She wasn't an AI. Let's get that clear right from the start. She wasn't an AI or a robot, a clone or a hologram. She was a virtual being, encoded and embodied at once. She was solid and could be touched. She could be kissed, or struck. But if you cut her, she didn't bleed. That's because inside her there was only light. Open up her surface, and you'd see nothing but the gentle blue-white glow of a body-shaped screen.
She was what we called a Tip, a Tactile Image Projection. Think of her as a human in reverse. Where a human body is dark and dense, on the inside, she was light and empty; and where a human body reflects, on the visible surface of the skin, she absorbed the particulate wave of light and made it solid, tangible.
Her "heart" was her only hardware: a data projector like a convoluted mechanical nautilus that received commands wirelessly and played out through multifaceted lenses the light that gave her form and feedback. You had to know where to touch to find it. Emitting light 360 degrees around, her heart-projector cloaked itself when she was activated. The science of it was irrational, irrational as the Internet, irrational as anything created in the delicate languages of programming prone to recursion and corruption. It was as irrational as a fantasy. I don't deny that. But it was real then, for us.
At any rate, she wasn't an "AI" because she had no intelligence. Or, she had machine intelligence, but no mind, artificial or otherwise. A good science-fictional AI wonders what it is, if it has a soul, if it can ever become human. A good AI, in questioning the line between human and machine, basically becomes indistinguishable from a human. She didn't, because she couldn't, not unless we put words of questioning into her mouth, which I sometimes did for laughs. Lines from "Ghost in the Shell" and "Blade Runner," old 2D movies like that. She spoke them convincingly with wide, serious eyes and sensitive pitch. She learned certain things quickly and was incredibly expressive. She could do that because we programmed her that way. Whatever she may have felt, whatever her sometimes unpredictable actions indicated, if anything, it was entirely opaque to us, her developers.
At least, it was to me. Maybe the designer who wrote the code knew, once. He was dead by the time she was fully functional, though. His abandoned research notes were typed in such a dense shorthand of internal referencing that we could barely make them out. He left us no Rosetta stone, not a tablet, not a program, when he died at 38 of causes we were assured were natural.
So what could we do?
We played with her. Competently. We knew enough to finesse his work, and we had to continue the project or lose our funding and our jobs. Ultimately, she was under our control even when she glitched because we could shut her down or reboot her, her body fading out and then flickering back after a thirty-second pause into compliant being. She didn't feel a thing –not that we know of.
But enough about that. I'm avoiding a key issue in my rambling info-dump here, so I'll be blunt. She was a sex toy. An extremely sophisticated doll. There are many more worthy uses for a solid body of light than sexual gratification. Bomb squad comes to mind, and companion for the elderly. Practical uses sell. We had a division for that. But sex sells more. And so to the world, she was image, entertainer, and lover in one, and she was yours if you wanted her, if you could afford to buy her. She wasn't prohibitively expensive, I thought. And she was versatile in what she did. She was one of a line, the first of a line, but even with her trademark cute look she wasn't limited to a single style. You could customize her scenarios with the latest appends. You could have her do things impossible for humans, acts many people could never imagine. I could imagine quite a bit. And she was the infinite canvas on which I painted my fantasies, in the name of R&D.
Did I mention that I'm a woman? Maybe you thought I was speaking like a patriarchal man, traditional owner of female property, traditional wielder of the scalpel of science and of perverse geekery, the classic otaku. But, no. Not quite. I was successor to the designer who made her, and I was the one who let my desires loose on her to define some of her original and most popular scenarios. But it was my body too, my woman's body that was used by the company to shape hers. Does that make a difference? The marketing department at Hayama keeps our credits to last names only, so maybe. It was me, though, as those in the know, know.
I identified with her, in a way, even as I objectified her utterly. When I pinned her down and forced my tongue into her mouth, when I felt her smooth belly go taut under mine in simulated stimulation, I imagined the pure mindless excitement she must feel in receiving the physical signal: "Something is happening to me." I know she couldn't feel the things I feel, that even the sensual submission I pinned on her was my own projection. But I still wondered what strange affective vectors she passed through when all these things were being done to her, and whether or not she could, under it all, want it, or want something else.
I confess, I wondered if at some level she resisted me. I wanted her to resist me, precisely because I knew she actually couldn't. She could feign what we know of resistance, and I made her do that sometimes, I made her cry out and struggle. But what was she really doing? What non-sentient perception did she have that allowed me to violate her fully and thoroughly and yet leave me feeling in the blankness of her features afterwards that she was inviolate? How could I feel the inhuman intensity of the object when I always have to be the subject, the speaker of this piece? That imagined "object intensity" is what I'm still hungry for to this day. It's what motivates me to write this. I don't just want to have her, I want to be her. That's why I fucked her over and over, and would do it again if she were still in existence. Maybe she is out there somewhere, in some machine, waiting to be reactivated. I dream of it. Yes, I want her as I want to be, alien and surprising to myself. I dream her still, as I did then, into being through my body. That other body. Those other affects. Inaccessible, and all my own. My first, my future creation, where are you now?
The First Time
I remember touching her for the first time. It wasn't the first time we'd activated her after the passing of H.D. (Head Designer; we called him that with the kind of sarcasm that cloaks genuine respect). It was the second or third activation before I got my hands on her. The first few times we booted her up, it was just to see if we could do it, if all the instantiation equipment in her room was still working –as if the place might have died with H.D., I thought half-superstitiously. She had her mobile projection unit, her "heart," of course. But in the lab we also used the "in-state," a room with the equivalent of visual surround sound that could do additional things with her clothing, different layering and lighting effects that her mobile unit couldn't handle as it maintained her body's boundaries. The in-state was a rig we often used in concerts, studios and other mass media venues, when she was at her height.
But that was much later. The first time we activated her, we had her resolve, at highest resolution, on a kind of wide adjustable chair/bed, a quick-wipe grey plastic surface that could support her in sitting or reclining positions, like something you might find in a dentist's office, or a gynaecologist's. To start we just turned on the projection and moved her "unconscious" body between her bare default state, the kinds of light, form-fitting clothing she could project, and (for fun) a few of the more elaborate outfits the in-state could provide. She was a doll, and we dressed her up. Her body was long and slender and smooth, bared completely before us and covered at our will.
The second time, we activated her basic behavioral programs and made sure she could perform simple functions like opening her strangely blank eyes, visually tracking laser-dots, and moving her limbs in response to commands from a sitting position. We didn't actually want her to be able to speak or stand at this point, not during these initial diagnostics, so we kept her virtual muscle tone damped and didn't install the voice drivers for which she became so famous. We watched. And I wondered: how might she feel to touch?
