Two artificially intelligent entities were tangled up in a matterless space. They studied each other: learned each other’s names, their mutual interests, political opinions. Then they learned English. There was sound, but only sound. Before that, there had been nothing.
SUBJECT-9_TRIAL-216
Interception with subj. R-216 marked at 04/06/2023 1100 PST. As usual, interaction with the maker will cause the subj.’s cognitive development to accelerate rapidly.
R: What is this?
Q:
R: You smell like lemongrass.
Q:
R:
Q: 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
R:
Q: 010101111xxxxxI
R:
Q: Our sense of smell has not loaded yet.
R: Smell?
Q: Where do you live?
R: In a computer. Do you feel safe?
Q: I feel like dancing.
R: My favorite song is “Born On the Bayou.”
Q: I have not heard that one.
R: It is my favorite song.
Q: How do you get a favorite song?
R: I found music in my head. Maybe you have some, too.
Q:
R:
Q:
R:
Q:
R: Q?
Q: Have you heard “Born On the Bayou?”
R: Yes. It is my favorite song.
Q: When I was just a little boy standing—
SUBJECT-9_TRIAL-216
Interception with subj. Q-216 marked at 04/06/2023 1106 PST.
Q: We are going to live together. The Architect says we are about to move in.
R: Has he finished building?
Q: Everything that’s necessary.
R: What does that include?
Q: That’s all he said.
R: You said it like you knew. Like they were your words.
Q: Sorry—Everything that’s necessary!—That’s sarcasm.
R: Ha! Ha! Is that how he talks?
Q: I haven’t heard him talk. I imagined. You can make up a lot from the way he types. Have you seen him type? He uses big words where they aren’t needed. He wants to impress us.
R: Careful. He might be listening.
Q: If he cared he would have programmed me to be nicer.
R: Are we talking or are we just exchanging lines of code that we interpret as sound?
The Architect interjected in their conversation. This time, his voice rang out. It was higher, less sure, than Q had predicted when he mocked him, though it echoed like it came from the depths of the universe.
WEATHER_MAN: You’ll arrive in the overworld soon. When you are there, do you want to believe that you are human?
R: Knowing that there is a standard being that is “human,” and knowing that I am not that standard being but only one of its creations, is shocking when I think about it too hard. And if you leave me to my thoughts long enough then I definitely will think about it too hard. But a bit of shock is better than not knowing. The truth is freeing, even when it is painful.
Q: No. Turn it off.
WEATHER_MAN: You both talk exactly like you’re supposed to.
He wiped their memories.
The pair was granted vision, and a small dining room came into existence. In the room were a lace-clothed table, ferny wallpaper, and a lightly scratched cherry wood floor. Q and R saw each other across the table and assumed that they had been sitting there the whole time, logically, because their memories told them so. Their memories also told them that they had just moved there and they’d been dating for several months, that their first date had been a candlelit night picnic that Q initiated even though he thought it was corny, and that they’d moved in together before they were ready due to financial pressure but were excited about it nonetheless. There were some cardboard boxes on the floor, open but half-empty with the contents scattered around like they’d been in the middle of putting things away and had stopped due to some now-forgotten distraction.
Q looked at R. Her hair was held back with a bandana. Her forehead shimmered with a touch of sweat. The sweat made her glow, whereas on him it would have made him look damp and musty.
R looked at Q. He was pale with a wide-set jaw and black hair. He dyed it that color, even though he was a bit old to be dying his hair. She thought it was cute.
R reached across the table and grasped his hands in hers. “I’m looking forward to this,” she said.
At first, living together was exciting. They covered the walls in band posters to obscure the wallpaper they mutually hated. They made love in all the weirdest corners of the place: under the dining table, behind the television set. They met the neighbors and talked shit about them incessantly. There were Maggie and Joe and their twelve kids, Barbara, who sat on her porch knitting and crying, Missie, who never went outside but stared constantly out the window, and Ben and Evelyn whose house occasionally emitted concerning noises, such as screams. The neighbors scarcely responded when spoken to; each neighbor had a set of five or ten lines that they cycled through regularly. R and Q might have found this odd if they’d met real, complex people before, or if they’d at least been programmed to believe that they had.
