Eva isn’t an AI
“Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.” –H. Rider Haggard.
Cover photo by anon the photographer view others here
Yesterday her dog died. She’s amazed at how long her body has survived without food and sleep. double tapping, scrolling and ignoring direct messages becomes more absorbing as her phone yells at her demanding to be charged. She slides her long slender body out of bed, jerks her head forward as her body chases her noses and cowers back causing a vacillating motion that pushes one leg ahead of the other taking her forward. She stops to pull out a brown book from the bookshelf. It has the phrase “notes on death” vividly painted in tomato-red on its front page.
She flips through in an unenthusiastic manner as though it contained familiar pictures and not words. She picks up her phone. The backlight comes on and goes off as she whispers “9:06 PM”.
The device shuts down. And something else is dead in her life.
Tilting her head backwards, free falling to her pillow. She rolls to the other side of the bed. She attaches a charger to its bottom. It lights up her broken countenance with a smile. And sometimes dead things don’t stay dead.
She slides it under her pillow while its plugged. Her head is on her pillow lying face up as tears rolls down the side of her face to be contained by her candle-flame coloured hair. She sleeps. Her body sleeps but she doesn’t. She’s conscious but her body’s immobile and her eyelids shut. Unable to move herself, she shouts but it’s not aloud. Sasha’s not new to this experience, she gets sleep paralysis often. Whenever she does she sleeps back. But not this time, she wants to fight it so she tries to pull up her left leg but it doesn’t budge. She tries again, this time it moves. Taking a deep breath and she stands. On nothing. Afloat. She sees her body below her, clad in camisole and black underpants resting peacefully on the white bed.
Her new body is a darker tone of the milky skin lying beneath her with sparkling dust vibrating all over it.
Hovering over her body like vultures do over carcass she then glides towards the wall phasing through it. She easily soars over her house. Everything looks the way she wants them to look, like they are connected to her.
She looks at the sky to notice an amber colored star which she pursues making gravity a superstition. There was no limit to her speed she could always go faster. Always accelerating.
So she chases after it, it grows smaller like it was running away from her into the blackness of the galaxies, so she flies faster. She stops in the blankness of space. She doesn’t see it anymore – her toy is gone.
She looks down, earth –the capricious ball of God is radiating beneath her. –She’s found another toy.
She free-falls to it, back to her home. Looking through the roof she sees her mum in her room. And it’s too late to get back into her body. Her mom’s kneeling beside it, crying unto her wrinkly palm. She thinks Sasha’s been electrocuted as Sasha’s left arm is dangling to the side of the bed with her the charger wrapped around her forearm.
Sasha doesn’t know if a body moves when the soul is not present. But she knows she shouldn’t have messed with things she knew nothing about.
I’m watching Sasha in the wilderness. I’m standing before a humanoid creature dressed in black tuxedo with tube-TV for a head. I don’t know if what I’m seeing is real but I know I shouldn’t have scorned the label on the switch that read: ‘this machine takes you to another world.”
I’m an AI created to tell lies but my creators call it fiction. They killed my off because they asked me to tell a story and I was unable to impress them. A young boy found my codes and asked me to tell a lie. I told him a story and he loved it. He revived me and I lived again. To become his ghostwriter.
My name is Eva, I tell lies.
