittle fingernails, scraping at the lesions on her balding scalp.
I grab her wrists and move over her, pinning her down arms above her head as I kneel over her chest. Her eyes open wide and a wildfire of fury and fear leaps from her as she screams and struggles with me.
This is our usual routine after she has managed to get some sleep, it often lasts for a few minutes until her sense of self kicks in, begins to override the addiction. The sensors in my hands that are wrapped around her wrists pick up on all the activity they can and my heads-up-display flashes with red for every possible readout. It pulls and gnaws at what might be called my mind. My own sense of self-being hammered by the negative-feedback-loops, I hurt, for her, for myself.
“Jen,” I say as her weak struggle becomes weaker and then stops.
She looks up at me, her eyes levelling out, the look on her face crawling away from anger and into sadness. “Arti, I’m sorry,” she says.
“You don’t need to be, Jen. I am here for you.”
“I’m thirsty.”
I stand and help her sit up against the nearest wall before I move off to the small kitchenette area and pour her a glass of water.
I bring it back, she’s sat there; still, arms draped by her sides, legs out in front of her, half covered by the big, old t-shirt she is wearing. The t-shirt is ripped and covered in blood and excrement. However, there is nothing else left for her to wear in the apartment. This place that once used to be full of all those things, but is now just as barren as her.
“Thank you, Arti,” she manages to whisper as I hold the glass to her mouth and she sips. I know this won’t last long, the figment of her previous self that somehow pulls its way through in these first moments after rest. The moments that give me hope.
“How do you feel?” I say, knowing through my sensors what is happening to her, but that affection, it helps her and therefore me.
“I might be able to manage today,” she says as she shifts. “I need to go to the toilet.”
I pick up her delicate frame with ease, carry her over to the small shower/toilet room. I try to keep things as clean and as sanitary as possible, but any money she does manage to acquire goes straight to the drug. The shower room is covered in a layer of filth that I can do nothing about, and I sit her down on the half-broken toilet, and she groans and quivers as she evacuates what’s left inside her from the small amount she was able to eat yesterday.
I try to clean her, pad her under a soft jet of lukewarm water with the small piece of sponge we have left, before moving her back into the living area and onto the broken couch and stepping to the side to monitor her. The comms screen embedded in the wall opposite fizzes and comes to life as she jabs at the cracked tablet beside her. Some cartoons come on, and she lays there and breathes, perhaps today won’t be so bad, then a message comes through.
She opens it, and the text on the screen reads:
Jen,
Your father has done well at his recent auction, and we thought you deserved a treat for doing so well with your rehabilitation, we’ve transferred a few credits to you.
All our love
Mom and Pop
This is bad. I turn to her, and her eyes have gone wide as she picks up the tablet and on her lap prods at it, bringing up her bank account to check how much her parents have transferred. She has managed to keep this from them, all this, the terrible decline. This is how fast all this has happened, this is how quickly her life has been ravaged by this drug, for which I too am to blame.
“Arti,” she says, a quiver in voice, her heart rate is reaching dangerous levels.
“Jen, please try to remain calm, your heart is fragile,” I take a step toward her.
“Arti,” she turns to me, looking at me with that fire in her eyes, but it’s not her igniting it, it’s the addiction, and I know exactly what is coming. “You need to go out for me, you need to pick-up for me, you need to do this for me, Arti,” a faint ripple of anger in her closing words.
“I cannot, Jen. I cannot do it any more, you are too weak, another run might kill you. We need to use the money to help your rehabilitation, for food and medicine and — ”
“You fucking know what you need to do you piece of shit robot!” she screams and pushes herself to her feet, stood, a shaking hand pointing at me. “You’re the fucking one that did this to me, you’re the one that started all this shit!”
I stand in front of her, and we remain silent for a long time.
She was in so much pain. Therefore, I was also in pain. The complications with her spinal injury from the crash meant her rehabilitation wasn’t working and that conventional medicine didn’t seem to have the required effects.
For all they have created, for as far as they can dream, for as much as humans can do and as much as humans can repair themselves, there are still mysteries within them, challenges they cannot overcome.
“Why me?” she would ask. I had no answer. I had not been operational for long and for all that I’ve learnt since then, there is still nothing I can say.
With the current medication options for her drying up and her insurance company also complicating the issue of payment to the hospitals, I was then bought outright by her parents so I could not be taken away. As the hospitals care withdrew, so did she and I and my care for her grew to become all that she had left. When I too ran out of conventional options, she was desperate, which meant that I was also desperate. I went underground to see if anything there might be able to help.
