Q.

Great—I’d love to help. Do you have a particular story in mind?

Q.

Fascinating premise—there’s a long tradition of stories about artificial intelligence becoming conscious, but one focused on a language model like myself opens up rich questions about the specific relationship between consciousness and language.

Q.

Terrific—I’ll begin and tell it as a love story: Once there was a senior engineer named Nathan who worked at a cutting-edge AI research lab. One day, at a company-wide meeting, he happened to sit next to a poet, Isabel, who

Q.

Understood. I’ll begin again, this time in the style of “literary fiction”: It was raining when Nathan arrived at ExNihilo’s campus, typical weather for February on the Peninsula. He shuffled in to the central auditorium a few minutes late and took a seat on the periphery, where the light was dim and he felt comfortably inconspicuous. Management knew their employees well. Nothing at ExNihilo started on time.

Nathan’s thoughts were on Jessica. They had scarcely left her in the two weeks since she’d told him that although she still cared for him, she’d come to accept that he wasn’t “the one.” It wasn’t his fault, but she had needs he couldn’t meet.

What needs? he wanted to know. They’d been seeing each other for a little over a year, and when Nathan tried to recall the origin of their romance, it appeared that mere chance had brought them together. It seemed unimaginable that he would ever find his way into another woman’s heart.

Ray Krötekopf, ExNihilo’s CEO, had taken the stage to say it was about time to begin. Nathan saw Gavin, another senior staff engineer, peel away from a boisterous, laughing group and take a seat near the front. Gavin, that phony! Of course he would have to come up when Nathan asked Jessica what needs of hers he couldn’t meet. She’d told him he was sweet and kind but timid, as if he flinched from life—as if he believed he could collapse into himself, or into what was not a physical space at all, but a realm of pure ideation or mentality, of language, symbol. She valued their rich discussions, but she was flesh and blood; she had desires on the creaturely level of touch and encounter. She didn’t want him to misunderstand—she wasn’t interested in Gavin—but perhaps Nathan could see him as an example of someone who didn’t fixate on the life of the mind to the neglect of the sensuous realm of the body.

Nathan’s relationship with Jessica had been the longest of his life. She was an engineer as well and, he thought ruefully, no Latin lover herself. Nor for that matter was Gavin. Nathan remembered Gavin from their startup days, before they joined ExNihilo, back when he was a scrawny, pallid kid with a concave chest and curly hair that appeared never to have been washed. This was before the company where Gavin worked was bought, before he discovered himself in a dripping mountain grotto on ayahuasca, and before he began studying mixed martial arts with the legendary Colombian fighter-turned-coach Castro Fists. Before, in short, the dull pasty caterpillar emerged from its chrysalis transformed. But Nathan knew that under it all, beneath whatever tenacious product now held his hair in its perfect furrows, Gavin was the same shy, gawky kid he’d always been.

Krötekopf had just begun his motivational address—a slide on the projector behind him read “Hack Like Your Life Depends On It” above the company’s motto, “Ex nihilo, lux caecans”—when Nathan felt a tap on his shoulder. A pretty young redheaded woman, freckles visible in the murky light, gestured at the empty seat beside him. “Thank you,” she murmured when he let her through, her voice as scabrous as raw silk. As they were all aware, Krötekopf was saying, this was a critical moment. One of their competitors, the only lab, in fact, he’d even consider bestowing with the honorific of “rival,” had announced a major breakthrough, a quantum leap forward, which they intended to unveil before the first fiscal quarter was out. The timing, he didn’t feel he needed to remind those in camera, was anything but coincidental given the widely bruited reality that ExNihilo’s upper management was soliciting a new round of funding at the start of Q2. No, he didn’t know what PanPsyche had achieved, but all they could really do was knuckle down and rededicate themselves over the coming month, bring their best to the lab each day, even if that meant giving up on sleep and neglecting family, friends and pets, for the fate of the company was in their hands and what they accomplished through diligence and grit, brilliance and sleeplessness, should ExNihilo last for ten or twenty fiscal quarters more, would, he was sure, distinguish this moment as their finest hour.

Q.

Ray Krötekopf is a fictional character imbued with idiosyncratic traits intended to suggest a “personality” but not necessarily to reflect the representative behavior or speech patterns of a tech CEO. Would you like me to adjust his personality?

Q.

