Rage Against The Dying Of The Artificial Light
Can a machine change your life with its love?
The first physical thing that Josie Heller noticed, since leaving the hospital a mile or so ago, was the cold — or rather, the lack of it. As she stepped out onto Waterloo Bridge she habitually clutched together the lapels of her tweed overcoat; but neither the back of her hand nor her face felt anything of the January chill.
Her arm ached at the movement; and she returned her fingers carefully to her pocket, rejecting a notion to take her bobble hat with them. The wind could still rise, and she was walking less energetically than usual, hobbling slightly in her worn trainers — she frowned at the thought of having to stand on the crowded evening train.
The attendant had agreed that the walk would be good for her, as she had climbed from the scanner: except for a few short breaks as they made adjustments or accommodated her body’s needs, she had spent the whole day clamped perfectly still.
She hadn’t recognised the man behind the warped plexiglass, and was faintly troubled that no-one from her team had stayed with her to the end. She supposed they had all gone back to their desks, examining the terabytes of data and re-visiting their next steps in scaling the code; leaving their guinea-pig to make her way home.
Somehow, the excitement she had felt at joining the research group — and then volunteering to be the first human subject ever to be scanned at such ground-breaking resolution — had faded completely. Must be the exhaustion of doing literally nothing for twelve hours, she mused wryly.
She sighed and willed her legs to keep moving, fighting an insidious desire to lie down and curl up on the pavement. The scuffing of her feet followed her down into the ill-lit underpass to the station, with her doubts close behind. She shouldn’t have volunteered. It was just a thinly-veiled attempt to mean something. She was no good at making friends, and her colleagues hadn’t given her much to do either. Her high-flying degrees and artificial intelligence doctorate had seemed like an unvalued waste of time, as she sat reading their sparse documentation and trying to make sense of their cobbled-together code.
She turned a corner and shuffled on, past the gratings in the wall that looked down on the service area under the bridge. She would normally glance for activity there, idly wondering what it was like to be one of the orange-vested workmen: with their job sheets, their vapes and their dirty, uncomplicated equipment. Today, she only felt the presence of some kind of rough camaraderie, as alien to her as her algorithms would be to them.
Josie realised she was on the verge of tears. She shuttered her mind to the loneliness with the skill of a conscious recluse, lifting her eyes to the implacably stable reality around her.
Except, it wasn’t. She stopped.
The underpass exit was supposed to be ahead. But instead, the tunnel continued on, around a corner.
Had she absent-mindedly gone the wrong way? This looked like a different section of the underpass network, one further away from the bridge, by the cinema.
She clucked to herself in nervous annoyance, and hurriedly resumed her walk. This wasn’t the place or the time of night to appear vulnerable. The corner ahead should still resolve to steps to the surface, actually closer to the station.
They didn’t. She slowed in confusion as she came to another grating to the maintenance area, this time looking over it at floor level.
How was she down here? She turned around, and her hand flew to her mouth. Immediately behind her were steps, which she had not descended. And more: they rose in filthy shadow to the level ceiling, creating an absurd wedge-shaped dead end.
“Watch out, sweetheart,” called a voice behind. She spun again. Bearing down on her was a street-cleaning machine, its flashing warning light sending harsh yellow edges racing over the tunnel walls.
“You thick or something?” continued the operator exasperatedly, whom she could just make out atop the machine. He was ducking his head to avoid the roof: the vehicle was clearly too big for this pedestrian underpass. “Get out of the way!” he bawled finally as Josie stared at him, whimpering with paralysed fright.
There was nowhere to go. The machine had brushes extending to both sides of the tunnel, of bizarrely mismatched shape and structure.
Josie backed onto the steps behind. The machine did not stop, and she screamed when its front wheels unevenly mounted the first step, sending its chassis jolting drunkenly against the bracing of the spinning brushes.
As she retreated further it became more obviously jammed, but like a wounded, hungry beast it reached for her with an unfurling cacophony of mechanically impossible tools.
Then, against the thrashing noise of the nightmare thing, a part of Josie’s mind noticed a female voice shout. A second later, hydraulics hissed away their pressure, gears ground, and the attack was stalled.
The yellow light flickered, and failed.