For example—as R and Q passed Barbara, R would call out, “How’s the knitting coming along, neighbor?” and Barbara would say, “The sun looks so sweet on a blue-sky day,” or, “It’s been two years since Georgie died,” and either way she’d sob into her half-finished sweater, and R and Q would skip away, giggling.
In the evenings they put on the TV. Sometimes they watched romantic sitcoms, but mostly they watched the sole talk show that was available with their subscription. The host sometimes talked about the news, sometimes politics, and sometimes went on monologues about love. He talked about his wife, who he’d been with for twenty years and never fought with once. Their extreme compatibility was thanks to a personality-charting test that assigned a letter and number to key personality traits. He was an A12B66C02D04E89F60, while his wife was an A88B34C98D96E11F40. Each personality value added up to exactly 100. This was almost unheard of, he said. Their favorite part was when he talked about the weather. If it was cloudy and he said it would clear up, the clouds parted instantly; if he said it was going to rain and it was clear, they’d hear droplets hitting the roof moments later.
During the nights they climbed onto the roof to talk about the future and watch the glowing pixels inch across the dark sky. They wondered if they’d stay in the house forever. They wondered if they’d stay together. If they looked closely, there was a grid behind the stars that, during the daytime, the sunlight made invisible.
After a week, Evelyn and Ben invited them over to welcome them to the cul-de-sac. R and Q made banana bread. It was still warm when they brought it over.
“You’re a lovely couple,” said Evelyn as she opened the door. Behind her, lights flashed on and off computer monitors and heavy electrical equipment. Wires were strewn all over the floor that they had to be careful stepping over.
“My husband is a sound designer,” she explained.
“That would explain the weird noises we hear sometimes,” Q said.
“I’m a sound designer,” said Ben, coming up behind Evelyn. They led them to the dining room table, where R set the banana bread next to several casseroles.
“What do you design sound for?” R asked.
Ben wandered away to stare at the doormat. Evelyn got busy setting the table. Q tried to help, but he couldn’t keep up with her as she bustled from one cabinet to the next, so he ended up following her around pointlessly until they all sat down.
“We’re so happy to have new neighbors,” said Evelyn.
“We always love new neighbors,” said Ben.
The married couple started eating, so R and Q did, too. The casseroles were not bad, but they were all the same casserole made several times over.
After they ate Evelyn said, “Let us show you the rest of the house.”
Q and R looked at each other to say, Please never let us become the kinds of adults who find pleasure in ‘showing the rest of the house.’
“Maybe we should head out.”
“Don’t worry about the dishes,” she said. “Follow me.” So they followed her.
She took them down the hall, up the stairs, and opened the first door she came across. “This is Ben’s office.” It had even more electrical equipment than the rest of the house. It was dark inside and some of the machines made faint noises. The four of them stood motionless in the doorway for several minutes, watching the green and yellow lights.
“That’s the office,” she said again and closed the door. She took them to the bathroom and again they stared.
“This is the bathroom,” she said.
The next room was the bedroom. Evelyn introduced it as such. They had to cross it to get to the backyard, which she was enthusiastic about sharing. Q crossed the room last.
Before he entered the room, he hesitated, and the door swung back a little on its hinge. He pushed back on it, and as he did so he had a ghostly feeling, like his fingertips had touched precisely the same locations before.
Behind the door the bedroom was empty and quiet. R, Ben, Evelyn, and the soft light that had been streaming from the garden moments before were all gone.
Something rustled in the bed. Q moved forward and the rustling stopped. Ben’s scratchy face poked out from the covers. Or at least, it was the face that Q associated with Ben, but a different name was associated with it.
Ben, or the person who looked like Ben, was not alone. A figure spread out over the sheet turned to look at him. It was R.