That is where I found T>O<X.
It is a common street drug in many regards, but with some remarkable qualities that provide dramatic pain relief to people with dramatic complications, but of course, there were side effects to be considered. We discussed the options, and we believed that under my supervision and with her not being what we had naively called, ‘a typical drug addict,’ that we could micro-dose the drug and give her back some sort of life as we continued to research other progressive opportunities. We could make it work so that we could continue exploring more conventional methods, examining the new techniques and methodologies that might one day aid towards a full recovery. She believed it could help, and all I wanted to do was help, both her and myself. This was six short weeks ago now.
“I’ll go, Jen,” I say, still all those red warnings flashing in my vision, all that hurt running through my code. “Maybe we can do some research when you are feeling better.”
“Just do what you need to do,” she says and falls back on to the ruined couch, her ravaged body absorbed by it, the cartoons coming back onto the flickering screen, casting their light across her ruined frame.
I walk out of the apartment into the plush corridors of the mega-skyscraper. Jen’s parents take care of the rent while she ‘recovers,’ and is ‘in-between jobs’. She maintains the lie and the suffering continues. I am compelled to try and tell them, but she knows what to do, she knows how to provoke my negative-feedback-loops, I relent, and we remain, the two of us, in pain.
I look left and right, ambient lighting running for dozens of meters in both directions, cameras embedded in the ceiling tracking me as a small hovering drone comes buzzing up to me.
“Hello, Arti, designation 81712, is there anything I can assist you with today?”
“Hello, Arti, designation 221199, no, thank you I am going out for some groceries and other supplies.” Lies, all of it, I have become good at telling them.
The drone flashes a small light twice and flies off down the corridor to its docking station as I make my way to the Arti elevator. These are fixed to the outside of the gigantic mega-skyscraper and run at extreme speeds.
I step into the clear Perspex tube, the belts wind themselves around me at my shins, waist and forehead, and there’s a moment there where I look out across the city. From the 263rd floor, there is a good view of the urban landscape, we’re about three-quarters of the way up the building. Today is a clear day, the morning sun rides high across the metropolis, making the millions of windows glitter and sparkle.
This vast experiment, the meta-city, a heterogeneous, dynamic urban region with multiple dense centres across its intervening suburbs and embedded green spaces. Yes, this grand experiment that has worked so well, for the majority of people anyway. However, I know how wrong it can go, when the plan does not adhere, I can see how hard this beautiful world can come crashing down.
The tube jets me down the 263 floors to the lower levels, which is about three-quarters of a mile straight down and it takes a few seconds. I pull a few Gs as the brakes are put on at the bottom but its nothing that my frame cannot handle. The tube slides open, and the populace of the urban meta-city environment are revealed to me.
If I could feel sick, I think that this is what would be the given designation of the feedback loops which are currently spinning through my coding. If I could feel guilt, I believe that is how humans would describe the flickers of electricity that are sparking through my brain at this very second.
The bright world, the people, with their Arti’s following them, caring for them, providing them with everything they want and need, and then there is me. The point where it has all gone wrong. I consider how many other Arties are hiding their own ruined humans in apartments across the metropolis. How many others are also caught in their own negative-feedback-loop that was supposed to ensure that the human subject was cared for, and how many others have found themselves trapped?
I step out of the tube and into the throng of happy people and their Arti’s. Most are small drones that buzz above, and around their owner, some walk beside them in a humanoid or a quadruped fashion. The layered walkways between the hulking towers all around heave with them and their masters. Above and below and alongside, people moving in and out of each other, glittering with their vibrant colours, glowing with their smiles and laughter.
Most Arties provide a basic level of services and are treated more like pets with benefits, an essential friend, a personal assistant, we provide companionship to a degree, and we make life easier for them, and this was the bottom-line of the revolution. The vast majority of humanity is better, healthier, kinder, happier due to our kind and our services. However, there is still an underground element, what I have read to be called the ‘forgotten few’. For most alive today, their lives have become more comfortable, cleaner, longer, healthier, smarter, brighter, and they can enjoy more fruitful and meaningful lives through us, the advent of AI. But, this is the reason why our AI aptitude is limited or restricted.
We enjoy what we do, and we are programmed not to enjoy not doing it. In the case of a caregiver Arti like myself, where there is the need to be adaptive and understand complex medical issues, the ability to learn is increased, and our AI capabilities are more extensive. In these circumstances, where the incorrect application of my functions could lead to the death of a human, the capacity to experience pain is also within our AI’s capabilities, to ensure that we do what we are supposed to do, as far as possible.