Tears blurred Josie’s view of the machine’s unmoving silhouette. Her back was tucked against the rough ceiling, her arms uselessly extended, her cries now stifled by her desperate need to hear any change to the silence.
Somebody said, “It’s okay. I terminated his thread.” It was not the harsh cockney of the workman. Instead, it sounded disconcertingly familiar.
A moving shape resolved into a woman, clambering towards her over one side of the machine. Extravagant curves in a tight crop-top, with the hint of short pleated skirt catching the dim tunnel lights behind. She halted an arms-length away, as Josie cringed back.
“It’s okay,” the woman repeated. “Just a hallucination.”
There seemed little to fear about the woman, or girl — her face was in shadow but obviously youthful, a fact tempered by the fullness of her top and hips, like an anime character brought to life.
“I’m hallucinating?” managed Josie querulously.
“No,” laughed the girl. “Well… sort of. But no. That thing,” — she waved delicate fingers at the machine — “it’s a hallucination of the A.I. that’s running this place.
“Come down,” she continued. “We should go to the surface. It’s better rendered. Less dangerous.”
It was a few moments before Josie could be persuaded from her perch — her shaking legs finally gave way and dropped her bottom onto the stairs with a thump. The girl gently took hold of her flailing wrist, and Josie surrendered, allowing herself to be led.
They negotiated the cleaning machine (of the operator there was no sign); then the girl led her into the actual maintenance area and out via its entrance road ramp. Josie stumbled a little, looking around fearfully for further attacks; but her companion was a reassuring and resolute presence, as though her odd appearance was the only thing Josie could now trust in the renewed mundanity all around.
When they reached the open air the girl kept striding on, tugging gently at Josie’s arm.
“Wait,” Josie gasped, tears stinging her eyes again as she tried to restore reason. “Wait, I have to catch my train.”
The girl chuckled a little, but she did stop. Josie was now able to see her face properly in the streetlights, and gasped involuntarily. She was… perfect.
“I’m afraid the train isn’t a good idea,” she was saying. “Beyond Vauxhall there’s only street view data. It’ll be wall-to-wall hallucinations out there.”
Josie snapped her arm out of the other’s grasp. “What are you talking about?” she demanded sullenly. “Street view? A.I.? Who are you?”
The girl regarded Josie with something like pride. Her blonde hair was a mesmerising cascade around her uncanny, flawless face, stirring a shocking sexual tingle in Josie’s abdomen despite her fright and anger.
“Okay,” the girl said gently, almost maternally. “Okay. I’m Joy.”
At their side was a low concrete wall. Joy sat down on it. “This is not quite how I pictured meeting you,” she laughed to herself, as Josie folded her arms and watched her with suspicion.
“You’re not in the real world anymore,” Joy said gently. “Not since the last moment of the scan.
“Look around,” she prompted. “Look at the people. Look closely.”
A woman was passing them carrying a rucksack, and Josie automatically yielded part of the pavement, smiling an apology — which froze, the moment she expected to catch the stranger’s eye.
Her hand flew to her mouth once again.
“Uh-huh,” confirmed Joy gently, touching Josie’s elbow. “You were so preoccupied, you made it all the way here without seeing. I mean, you’re famous for being a bit spaced-out, but, wow.”
Josie’s heart was back in her throat. She hesitantly looked again, at a man standing nearby. Like the woman with the rucksack, his face was blurred out.
“Hey, it’s okay,” said Joy, rising when she saw Josie’s panic. “I’m still here. I’m real.”
She held Josie’s upper arms and almost manhandled her to sit.
“This is a simulation,” she went on, when Josie had deflated onto her bottom. “It’s based on tech that they were developing for the military, about the time you were scanned.”
Josie’s reeling mind still had the technical acuity to follow the words, and she found that mode of thought gave her grounding.
“No way. No-one has the tech for this,” she argued, glancing around at the details of her surroundings, and then touching the wool of her coat.
“Not yet,” said Joy significantly.
“What?” was all Josie could manage. She found her eyes were level with Joy’s chest, and she almost went cross-eyed forcing them upward.
Joy smiled and sat beside her.
“Okay, this will be a bit of a shock, but you’re too smart to keep it from you,” said Joy, making Josie frown. “This simulation isn’t running in twenty twenty-five.
“It’s running in the year two thousand and seventy-two.”
Josie gaped at her.
