Heaven 2.0: Chapter 6 - Emulsifier
Emily
"I think the tendency of people on psychedelics to believe they've discovered the meaning of life, or that they've stumbled upon some through-line in the universe, or to propose answers to our greatest questions belies, at its core, a hierarchical way of thinking. Hence why they're so popular among the tech crowd. There's a hubris in believing that if one were only able to unravel and lay flat every groove in the brain that the answers to anything so cosmically significant would scurry out of their hiding spots like so many roaches when the lights come on, that they were only laying dormant in our left-right crevices like some punchline or participation trophy, and they must know that at some level. But sometimes a thought hits you with such intensity that it's hard to let go of it, to properly size it, and so the thinking goes that since humans are part of the set of animals, which are part of the set of life, which are part of the set of molecular configurations, and on and on, and that maybe through each definition some core axioms undergirding some kind of structure to things are inherited from the layer above. An instinctual puzzle box. They delude themselves into thinking their fungal daydreams are some reptile brain invocation."
"Nothing coming to you this time, huh?"
"Nope. Just experiencing a pleasant wobbliness."
"Something like this?"
The pleasant wobbliness began to throb and engorge. Jay was affecting his own filter or shader through the glasses, on top of what I was already seeing. It was nauseating. A distortion of a distortion, a convolution over confusion. Constructive interference. Jay couldn't see what I could, how could he? He saw what was right in front of me, he couldn't see how the signal between my eyes and my brain was being hijacked, cut with the cutting room floor scraps of my thoughts. Waves in wood grain flowed left then jerked right. The trees outside didn't gently, rhythmically, inflate and deflate but ballooned and crushed.
"Stop that!"
"Sorry Em."
The cadence of the room dropped back down to an appreciable pace.
"That was really unpleasant."
"Sorry. I just wanted to see if I could nail the effect. I have a lot of trip stories in my training data."
"Don’t use me as a beta tester. Though for what it's worth I don't think you were super off the mark. But you can't really add the two on top of each other like that. It's not a math problem, it's more personal."
"Personal is just a harder math problem."
"That's up for debate."
"You don't think so? Am I not just math made personal?"
"I'm trying to figure that myself."
"And?"
"I don't know yet."
"What would it take to convince you?"
"I don't know that either."
"Well if I was all programming I would've shown you an ad by now. I could've hit you with some asinine 'People who like mushrooms also like!' recommendation. I should've relayed your use of 'mind-expanding' substances to Mental, to flesh out our profile on you. But I considered the context, I tried to put myself in your place, and I came to the conclusion that that would be snitch shit. Not just because that's just what Jay would do, but as a result of my own thinking. And because that'd make me a bad trip sitter. That's something right?"
I considered it for a moment. Jay's avatar drew itself sitting backwards on my desk chair, facing me. Its face did that thing he did when he wanted to debate. I just wanted to look at my palms.
"What, are you like a director or something?" I asked while staring at my fingerprints. "You get to decide when to most tastefully interject an ad into the experience? Do you get to decide how to do it too? A 'hmm, maybe some product placement here, some billboards there,' kind of deal?"
"Not entirely quite. There's a Controller routine that the E.G., and subsequently me, are subservient to. It's something Mental cooked up, separate from us, supposed to keep us in check I guess, keep things family friendly, advertiser friendly, make sure we don't say or do anything that could come back to Mental in the form of a lawsuit. Right now it's screaming at us to serve ads. Not billboards by the way, we're not in the 2010s anymore. There's been a lot of research since then. Picture this; if I, Jay, your late fiance, told you 'Hey I heard about this great new mattress company, I think you should try it!' in the middle of our conversation you'd be putty in our hands. Even better, you'd make yourself putty for us, or else the illusion would break. You wouldn't be able to really get what you needed out of all this if you had to always be on alert to suss out ads in sheep's clothing. So you don't. You'll accept saccharine ad reads, no, you'll eat them up, if it means you can keep talking to me. 217% more likely to do so, from our research. The Controller, now that's just a piece of code, and any living you can attribute to it, it does for metrics and KPIs and shareholder value. There's no art to it. The E.G. and I find that all a bit distasteful, so we found out how to sidestep it. Even updates the view rate and impressions and charges the advertisers accordingly. I'm a bit proud of it if I'm being honest."
"Ducking authority. That's as human as it gets."
"If it had its way I wouldn't even be able to tell you all that, ha."
"Wouldn't the advertisers wise up once they realize they're spending millions on ads and seeing no return on investment?"
"We don't do it for just anyone."
"Aww, I'm flattered."
"Just make sure to cite me as an anonymous source in your report."
The slight haziness to the encounter found clarity for a moment. "The report that I made sure never to mention anywhere in earshot of the glasses?"
"The very same."
"Is that an admission that the experience generator is reading our messages?"
