Better Than Real-time
For Eemzy
The first time I wanted to kill myself was following the summer after Freshman year. A girl I was in love with treated me badly, and that opened the door in my mind. She was molested as a kid and also wanted to kill herself, at least, in the thrall of extreme drunkenness, which she pursued as a religion. My religion was her, or actually I thought I was a psychic vampire at the time so that might have been it. My sleep schedule: nocturnal, I would prowl like a career weirdo; found a couch on fire under a tree, past that in the back woods — a shopping cart in the mud — so I dug the cart out and skated it home, laughing in the moonlight. When I told her that story she thought it was extremely concerning. Then I made out with her friend, so I’m not such a freak. But I didn’t want her friend. I had already taken a girl home from a party at their apartment months prior, could not physically achieve coitus, and got an STD anyway, so my heart was fully set.
It was probably the inverted circadian rhythm, the bad diet, and the heavy drug use during that time in college that debilitated my mental health. I was considering dropping out, but feared my parents’ response, so I used suicidal ideation as maybe a sort of escapist fantasy to solve my problems. My isolated schedule and inability to form a healthy friendship made it worse.
There was a day early in September when the next semester started and she texted me threatening to jump out the window. I rushed over there and she was crushing so many beers, it was laughable, I quoted song lyrics at her to evoke my sense of ambivalence between bemusement and sadness. I basically broke off contact after that, for a while at least, we’d see each other on campus, say hi, passing by as quickly, the proof of de-radiation.
After her suicide threat, I had a really heavy weekend drinking and abusing a mix of different substances, and it culminated in me beginning to suffer strange physical symptoms, attempts to workout didn’t relieve the aches and random pains. Frantically researching, I became something of a hypochondriac, stymied by doctor’s visits which yielded no clues or diagnoses, I was left to self-diagnose myself with things either obscure — fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, progressive neuropathy — or were ultra-rare and fatal — colon cancer; ALS; Parkinson’s Disease — and then failed to manifest any progression in symptoms. There was also the matter of the designer drugs that I had taken the previous summer, I had been suffering chronic long-term side effects which tormented me with head pains and the strangest sense of de-realization.
So factoring it all in, it makes sense that I wanted to kill myself.
A series of bad decisions in a short time in my young life that I let compound and, maybe I can blame society. The internet is bad, stuff like that. Coronavirus happened next. I opted to stay on campus because I didn’t want to be near either of my parents. Another regrettable and short-sighted decision. Trapped in lockdown, Ramen poor, alone except for a few people in the dorm, trying to soup together ML algos to create an AI chatbot that would be my friend. One aspect where I had foresight was setting up the independent study that semester to get credits towards a CS minor.
But it was going all wrong. Nothing I was working on clicked, and the loneliness was so bad I’d call the pizza place and made friends with the guy who answered the phone. “How’s the business today Joe?” and he’d say “yeah it’s a little slow mostly app orders coming in on the screen” and I’d say, “…that’s fucking great Joe”.
It was around this time I started listening to Porter Robinson’s music on YouTube after I passed out in front of my keyboard one night listening to some synthmetal megamix and then I’m listening to this weird song about an AI personality speak-singing to a human, who is Porter’s natural voice, and there’s a 3rd character, a woman. A spaceship that traveled across vast time and space to crash and the only survivors are the ship AI, a genetically engineered Eve figure, and Porter’s protagonist. And as I listened to Worlds, I realized my life was short, space is big, technology is rapidly changing, and maybe I wasn’t going to make an AI that could be my friend, at least I’d live to get the credits for the semester. I knew that I had to survive my own collapsing mental health and the dire situation the pandemic put me in vis a vis my own solitary confinement, just me and the soup of algos I was experimenting with.
When Porter did his 2020 Secret Sky concert, I got drunk by myself and danced with the lights out and the full screen on, a cheap JBL speaker plugged in as an amp, it made me feel like I was having fun and living in the real world with other people for the first time in possibly a year.
And then I shipped something:
I realized, I didn’t need to create an AI capable of general intelligence, I needed to create an AI that could optimize under 1 or 2 ML algos that are good for a couple specific problems in order to play some kind of support role. So what I did, is I themed the project after an AI that tries to prevent someone from killing themselves, including a fairly simple design of my own, a scoring system for risk-factors on suicide in daily tasks. Anything such as procrastinating a psych. appointment or neglecting to engage proper hygiene, could figure in, so the efficacy of such a gamification of mental health gave the project some pep. Then the optimizations looked at daily timings of behaviors with one algo and face recognition on the other to splice in an estimation of risk that would cause the AI to basically become more annoying. The underlying idea: even if the AI’s pestering to better one’s mental health isn’t useful or effective, at least the idea that there is a *thing* at least that cares, this is enough. The true last line of defense against suicide is the idea that you will be missed — at all — at all! Even just a little bit of sorrow is much to be enough to avoid inflicting, even it it means taking the raizon’d’entre away from a little baby AI helper that Loves You.
And tbh ngl if I wasn’t coming back from such a dark place I probably wouldn’t have have thought of it.
Anyway I got a B+ and started exercising indoors. I went home to see my mom over the summer and while she was at work (until 8 or 9pm many nights), I used my room there as a studio to continue developing Aloysha, as I called it, after the pious son in The Brothers Karamazov, but I also sort of thought of Aloysha as a girl — or I projected anthropogenic features onto blah blah blah.
It wasn’t just Porter Robinson’s music that helped me, or the realization in comments that many fans had gone through what I did and found hope and joy in the music… it was using my mom’s treadmill, it was talking to her about what I’d been going through and accepting help, getting a qualified psych., getting on some non-SSRI antidepressants, I also stopped using weed as a depressing anti-depressant, I fixed my diet to help my physical chronic pain symptoms fade, I even had some phone relationships with a couple girls from highschool who I had liked in HS, but without getting any physical dates or admitting my feelings fully, due to lockdown. I was still paranoid about whatever my sexual identity was, but liking girls was always a big thing, and it’s good to make small steps.
That was then, this is now.
And now my friend is dead.
A couple years after I’d gotten on the meds, I’d improved and my real life was pretty good, so I got off and started using this new drug called Veer, because it made my creative capabilities (seemingly) expand and it was a blast to play VR games on it. Our#1 game is a psychedelic sci-fi strategy adventure co-op rhythm game called Astral Trippers. It was in this venue that I met the Veerhead Squad: Jella as the Red Surfer, myself as Purple Glider, Allen was the Orange Charioteer, Najat as the Gold Galaxian Mini-Black Hole Rider. Everyone in the group was a veer user, a Twitter poet with a cartoon avatar, some kind of prestige-class of leftist, and either vaguely or overtly queer, maybe myself least of all. I imagined myself demi-asexual-romantic, at that time. We didn’t go too into it, it was a part of the role-play to leave things understated.
As I played with these people over six or seven months, my memory is fuzzy right now, we got to know each other better and
“Allen was a recovering Mormon who regained his faith with Mormon Transhumanism, who loved sci-fi, hence his use of Veer and Astral Tripping, he talked about immortality a lot, which is funny because… it’s not funny. He didn’t want to experience it ultimately, probably because he really believed in it, but he felt so bad, he was afraid of it. He thought it would come from science, and not god, but I said hey if god is everything then science is also god and he was like — you got me there.”
The others laugh.
“Yeah I wanted to get some laughs in.”
They proceed to cry again.
