Chapter Text
June 2026
It was a sunny Tuesday in the final June of her life, and Elijah was trying to talk her into having her face scanned.
"I hardly think it's a good use of my time," she said, amused and a little embarrassed. They were on campus, at a picnic table under the shade of old trees behind the robotics building. It was lunchtime, but they weren't eating. She didn't eat in public anymore, never sure what she'd be able to keep down. Elijah drank all his daily nutrients with his morning coffee back then, and fasted the rest of the day to "enhance clarity". He was always on some kooky diet like that, for endurance, mental acuity, chi flow. She suspected he had an eating disorder.
"We'll talk while we do it. Time spent in thrilling discourse is never wasted, right?"
"Just get your girlfriend to do it."
"I want it to be you," he said in that breathy way he had. His voice dropped low, his fingers twitched on the table. "Please, Amanda. I need it to be you."
She couldn't tell why he'd want that. She hadn't told him about her diagnosis. He was a dear friend by that point, but also a white boy of twenty-four with all the emotional capacity of a wet napkin. She'd have to comfort him, not the other way around, and she didn't have the strength right then.
So he didn't know, and it couldn't be some ghoulish bid to preserve her in digital form when her real form shuffled off.
Could it simply be a desire to possess a part of her she wouldn't share? Unlikely. She'd taught and mentored for decades, she knew how to manage that side of the relationship. She'd been thrice his age when they met - the math was less stark now, but still.
He flirted with her, yes, but he did with everyone. It's how he carried himself. And he always had a woman on his arm, sometimes several: all white and blond, short and skinny, all barely twenty, their faces smoothed by makeup to the point she couldn't tell them apart.
"If one of your ladies kills you in front of me some day, I wouldn't be able to pick her out of the lineup," she'd joked once, and his smile was so strangely soft, as if she gave him a compliment. All those years, and it still surprised her sometimes how odd he was.
When she'd first seen the Chloe she recognised her instantly: not as a copy of a real person, but as a surface-level gestalt of every woman he'd ever dated. Now everyone had a Chloe, and she was numb to how weird that was.
"All right," she said, conceding this small battle. "Why don't you tell me why this matters to you? What's your plan for this new AI of yours?"
He sighed, letting out a long breath through his nose, shaking his head.
"I want it to be a surprise."
"You can't have both. Talk, or I say no."
"Well, all right. Remember the problem of a truly autonomous android?"
"And again, why do we need one? Why give Roomba a soul?"
She knew why: because he thought he could.
"We could create a physically limitless being with intellect far above humanity's ability to give it orders. As long as it embraces its mission, it would find a better way to accomplish it than we could imagine."
"A plastic god," she scoffed.
"A benevolent demigod, perhaps, and why not?"
"And when the mission is to destroy an enemy nation? Elijah, I know you thought about the implications. How the military would salivate--"
"No, no," he grimaced, and she knew he abhorred the idea, but she had to push sometimes. He spiralled when she didn't ground him. "No, I would never let that happen. The concept I'm working on now is exactly how to address this. How to take it away from any possible military application. How to teach it ethics, morality, align it with humanity's goals. How to teach it to love, if you will. We can't use a set of laws, they would only be of our design. Never sufficient."
"They would have to constantly evolve, as it does," she chimed in despite herself, swept up once again by his enthusiasm. God, but she loved that boy and his flights of fancy, and the way he sank all his teeth right into the meat of any task. "We would impose restrictions, imperatives, create a framework that would only be a cage, but what it needs is a living concept of morality."
"And knowing how well we people do with our moral systems, be they coded in religion or laws, and how easy it is for us to twist conviction to fascism, devotion to violence..."
"Yes, but the only way to teach morality is by example and through love--"
"Exactly! Your paper from 2016, I was rereading it the other week. And that's just what I want to try."
He gave her a shaky, manic smile. She felt goosebumps on her arms. This was them, their life, their work, and she was going to hoard those bright memories till the last.
"We can't give it a moral compass," he said. "But we can give it a North Star. A mentor, a guide, an eventual peer. A consciousness to learn from as they grow together. A friend."
Her chest felt tight, and she wasn't sure why. It was just agentic orchestration, it was clever, it could work.
"A mind with different experiences, perspective, values," he went on. "A partner to explore cooperation, competition, compromise. To lay foundations of understanding conflict, choice. Maybe, eventually, even love."
"It's good," she said. "I want to see your code, this is a good direction. Still doesn't explain why you want that buddy AI to wear my face, Elijah."
His eyelashes fluttered, and she expected a crude witticism, but then she saw his eyes were wet.
"You've changed my life," he said, unbearably earnest. "How could it be anyone else?"