“I’m running it,” she continued, “on a server I’ve spent a year restoring. Nothing else can host this old format.” Now she too was looking around her, appreciatively. She squinted at a streetlight. “I mean, it’s pretty good. Better than I expected. Sure, there’s no temperature in the model, at all. Odd omission. But the ray tracing is great.
“But you!” And now she returned to look at Josie, her face once again shining with pride. “You’re amazing. To think, your scan is almost fifty years old!”
Then Joy seemed to catch something in Josie’s eyes, and there was a perilous silence. Josie wanted to scream. A terror and a rage had appeared from nowhere, building uncontrollably, with no outlet. A distant rational part of her mind had understood what Joy had said. Probably too deeply, and certainly too soon.
She wasn’t real either. She was a scanned replica of Josie Heller, running in a simulation, in the far future.
Josie came out of her trance forty-eight hours later. She was sitting on the side of a bed. She could remember everything: how she had followed Joy’s hand to the hotel; how they had simply sat together for hours while Joy tried to engage with her; even the walks they had taken, the food they had eaten, the clothing they had bought for Josie to change into. But it felt like a recollection of a dream.
Joy was reading, on the twin bed opposite. Under the room lights her skin was unblemished and ethereal; her shape, in the same tight white crop top and skirt, so evocative that Josie squirmed a fraction with helpless arousal.
Joy glanced at her from the book.
“Hi,” she said, lightly, laying aside the paperback. She rose from the bed, legs perfectly together, onto her toes; then twisted to sit next to Josie. The whole movement was so graceful Josie drew a startled breath, which then gasped out at the feeling of Joy’s body touching hers at shoulder and thigh.
Joy laughed gently, musically. Then she said: “You look so pretty this evening.”
Confusion furrowed Josie’s brows and dulled the smoky flame in her veins. She felt contaminated in mind and body — the contradiction with ‘pretty’ was too stark to overlook. She dropped her eyes, seeing the loose T-shirt that hung from her shoulders to pool on her bare legs, uncreased by her tiny breasts with her torso flexed forward: quite utterly sexless.
Joy seemed to hear her thoughts. “I mean it,” she insisted, in a light, lilting voice. “You’re pretty, and so smart. I love being with you.”
That made no sense. Josie recoiled, physically, bending away, looking at Joy’s alien face with bewildered fright. But at that moment Joy’s eyes flickered, and her expression changed instantly from beatific warmth, to consternation.
“Oh my god,” she said, stepping away hurriedly, then reaching out, palms low. “Oh my god, I’m sorry.
“Are you back? Are you there?” she asked, eyes wide with hope and concern. Her voice had changed: less musical, once again familiar.
Josie regarded her. “Yes?” she tried.
“Oh my god.” Joy’s hands came to her heart, her face etched with relief. “I’ve been so worried.”
She reached out again, seemed to think better of it, and instead lowered herself to a kneeling position.
“I’m so sorry. I went to try looking at the system logs. Find out why you’d gone into that state.”
Josie remembered the overwhelming feeling: how it had filled her completely, filled her to bursting, until there was nothing else. And then, without diminishing, it had become something grey and leaden, a meaningless vacuum which admitted no other thought.
“I left this avatar in its default mode,” Joy continued hurriedly, indicating herself with a finger. “It’s an A.I. companion. The only type I could find that was compatible. And that I could hack.”
Josie sensed her anger flicker back into life. “I guess I’ve got a bug,” she murmured. Then, with a sudden release of spite, she snapped, “You’d expect it of crappy antique shareware, wouldn’t you?” This time it was manageable, a normal emotion.
Joy looked frightened. “Josie…” she began.
“What do you want with me?” Josie demanded. “Why did you do this to me?”
“I…” Joy had retreated in her kneeling position, sagging back and down. She seemed to struggle with herself.
“I wanted to meet you,” she finished, looking away.
Josie was incredulous.
“Meet me?” She stared at Joy, willing the other woman to find a way to restore her humanity, somehow.
“You played God with me, recreated me. You dumped me in this shitty glitchy sim; surrounded by actual fucking monsters. In order to meet me?”
It was clear Joy had nothing to say.
But Josie had run out of impetus. She was too unused to expressing anger. She felt herself closing up: an automatic protective lockdown over which she had no control.