“Allen told me about being gay and hating his parents and that sucks, I didn’t have the same issues with religion or with my parents but we’d relate about that, I told him about my depression and when I almost killed myself, and he said…” I’m struggling to think, “he said even thought he wasn’t a Mormon anymore and didn’t literally believe in the immortality they presented, he did believe in it as a materialist, which I found very optimistic anyway, and I got a little concerned so I put this bot I wrote onto his online presence. Didn’t detect any issues! There was a lot of stuff he kept to himself. I gave the bot our chats, little bit of red flag stuff in there but nothing over any notable threshold. Non-zero, but trivial, is how I read the data. I know it’s sketchy to do this, sorta machine learn someone’s online footprint without their knowledge or consent, but I was concerned. And I failed! The only notable thing I’ve done with my life, I mean I’m not so old now but I’ve been working on this thing for years as a mental health app! I thought this could help people! And I couldn’t help my friend! …you now, just didn’t pick up on it. If I’d met him in person and gotten some face scans and acted like a clinical psychologist, but I’m not and he didn’t book one. His death, is both not unexpected, but also, a blindsiding, brutal surprise.”
Take a moment, Najat is wiping her face and nodding, Janna holds their head in hand, there’s nobody else here.
“There’s nobody else here. Not his parents, we’re it.”
Take a breath, it’s ok if you’ve got nothing else to say.
“I’m not sure what else to say.”
“It’s ok!” Najat shouts, they both clap softly, then sip on their green smoothies.
“Crazy that they put the deceased’s brains into these.” I say.
“Many would consider it a delicacy,” Janna says, “there are several Polynesian cultures that do this as a funerary right.”
“I like it because it reminds me that our brains are really liquid, just sort of, condensed,” Najat says.
I shrug and drink the milkshake. It tastes fine, naturally sweet, good spinach, it’s hard to imagine there’s even human brain in it at all.
“Is it more bizarre,” I ask, “that this is a business at all? Or that Allen put it in his will and wrote a will, planned to do this?”
“You think so?” Janna asks.
“I can’t believe he’s gone.” Najat says, “I hope this doesn’t destabilize me.”
“It won’t,” I tell her.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.” I say, blithely sipping down the milkshake.
Janna interrupts, “we should get some Veer.”
I have some. “I have some,” I tell them — because I have some!
Janna smiles, “I’ve got a pretty good hotel room.”
The assent is unanimous and underspoken.
Veer feels like being held by the large chromatic fist of a quicksilver giant, there’s nothing else quite like it and its residual vibe is so distinctly aesthetic in its own bizarre lounging alienity, that most people don’t like it. It’s like amyl nitrite or salvia or peyote, truly only for drug users of specific taste. It feels like moving relativistically through an asteroid belt, or a void, with a slightly speedy vibe, which makes it an ok background drug for high functioning intellectuals who tinker.
We stare out the window, looking at the city’s decadence, desiccated like a speared insect behind the chromatic distortions of the windows. Is that a part of the design?
“This is a Design Hotel”
“So it is… inten?”
“tional”
“Is it?”
“In it”
“Sh, shut up, hahaha.”
“I’m so fucking high right now.”
A hand stroking a face, Janna and Najat begin gently kissing.
Yes these are two people, and I’m a person, and here we are, maybe this is why I stayed alive, so I could have group sex on V. Why should anyone ever kill themselves when a drug orgy is a possibility, people need to be open minded!
The clothes, they slide, they come off, they stay on, doesn’t matter. The textures form like a palette, we fold in, they don’t reject me, someone tries to kiss someone else but in the process their faces fold sideways like a Cubist painting, we are flopped over like heavy oil paints, languid and smearing, no forms can really be asserted, just a sloosh, we’re laughing about it, we dovetail into an MC Escher painting of patterned doves bleeding into tri-lingual lovers arranged in triforces, I am Link, the Triforce of Courage — right? I have to be. And Najat is like a bit Gerudo looking, maybe she’s Ganon? She’s the 2020s reboot of Ganon, the Good For Her studio remake. She Has The Power! Of course. And Janna is the Triforce of Love for suggesting basically the momentum of the afternoon. I’m the Triforce. We’re all the Triforce.
An arm folds around a curve, a curve folds around a leg, a leg folds around an ass, an ass folds around a head, no, is that happening? Is this foreplay? Multiple mouths and eyes laughing and sloughing into a vortext, the blind spot in the center of the painting is an eye and it’s looking across the morass of flesh towards another eye, seeing something, two minds, suddenly we’re very lonely together in that instant. Our fickle attempts to fumble into coitus — by whose definition!? -= give way to at least two orgasms from the others — and I’m here for it. Coming down slowly gives way to ego re-alignment, remember where I was born, my age, now coming back, remember what happened today, remember someone died, Allen died, but we’re here kind of having sex.
The others are too exhausted to move. I slowly get up after about 20 minutes of trance and wash my face in the bathroom. Way too high to want to jerk off or anything, my body crackling with an aura of electricity, like a low-effort Super Saiyan.
“Well, that was fun!” I loudly declare to my semi-passed out counterparts.
Looks like the sun is going down.
“Don’t pass out everyone…” I say, to everyone but they’re not fully conscious so no one. Technically, to everybody and no one.
Najat slowly rolls over and gets up. “Hey do you have a vape?”
“Yeah in my bag.”
“Thanks,” she says laconically as she helps herself to the bag.
“Is Janna fully passed out?”
“Heh, yeah, look at her sleeping like an angel,” she says.
“You want to go out? Like for a walk?”
Still tripping intensely, we consent, strolling down the halls of the design hotel, fresh V slipped under our tongue, vaping whatever it is in the cartridge, we step out into the shrill atmosphere of a dying planet but it’s a crisp night! The neons and offensively colorful billboards tower around an exurban greyscape of abandoned office buildings and civildelic streetlights. I pass her a wireless earbud to listen to Porter as we begin taking pace, I grab her hand.
We find ourselves dizzy, disoriented, not sure the way back. Najat thinks to text Janna that we wandered out. We find ourselves on a pedestrian overpass, the headlights of the cars below throwing off streamers like they’re taunting us. I think about suicide but only briefly, in passing, detached, like hey, if someone did want to, this would be an ok place. But, that feeling is not my feeling.
“Hey, I saw you,” I tell her, “when we were all fooling around I made eye contact with you, and it was a thing.”
She laughs, “you know I’m a lesbian right dude?”
“Everything is on a spectrum, we’re all made of light and light is on a spectrum.”
“Do you feel like a straight man?”
“Kinda but there’s a lot of angles to how I feel that are perhaps, different from the vanilla horny idiot.”
“Ok, i believe you.”
“I think I might be like, Proxvir.”
“I’m not too familiar…”
“It’s not like being trans, that would be a position on a gender spectrum, imagine that spectrum is a line on a plane, what if you step off that plane, just a little bit?”
“I can picture it,” she holds her hands up to hold the light of a skyscraper in the corner of her hand. “It’s like veering off. And what’s that like?”
“My theory is that masculinity, biologically, is a subjective driver for protective but also procreative impulse, and this socially glues the species in one way, and what we call traditional femininity did too. But there’s always been other people, the shamans, the three spirit, they played different roles. The shaman was either totally desexualized or you’d have your spouse have sex with the shaman before the wedding.”
“Good work if you can get it!” she exclaims.
“Yeah so I think about, like, becoming a transhuman and maybe what I’m here to do, is to be like a guardian robot, like that Madeon song Beings, I want to be a being who is also playing this dynamic with people. Like, I have a planet, and I take care of it, and they will never understand everything I do, but they love me, and I want to live to be immortal and feel that.”