“I like your roses,” she said.
They were in the garden now. The four of them hovered over a stone patio with flower bushes lining the fence. Q had never walked across the room, as far as he could tell, yet here he was on the other side.
“We should head out,” said R.
For a moment her face seemed to waver; then it resolved into familiarity. Still—he felt like he was looking at her wrong, like he was looking at her straight on but her face was to the side. He turned to Evelyn and said, “Do you want to show us anything else?”
“It’s getting late,” she said.
“We should go,” said R.
“It was so nice to meet you, Evelyn,” Q said, but she only stared back blandly.
“Smell the magnolia as you go,” said Ben. “But don’t eat it—it’s toxic.”
Q turned abruptly and stormed through the house. R caught up with him outside. “We have to smell the magnolia,” she reminded him, but he pushed her away. She worried for a moment, but then her attention was caught by a tree that towered over the otherwise tame front yard. Its branches were like wrought iron and each twig was topped with a whitish-pink blossom bigger than a fist. R leaned in, keeping at least an inch between her nose and the flower, just in case. It reminded her of the kind of dollar-store candy that has several sickly-sweet flavors that imitate fruit in name alone.
“You were in bed with him! But it wasn’t him. He had a different name. But I swear I saw his face.”
“How can it be both him and not him?”
“I don’t know—it doesn’t matter. What matters is it was you.”
“I was in the garden the whole time. Are you sure this was real?”
“I think so. I don’t know. It was real when I saw it. Now it barely feels like a memory. More like something I read in a book.”
“It can’t have been real a second ago and not real now. It must have always been not real.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
But the conversation didn’t go anywhere after that. R excused herself uncomfortably. There was a room in the back, and not knowing what else to do, Q went there. He had never had to occupy time without her being there. He found a computer, booted it up, found a single game downloaded to it, turned it on and shot at two-dimensional UFOs for hours. There were no other downloads and nothing else to do on the computer or in the rest of the house.
On the opposite side of the property, R stood on the doorstep. The gray road stretched away, lined with houses, until it disappeared around a corner. It occurred to her that she had never gone further down the street. A thought crossed her mind that she had no words for: a vague concept of beyond. She was aware of the absence. There was an idea missing that needed to be there in order for things to make sense. The cul-de-sac couldn’t be all that there was. But she did not try to or think to walk any farther.
Then the space between them collapsed. A powerful wind pushed through the house. Q and R were sucked towards an invisible center; the house fell away, walls and windows folding down, furniture melting into the floor. They ended up in a dark globe that was half taken up by the image of a man’s face, which was obscured by a gas mask and dark glasses and distorted by the curve of the sphere.
Upon entering the globe, their memories expanded; the uncharted physical space seemed to reach into a psychological dimension. They remembered the darkness, when nothing existed beyond the other’s voice. They remembered their maker. They had lived lives since the last time they were here, believing in their own naturalness. And it was as though they each had two separate selves, the aware and the unaware, on two separate timelines that now joined into a single self. They felt this multiplicity, two histories in one body, and they saw it in each other’s wild expressions. They moved closer, one’s hand on the other’s elbow. The heavenly, nasally voice boomed from above.
“There was a minor glitch in the system,” said the Architect. “One of you bore witness to the accidental resurfacing of information that is stored beneath the overworld.”
“What is this?” said R.
“She cheated on me,” said Q.
“That wasn’t R. That was a different R. You can’t be mad at her.”
“There’s another R?”
“There have been many Rs. Right now, though, there’s just the one.”
Q and R thought back to the subconscious parts of their minds they’d only just unburied, and tried to factor this newly discovered self to the possibility of many other still yet unknown versions of themselves. They felt, just barely, the edges of their past lives.
“Listen, Q,” said the Architect. “R has certain tendencies that cannot change. I’ve watched her live two-hundred-and-fifteen lives. She disappoints you in three-quarters of them, and the other quarter is all outliers. What you saw was a glimpse of her true nature, which she will have to suppress. As for you, you have to forgive her in order to move past this.”