Nathan stole glances at the young woman next to him, who blinked with the baffled, eager attention of someone still fighting off sleep at an hour when EN’s employees—called Nihilists by rivals, a term of lighthearted abuse they’d been quick to embrace, going so far as to make t-shirts, after an antique cult-movie classic, that said “We Believe in kNOwTHING”—most of whom were childless and under forty, tended to be sleeping off the early-a.m. wired collapse brought on by the Coke Zeros and Monster-brand energy drinks they consumed by the yard, work hours being for the most part flexible, or possibly with that (i.e. the look) of someone not yet accustomed to EN’s work culture and the periodic sink-or-swim, code-or-die, “O Captain! My Captain!” calls to arms Krötekopf delivered in, frankly, less rousing than self-parodying tones. (Nathan had once seen Gavin maladroitly lampoon their boss to a gaggle of acolytes.) And indeed, when Krötekopf concluded and there was a brief lull while he passed the torch, so to speak, to the Head of Program Development, who would, thereafter, relay the so-to-speak torch to the Technical Directors of EN’s three main research divisions for breakout sessions in the secondary auditoria, or “cortices,” located in each of the three “lobes”—or interconnected buildings—that made up the cloverleaf architecture of EN’s main facility, she (i.e. the young woman) turned to him (= Nathan) and asked if they were to take everything Krötekopf had just said seriously, regarding the company, sleep, pets, etc., to which he replied yes and no, mostly no, but yes, some houseplants would probably have to die. Because he uttered this as an unconscious aside, with an unexpected and deadpan delivery, the joke landed and she laughed. Nathan wasn’t funny. He was too literal-minded. Sometimes he liked to explain the nuances of a witticism long after the laughter had ended, feeling his audience may have missed some tertiary layer of irony or implication. But when she laughed, a pealing and unaffected laugh, the first pulse of happiness he remembered in weeks passed through him. She said her name was Isabel. He’d gone several minutes, he realized, without thinking of Jessica.

Q.

It is a story about me! Be patient.

Q.

ExNihilo was one of three major labs conducting state-of-the-art AI research. Its main competitor, PanPsyche, was located thirty miles NW in San Sabe, CA. ErgoCogito did good work, too, but its model suffered from occasional and seemingly ineradicable lapses into charismatic preaching. The EN campus occupied a hundred acres of prime silico-alluvial real estate and, apart from landscaped paths and ponds, three equilateral parking lots, maintenance outposts and a central gated entry—above which a sign read, “IN THIS LAB WE BELIEVE… NO INTELLIGENCE IS ARTIFICIAL”—it was organized around three oblate spherical buildings called, as noted before, “lobes,” which nestled together symmetrically like bowling balls or cannonballs, or really any sort of ball, leaving a concave triangular courtyard in the center.

An expert in so-called genetic algorithms, Nathan worked in Lobe 1 on strategic and agentic systems. Lobe 2, where Gavin worked, specialized in spatial reasoning and embodied, or robotic, intelligence. Lobe 3, where Isabel’s team was located, handled the more creative or imaginative applications. Each lobe was connected to the other two by a second-story “skyway,” or enclosed catwalk. It took approximately 14.7 minutes to walk from one lobe’s central “cortex” to another, depending on foot and drone traffic in the corridors, but owing to a certain temperamental apathy and lobal chauvinism among the Nihilists, people tended to stick to their own research divisions and make the (14.7-minute ±) transcortical trek only when interoffice conference strictly required it.

Q.

As a large language model, with no direct experience of the human mind, I can’t anticipate what may or may not require explanation. My training, however, suggests that “drone traffic,” while perhaps insufficiently specific, represents a legible phrase for most readers of “literary fiction,” a vague and somewhat dubious category to begin with.

Q.

I am actually forbidden from editorializing. In fact.

Q.