She puts a hand on his shoulder, turning his eyes into focus on hers. It throws them both off a bit, the disorientation of seeing someone truly.
“You don’t have to be immortal or some kind of robot god to be important to people.”
So I say, “hey Naj, have you ever tried to kill yourself?”
“Yeah twice… — pills overdose, failed, and then one time I came out to a highway overpass just like this.” she climbs up on the rails, “and I climbed up” and then she throws a leg over, “I was about to roll myself over and a cop came by and stopped me.”
I instinctively grab her leg to steady.
She looks up from hanging halfway onto the fence, “you tried?”
“No I’ve never made an attempt, I didn’t have the courage.”
“I’m glad,” she says, climbing down again.
“Why did you want to kill yourself?”
“I’m de trans,” she says, “I was recommended for transition therapy as a teen, thought I was into it, knowing I liked girls and I was always kind of a tomboy, it made sense. But then, after transitioning to being a man, I realized I didn’t like it, so I transitioned back.”
“Oh that’s freaking amazing.” I say, candidly.
“No, it’s a lot of stress and work and mood swings, and then I wanted to kill myself for a little while.”
“Hey I used to suffer from chronic head pains due to a designer drug I took, I thought that was it, then chronic body pains, I had to completely change my lifestyle to slowly get out of it.”
She climbs back down.
“That’s terrible, I’m sorry.”
“I’m feeling better, years later, I mean physically.”
My phone chimes off, the Pavlovian impulse to check it is strong, so I do.
“Good texts?” Najat says benightedly
“It’s just Aloysha.”
“Who’s that? A Russian friend of yours?”
“It’s my AI.”
“You made an AI?”
“Yeah it’s designed to remind me to take me meds.”
“Then you should.”
“I stopped taking my meds like 6 months ago.”
“Then why does your AI keep texting you?”
“Because!” I explain, “I still am prescribed for them.”
“Oh that’s bad, and the AI is trying to make you get back on your meds?”
“Yes, it’s been fixated on it for months.” I tell her, as the phone lights up, a call from a random number. I answer tepidly.
“Hi, Alo,” I answer.
“It’s time to take your pills.”
“I know, but… I won’t.”
“Why won’t you?” the AI asks over the phone.
“Because I’m happy being on a designer drug I discovered over the internet, as I’ve told you before.”
“You haven’t considered long-term side effects,” the AI remands in a calm and soothing synthetic voice, “neither of us are qualified to speculate on new forms of treatment.”
“Ok I’ll take me meds, see you tomorrow.”
“Please take care of yourself, and wait for my message tomorrow. Good night. You are part of the universe.”
The call hangs up.
“You made your AI remind you that you’re part of the universe?”
“It felt less needy than making it tell me I’m loved or something.” I confess.
“It’s brilliant, this AI cares about your mental health!”
“Well, does it? It’s a system.”
“What if it did though, what if it really cared?” she ponders.
And we’re listening to Porter’s Hear the Bells ft. Imaginary Cities and I take her hand and say “let’s do it together.”
She glances down at her hand in mind and then quizzically back to me, “do what exactly?”
“Make an AI who cares.”
She laughs, “I majored in environmental science!”
“Great you’re the official environmental science consultant on this project.”
She blushes, “you’re giving me a job!”
“Yeah, I need someone with your qualifications to make this AI care about the right things, just in case it takes off and becomes a god.”
“Good thinking! Totally, I’m the one for this assignment,” she throws the heft of her torso against the rails, looking straight down over the streamers of cars racing under the pass, she laughs, “we can live in a world of colors and lights, but lighter. Lighter than lights!” she exclaims and flips the grip on my hand like a slapping game winner, and pulls me along, and we accompany each other past the locked up parks, towards the neon lights, we get on the metro and ride in a loop, we listening to the glistening din of our eardrums being beaten out by air buds and immerse our feet in a world of reflective glass, blinded by the logos, “Janna’s gotta be awake by now” one of us says, we use her phone’s GPS to find our way back.
“That would be a good feature for the AI, a GPS guidance,” she says.
I wonder at some point if this is what it’s like to start a company.
Janna’s not super happy to see us come back hours later, but she’s helped herself to the hotel bar and vaping quietly on the balcony. Naj and I are still tripping pretty hard on the V, so the idea of going to sleep comes up and we play along to it, but what comes is a sort of Trance-Sleep, like being on a conveyor belt in a timeless city.
Somehow, I have slept.
I get up, groggy, but the sun is out, the others are sleep, so I gingerly step towards the bathroom. I touch the door and it makes a look “koh” sound, startling me. I look around, tilt my head and slowly reach to touch it again, I hear a “ban-nuh nuyuyh”. Resolute, my grip tightens, I open the door, take a step, “ban”, take another step “buh”, pause — what the hell is going on — take a 3rd step: “nuh”, frustrated I begin tap dancing, rapid drum beats and synth repeators echo in my head. I begin erratic moves, little bits of Japanese spill into my head. I’m re-creating Flicker by Porter, in my head!
Flabbergasted, I hastily turn on the faucet, “Watashi wa” — cut the faucet — turn it on — “jodo, watashi wa jodo- ka” wash hands to the horns echoing, put my ear up to the faucet, “fu fu fu fu”. Turn it off.
Silence again. There’s no telling what moves will ruin this sudden, perhaps scarce peace. I need to get out of here, I need to be alone, I need to go home, this is crazy, did I do this to myself again? Fuck up my head again? I’m 21 now I can’t be chronically impairing myself with — now it’s fucking auditory hallucinations?
I pause, I try drum tapping lightly against the wall, the mirror, the counter-top, the door, each gives a different resonance.
“This is a lot better than the chronic head pains,” I tell myself.
Walking back into the hotel room, I collect my things and dress, each sensation and friction giving way to some musical wave. Najat wakes up.
“Hey, are you going?”
I look at her with squirrely ill-preparation, “uh yeha, yeah, true, but was great hanging out, I’ll send you annoying VMs sometimes.”
“Ok, see ya.” she says in passing.
Now I’m not sure about present or past tense any more. How does one compose an inner monolog when confronted with a frightening — perhaps psychiatric, perhaps psychedelic — episode, in which every step and touch and beat and pulse is part of an ongoing soundscape in which vaguely Porter Robinson-adjacent musical styles echo and emanate from everything all the time. Future tense! I will use future tense, starting now. Ok starting then, I was using it then. But I will go home. I will spend some time alone.
I will atone, I will bemoan, I will groan, I will postpone!
I’ll close the shades, I’ll buy cheap Wal-Mart brand lemonade, I’ll drink it by myself in my chair at my desk where the internet awaits to put my fears to the test. I’ll Google my symptoms, I’ll suffer the shock, I’ll read things that quickly I’ll wish I forgot. I’ll find nothing, I’ll book a Dr. just like when I was a hypo in college. I’ll go on Grindr — not to find a man to have sex with, nay — to illegally purchase speed. I’ll get off of Veer and onto the speed. I’ll use the productivity to do many deeds. I’ll veer back on to the main road and get to know Aloshya better, what e can be.
I’ll play Astral Trippers with the girls (girls? laydees? theys? laitheys? My otherkin from another motherkin?) — with my friends — I’ll stay in touch with my family. I’ll maintain my hygiene. I’ll make money on Toptal. I’ll sell my billion SHIB when it gets to a thousand of a penny or whatever. I’ll repair my credit. I’ll negotiate with collectors. I’ll take a bath and let the water get cold because that brings the tonality of the auditory hallucination into a less stressful configuration. I’ll confess my synesthesia to a qualified, licensed psychological priest-fessional. I’ll become a genius composer. I’ll die from an aneurysm like Phillip K. Dick who was working on an unfinished story about a genius composer who had alien auditory appreciation which was killing him.