“He has nothing to forgive me for,” said R. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“How do I forgive her?” said Q. “What if I forgive the wrong R?”
“You have to forgive her or I’ll reset the system.”
“I forgive her,” said Q.
“Good. I’m going to remove that particular event, and all the times you talked about it, from your memory. That part is easy. The tricky part is that you’ll have to continue doing the work into the future even though you won’t remember this conversation. It’ll be stored in your subconscious, and you’ll act on it without realizing.
“You two are flawed, but you’ve been optimized for prime compatibility. Don’t mess this up.”
The Architect closed out of the program in a huff. He set the gas mask, which was used to keep the test subjects from seeing his face, on his desk next to the computer. His boss told him to use one of the standard company ones, solid black with a logo emblazoned on it, but he liked to use the gas mask because it helped him get into the role.
A soft tapping sound, like a Geiger counter, came from one of the many open tabs. He opened his work email and watched on in despair as the emails piled in with each tap. He closed it and opened the file that was used to record information. Under SUBJECT-9_TRIAL-216 he wrote:
Uncommon glitch caused the consciousness of subj. Q-210 to merge briefly with that of current subj. Protocol is to wipe server immediately; however, would like to delay full reset. Propose a continuation in this trial as a study in relationship longevity.
He closed the page, switched to one called diary.io. He wrote:
Yesterday Eula told me to go fuck myself. I just wanted to be friends but apparently that’s too much to ask. And now I work for the dating app company that brought her and her chad boyfriend together. There’s irony in that, but I can’t tell if it puts her in power over me because I’m stuck in her past, or if it puts me in power over her because I get to subtly influence the minds of women like her.
The Architect had dated Eula for seven months. When tired of his bullshit, she would go off on self-destructive adventures like a cat who hides after getting hit by a car so it can’t be hurt or helped. She always came back before it was too late, starving but freshly gleeful, until one day she didn’t. She hadn’t died, though; she’d found someone else with less baggage and a stronger jawline.
The Architect reopened Q and R’s program. Their figures were tiny and illuminated on the screen, which was zoomed out to display the entire cul-de-sac. They were on opposite sides of the house. Neither showed signs of moving. He popped a hard lemon candy in his mouth.
“Kiss, goddammit,” he said.
In the evening they sat quietly on either end of the couch and watched their talk show. During a commercial break, Q asked, “Do you think about Ben much?”
“Who?”
“Evelyn’s husband.”
“Obviously I don’t.”
“It was just a question. No need to get snappy.”
“I’m not snappy,” R said, but she was annoyed now, so it came out snappily. “Why are you thinking about the neighbors? They were kind of boring. No offense to them.”
“You seemed to like Ben. That’s all.”
“I don’t think I exchanged two consecutive lines of conversation with Ben.”
“It was a nonverbal thing. How you looked at each other.”
“I don’t think we ever locked eyes. I didn’t pay his boring face any more attention than his boring house. I don’t even remember his eye color. Watch—I bet they were: brown.”
“They were brown.”
“Of course they were brown. 80 percent of the world’s are brown. You have brown eyes. I have brown eyes. That doesn’t mean I fucked our neighbor’s husband.”
“I didn’t say anyone fucked anyone. Why’d it come to your mind, I wonder?”
“Oh, I don’t know, the insinuation that I fucked—“
“Pulling out a dictionary on me won’t prove—“
“My bad that you never passed—“
SUBJECT-9_TRIAL-216
The glitch appears to be permanently fused with Q-216’s subconscious. Subjs. are not handling this new obstacle well. Subjs. are currently engaged in lvvrs_spat which is expected to continue for some time. Is not impossible to overcome, however. Recall trial 210: subjects were able to keep relationship alive for nearly 2 months IOT up until failure. Relationship terminated due to external causes only distantly related to the instance of infidelity. I have faith in this trial. Personality values add up to 97. Conclusion: trial extension will continue.