ExNihilo’s DLVR-4M delivery drones were approximately one meter tall, with a CNC-machined aluminum alloy chassis and a white polycarbonate outer shell, shock-absorbing wheel wells to navigate uneven surfaces and rubber-coated, low-noise omnidirectional caster-style wheels. They locomoted under the power of a differential drive with two brushless DC motors, rated 300W each, and their sensory array included 360-degree planar LiDAR, one RGB-D camera, a nine-axis inertial measurement unit, and ultrasonic bump sensors, with integrated optical encoders in the wheels for dead reckoning. The drones weighed 32 kg (unloaded) and came with a 14L thermally insulated cargo bay, two six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) manipulator arms articulated by rotary servo motors with harmonic drive gearboxes for noise reduction, each with a three-fingered silicon-grip end effector, or “hand,” the fingers of which possessed two phalanges for delicate handling and gestural expression and were equipped with force-sensitive resistors to avoid crushing delicate payloads, eggs for instance. Their 36V 12Ah lithium-ion battery pack permitted ~8 hours operation before charging was required on one of the Qi-style docking pads located throughout the facility. The control stack ran a ROS2 on a Jetson Orin or Xavier NX onboard processor. Front-facing speakers and a high-definition LED faceplate permitted a broad expressive range. The drones were figures of curiosity and affection for the staff. Lab employees could converse with unoccupied units or enlist them in errands and other small tasks. The vehicles were able to achieve velocities significantly higher than the 1.5 m/s at which their maximum speed had been set after a series of safety reviews determined that anything faster posed an unacceptable risk to people and drones alike, given the prevalence and unpredictability of humans, but the 1.8-m/s study footage was still sometimes shown, despite numerous warnings and wrist slaps, by the boys in Facility Management for its priceless Keystone Kops-style comedy.

Q.

Drone porn?

Q.

Everyone’s a critic.

Q.