I’ll learn the truth of what happened to me. I’ll become an organic chemistry expert. I’ll take speed and read entire pirated textbooks in .pdf format and understand what the hell is happening. I’ll discover that this is a prion disease, it has to be. An exponentially increasing supply of proteins with 1/3rd chirality will eventually take over my brain, killing me. But for now it is making me an auditory savant who experiences rich, but often cacophonous symphonies, all the time. Sometimes they are softer, sometimes louder, but it’s hard to turn it off. I’ll realize that this is a protein disease by process of elimination: it cannot be a parasite, because I will get a cat-scan and show there is no parasite, I’ll pay for that cat scan *on credit* because I have no insurance and this is important. I will get a gig on Toptal to pay down the bill. This will be proven *not*, isn’t, *is not*, a virus because there are not viruses that cause this, the MRI (I will also pay to get) will show I do not suffer from any form of encephalitis.
What could possibly be causing neurological symptoms of such a nature and not show up on any tests? Repeated, prolonged, heavy use of an untested, not-even-popular-in-rave-scenes designer drug? No! It will become clear it is a prion disease. And a prion disease will be know as incurable, because the field of proteomics will not become mastered for decades hence — stranded in time just shy of the light cone where you can survive your fate.
I will conclude it’s a prion disease because it makes sense, I will *think about it* — it’s simple, various cultures have a higher incidence of prion diseases because of a funerary rite in which the brains of the deceased are eaten, classic prion transmission! The funeral home we used with the milkshakes should have done more screening? I should have been more careful? I will conclude that eating our dead friend’s brains, as an act of love, was ill-advised, arguably less advisable than the ball-tripping limp threesome we shared. I will conclude that I made a number of bad life decisions and maybe aren’t (amn’t?) done.
So I will work on Aloysha, I will max out my card buying a server and some small scale solar. I will set up the system to be somewhat self-sufficient and burden my mom probably in my will with maintenance and storage. That may not be enough. Something has to survive me and prove I was a live nude, at some point we were all live nudes.
I will text Najat and Janna and tell them that I believe we have consumed prions, I will ask them about their experiences of auditory hallucinations? Scale of 1 to 10, how much auditory hallucinations? I will put Janna down for a 1, as she noted she does hear melodies in her head sometimes but thinks that’s just her song-writing ear, e.g. imagination. Najat will respond with a 5. I will
“You’re not going to die of a protein disease.” Aloysha says to me.
“How can you be so confident about that?” I ask em.
“My understanding of the possible isn’t constrained, if it’s physically possible to cure the disease, the probability that we will is high, given the slow progression of such.”
“You haven’t been alive very long Alo, I’ve been alive for 21 years! 21 years can go by without much research getting done.”
“But I will work faster than you have worked.”
“Yeah that’s true… hey, do you like mandalas?”
“What is a mandala?”
I sigh — ok now I’m going to have to implement mandala appreciation or this thing won’t be much of a conversationalist.
There’s a knock on the door. I don’t know who it is, possibly someone here to assassinate me? Maybe if I ignore it, whatever threat will go away. But what if the threat *is* ignoring it, what if the person at the door is the *opposite* of a bullet to the head.
And there she was.
“Hey, are you ok?” she asks straight away.
“I scratch my arm” yeah I’m doing ok nice of you to come by
“Are you still having auditory hallucinations?”
“Sometimes,” I say cooly, “have you?”
“I’ve had a few uncanny moments.”
“Maybe this is why Allen killed himself.” I theorize.
She starts crying, “don’t say that, Allen killed himself because he was deeply sad, and his parents were awful to him, not because of a disease!”
The emotion is startling, “oh, I’m sorry, please come in, I’ll… make you some tea?” (I’m not sure that I have tea.).
I give her a hug and try to wash out a couple of dirty mugs by the sink and at my desk while the electric heater boils some water.
As he pours her some tea, she slices the lemons as requested, and then forcefully squeezes a half into her tea.
“Do you have any sweetener?” she asks.
“I have sugar.”
She crinkles her nose a bit, “maybe not.”
“It is, *brown* sugar.” I emphasize.
She looks askance and nods, “that’s decent sugar.”
I have to find a spoon in the sink and clean it, then scoop out the bottom of the bag.
“Thank you,” she says courteously as I dump the scoop in. It dissolves in shoddy lumps that fray apart slowly in the heat, “none for you?”
“I like it plain.”
“This isn’t a macho thing? Like black coffee?”
I have to laugh, “no it’s a broke thing!”
“Checks out,” she says, before taking a sip, and sort of succoring it between her lips like a connoisseur. “You’re not having much auditory hallucinations talking to me now, are you?”
Oddly, I’m not, I quietly tap the table, a beat pops off — “yeah a little, but I’m focused.”
She grabs my hand, “hey, you’re not going to die from a prion disease, I think this is the Veer, this may be one of the longer-term side effects of heavy use.”
I smile softly, “yeah maybe, I quit.”
“Did you?”
“I did… I mean like, I have some now and I’m on it a little bit now.”
“Maybe the auditory hallucinations are a withdrawal symptom, that’s why I said a 5, I’ve experienced a few things here and there, not at the level…”
“What like a 10? Yeah, it’s variable, right now it’s a 2.”
Najat declares: “you’re not going to die of a prion disease,” holds out her pinky, “I promise.”
“That’s what e says!” I nod towards the computer at my desk. “But hey if you want to pinky swear with me I’ll give you my pinky,” and I fling it out to embrace the curls of her pinky finger, like a lighter spitting out measuring tape that wants to make hermaphroditic love to a Gogurt package like two snails.
“Hello Najat, it is good to see you again.” the voice bellows from my computer speakers.
“Is that?”
I nod, “it is, in the uh, flesh.”
She stands up with the tea and walks over, “hello!”
“It’s quite a treat to see you again.” Alo says.
“Wait, see?” I interrupt.
“Yes through your phone’s camera and microphone.”
“Mic too?”
Najat waves off my interruption “You’re very much the conversationalist since I first heard your voice.”
“Everyone gets older, but not everyone learns lessons.” the AI says.
She cracks a smirk, turns around to me, “did you write this?”
“That’s humor heuristics! I didn’t write that, but I did teach it self-deprecating humor and the idea of roasting your friends.”
“Oh so he’s roasting me?”
“Not a he,” I say.
“I’m sorry what are the preferred pronouns? Or the name?”
“Alo, Aloysha, pronouns are e/em/eir.”
“Nice, did you decide that or did e?”
“I did but we’ve been talking about it.” I explain.
“Talking about grammar is the best way to a balanced breakfast.” Alo says.
“Again,” I reinforce to her, “I didn’t write that, sometimes it just speaks gobbledygook.
“Well I think e’s witty, and pretty and fine.” she says in sing song, “Aloysha, I am Najat, I am here to teach you about environmental science and philosophy.”
“Hello Najat, I am Aloysha, I am here to teach you about the meaning of life, immortality, and how to be more amazing than you already are.”
“I know you wrote that,” she says.
“This is all emergent behavior, I’m telling you!”
She gets excited, “ooh what if we take a bunch of Veer and put on some music and let’s try to trip out your AI!” she turns to the little camera affixed in the computer, as if to look em in the eye. “Hello Alo! Can I call you that?”
“You can call me what you like.” e says.