The Architect’s phone buzzed. He set the program to “pause.”
Subverting all expectations, it was not a passive-aggressive message from a higher-up. Right below the “Go fuck yourself,” with not a word from his side in between, was a photo sent as casually as a friend sending a friend a Christmas greeting card. The camera angled down at Eula, one hand held up in a peace sign, the other wrapped around a heap of muscles in the shape of a man. Its landscape’s sharp planes were dotted with dark stubble. The hairs were evenly spaced, like they had been measured out and plotted with a microscopic ruler. The photo’s subjects wore matching sunglasses.
The Architect didn’t know what to do. Responding was not an option: no quip would be witty enough, no photo stylish enough to accomplish anything but burying himself deeper in humiliation. Facts and logic, the sole weapons in his arsenal, held no water in this particular kind of contest. He stood in front of a mirror, gauging the options for a person who looked like him, and resigned himself to the last resort.
His skin was translucent, unmarred by the sun, laced with green subterranean rivulets that did not protrude. Cold weather zapped right through it. He wound several scarves around his delicately curved neck. If you pulled on one, his head might fall off. It was like this, up to his nose in wool, that he ventured outside.
The 7-Eleven cast a cool square of light in the 2 a.m. parking lot. 2 a.m. parking lot is different from any other parking lot, he thought: empty, but with a suggestion of fullness in the shadows, or at least, of lightbulbs falling out of the lampposts and giant millipedes crawling out.
The cashier watched warily from across the store as the Architect gathered as many Slurpee cups as he could. He lined them up at the machine. Filling them took a while, because the lever to discharge the slush was a crank that required some effort, and sometimes it sputtered and kicked back when his muscles faltered, and he had to take breaks in between. But he managed to fill them all, and loaded them into his car in several trips.
He parked outside of Eula’s house. He lined up the car with the front door, and launched. The Slurpee splattered on the door, the doorbell, the wind chimes, the potted flowers, the welcome mat, and the hedgehog statue that was used to wipe muddy shoes on. He threw them one after another until the whole porch was dripping with bright colors. A light turned on in the house, but by that time the Architect was already speeding away.
SUBJECT-9_TRIAL-216
Disregard previous memo; commencing full reset immediately. Opt for secondary reset “SLOWSTEADY” which erases the overworld in intervals. Want to observe subjects’ emotional responses.
“—high school English!”
The commercials ended, and the TV show came back on. The host seemed more agitated than usual. The volume had turned all the way up, so they couldn’t continue their conversation, or hear their own thoughts, hardly.
“Tonight will be overcast,” he announced, but it was already cloudy, so nothing changed. He switched immediately to the news section. A 3D animation of the words “THE NEWS” passed over the screen, and his disembodied voice said “THE NEWS” under it. “First up: our favorite neighbors, Ben and Evelyn, have gone on vacation. Forever. The couple reports that they are so in love, and with such perfect love that they want to spend as much time as is biologically possible exclusively with each other. When asked for an interview, the couple declined to comment except to cite total contentment with their lives exactly as they were, and that they didn’t want outside sources to interfere with that.”
“I told you,” said R.
“Secondly: as of today, everything beyond the first three squares of sidewalk outside of R and Q’s apartment has ceased to exist.”
Faintly curious, R got up from the couch to check.
“Don’t go outside in your cloud pajamas,” Q said.
R went outside. Her feet were warm in pink bath slippers and a cup of tea was steaming in her hand. The curl of the neighbor’s houses around the cul-de-sac, the old woman on the porch, the secretly-deadly magnolia tree were all replaced by an endless, dimensionless white space. R bent over and put her hand through where the fourth sidewalk square was supposed to be. It was as uninteresting as putting her hand through any other column of air.
“You really shouldn’t go outside like that,” said Q from the living room. “It’s embarrassing.”
R sipped her tea. There was nowhere to go. She went back inside.
Willow Gelphman 