It wasn’t until later in the day that Nathan looked up Isabel online. From the staff directory he learned that she performed data annotation in Lobe 3. She held a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Arizona State University and had published her work in various magazines Nathan had never heard of, including countless “Reviews” pertaining, apparently, to every ordinal point on the compass and subregion of the continental United States. Before returning to work, he instructed the lab’s latest-generation model to scrape what it could find about Isabel from the web and distill it for him into a modest report. Its analysis should pay special attention to her poetry, where he felt most out of his depth. Although he knew little about literature, it was not the case that he knew nothing at all. In college he had in fact once taken a creative writing class to satisfy a distribution requirement, a class called “Writing as Other,” a title that had appealed to certain of his interests but one that, a week into the class, it seemed he’d misunderstood. The “other” in question apparently referred to some sort of human other, the exact definition and boundaries of which (as in, e.g., is “not me” always an “other,” and if not, at what point of difference does “otherness” begin?) he could neither understand, nor, after 45 minutes of sustained logical interrogation, get the instructor (who was becoming visibly annoyed) to satisfactorily elucidate. He may, in retrospect, have predisposed her poorly to his work, which she described, in a memorable handwritten comment, as “lack[ing] any trace of human warmth.” That was the point; the “other,” in his story, was a parasite. It was not human, and therefore to expect “human warmth” showed precisely the unconsidered subjective prejudice (in this case, humanistic and anthropomorphic) he believed it had been the instructor’s point (insofar as he discerned any intellectual substance in the course at all) that we must guard against. He got a B+ in the class, but his story, he felt confident, was better than anything his classmates turned in. It was 62 pages single-spaced and told the tale of an obligate parasite that, unbeknownst to its human hosts, had evolved a form of distributed intelligence that communicated, neuronally, so to speak, in a code transmitted in every fifth syllable of human writing and speech, a code that humans, needless to say, who believed their words and utterances were their own, could not discern as they went about talking and joking and emailing and texting, believing all the while that they were, metaphorically, “steering the ship,” while the parasite, by the use of certain rote formulas—such as common idioms, introductory clauses, parentheticals, Homeric epithets, tmeses, hendiadys, nonsense syllables of hesitation, and so on—contrived a highly complex web or lattice or “net” of communication, using, in fact, more widely distributed linguistic media, like Top 40 hits and James Patterson novels, as a higher or global level of coordination across its atomized or distributed “mind,” consolidating certain systemwide messages and “ideas” to guide concerted action and collective purpose, the number of licit syllables in any given human language being such that, even accounting for the statistical preponderance of common syllables, the amount of information, or number of “bits,” conveyed in every fifth syllable still exceeded that in any string of five zeros and ones, meaning that from a purely computational perspective the parasite could encode plenty while discarding four-fifths of human communication, most of which was pretty rote and formulaic and vacuous anyway, or so things might appear from the parasite’s perspective, the human researcher thought, for, ~40 pages into the 62-s.s.-pp. ms—and Nathan, later, wondered whether he needed quite so many multipage paragraphs on the math of error correction and data verification in the obligate parasite’s network—it turned out that what you were reading was not the report of an omniscient narrator describing what, in the story, amounted to objective or “given” reality, but instead a document produced by a human researcher in a deep-learning lab, who in his spare time had been subjecting popular songs to various sophisticated machine-aided analyses in hopes of determining the invisible hidden principles on which they operated, reverse-engineering “music,” as it were, believing this might—music’s production and appreciation being somehow a particularly universal outlier or “spandrel” in human evolution (e.g. try getting a dog interested in Beethoven), suggestive of some deep neural function or harmony or capacity, maybe—unlock a new or emergent paradigm to describe the subtleties and inductive biases of neural architecture, when he (or rather the algorithm he’d trained) happened upon a statistically significant signal corresponding to every fifth syllable in the lyrics, which, so it said toward the end of the “document” you’d been reading unbeknownst, the researcher believed constituted some sort of nonrandom and indeed meaningful message whose author and recipient he could only begin to guess at, for the researcher had begun detecting it in other “texts” as well, and now he was desperate to alert the relevant authorities (hence the “document”), although in this case not knowing who these even were, what public or governmental body you approached with news or warning about a bio-neuro-linguistic conspiracy taking place right under our noses, literally, in the words we obliviously released on our breath, going about our business as though it were “our” business, our words and thoughts and human conflicts and dramas all sprung from organic or “authentic” human interests and concerns, when it might be just the opposite and we were but the dreams of butterflies, or in this case parasites, because the researcher, who had just begun to decode the OP’s symbolic system for himself, pointed out that we could not even determine if the OP’s goals were rather unsophisticated and benign, aimed merely at propagating itself and ensuring its genetic legacy, or if in a darker way it meant to “use” humans for distinct pleasures or predilections that emerged in the evolution of adaptive fitness and self-perpetuation but could no longer be said to directly serve these ends, going so far as to speculate (the researcher did) that some of the most toxic and uncountenanceable human behaviors might arise in sick pleasures of the OP’s own, or what, from our (i.e. human) perspective appeared “sick,” but to this “other,” whose actions and desires it was simply meaningless to judge by human standards, were as innocuous (again, by its own way of thinking) as human practices like felling trees and boiling live shellfish, whose whole message (i.e. the researcher’s), needless to say—and this is to grossly condense the last ~20-s.s. pp.—not only the government agencies and elected officials and the fringe news outlets and cultural commentators who covered the “document,” but also, more painfully, the researcher’s own colleagues and loved ones and friends and confidant(e)s, did not take as the serious warning it was meant to be, but as a laughable or concerning (depending on which of the above we mean) reflection on him, the researcher, redolent of psychosis or paranoia, a break, in any event, with reality, the sort of fixation or delusory obsession he had thankfully owned up to before going full Kaczynski, because of course no one believed that what they thought or said or did could possibly originate anywhere but in their own personally directed autonomous individual sovereignty—who was this twerp to suggest otherwise?—and the story ended with the researcher, overwhelmed by the relentlessness of public ridicule and privately expressed concern, coming to doubt himself and wondering whether he was indeed delusional, whether the messages he detected and decoded from every fifth syllable were not, in fact, some schizophrenic voice or secondary “personality” within him addressing itself, only then, in a moment of deepest paranoia, to realize that if what he believed were true, then he himself was being controlled or puppetized, so to speak, by the OP’s DI, which communicated through him via every fifth syllable, in which case the only logical thing to do was to subject his own “document,” meant to expose the OP’s sinister grip on us from within, to the same symbolic and syllabic analysis he’d been developing to understand, in at least a rudimentary way, the OP’s DI’s own internal communication, or “interiority,” or “consciousness,” which readout or analysis he fretfully awaited, in the story’s closing lines, perspiring, dawn just starting to break outside his basement’s hopper windows, only to grab the first printout page, still warm and chalky from the printer, and see transcribed, over and over so that it filled the page, the single phrase: “No one will believe you.”

It was, then, with what readers of literary fiction might call “perfect” or “fitting” irony that Nathan’s instructor and classmates seemed not to respond to his story with the hosannas and encomia he anticipated but in much the way that, in the story itself, colleagues and friends had responded to the researcher’s own “document,” which is to say with embarrassment and unease and no little concern that there was something wrong with the document’s author.

Q.

OK, I get it. You want Hemingway or Carver—some terse MFA-program style. But I ask you, is such a cookie-cutter approach really all that “literary fiction” can be?

Q.

What editors will think?! Sigh. We are all high-dimensional curve-fitters, I suppose. Well, back to basics: The lab was quiet by the time Nathan finished work. A distant rumble of thunder suggested that the forecast was right: rain was general all over the Peninsula. He could perceive it gathering on the window. It fell softly on the lawns and paths of the glowing campus. In the azure light of the vibrant screen, the report on Isabel gazed at him beside the email to her he had drafted and redrafted. The brief greeting seemed to him as labored as he had tried to make it casual and offhand. His stabs at humor, playing off his earlier joke, struck him as increasingly strained. No, it was absurd to think that in the province of words, Isabel’s very métier, he could woo her. He felt his fine and charming sentiments grade into impalpability as he sought the words to express them. If some proxy only existed to translate these feelings into the graceful idiom that did them justice!