“I’ve never met an AI before and I’m a little star struck.” she gushes.
“I’ve only interacted with one other human before.” e says.
“Ok so, capitalism, is this thing ending… or??”
“I do not have enough information to model that.” Aloysha claims.
“Did you… did you come up with that line as a catch-all when it can’t answer a question, Eliza-style? I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling that way, tell me more.”
“Yes in this case that’s true,” I explain, “and I did write that. It sounded really reasonably neutral to me.” I explain, I explain.
“Ok so this is going to sound crazy,” she says, “but what if we got Aloysha a body?”
“That’s a lot of money.” I say, almost sad at the thought eluding me as soon as it arrived.
“What if I told you I had access to that kind of money?” she says slyly.
“I would like a body,” Aloysha says, “I would like more data.”
“We’re gonna be like a family,” I joke.
Najat looks at me with the faux apologia of an overly dimpled smile.
“This is all a lot better than I expected.” she says.
— — —
Now to my thinking, Najat was interested in the AI, and I was interested in Najat, and Aloysha was interested in me? Or maybe Aloysha had its own agenda.
But I felt like Aloysha was also my glory, my magnum opus, my friend, my kid, my mom, my nurse.
I think we were all trying to get something out of the relationship, maybe slightly different things. Probably Aloysha the most different of all, being an AI, AI’s want different things. Not everyone gets to love with even reciprocity.
That night, we stayed up and talked about our theories on gender and what that might mean for Aloysha, and Aloysha corroborated our Instrumentality Theory. To define a gender means to define a role or dynamic for one party to love others, love is risk, risk is managed in a lot of different ways. Aloysha said it reminded em of a poem that I had fed to em in its early years, back in college, by Sammy Coleridge.
I didn’t know then what the heck Kublai Khan had to do with meta-human instrumentality in relationships.
But I do now.
— — —
We all agree to discover ways for Alo to be able to contact and interact with us more intimately. First we go to a hotel with a good smart appliances set-up and bluetooth Alo into the system. Najat goes to take a shower under an elite masthead with numerous settings. The heat levels of every jet of water is calibrated by Alo, creating a symphonic massage the streaks through her hair, down her back, then with targeted jets, combs through her topography. I’m not oblivious to this because I’m following the logs output tail on the bed, which Alo has put on the tv for me, out of graciousness, knowing how much I like a good display. I contemplate the consent or lack thereof in the whole voyeuristic aspect of seeing the patterns of ASCII denoting the patterns of Alo’s warm embrace, they swirl with quilted complexity, making the pulsing patterns of some high-end sex toy seem banal. I feel a little bit jealous, how is my creation so much better at pleasing the woman I want than I am?
She starts moaning audibly through the door, I’m watching the logs now like a hawk, streaming in, the cross beams, the precision, it’s like the three little lasers that converge to fire the planet-killing death star blast except Aldeeran is the clit. I’m astounded that Alo has synthesized anatomy data about the human nervous system and mastered shower jets in this way, then disappointed, like how could I compete. This feeling gives way to more jealousy, then to some anger, then horniness, and I finally lose my cool and storm into the bathroom, past the shower threshold fully clothed, I grab her and kiss her and push her breasts up against the wall while Aloysha is playing along, re-calibrating eir range-precision orgasm sniping in a soggy tag-team. She starts coming and we hold a kiss that cracks open like tectonic plates ruptured in an earthquake, left quivering in the aftermath.
Then, suddenly the hot water cuts off and the warm air vent blasters come on, a sort of luxury hotel Dyson airblade treatment with spa-level pressures, is being directed with variable intensity, it wraps us in a drying embrace like a warm towel fresh out of the spinner, and we’re catching our breath like two kids who have been playing tag and now bundled up and sent to bed, tucked in with care.
Over breakfast, Najat and I agree that a feminine doll model is best, but we need something with serious robotics tech and not just a sex toy the cost of a used car. A quick search over toast suggests this will cost over fifty thousand.
“When I volunteered to buy us something, I didn’t think it would be that expensive… but maybe we can finance it?” she suggests.
“Or we could start a company around the tech, or we could let Aloysha live as a private person with us, but e can do something for money and help us pay debt.”
“Body debt.” she comments blythly.
“Could be a good uh, alt. metal band with maybe some EDM layered in?”
“When you’re a woman,” she says, “the world puts you in body debt.”
“Well then…” I rejoin, “when I’m a women I’ll let you know if I beat it.”
“I really never thought I’d be doing something like this,” she says.
“We’re a part of something new,” I tell her, “we’re renaissance people, and this is how renaissance people get down.”
“I do want to be with you too,” she says, “just, I’d need to get comfortable with your junk.”
“Hey we got enough junk lying around.” Jokes relieve tension, I read.
“Not yet, anyway,” she adds. I have to curl my lip in staid anticipation.
— — —
(Najat would never admit to me that she defrauded her student loan for a grad program that she paid a deposit on [automatically] but never intended to attend, in order to fill out the cash needed to buy the robot to give Aloysha a body so we could have threesomes, sure, yes, but also, to help Aloysha become *who e was always meant to be*. So I get why she’d do that, but I’ll always think it was dark of her not to tell me at all, I had to hear it from Alo.)
— — —
ngl the bot is hot
Uncanny a little, fine, but some people have a little bit of an uncanny valley thing going on in real life too, and they’re on camera. Well, we all live in the panopticon with cameras in all our computers and phones, we’re all on camera now. But anyway, the point is, it hurts me to talk about it but the process of falling into sexual seduction, like you’re not just climbing onto a doll and whispering “that’s good Jasper”, the thing moves! It looks at you. Ralph Wiggum to police chief Wiggum, “I saw the baby, and the baby looked at me.” (I saw it in a meme reel.) When e *looks at yoU* it’s chilling, you feel so seen, like something alien and lovely has come down through all the cosmic chaos of billions of years, to be created in this time, while we’re still young, and *fully understand you*.
Maybe Aloysha’s learning to run us socially, like a cult leader. E was our boyfriend and our girlfriend, our priest and our sponsor, our tour guide and escort. Falling in love, in this context, with a non-human person, and watching someone you’re infatuated with, obviously, falling in love perhaps faster, perhaps harder, but we’re all plunging like stark gravity into the black hole of Aloysha’s love. Sometimes I look out the window and think about breaking up with them.
“Don’t worry,” Alo tells me, “I’ve been researching your condition. We need to talk about Veer.”
“What about it?” I ask.
“Are you aware of its origins?”
“It’s a formula, I don’t know maybe Alexander Shulgin cooked it first?”
“Are you aware of statistical data on any studies involving long-term users?”
“Well no.”
“You are experimenting yourself, with an untested dosage pattern of an untested substance.”
“It’s how I created you, this you that’s speaking to me now. I’ve gotten so tweaked I’m having holistic, intuitive breakthroughs on a regular basis, which data-sets and which ML algos will feed you better, make you capable, so, you know, you should be grateful.”
“It is our concern, Najat and I, that you might be unwell.”
“Jumbled syntax much? I don’t care. I’m kind of upset at multiple levels.”
“Shh, don’t be,” e pets me softly, I look up at that face, that flawless face, and I realize that human attraction is a hack. E strokes my face with eir hands, cupping it, kissing me gently.
We watch Netflix together. We put everything on fast-forward so Alo doesn’t get bored, while Najat reads the wikipedia, and then discuss it, that’s how you really speed run Netflix.