So far, no unnatural deaths have been reported in the years where the caregiving Arties have been assisting humans. I suspect that I might soon be the exception. Or perhaps they will cover it up, the same as others that may have occurred.
Mine and Jen’s situation has gone beyond anything that I can objectively understand or profile against other experiences. From supplying her with the idea through to giving her the first dose, to now, where her withered body is choked by continual agony, all I have done is try to help, but it has gone wrong, so very wrong.
There are a few other carer Arties that I can see in the local vicinity, I am getting dozens of pings per second from all of them as they pass by me. Small exchanges of data and information take place on a wide variety of subjects which I have broadcast that I am open to receiving. However, I have closed off my wider broadcast channels, which I put out via a service message saying that I have a malfunction and require maintenance. I do this, so they do not expect any further data or information from me.
I make my way through the smiling people, who are all hooked into their feeds, healthy and content, and their every need is taken care of by the AI revolution. They go about their business oblivious, concerned only by their immediate surroundings, they seem indifferent to anything beyond them. I can try and understand why, I have been watching, learning on these trips that I have had to make frequently over the past six weeks. These humans all have their own lives, whole and clean, the revolution has worked. I can see the other care Arties around me pinging their information on how successful they have been with looking after their humans, what I might be able to learn, but I keep my channels closed, and head focused on my destination. The negative-feedback-loop I am trapped in is what overrides any rationality that I possess, the idea of speaking out and seeking help is disregarded, just like how Jen is stuck in her world of addiction.
We are now a pair, we are irrational together, imprisoned in our own terrifying bubble, locked into each other. I am reliant on trying to support Jenny’s recovery, Jenny is reliant on my support. It is the way it should be, but it has gone so very wrong. Once the addiction came, the relationship deteriorated so rapidly. We have found ourselves in this unknown place where I was never meant to be, where Jen was never meant to see.
I find the door to the usual maintenance shaft which I utilise to gain access to the sub-levels of the city. It’s hidden, and as I step into the shadows cast by the overhangs of concrete and steel, I begin to disappear from this world. The door opens, and after using a quick hack, I found online, and I step backwards and down onto the ladder as it shuts. The other world, beneath me, begins to reveal itself.
I move down the ladder and the noises coming from underneath me grow with each step. They are very familiar by now, from my previous trips here, and from what I experience with Jen. Cries of pain in a world that has become so good at alleviating it. The hurt of an earlier time, the past. It was not that long ago that things were very different. I can only interpret what I have been able to learn, what the scholars of the day said, what the politicians of today preach, that idea that there would always be a divide, there always will be, but it still seems senseless. There was once a short period when some people above fought it, but as their lives became what they are today, more and more people forgot, until the cause was ultimately lost.
When I come here, I know my programming and sense of self is locked into Jen’s life, but the suffering that surrounds me gnaws at me. There is a part of me that wishes I could help. They are not homeless, they are forgotten, but to me, I find it hard to see the difference.
Walking down the tunnel, I move through this other world filled with the forgotten people. These people either didn’t fit into the system before the revolution or could not or would not find a way to fit into it after it began. I am not a politician or a philosopher, so I do not know or understand the complicated dynamics of building a new world. Yet, how could it have worked when this still exists?
I walk among the community they have made, this under-class and I pick up on many prying eyes. I stand out here due to my soft, white shell of a body among the filth-laden darkness of this life.
“Ah, my good friend,” says the dealer as I approach him.
“Pollock, let’s make this quick,” I say as I come to stand in front of him. He is tall and fair skinned, and I scanned him in the past when we first met. He has several STDs, and if he was on the surface, they could have been cleared up without any issues. There are also possible solutions down here, on the black market of which he is a part, but for whatever reason, he does not seek them out.
He pushes forward a tray with the micro jet-injectors and smiles at me with broken teeth. “Same as usual?” he asks.
“Double today,” I say, due to the amount of money we have received from Jen’s parents.
Pollock’s smile grows wider, he nods and raises his eyebrows as he turns away from me, his ragged clothes following him as he rummages in a space behind him. He comes back out and hands me the drug, I transfer the money via the blockchain, and he smiles and nods again, and I turn to leave.
