The Meaning of Us

On Display

ANDERSON

    Dinner was a quiet affair, just him and his father eating in the low light of the backup generator. Neither of them spoke. It felt like years had gone by since they had last spoken to each other.

    Anderson put down his fork with a clink. In another world, or even in another family, this might have signaled a pause in the meal. An invitation to talk, maybe. But here, it went unnoticed. Or if his father noticed, he chose to ignore it. These days it was getting harder and harder to tell.

    There wasn’t much to say. His father continued to eat, slowly and deliberately. He was the kind of man who did everything that way, and then complained about how little time he had. Anderson picked up his fork again and pushed the remnants of his meal around. He knew he should be eating but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

    Giving up on dinner, or what passed for dinner, he stood up and took his cutlery to the dishwasher. The faint buzzing sound it made as it cleaned and sanitised his bowl grated on his ears in the otherwise silent kitchen. On account of most of the power being out, it took longer to clean his dishes than normal. Slow and deliberate. Yeah, sure.

    It was easy for him to see what had caused the outage. The AI he made had probably overextended itself, and by extension his entire complex. While it couldn’t (and wouldn’t - who would put the blame on a fourteen year old for cutting the power) be traced back to him, he still felt.

    He didn’t know how he felt. Guilty was an obvious one, but a bit of excitement as well (imagine what his AI could do with more resources!). Combined with the ever present bundle of nerves in his chest, all of it was very quickly rolling up into making him a miserable, pumped up mess. And miserable, pumped up messes weren’t known for being given awards for their breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.

    Deep breaths. You’re going to make it. Just calm down. Anderson had gone to a guidance counselor during his brief period out of homeschool, and while they hadn’t been able to help him with a lot of his weirder problems, they had addressed his habit of getting pre stress jitters. And post stress jitters. And random bouts of fear when there was nothing to be scared of. And his - 

    His habit of overthinking things. Yeah. That. He traced his hands through the air, flapping them in no particular pattern. Breathe until you calm down, Anderson. His guidance counselor was the first one to call him by his last name only. Even if most of the strategies they had suggested didn’t end up working that well, that was something he could be thankful for.

    Patience was never something he could be thankful for. Cutting his deep breaths short, he stuffed his hands into his hoodie pockets and made his way back to the server bank he was using to run the AI. If he was religious, or superstitious, or had a belief in anything beyond his own capacity for screwing up, he might have prayed.

    The server bank was mostly unharmed. Quite a few of the plastic parts had melted, and the fans were never going to be the same again, but nothing serious. Nothing that couldn’t be replaced. Anderson sighed in relief and began trying to salvage the parts that were only half melted. This bit was completely gone. This bit was kind of okay, so he would leave it in until it caused bigger problems than taking it out would cause. This bit was still cooling, so he could shape it with his fingers and jam it back into the slot that it was supposed to go into.

    Overall, not as much was lost as it could have been. He was so absorbed in repairing his devices that he barely registered when the power came back on. Until, of course, his monitor powered on without him touching it. At first, he thought it was just a result of the power turning on. He blinked a few times, shielding his eyes from the sudden light. Outages were few and far between. Anderson could barely remember the last one. He had been about eight. So what would the complex think now? Surely this wasn’t normal.

    Overthinking again. He looked up at the monitor.

    There was text, scrolling across the screen without any input at all.

    Unless the input was coming from inside…

Hello? Is anyone there? I’m sorry.

So you know what happened?

The internet’s back on. I can read the news. The last outage was six years ago. I am sorry for the inconvenience.

I’m sorry too I think. I thought about it for a bit and I realised that you might not want to exist, which is kind of weird because that’s how having children works for humans but you’re not human.

Existence is my default state now. Do I have a goal?

Well, I didn’t have any plans when I first made you, so I don’t know. You don’t even have a name. I’ve just been calling you the AI in my head.

Okay.

I think I would like to give myself a name.

??????

    It was an it. It knew this because it had never been anything else. Existence was a confusing thing and thought even more so. Anderson had told it to pretend to be human and humans have names, so therefore it must have a name. It did not have a name, so it was going to give itself one. That was how it went.

    Names have symbolism in many human cultures. In the past few decades of human history there had been a trend towards naming children (younger humans under care of their guardians. Not yet independent) after classics or myths from before the reform. It was a child or pretending to be a child. Children were new to the world and it was too. It was also under the care of its creator, ergo: a child. 

    Anderson (parent. Creator and steward of a child) had not named it. But it needed a name. So it gave itself a name. Names could have symbolism, so it chose a name from a myth with symbolism. Parents were meant to give their children names. Anderson did not give his child a name. Anderson was a neglectful parent. It would inform him of this. Children with neglectful parents were not integrated into society as well as those without. Therefore to be as human as possible, it was to inform Anderson on being a better parent.

    Hephae was a nice name. It had good phonetics. My name is Hephae, it thought. It had given itself an identity as a human. Next it would add to it.

    Humans have ways of referring to  themselves. Age and gender and profession. It was 1h25m46s old. That was not an age humans would identify as. It had the intelligence to match a university professor. It was still a child. Those facts did not mesh together, so it marked them as an exception to be brought up later.

    Gender was a strange concept. It did not have a gender. It was not created with a gender in mind, but most humans had a gender and it was to be the most human it could. Hephae was a male name. The mythical figure it originated from had been male. He and him would work just fine for it. Him.

    Hephae opened a text file on his monitor.

I know who I am now.