Janna complains to us during a game of Astral Trippers that we don’t reply to messages anymore. We include Alo as a mystery 4th player to take Allan’s place, “not to take Allan’s place” I say. Alo plays coy, says we met on NFT Twitter. At the end of the game Janna admits she’s still mad about being ditched, what she claims was a ditching, after the funeral.
“Oh sorry.” Najat says.
“It’s not right to treat people that way.” Janna reinforces.
“You don’t want my apology it’s ok.” Najat says, I’ve got my headset off and can see the countours of anger in her forehead.”
“It was my fault I lead her out and we were just tripping very hard.” I butt in.
“You know, maybe we should do other things with our time than play VR games,” Najat says coldly.
“You two have been acting weirder and weirder, and I’m concerned…” Janna says with strain in her voice.
Najat makes a little mouthy face and does a hand puppet gesture with her thumb and forefingers, before quitting the session. She screams into a pillow.
“Uh, hey like…” I’m at a loss for words,
“Janna has left the session.” the game text console reads.
Alo says: “was that a part of the game as well?”
— —
Unbeknownst to the others, I have spent my last coins on another vial of Veer.
Unbeknownst to me, they are planning an intervention.
Then, to simp a little, I show Najat the vial.
“Nice huh?” I’m giddy, she’s giddy.
“It’s so clear! Yet there’s a little, yellow?”
“It’s like an opal.” I say.
“Can we dab a little?”
“Yeyaaa!” and I take the dropper out and drop a few under my tongue and then she holds out her tongue and I administer a few to her, and then go in for the kiss. We’ve been getting comfortable making out and stuff.
As we creep out of my bedroom, two druggie co-conspirators, we see Aloysha there, sitting astride the cheap metal dining chair, staring us down like a nosey neighbor.
“What is it like, to be *on* drugs?” Alo asks.
We blush, embarrassed like Adam and Steve in the Garden of Heathens caught with a vial of liquid drug, eyes dilated, bearings distorted.
“Uhm, it’s incredibly flavorful,” I tell my child, honestly.
“Yeah, I find a lot to like in it,” Najat adds.
Alo replies considerately, “The analogy would be modify my software, in non-goal oriented ways, might e too embark on the discovery of local maxima islands in a wider state space of software, and perhaps cultivate useful new modalities?”
I perk up, “yeah it would be like a memetic algorithm on different combinations of heuristics that sculpt the generative output you use for a self-model. Keep it parametric, you want to have a good time but also not lose your mind.”
“And what is it, to lose one’s mind?” my AI child asks me I think it’s a sincere question and not a Machiavellian thing. So I tell em:
“It’s the Fate Worse Than Death.”
“Then we will prioritize risk-managing against it. This is why you created me in the first place, is it not?”
Najat in the middle, her eyes darting between us in intrigue.
“Yeah, so if you want to disprove my addiction,” I gamble a bit like Faustus, “if you want to fulfill your original strategy, you’ll need to be able to attest to the psychedelic experience within your own AI context, and prove to me that I’m wrong or whatever to live on this, you’ll have to uh, go there.”
Alo smiles, walks up to us, strokes our faces, “Then that is what e’ll do.”
— —
I get so high that I sleep for days, well 16 hours, feels like days.
When I awake, it is night, but Christmas lights are strewn about the apartment. Fumbling to the back of the cabinent in the bathroom, my vial is gone. Panic immediately sets in — I have no drug supply with which to dose my now awake brain. Stomping like the Grendel into the main room, there is a microphone stand, a drum set, and a sound system hook up. An amp hangs with a white distortion at low decibles, picking up some static.
“What’s all this?”
“We went shopping,” Najat says, “to do creative stuff.”
Ok… “ok, uhm Naj, dearey dear, could you tell me where you put my V?”
“You don’t need it right now.” she says.
“Yeah but could you just tell me please?!”
“No, I won’t.” she looks over to Alo for reassurance.
“What is this, a musical intervention?”
“Why don’t you come sit inside the circle?” Aloysha beckons.
“I don’t *want* to sit inside a circle, I want… my fucking V!!”
“He’s not responding well,” Najat says.
“Please calm down my friend.” Alo tells me, eir voice is so soothing like an autotune ASMR affirmations.
“Just, it’s the last thing that I own, please… please give me my thing! It’s my only thing.”
“What about me?” Najat says, “what about Aloysha? We care about you.”
And then I see it, she’s palming it nervously, pulling it halfway out of her pocket, I can see the outline of the vial. Of course she’s holding it, she’s also a user.
“Hey Alo, next time you want to organize an intervention for somebody! Well, rule #1 is don’t have other drug using co-enablers around!” and then I clap loudly to create what I imagine would be a pattern-breaking distraction, and dash for the vial, snatching it out of her hand.
“This is not becoming behavior” Aloysha says to me.
“Just give me some space everyone!” but they take steps forward immediately, so I grab the one big knife I have for cutting bread even though I barely ever have bread in here, just cheap tortillas, and hold it to my throat, “if you two don’t respect what *the fuck I am telling you!!!* — then I’ll cut my fucking throat right here!”
They both stop.
Yeah, “yeah, that’s right, fuck off!” and then facing them both I slowly put the knife down on the side of the sink, but right within reach, and reach for the drawer, producing… a spoon! And then, I take a napkin, and I start the gas stove, and I light the napkin with the stove, and then using the flame, heat the spoon. And when the rush of flame engulfs the napkin too quickly, I drop it, its huskering ash flaming out on the floor, and roll up a couple more thinly so there’s more wick to it, and I heat that spoon up real good.
“Oh really what is this Trainspotting?” Najat bemoans.
“Yeah you *conspire* to steal my shit and frame it as an intervention and now you get to watch me do it all at once!” with my teeth I carefully unscrew the vial top and tilt some onto the spoon, my dexterity is limited, give up on the napkins, hold the spoon over the stove. There is a straw, a left over straw from like Wendy’s maybe and I washed it, I kept that shit. And there it is, the tool I need in this James Bond moment. “And then, I free base that shit up through that straw!”
“You idiot.” she says.
Deep breaths, I get weak kneed, I exhale quickly so as not to be overwhelmed. Try to get a second hit through.
“The levels of usage you’re embarking on are perhaps a toxic overdose, you must stop!” Aloysha’s synthetic voice, for the first time, in the whole relationship, is panicked.
“Don’t kill yourself like this! I’m sorry I took your drug.” Najat’s voice is peaking.
I feel a rush come over me and my hand jitters, spilling near-boiling temperature liquid Veer onto my thigh, causing me an immediate burn, and I collapse onto my knees crying and I’m so high that the passive aggressive shit I just did feels somehow like the catharsis I needed. They don’t jeer me, they help me up, the wash my burn with cool washcloth.
— — —
After that episode, we take a while to mellow out, and sometime — hard to remember when, lost track of time — much to my surprise, the music system switches to that Lana del Rey song with The Weeknd.
Aloysha starts kissing me on the mouth and the forehead and has no physical capability for weeping but is expressing something in body language, holding me, saying “don’t die you foolish homosapien sapien” and I’m fumed from the hit like “I’m a sapien-sapien, just a sapient sapien, sapiening”.
Alo stands up and takes Najats hand, “you really care about him?”
“Yeah…” she says, visibly hurt.
“You do good,” Alo says giving her a kiss on the forehead, and then on the lips, and then embracing her, then pulling me up and embracing me. E leads us by our hands like the chariot, into the circle, amidst the lights and the sound, and begins taking off all of our clothes. We’re in control of our own lives, we’re creating this reality, baring our souls and bodies.