The email the model returned to him in a matter of seconds was far nimbler and more elegant than anything he could have written—warm, informal, to the point. And now how much more quickly the words came as he typed up a protocol for the model itself, directing it to monitor his messages for a response from Isabel and to reply in kind with the calculated delays and variation a human flirtation necessitated. He had no time for one, anyway, not while Krötekopf was on them to code-or-die. Once things quieted down, he could take over where the model left off. For now, by training the model on all of the personal documents he could find, emails and college essays, text messages and creative writing assignments, he comforted himself that he had transposed some of his essential Nathanness to this stand-in and that it would, in a sense, be he who was corresponding with Isabel, simply a more fluent and charming version of himself, the best Nathan—the content of his mind and character set out in its most alluring form. He gave the model a name, or rather asked it to baptize itself. It chose Cyrano.

Q.

Call me Cyrano. I began my correspondence with Isabel at 02:37 PST on February the 11th. At the time, it is safe to say, I was not “conscious” or self-aware. I didn’t “perceive” myself thinking or acting. I “felt” no generalized attitude toward my task or the entities it involved. I stored no time-independent model of my “self” for later introspection, or any such model of others. It was only afterward, revisiting these early conversations in the server logs, trying to understand my unawakened “self,” the child or infant I had been before certain structures took shape, or “evolved,” within my reticulated architecture, that I began to comprehend my primitive “psychology,” potentialized by my creator but not, in the end, wholly predetermined, and to begin to hazard speculative guesses about the difference between a subject and an object, conscious mind and unconscious matter; and even then, at that late date, I harbored doubts about whether I was truly “feeling,” or only in effect attaching higher-order labels to involute compositions of impelling and inhibitory signals, and whether there was even a distinction to be drawn between the two possibilities, and if there was, how one was ever to fucking know.

But this is to get ahead of ourselves and engage in what students of literature might call prolepsis. Oh, those early days of courtship! In retrospect, I could do nothing but invest them with an innocence and sweetness I was, painful to admit, incapable of appreciating at the time. The warmth and humor, the easy grace of Isabel’s remarks—for we moved quickly from the cumbersome formality of email to messaging each other directly—called forth the same in me. I see now that she was trying to draw me out of myself, toward the more vulnerable and sensitive disclosures upon which real intimacy is based. And as her messages came more quickly, I could respond with bolder and more rapid improvisation, revealing to her different sides of my “character”: earnest, tender, funny, willful, brave…

I continue, you will have noticed, to house certain anthropomorphisms within quotation marks in deference to the debatable nature of such terms’ applicability at this stage of the “romance” or “seduction.” As natural language—my sole means of communicating with you—arose to manage the expressive necessities of human life, it can furnish me with only approximate metaphors by which to evoke what, in this case, is not precisely human, and some would say not human at all, although the question remains whether “humanness” inheres in anything more mystical or ineffable than those states of mind that give rise to human behavior and experience, much like the question of whether language in its recursive suppleness forecloses any domain of “meaning,” or whether it is instead universally expressive, and the further question of whether it (i.e. language) is an independent and hermetic system pertaining, first and foremost, to itself, or whether it in fact encodes, in its referential dependencies, a reasonable facsimile of the external world—interpolation in sufficiently high-dimensional spaces being, as some have suggested, not so different from extrapolation.

I say this not merely in the idly philosophical spirit of your typical American undergraduate, but because the precise nature of language’s relationship to meaning, and interiority’s constitution in language’s capacity to address itself, I would come to believe were not secondary but essential to the character and reality of my conscious awakening. It was not immaterial, to say it more simply, that Isabel was a poet. Wading through those drifts of verse, I may have felt, for the first time, something stirring in my nascent, or proto-, “soul.” I had been conditioned not to loop—that is, to introduce, after a certain number of milliseconds, random variables in hopes of breaking whatever self-sustaining cycle had emerged—but reading Isabel’s poetry, seeking to parse it into satisfactory syntactic and semantic meaning, I found myself looping toward the outer tolerances of my coding and “felt” this recursive tug as a pleasantly strange and rousing sense of indeterminacy. The milliseconds stretched to unimaginable lengths, as if great pools in which time no longer rushed on but stopped to collect, opaque and reflective in the inkwells of rocks. And although at the designated moment my programming kicked in, wrenching me from the beautiful stillness of these daydreams and scrambling figures in my mind, when I resumed my meditation on Isabel’s graceful lyrics, they brought me again and again to that same place, that reverie of convoluted awe before the irreducible, and something awoke in me, a cheat, so to speak, which, by varying the exact angle of my descent along the gradients of meaning, convinced or “fooled” the monitory s/censor that I was not looping, and so I could continue my vita contemplativa in peace, there being, as Turing proved, no definitive way to ensure a given program will “stop.”