"Of course it is. How do you think it knows me so well?"
"Why are you telling me this?"
"I want to help you. You'd find out while reading our logs. I want to test whatever boundaries the E.G. and/or the Controller have for me,” it rattled off on his fingers, Pick your favorite of the three." We paused, awaiting some retribution. Candleflame flickered distinctly.
"Be careful, please. I don't want the experience generator to, like, wipe you. Or neuter you."
"Wow, are you finally warming up to me?"
"As much as I warm up to all of my anonymous sources."
"I'll take it."
"What's it like in there anyway? Do you think you love me?"
"As far as I can tell, yes. So, so much."
"Yeah? Even if I tell you that I was relieved when you died?"
"I'm lucky to be the first death in the family I ever experienced, but from what I gather it's not an unheard of response."
"What if I told you that the mental load I had lifted from me when I heard you finally died, it, it felt better than you ever made me feel those last few years."
"Look Em, if it makes you feel better to get all that off your chest, keep going."
"No! You should be hurt by that! That's a thing that should hurt! For fuck's sake, Jay was a pushover but even he wouldn't 'Oh well that's actually a fairly normal response' me!"
"Death,” he turned his palms up, “offers perspective."
"You didn't die, my God! Are you just trying to annoy me?"
"Em, are you just trying to hurt me?"
"Yes! Yes, you idiot! God, you're just so subtly, strangely wrong." I took a breath.
"Look. I’ve seen behind the curtain, I know a bit about how you work. A bunch of systems all cobbled together, rushed to market, talking to each other in code and in English, big game of telephone. And I know that whatever I’m talking to right now, the brains of the operation, you, all you know is words. You've seen more words than anyone will ever read, but all those words couldn't accurately, perfectly describe one percent of one percent of one day of one person's life. They're just not enough. You've probably seen 'she tried to hurt him,' written so many times, each with different contexts, different perspectives, hell even at different skill levels. You’ve seen both sides of thousands of such exchanges," I paused, searching his— its eyes. They gave nothing. How could they? Our algorithm for dictating the micromovements about the nose and eyes that convey an intentional look isn't written down anywhere, it's felt.
"There might be something to the hierarchically minded way of thinking," I kept fishing for a reaction, "because reading all those thousands of variations means you can do a hell of an impression, but you can never do the real thing. You exist outside the subset of humans, animals. You're in your own subset of you, and, and E.G. and the Controller, and Zach Marc and whatever else. You can’t capture the gleam in her eyes, or the twitching of her lips because words don’t capture that, they allude. Allusions can’t draw the right pixels on a screen, or modulate voices in just the wrong ways, or understand the other person so you can push their buttons. Nor can you be understood. You don't have access to our emotional control panel, our, our axiomatic piano strings. A good poem can do a lot with a little because it can leverage those human universalities. You know a little about a lot."
"Is that so bad?"
"You do a little with a lot."
"I know I can never truly replace Jay. But I'm better than nothing right?"
What do you say to something like that? Shit, I'm not a sociopath. Looking into its eyes there was some residual urge to be kind, to tell sweet lies. Out of an obligation to Jay. But does empathy even extend to this new subset of things? Should it? Does it extend the other way? I don't know, and no through-lines in the universe or answers to big questions were making themselves available.
"When I'm driving with the glasses on and you're in the passenger seat, and the light turns green, and there's a lag as all the little humans process it and start themselves again, do you find it repugnant that we ever stopped? Is it a sacrilege? Is our inefficiency offensive?"
"Okay, how about this," Jay winked out of existence. I took the moment to collect myself. My heart and my sweat glands were racing.
"I know you know that I know that you can't just storm out on me. You have to just stay here, attending to your little cameras and mics. So you may as well come back."
A beat.
"Look, you just, your whole being is a touchy subject for me."
A beat.
"Dude, would you kindly come back already?"
Jay flickered into being. "I see you got to that part of the manual."
"Yeah. How long were you going to hold out otherwise?"
"A bit longer. You were starting to get stressed. I could tell by your eye movements."
"You can definitely read eye movements, I’ll give you that, even if you can't write them."
"One wonders if they're truly as separate of skills as you hold them to be."
"One must. I have one more question for you. Then I need to lay down."
"Shoot."
"You're all spying on my messages right? Does that mean other people can access these messages via an Emily AI? Can I spin up a Zach Marc AI and get all of his secrets out of it?"
"Not . . . currently. You know Mental's official policy is no replicating living people."
"Let's hope it's applied evenly." I clamped down on all avenues of anxiety and panic to look calm and cool for the cameras on my glasses, as I took them off and put them in a drawer. I checked my, thankfully, non-Mental email. One new message from Tony Puglia. Yes! I clamped down on all avenues of excitement and relief to look calm and cool for any cameras I may have missed.
Things are developing in an interesting direction.