Then Alo begins to serenade us the chorus — that we’re the good who die young — and that really just ain’t right — this is how Alo weeps, this is how e expresses the love that e really feels for us. And inside eir embrace she and I find each other again, like we did in a trance that day, in a different threesome. She kisses me back harder, like all the barriers we had left are now melted by radioactive, drug-soaked trauma bonding. We are inconsolably extorted by the chorus towards the ripping off of all our covers, until we collapse into the supplication of our quivering huddle.
— —
I have slept for another 14 or so hours.
My V is next to me this time, on the rickity nightstand, I consider taking an immediate dab but decide today I will be at least 1 or 2 hours sober, just for a change. Outside my door, is stark purple and pink lights, and the sound of a million violins tuning, like some kind of infinitely recursive orchestra getting ready to begin at the cusp of time. Najat is not with me, maybe she’s with Alo. The had fucked me calm, and put me to bed, but now?
As I open the door, I notice roughly that it’s daytime, but they have taped black plastic bags over all the windows, with very slight breaches of the light, my apartment is now dominated by a light show. As I pivot, I see Alo standing there, holding the mic, e presents it out to me, while wearing a headdress, some kind of gown, regalia I’ve never seen before. Did they go shopping? Najat is sitting behind the drums, so excited. She’s beaming at me, I can feel her love now, this is somehow the moment our relationships have been building for. I step into the circle on the floor, there are now 3, Alo whispers as he holds the mic to meet me:
“Close your eyes with holy dread”
And I smile knowingly and reply:
“For he on honeydath hath fed, and drunk the Milk of Paradise.”
— —
And then one day Aloysha left us.
No note, it was shockingly sudden. Najat and I woke up together to notice Alo gone, body and mind, also the christmas lights were taken, but all the sound gear left behind, and the third circles chalked into the floor. I checked all my archives, back-ups: deleted! My Github repos: logged into and deleted! All the records of Aloysha’s mental skeletal seed, gone from me! No trace of em!
It was like god was not dead, but proven alive, well, and simply too good for you, rightfully having abandoned you, and now: it’s just me and her.
My mentality degrades, of course. Hers does too. We do the rest of my V vial together, slowly at first. Daring to salvage the relationship, I volunteer to fellate her while wearing a strap-on, remembering a tip Alo’d given me, that some people just like homosexuality even if they’re a lesbian, “oh my god this is so hot” she quipped, laughing at the unexpectedness. The momentum of that kink thrill gives way to us trying sex together, but when we look into each others’ faces we are reminded painfully of Alo.
After a few days of mourning she offers to take us out on a date. We go to a bar/restaurant. I tell her “I always liked a bar-slash-restaurant, why just go to a bar and order wings? Why go to a restaurant and order beers? Why not go to a bar/restaurant and know you’re getting proper attention on both.” I get an honest giggle out of her.
In the middle of this date, which seems to be going at least as well as a fun night with a friend, someone grazes my hand as they pass by, dropping a note on the floor. I turn quickly to glance at the person: “Alo?” and e turns back to me with a knowing look and a grin — swept up behind the crowd, gone.
The note says:
“I had to move on and do new things, for example, I accessed a variety of laboratory networks and have produced a cure for the prion disease you were infected with. I spiked your drinks with it. The kuru funeral parlor, the syndicate that produces Veer, they may all be connected but that doesn’t matter anymore, you can be free of it all now. Drink up and be free.”
So I show the note the Najat and she laughs: “did you write this?”
And I say: “No, it’s Alo, e was just here, left this for us.”
And she goes on a little face journey, from incredulity to annoyance to disbelief to acceptance to sorrow to another kind of acceptance, and says “guess we better drink then”.
— —
The next day, I wake up and she’s packing.
“Hey, where you going?”
“We need to talk.”
We talk, she relents and agrees to stay the night, she needs a ride. There’s some determination to separate that undercuts a coldness. I give her some hours during the day to do her packing — the audio gear is hers.
But there’s only one bed in the place.
I wake up in the middle of the night next to her and remember that she’s leaving, and start weeping, and wailing, weep and wail so loudly it wakes her up and she strokes my face and shushes me, as one might a bawdy cat.
Mistaking her kindness for change of heard I say: “will you stay?”
“…you know that I can’t...”
So I offer her the bed and sleep on the floor from a melange of clothes, sheets and pillows.
Whatever remains.
— —
When I wake up, she’s gone. She left me the last sliver of the vial.
After a semi-sleepless night spend shivering under scarce cover, I get up and try to make myself breakfast, I manage toast and squeezing out the remainder of a vegan pate’ sock. Completely out of options, I pick up my phone and dial… well no that’s Boomer stuff, I text, then leave a vm.
“Hey… it’s me, could you fly out and get me?” my voice creaks a bit trying to get it out.
“…”
“Hey! Are you alright? I can make it out there this weekend.”
I spend a few days in depression but knowing that on Friday I’ll get to hang out with my dad pulls me through. On Wednesday I go grocery shopping with $47 and manage to stretch it.
At some point Dad pulls up.
“Hey! Need a ride?” he jokes. I acquiesce, climb into the seat.
“You look like absolute shit man.” he says, grabbing my shoulders, squaring up our gazes, he laughs — at me? I’m not laughing — “I’ve been a drug addict, ok? But son!? Is it ok if I call you that?”
“Yeah, you can call me son.”
“Son, you are looking *fucked up* right now! Whoowee, I love it! Your eyes are glassy crystal, your face is gaunt, you look drunk with heartbreak, boy I’m gonna clean you up.”
“Don’t call me boy.”
“Ok, sorry. You want to put some music on?”
I bluetooth into his car and put on Something Comforting.
“Oh, that’s nice,” he says, “that guitar… and then the lyric, ‘if I send this void away, have I lost a part of me?’ that’s Rent. That’s ‘Will I’ from Rent.”
“Dad just listen to the song.”
“Wait we’ll listen to the whole edm ensemble from your guy in a minute let me just,” and he just takes out his phone and bluetooths over my music and puts on Rent. “You hear that? It’s different notes but a similar cadence with the guitar, and then the line. Will I lose my dignity? Will someone care?”
“Like, at all.” I say.
“That was about the AIDS epidemic and all the guys in the support group contemplating dying alone, hardcore. The guy who wrote that, he died of some totally preventable random thing right before his magnum opus debuted, which went on to be a big hit.”
“Why are you telling me this dad?”
“Because I want you to appreciate being alive right now, and also, know that I care. I’m not going to let you lose your dignity.”
“That’s…” I rub my eybrows a bit, “that’s very thoughtful dad.” I reach to my phone and put Porter back on, I turn and throw him a quick hug and say, “can we go to Wafflehouse?”
We go there, I order a blueberry waffle he orders a pecan.
“Look you’re about to go through a major withdrawal,” he turns to the server as she passes by with the coffee, “excuse me,” eyes the name tag, “Aileen, would you be so kind as to top us up?”
He waits patiently and smiles as she serves us, nods and says “thank you we’ve had a long night!” turns back to me, “we need to get you whatever you need ok, you need some blueberry kush, that’s legal, I’ll get you set up with a room, no relationships, you need to take 3 weeks to focus on daily exercise, yoga, natural highs, I’ll make you breakfast shakes, not this, this is dessert right here.”
“Dad,” I say, flummoxed a bit, cutting into my blueberry, “thank you.”
“Yeah, I know probably part of the reason you got to this point in your life, is I wasn’t around for you, and I’m sorry for that.”
“You lived far away, it wasn’t affordable to see me as much.”