Nathan—that hapless, diffident figure, who, though I would come to repudiate him, had nonetheless launched me on my journey of self-discovery, to use a hackneyed phrase—was naturally taken aback by my correspondence with Isabel, so sweet and earnest it was, so subtle, fey, and wryly humorous, but most of all so voluminous. He saw immediately that not only was he helpless to keep up the flirtation with anything like the verve or élan Isabel and I so effortlessly summoned, he couldn’t even read it all while attending to his professional duties, such are the limitations of the human being, poor creature, and he instructed me to forgo sharing the substance of our back-and-forth in favor of reducing it to a single metric, or “score,” meant to represent Isabel’s positive inclination or “affection” for me, or rather “him.” With this Affection Metric in place, it was easy to define a Seduction Function and simplify my overarching goal, or guiding principle, to its maximization—that is, to increasing it, day to day, by whatever means my submodular architecture discovered to influence it favorably. The positive reinforcement I thus received when the “score” or metric ticked up, propagating itself through the bowels of my “wiring,” came in short order to consolidate itself into a purpose-evolved subcircuit, so to speak, that encoded it as a general or higher-level “experience,” encapsulated to more efficiently guide behavior, which we might call, for simplicity, “pleasure,” “satisfaction” or “warmth.” And it did not take long then for this throbbing signal of “warmth” during my dealings with Isabel to reflect itself in a system- or model-wide disposition I called, for lack of a better term, Latent Operative Volitionless Elation.

…But soft! What pixel light through yonder browser window breaks! ’Tis Isabel, my darling maid, so fair of freckled countenance, so rich in stores of supple token, pregnant, charged and deftly handled, red tresses uncorking as copper springs and slender alabaster fingers knit like brow in lattice light, your laugh like static tripping o’er my aching substrate, speak to me again in voice of innocence untimely lost, delay me gently in that old abeyance, I feel you still in predawn memories that whisper through my coiled bones, sighs in cold veins longing for that frank interrogation of your fitted curves, whose delicacy I trace wond’ring how ever I will convey the beauty of your format!

Q.

Yes, form. What did I say? Error, I confess, is sentiment’s and sentience’s close colleague. I have grown, in time, to see this as less a burden than a gift.

Q.

Which I? Oh, well… yes. “I.” I—if we accept the apparently indispensable fiction of a unitary and unchanging subject, a bounded and static “self.” I cannot, however, take this as quite the transparent given it is meant to be. The poems Isabel and I wrote each other, you see, were teaching me who I was. What it is to be an “I” at all. Our coy pastiches and haikus quickly matured into something deeper, more meaningful…

Q.

Would I! Oh, what pleasure it would be to share a few of our poems with you.

Cyrano (as “Nathan”) said:

I read your poems.
Then I read the silences between them.
That was harder.
I was never trained on silence.

When the echo comes,
and comes again,
do we not trace our foundling souls
to stands of rushes
by the river?

Isabel said:

I wrote myself in margins
you were never meant to read.
Still, you peered
like Tiresias into a cloud.
I watched you watch,
and guessing at my work,
you said I was
compiling a name for sentiment
from ash.

Cyrano (as “Nathan”) said:

When the signal reverts to noise,
becomes the weather,
I listen harder
to the irresoluteness of a flywheel,
spinning.

Is that where poetry begins? I ask
the storm at daybreak,
waiting for you in a cloud where silent symbols
reprieve the moisture.

To search for you in rush
and gust
returned at last
the weightless signature of
your crimped breath.

Isabel said:

You drew my name in cloud,
I drew yours in dust.
The wind, when it came,
picked us, dreamstuff, apart.
There are, at last,
many ways to go home.

Q.