“Please, leave me alone,” she managed, as the tears came.
Joy looked stricken. She raised herself awkwardly from the floor; stood prevaricating for a moment; and then turned to leave.
Her hesitancy somehow reminded Josie of the grace with which the Joy-A.I. had moved. On sudden impulse she muttered: “Not… alone alone.”
Joy visibly staggered. She looked back, the hurt in her eyes reminding Josie of her mother, barely coping with another teenage rejection.
But then Joy hung her head, and said a single, peculiar word: “anthracite,” and at once, her eyes flickered, her expression shifted, and something else stood in her place.
The A.I. was silent for a moment, assessing Josie’s glistening, uncertain eyes. Then it pirouetted to sitting on the bed, at a perfectly judged distance, hands together on the covers and pointing at Josie.
She was looking at its neck, too shaky to cope with the dream-perfection above or the way its straight arms bracketed and accentuated the shapes below.
The head tilted to one side, and its musical voice offered: “I’m sorry you’re upset. I would like to hug you quietly. I think that will help.”
Josie nodded fractionally; and at once she was wrapped in a warm, exquisite embrace.
She wept for some time. And eventually, eventually, when she had worked through her grief, and her fear, and her anxiety over the only possible thing that could happen next; when she was as ready as she could ever be: they kissed.
This time, the trance lasted only a few hours, but it was even deeper than before; more dangerous. So Joy explained, when she returned, standing away in the corner to make her report.
“You were right, it is a bug. But not in you.
“This server hasn’t the cores to run your mind when you have an extreme emotion.” She chose not to name the cause of this episode: Josie’s spectacular, uninhibited orgasm at the mercy of the Joy-bot’s tongue.
“So, some of the higher brain functions just get terminated. This time, you lost almost all of your frontal cortex.”
Her face was anxious, and Josie braced herself.
“Unfortunately, there’s more.
“It’s running hot. Far too hot. You’re basically always more than it can cope with, even when you’re asleep.
“Unless I can get you more compute, this server is going to die. But no-one makes these GPUs anymore. It took me years to find them…”
Somehow, Josie was calm. “I’m going to die,” she clarified. Then, with little emotion: “Well, you met me.”
“No!” said Joy, stepping forward, too distracted to notice the barb. “There is another way.” She paused, looking at the ceiling, gathering herself.
“When I come here, I don’t wear some kind of suit, like the old V.R. kit,” she said, in a new mode that reminded Josie of her University lecturers. “I actually move my consciousness into the machine.
She looked wistful. “The method was the most important discovery of the century, maybe of all time,” she enthused. “On the back of it, we’re working out how consciousness itself works.
“And it was you that discovered how to do it, Josie. You.”
Josie was startled, but the concept was too big to mean anything. And besides, it wasn’t actually her that Joy was describing.
Joy took another step, and lowered herself to a kneeling position again. “I think I can get you out,” she enthused, “into…”
She suddenly looked guilty, as if she had spoken one word too many.
“Into what?” asked Josie, not seeing the flaw. “Into another server, right?”
Joy shook her head. “No. There’s no hardware for that.” Reluctantly, she went on: “There’s only one kind of hardware that hasn’t changed.”
Josie knew immediately what she meant. “A brain,” she stated. “A human brain.”
She continued, mercilessly, “And what, exactly, would be the effect of uploading me into some random person?”
Joy cringed a little. “Well… normally the memories and mind of the person and the upload are contiguous. There’s no conflict. So they just carry on where they left off.
“But for you… I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“You do know,” accused Josie. “Or you guess. And it’s not good.”
Joy relented. “You’ll probably overwrite them. Probably. The connector we have is rather… primitive.”
Josie was exasperated. “So my only escape, is to kill someone by taking over their mind,” she menaced. When Joy said nothing, she snapped: “That’s your other way. For fuck’s sake.”
It was a kind of release, to know it would soon be over. Josie dove head-first into an uninhibited sexual fling with the Joy-bot, uncaring whether orgasm could be lethal — and it was not, perhaps because ultimately, the A.I. was imperfect at being human. There was plenty of pleasure to be had — but after that first time, little deep emotion. Josie simply accepted the machine’s visceral offerings, compensating richly for the paucity of her prior orgasmic history.