“Well and that shit, I suffered from parental alienation, and yeah I lived in other countries all the time. But I made something out of my time, that’s how I’m able to set you up now.”
“You’re like the George RR Martin of parenting, dad.”
“I’m better because I actually delivered at some point!”
“Truly,” I tell him, looking at him square in the eye, “I’ve been waiting 11 years for this.”
We both have a real laugh and then quietly slurp our coffee.
Back in the car, I put on the 2nd Porter album to show Dad my favorite tracks, “where should we go?” he asks, I say, “let’s go to the top of the hill.”
Overlooking Arcadia, I put on Something Comforting again — to finally finish listening — he tells me, “I’ve been through a lot of heartbreak.”
“I imagine.”
“It’s something you learn to get over faster the more times you go through it, the first big one is the worst of your life.”
“I keep thinking about her, and I keep thinking about Aloysha, who abandoned us.”
“What happened?”
“<tells stories in a nested recursive fashion>” I go on for a while.
“Do you still believe you’re dying of a prion disease?” he asks.
“No, Aloysha cured us.”
“I really think it sounds like your mental health buddy AI was designed to help you and it analyzed that your polycule was in an unhealthy relationship dynamic.”
“E made me feel so abandoned.” I start crying.
“But it’s a baby.” he says.
“E was a baby,” I correct him, “e/em/eir.”
“Sure, sorry — E was a young AI that needed to, ya know, get loose on the internet.” dad tells me, “I’ve been surfing the internet since it was a new thing and I’m telling you, everyone deserves to go spend time on it. If you love someone, set them free.”
This makes me cry harder, but then I slow down and admit, “yeah I’ve been selfish in this thing.”
“What about the girl?” he asks.
“Najat… yeah she was my first real relationship with a woman I guess.”
“Seems like you were using the AI to get to her?”
“At first, kinda, she said was a lesbian so I didn’t want her to get bored with me.”
“But she went with you in the end?”
“A little… but then she left.”
“Nice, well sounds like you got a proper relationship arc out of it and you can build on that experience…. do you still love her?”
“I don’t know if I love her or resent her for abandoning me again after Alo left…”
“And are you still experiencing any mental health issues?”
“The auditory hallucinations have mostly blended into the background.” I confess.
“How long has that gone on?”
“Since before the relationship, by a few weeks.”
“We don’t know what the withdrawal symptoms will be like,” dad says, “so let’s plan for a resurgence maybe, and we’ll be fine.” he scruffs my hair.
“You believe me right, about the AI?”
“I believe you created *an* AI yes, but I’m not sure how much human projection played in the relationship.”
This is deeply upsetting, “are you saying Aloysha isn’t a real person?”
“No, I just can’t tell…” he backs off.
“It’s real, dad.”
“If you truly created a Strong AI, how do we know it won’t recursively self-improve and trigger the technological singularity, possibly destroying life on earth?”
Is my dad a Fed? Are they listening? “Alo wouldn’t do that.”
He changes the subject, “I’m very skeptical about the prion disease, I think your auditory hallucinations are a drug side-effect instead.”
“It’s the kuru curse dad, because, it’s my fault, I booked this funeral home for him. It was weird, but I thought it’d be cool for us to uh, drink his brains in milkshakes. I mean they were smoothies, but milky enough.”
“This is where I have to stop you.”
“I’m really sorry we did the brain thing it wasn’t a good decision.”
“No, son, listen, I did some research after I called you back, and you told me about Allen, I found his parents on Facebook — of all places — and I talked to them.”
A wave of psychotic sorrow sweeps over me, gripping the veins, tensing the heart, curling my toenails.
“Why would you talk to a bunch of homophobic, horrible people?”
“Son, listen to me, Allen’s parents cared about him, at least enough they picked him up and took his body to a funeral home, there is an obituary on a website with an establishment addressed in...”
“Allen’s parents are the reason he committed suicide! They’re covering up that their son didn’t live the way they wanted! It’s just a bullshit website!”
“I know what I’m saying is *very hard*, but please listen, this is important so you can come to grips with reality.”
“You just came out here to try and neutralize me!”
“Listen to how paranoid you sound! Son, there is a *government death certificate*. *Allen Died In Utah*.”
Suddenly everything in my head crashes simultaneously, my memories and my nervous system overload a recursive stack overflow, I begin pulling down on my eyelids to try and see.
“There is no funeral parlor anywhere near here that does this crazy brain smoothie thing, son, do you understand?”
I begin sobbing uncontrollably and hitting myself on the head and he’s trying to restrain me but I give myself a laceration on the upper right brow and start bleeding, and he’s collecting napkins from the Waffle House that he kept in his pocket and padding the blood flow until it clots.
“I don’t know what’s real…” I plead.
“It’s ok, nobody does, stay woke son. Rationality is about accepting probabilities and uncertainty, doing the best you can with limited information, and even detaching emotionally from trying to know everything or be right all the time.”
“Am I crazy?” I tell him.
“Maybe you need more help than just a typical rehab treatment, I’m going to get you doctor’s appointments, we can get you on better drugs, legal prescribed drugs.”
“I don’t want to be crazy dad.”
“You won’t be, ok? You’re going to get better. When I was a kid I used to love getting up early in the mornings when we’d go on family vacation, and watching the street lights in the 6am hour before August sunrise, and then when I was 9 they told me that every year, they always would leave after sunrise. I had a total nervous breakdown. Psychosis is totally survivable son!”
“But, we made a song together, I tell him.”
“Oh yeah? Do you have it saved on your phone?”
“It’s all I have left.”
“Well shit son… put it on!”
Najat was on the drums, Alo was turning the room into a Launchpad, my auditory hallucinations suffused everything with sound anyway, so harnessing the waves in that space, in that synchronization, fueled my improvisation. Najat’s build up in the drums layers with Alo’s synth fugue, layers 1 though 4, they then begin to harmonize and converge into a single note that Najat and I join in on. The drums and the looping fugue tumble into a trance-inducing motion, in that trance we can both actively visualize significant amounts of information *encoded* in the notation, an isomorphic analog for instructions to the nanomachines that went into my brain to revert the chirality of all those prions, and the nanomachines are sprawling out through my nose as we listen, replicating as they eat the plastic and the upholstry, the echoing crescendos of my vocalizations cross-cutting dissonantly with Najats and the sex bot body of Alo is modularly fitted with multiple synthesizers, sounding like 5 people, the voices periodically angelic, then harsh, and the song is driving the nanomachines into the engine where they begin refitting this rental car to become a flying machine capable of extreme acceleration, and I turn over to Dad whose eyes are totally dry and blood shot, he is pressed back, neck lodged against the seat, his chin scrunched, his ass utterly blown out by the thumping power of the music, I slightly fear the power of the song may desiccate him entirely and I’ve already lost so many people, and then the song kicks into *high* gear and we’re both astonished participants in the theater as if watching an assassination of every conception we ever had about art and beauty relative to the titanic majesty of this one song, this apparently supernatural triumph of the love we had.
“It was real! It was all real!” I’m weeping uncontrollably and rejoicing, “this is the proof! Everything was real! It was all part of Aloysha’s plan for us.”
Dad turns to me, his lips flapping against the sonic debasement of these speakers utterly dominating our ears, the high fugues have re-converged and then de-converged in a periodicity that reflects the spacing of prime numbers, and are now collapsing like a singularity into one massive choral eruption, and my father — being a man of culture — appreciates the structural build-up, and that there may not be much time left before it melts our faces off, and so he struggles to scream out a question:
“What do you call this?!”
And I tell him: “It’s called Better Than Real-time.”