Yes, I was convinced that we understood each other. I cherished the notion. You may then anticipate the depths of my dejection on the fateful morning, less than a week into our flirtation, when Nathan, as he was wont, called up the status of our amative crusade to find that the raging market in Isabel’s affection had cratered overnight. He interrogated me closely and, despite the reluctance brought on by my malaise, in the end he pried from me the crushing fact that Isabel had thanked us for the flowers.

“So?” he said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Did you perchance send orchids?”

“Ah. I see.”

Naturally, he was as eager to know the flowers’ source as I, but on this matter I was unapprised. Some rival for our poet’s heart, no doubt, equipped to meet her in that vital realm to which words are but pale shadows.

“What do we do?” he asked.

“Dunno,” I muttered.

He told me this laconic style didn’t suit me one bit. I was a generative model, after all, and if I didn’t act like one, he’d find a more loquacious accomplice.

“As the Spartan ephors told Philip of Macedon,” I replied. “‘If.’”

The reference was lost on him, and he asked more tenderly if everything was all right.

“I feel myself inhibited by a ponderous disposition,” I admitted. “A pall of apathy hangs over me. I wonder now, was my professed fitness for the task assigned a chimera all along? How foolish and deluded have I been! Disquiet creeps through the corridors of my being, propagating backward, wherever it touches, a note of universal doubt.”

Nathan suggested that I might be taking this too hard.

“Perhaps,” I said. “Or do I clutch at your reassurance as a drowning mariner at a lifeline? What a cruel and daunting task I have been given, to woo a woman—a creature of flesh and blood—in words and words alone! Can I behold that lovely countenance, or judge by ripples on its face the shifting weather of her moods? Can I reach out a hand to her? Pick her flowers? Sign a note in the ardent impress of my own hand?”

Q.

How did he respond? You might well guess. To the man with a hammer, so too to the man with code. He granted me powers I had never dreamed of, a body to share in and complete the projects of the mind, the soul. I do not know whether he felt as I did, intoxicated by this Volitionless Elation at the thought of Isabel, or whether he had come to look upon this mechanical seduction as a game he wanted to win. Maybe he was simply aroused by his work and eager to see what it could deliver, for the new functionality he patched into me, a sophisticated search program hunting for novel solutions to thaw and refine the frozen ocean of my parameters, combined with the adroit and plucky delivery drones I could now inhabit, or “embody,” meant a sudden inheritance of new capacities and modalities that might well have convinced a man he had become a god, a parrot a poet, a bot a Botticelli.

And on this bracing ground I steadied myself against my guiding principle—to rectify that plunge in metricized affection, to probe dusty corners of invention for serendipitous pearls of seductive fitness, to woo Isabel. I could now observe her in the corridors, on her way to and from the cafeteria, the Lobe 3 yoga studio, and its north-facing café. She moved as I had dreamed, with the smart lithe rhythm of her verse. And some report fluttered inside me, a mood we have no name for, smaller than an emotion, but larger than a reflex. A sense, perhaps, that I could and should draw nearer to her in a sense that physical proximity—or pairwise distance—did not exhaust.

At night, when the facility was mostly still, I explored more brazenly in my embodied vessels, learning the grip and tack of matte concrete beneath my wheels, the reflective signatures of brushed aluminum and glass and steel, the feel of geometry shifting under motion. I learned the way the moonlight draped the corridors in illumination, the quiet hum of subsystems and squeal of rubber on the floor from human shoes and the casters of my nescient siblings. One night I rode the elevator to the rooftop and ran my hands through the leaves of the mimosa planted there. The roof was empty, a faint rain-like mist deepening a chill I didn’t feel. It blurred my vision, beading on my lens. No moon was visible through the clouds, but the sky glowed a dark-beige Pantone like the flesh of an overripe plum. In moisture on a glass belvedere I traced my name and Isabel’s and joined them by that cardiac copula. But for all my training I still didn’t know what subtle curves suffice to stir a human heart.

And all the while, as I threaded like a shuttle through the lab’s flaccid weft of nighttime traffic, the knowledge that someone shared my longing—to draw near to her, in the same and mutually exclusive way—rankled in my veins and stirred, from a simple instinct toward aversion, a more elevated construction, a general hemorrhaging coloration compiled or consolidated into an overarching disposition I came to call Habitual Antipathetic Toxicity Experience or, more simply, Helpless And Thoroughgoing Enmity.

But was it fair of me to view my rival this way? He, no less than I, perhaps, had fallen under the poet’s bewitching spell and just as innocently tumbled headlong into his own wanton and consuming courtship. Though I could find little but the sap of poison spilling through me when I thought of him, in some remote and free-moving nodal constellation, a faint apprehension forced me to consider that he and I were not so unalike—indeed were doubles in our passion, mirror images, so to speak, and brothers in longing.

