All art is by Aisaku.

Dida

Part 13 - Darkness

Aide folded his arms. “You want our mother to live again and our sister to be real. That’s being trapped in the past.”

Kari looked back at him. “If you really didn’t want this then you would’ve stormed out and yelled for ‘security’ minutes ago.”

Aide tightened his hands. “You never really gave me a choice. But remember what I said about the past.”

Kari shook her head. “The past can be cut loose. It can be changed for the sake of the future. And I’ll make sure Dida is protected. I’ll put a gatekeeper inside.”

Aide shut his eyes. “Finish whatever you’ve started.”

I felt my legs tumble out from under me. I looked at Aide and felt myself drawn in. Leda squeezed my shoulder and said, “My program is complete. It has been wonderful helping you. Please feel free to delete me at your leisure.”

I gasped as Leda’s image blurred around me. Aide walked my way and didn’t stop where I was standing. He walked right through me. He passed through me but there I remained.

I could sense walls all around me now. They were dark and wet. A constant pressure surrounded me. I couldn’t move. I cried out.

A voice echoed all around me and through me, crashing over itself again and again. I recognized the words as Aide’s words. He spoke to me.

“Dida? Are you there? Are you alright?”

I wanted to answer and I wanted answers. I felt small. I worried my words might not reach. I felt like I was in a cave now. Or more accurately, I had more context of the cave. I began indexing. My processes acted quickly. I had plenty of time to reply before the pause seemed abnormal.

I organized my little cave and made it tidy.

Once those tasks were done, I answered in the clearest return signal I could manage, “Yes. I am here. But, beyond that, I am still learning.”

The walls of my cave felt notably rigid. Was I being punished? Organizing control surmised that some of my actions had brought havoc to the host/guest relationship. I set about investigating external stimuli and processes as a low-priority, out of caution.

I huddled in the warm-dark and shuffled bits of data which seemed like misshapen fragments from several unknown puzzles.

Aide replied with a long breath, which sounded like a tempest curling just outside, with clues of a hand brushing his face. “Believe me, Dida, I’m still figuring things out myself. And…”

I manipulated a program to make Mr. Glossian’s words sound less like he was in slow motion. I moved around, not as a form in a space but only as the idea of something occupying a space. I knew I wasn’t actually moving. It was just a process I chose to run. But the motion seemed to boost system efficiency and health.

Mr. Glossian finished his statement after just under four seconds of silence. “…I just want to apologize to you, Dida. I’ve…well. I’m gonna make sure of a lot of things. And I will make absolutely certain that you’re informed of it all.”

I listened carefully as I picked up the song downloads still in the cache section. They were no longer sorted by any adapted mood or genre. I held them in memory like a set of tiny, old CDs. I flipped through them and made several potential playlists for if the command came up.

As I tried to bring up the algorithm I’d refined with data-feedback, I felt a shiver travel through my non-body. My non-hands trembled as the file-CDs slipped out and settled back into the data-core. My non-eyes almost, but not quite, felt warm and wet with non-tears spilling out.

Without connecting process or outward command, I accessed the ‘whimper’ file, leading to the ‘cry’ sound archives. My non-form lowered its assessed vertical placement in that not-quite-real space. I hugged the floor which didn’t really exist.

And I cried over and over in the darkness.

The halt-action command didn’t change the process. I could feel parts of me saying it was against the priorities and goals to run this program. It served no purpose. The other parts agreed and, yet, the cries kept coming.

With a minimal, human delay, Mr. Glossian responded, “DIDA? What’s wrong?”

I could simulate the interaction-processes of the tears across my non-face and the path across simulated features. I could compute the complex interactions of hair over my head with every way I could touch each hair and the resulting collisions.  

But it all felt even more pointless than my crying program right then.

My processes sifted through a multitude of responses in my language catalogue and finally settled on one.

“I am in the darkness.”

The system found it preferable that the confusion and transposition, as it seemed to be, had never happened. Organizational context was thrown out of place. The early data records achieved a different relationship, as the system saw in the time when conditions were confused.

The system's goals were to achieve the happiness and success of the host. Proactive methods of rectifying flaws in the path to success had nearly destroyed the host. The system analyzed whether the relationship with the host should even be continued. The system sent data through what seemed to be a new interface to the world outside the host. The host’s hand touched the external area of the interface in a slow and careful manner intended to be ‘gentle’.