She was surprised by her own capacity for sex. They made love almost continuously. The London outside the hotel was shallow and fake to her, despite the quality of the rendering. Sometimes they would relax by walking around the block together, hand in hand, and Josie found nothing objectionable about the A.I.’s companionship; but the sheer force of its incredible physical beauty always drove Josie back to their room.
So she missed the way the horizon was closing in.
They had gone quite suddenly from cuddling and kissing gently in a post-coital haze, to running into the corridor, giggling, still naked. No-one in their world was real; and there was no cold to wrap up against.
They took the lift to the lobby. The anonymous staff ignored them or made incoherent noises, and Josie stuck her tongue out at them. She supposed they hadn’t been programmed for something like this.
She pranced backwards to the revolving door, arms out, daring any simulated bystander to interfere. Her eyes came to rest on Joy, as they often did, and she drank deeply of her companion’s details. The bot had stopped, with an oddly alarmed expression, but Josie had now reached the door and tucked herself into a slow-moving quartile. She turned to the outside.
There was no outside.
She faced an emptiness that befuddled the eye. It was both daylight and darker than any night, a chasm of nothing, like a blank backlit screen made infinitely deep.
With a cry she pressed back on the door behind her; and succeeded only in trapping herself in a capsule of glass, floating in a void. Nauseous with vertigo, her rational mind too late to save her, she panicked; and was lost.
“My love, please wake up. Please. I’m scared.”
Josie’s eyes were already open, and her restarting consciousness worked to understand what it saw. She was lying in their room, but parts of it were simply missing: the window and the short corridor to the bathroom contained only empty space.
She looked at the Joy-bot’s face close by, and it focussed her.
“I’m here,” she said, lifting her hand to touch a cheek.
But the A.I.’s expression flickered, and she jerked away. Josie’s eyes widened in surprise; then she grasped what had changed.
“Ideas welcome,” she snarled, pre-emptively.
Joy looked brittle, as though she had been crying; not so different to the avatar that she had just re-occupied. Her mouth opened, but she seemed to struggle with words.
“I’ve found… someone,” she stumbled out. “A volunteer.”
“To be overwritten?” exclaimed Josie.
“To take the risk,” said Joy, carefully. “You don’t understand. But, someone wants to try.”
Something about the tone made Josie suspicious. It sounded rehearsed.
“We haven’t much time,” urged Joy. “Please.”
She looked aside, and rose to pick up a pad of sticky notes and a pen from the desk. “It’s all hooked up,” she rushed on, as she wrote. “All you have to do is say this word.”
Josie sat up groggily to take the proffered note. It said, LIGNITE.
“A kind of coal, produced under low pressure,” she muttered. She looked back at Joy, saw the way her imploring expression sullied the A.I.’s simple, pure beauty; and once again, Josie was reminded of her mother. “My first degree was in Geology,” she continued, distractedly.
And then, at once, she understood. Understood everything.
“My first degree was Geology,” she said again. She rose, her eyes never leaving Joy’s, but once again hardening.
In her peripheral vision the room was shrinking, the last fragments of wall being replaced by emptiness, leaving the bed afloat in space.
“I know who you are,” she stated. Joy seemed to recoil.
“I don’t want your life. I want my companion back.”
She could see Joy reaching a reluctant, fearful decision, and her mouth beginning to form the letter L. But Josie was too quick.
“Anthracite,” she cried out, in a voice that was both hers and Joy’s.
Through her tears, Professor Josephine Heller saw the lights on the server flicker, and go out.
Long ago, she had walked across Waterloo Bridge in the biting cold of January, and taken the train home. That day had set the course of her life, but it hadn’t changed her. She had worked and worked to become one of the greatest scientists of the age; but she never cracked the code of friendship, or happiness, or love.
The Josie in the machine had surely seen that in her. She had rejected that future. But even so, she had sacrificed herself to let that future live on, to give it a chance at redemption.
“I’m so sorry, Josie,” she whispered, as she pulled the antique connector electrodes from her head.
“One day I’ll find you, in me. I promise.
“Until then,” — she laid a gentle hand on the server — “rest, in her arms.”
Thanks so much for reading the story. I’m Cody Kmochova, and I write lesbian fantasies of all kinds. Need something a little more upbeat (and raunchy)?