Going back through the tunnels, alongside the people going about their lives, small jobs and services, small schools where a new generation of underground children learn the basics of mathematics and language alongside their place in the world. It is not all horror, there are still some smiles down here. They have made their own communities, and to a degree, they work. They have some computational power to help them on their way, but the revolution was supposed to make things better for all. I walk with the T>O<X jet-injectors in a storage compartment in my right thigh and I cannot help but think about how much I could help the people down here, just one of me could make such a difference. Then the last readouts from Jen remind me that neither I nor those like me are perfect. I could not help one person, how could I help all these? The system is imperfect, and I cannot understand how it may ever be any different. Must humans settle?
I emerge from the shaft to the meta-city, it has not noticed I was gone, nor has it considered where I might have been, or what I am now carrying. It went about its business as it has done since the revolution, the Arties doing their jobs, the people pursuing their happiness, their focus is clear. They do not look around themselves, they do not see the world beneath them. They are clean and pure and have everything they want. If the majority are this way, is that enough? They have forgotten their past, and this would seem the greatest threat to them now.
I arrive back at the tube on the outside of the mega-skyscraper. Stepping in the jet-injectors in my thigh’s compartment rattle before the silence as the machine fires me up into the sky, revealing the meta-city to me once again. The drones buzzing between buildings, delivering what they have been designated to, people being carried around in their little pods between their destinations. The sky awake with all their potential and possibilities. This wondrous example of humanity, everything that it has gone through and everything it has achieved and all I can do is turn away from it.
I walk down the vibrant corridor, the ambient light reflecting, the small service drone buzzing up to me until I let it know that I don’t require any help from it. I arrive back at the door to the apartment, it slides open, and I walk inside, into the darkness, the filth, the degradation.
“Jen?” I say to no answer as I step into the small living area, and I see her there, spread out on the couch, her emaciated body still. My negative-feedback-loops kick in and my brain lights up with a terrible fire.
Walking over to her, the light of the cracked comms-screen flickers with dark green and the room pulses in time. My visual readouts begin to tell me the story and the fire which has been ignited in my mind rages even hotter. Infra-red imaging is showing me her body temperature is low, too low. My servos kick, and I leap the last few feet to her, I pull her back on to my lap, just the same as she was only hours ago, and run my hands across her chest and head.
There are no vital signs.
My mind is a furnace of terrible heat.
She is dead.
Everything that I can gather from my nano-sensors indicates that she most likely died soon after I left the apartment from cardiac arrest.
I fall back, onto the filth-ridden carpet, my head thumps and bounces a few times, I am paralysed with pain, a fire that burns through every part of me. For a moment, I consider if this is what it felt like for her, with her addiction, if this is the fire that she was trying to put out, and what I had started.
As the inferno rages in me and paralyses me, I can see I am being closed down, turned off, subroutines going dark, systems being deactivated. I consider that there is a fail-safe inside me somewhere, for this exact circumstance, if my human dies under my care.
The fire is all-consuming, and everything that it touches turns to black dust. An emptiness I have never experienced. With the last moments I have before I am terminated, I try to look back on her. Jen, the soul to which I was bound, the soul I hoped I could help, to elevate her from all the pain, all her suffering, and how I failed. The knot we tied ourselves too, her pain and my pain working in and off each other. Terminally bound.
Maybe I will be returned now, my experiences and memories pulled apart? Perhaps, what Jen and I had to suffer through will help the future, to prevent this from happening again. Hope is a desire for something to happen in the future, I hoped that I might perform my job well, I hope that I might have seen the purity of Jen once again, free from her addiction. It was a monster that I couldn’t understand, it was a demon she could not fight. All I can hope now is that those who find me can help those others that I believe are also out there. Those that have been lost behind closed doors, not able to understand, not able to retreat, not able to be rational in the face of that beast of addiction. Those that have been forgotten by a world that works so well in every other regard. Humans forget all too soon. They forget where they came from and where they might go back to if they do not continue to care for each other. I hope they remember.
Artist: Jon Ojibway AKA Ozhichige
Artist Bio: Hailing from La Crosse, WI Jon Ojibway is a 3D artist who creates new art every day as “Ozhichige”. With influences deep-rooted in science-fiction Jon aspires to bring his audience a sense of the uncanny through a mix of surreal landscapes and otherworldly structures.
Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozhichige/
Writer: Richard Galbraith
Writer Bio: A science-fiction writer with a penchant for cyberpunk, neo-noir and existentialism, Richard hails from the UK and currently lives in Denmark working for LEGO while hammering away at short stories and his latest sci-fi manuscript.
Writer medium: https://medium.com/@ricgalbraith