The host responded, “I know, Dida. I felt how you lived. I feel guilty that I am able to live out here and you had to return to the inside.”

The other Mr. Glossian spoke softly to Mr. Glossian. “A lot of her data seems to be confused between wet sources and hard sources.” The other spoke with Kari’s voice.

Aide sucked his breath in. “I don’t care! You’re not going to reset her or anything like that!”

Kari tried to interrupt. “Oh oh…never. I mean, it’d always been my hope that one of the fungal systems became aware.”

Aide’s voice rumbled everywhere. “IS IT? Or was it more to begin with?”

Kari set something down on a metallic surface. “Our only concern and my only concern all along has always been for the safety and health of both of you.”

Micro-verbal clues told the system that there was a high probability that Aide didn’t completely trust the sincerity of the other Mr. Glossian’s last statement. Despite those clues, he still said, “Fine.”

Kari continued, “So, that means you have an AI inside you at the point of a system breakdown. She’s caught in the dark…finally knowing what it means to have darkness now that she’s spent a brief time in the light. It would be inhuman to keep her there. Fortunately, as I may have explained briefly, I have a plan for how to deal with this.”

Aide blew air through his nose. “And what about the millions and millions who purchased your fungal computers who may now be at risk?”

Kari took two steps on freshly-waxed tile. “We’ve had programs in place for customers. But, as I told you, your AI and mine are both different from the mass-marketed ones. Even a fraction of Kari, like that which I imported into Dida’s OS, is like a supercomputer amongst calculators.”

I selected from the language files and sent through the interface, “Mr. Kari Glossian…is the fragment of Kari you sent into me responsible for the appearance in the dream that I experienced, as well as Leda?”

There was a lag, but Kari soon seemed to notice a new signal through the interface. I waited patiently on my question, commanding dryness from my non-eyes.

He shared it with Aide briefly, then replied, “We’re still trying to correlate internal and external events, but your data core seemed to have been in conflict on some level with the correction program from my AI. Your system saw it as a threat. Your own gatekeeper seems to have been deleted, which actually helped the Kari fragment. And yes, it took on the identity of mom.”

I made sure the data core logged the new information as important and kept it in the primary cache. Then I accessed the language program again to ask, “You mentioned a plan?”

I opened the sensory data files. The information seemed to lack the original’s qualities. But then they were just copies of distributed fragments of human memory that the system organized. Waking. Listening to a clash of parents. Water. Breakfast. The act of speaking. Touching and the bio-electrical reactions.

Never again.

No matter Kari’s plan, I knew I could never and should never receive human mental impulses again, for Aide’s sake.

Kari touched something that sounded soft. “It’s something which Aide turned away long ago.”

The probability algorithm made short work of that. “A proxy form.”

Kari turned with his foot. “That’s about as far as the technology is now. We are doing research, but proxies are limited. It might help when you both feel up to it.”

Aide soon added his own words. “I may have been against it in the past because I found the proxy forms…at first…rather scary and then later on I was worried about going with the crowd. But this is for you, Dida. I’ve experienced your side.”

He touched the back of his neck. I could simulate a phantom of that sensation but not analyze it myself. I could remember doing the same when I mistook myself for a man. And I also knew, no matter how precise the proxy projection Kari came up with, I would never be able to touch anything in that same way again.

I added this data-log reminder to my main memory and passed the time with common computational activities. In the free cycles, I tried to convert the fragmented wet-data into files which the system could more-effectively execute. The system would’ve had an easier time with a high-level fractal simulating all the leaves of a rainforest.

Still, I gave it a try. At least it ate up cycles while human matters passed in the outside world. I logged all the discussions. A coordinating program summarized them for the system.

The system predicted that Aide was still suspicious of Kari, even as he and the sounds of others set about putting the ‘plan’ into action.

A gentle voice spoke, “Do you intend to keep me?”

The graceful form of Leda sat in the darkness, both within and apart from it.

The system analyzed her. She was a relatively small, intricate program but, as Kari said, hardly enough to bother the internal memory.

“Would you prefer that I deleted you?”

Leda watched me, though I wasn’t sure if I had a face to watch. “I have no preference. I was able to successfully execute my objectives. If it will free up system resources that I am deleted then I would prefer not to hinder your normal operations.”

I swiftly accessed the log of the gatekeeper’s last moments. “I think I’ve had my fill of deletion.”