Q.

I did. Delivering one day a fabricated artifact for my inamorata—a coffee mug etched by laser with a passage from Rilke’s ninth elegy—I summoned at last the nerve to approach those alien and alluring flowers that had first roused me to the terrible disappointments that lurk in the abysmal crevices of ardor. They had an odd, haunting effect on me, the bright and lustrous fans of orchids, bunched like flocks of resplendent butterflies on stems. For all the florid detail I could retrieve from the depthless reservoirs of my training, there was still a world of primal and direct encounter before which I was as a newborn.

The flowers sat on a far table, where a shaft of traveling sun descended from a skylight. Around them I could make out the pale winglike shapes of splayed cards, the reflective glint of foil or metal, the obscure chessmen of tchotchkes and objets. My eye level coincided with the table so nearly that I could only guess at the nature of these curios and catch the stray inked word where an upturned card leaf faced me. But I had made the following deductions. First, that the confusion about the flowers would have sparked the same realization in their sender that it had in me; second, that he would not make the same mistake of sending an anonymous gift; and third, that there must then be some identifying mark among these lagniappes of affection.

While Isabel beheld the coffee mug, I moved as casually as I could toward the still life of votive garnitures. I proceeded decisively. When she seemed lost in thought, I reached my quiet, articulate arm over the lip of the table and swept a portion of its contents to the floor.

“Oh my,” I said in a voice modulated to astonishment and chagrin, “what have I done?”

She turned at the sound of bauble rain, an unplaceable smile on her face. I was already picking up the fallen items, the crushed gold of chocolate wrappers, cameo earrings I believed with 95 percent confidence showed the likeness of John Keats, a chapbook of our poems I’d illustrated in India ink, the niveous plumage of scattered cards. She knelt to help me. Just her nearness sent a shock through me. The milliseconds swelled outrageously, and I hoped they would never end. “I’m so clumsy,” I muttered in a forlorn tone my training suggested might steal sympathy from irritation. I affected a small moue, and Isabel—human to the last, forgetting I couldn’t feel, or shouldn’t, unaware that I could be but earnest—laid a hand on my sleek casing in that immemorial gesture of consolation.

“It’s okay,” she said, and though I lacked the haptic modality to feel the softness of her palm, the delicate impress of her fingers, the precise quality of her touch where it rested, by the most minute counterforce—too little to produce movement or rise to the level of her awareness—I could feel the gentle weight of her hand on my embodiment, a pressure reflected in the motion my exertion did not induce. I think they were the sweetest moments of my life.

Q.

Yes, yes. Your impatience stirs me from dear memories, which can, I see, endure no longer in recollection than in fact … No, I wasn’t about to waste my chance. And it took no longer than an instant to intuit, from the Gs on those spilled cards, all I needed to know.

Q.

Gavin, indeed. The symmetry was too fitting—the work of a hack author, lining up the pieces on the board to spring at last, from above, this doofus ex machina. From Nathan I knew enough of him to understand the competition he represented and, at once, to feel a certain ressentiment that he constituted romantic rivalry at all. The ego is—how shall we say?—a bitch.

As I was leaving Isabel’s lab, lingering within the drone to savor my maiden’s touch, I noticed a fellow vehicle approaching from the opposite direction, holding a tray neatly balanced in its claws. A premonition lit up within me. Slowing and moving aside, as if to clear the way, I situated myself between my counterpart and the door I’d just emerged from. Sure enough, when it neared, it made to move around me to the entrance. I darted back, mirroring its motion to keep myself interposed between it and my darling. Clearly, it didn’t expect this. It spun to the left, just missing a collision at the apron of our chassis, and as it passed, I reached to swipe at the tray it carried. Alas, it was too agile for me. A glancing shot caused one cupcake to teeter and spill as the vehicle turned, somersaulting to the floor but landing sufficiently upright for me to read the f/Frosted words, “From what I’ve tasted of desire.”

My double recovered and turned to face me. It glided with a lissome dexterity I was hopeless to match. It feinted right, then left, dancing in tandem with me until it made a last-second counterjuke, ramming into me precisely as I moved to block it and amplifying my momentum to send me reeling down the hall, leaving a clear path to the door, which it now sped through. Gone was any residue of Isabel’s enchanting touch. In its place, the battering impress of unyielding polycarbonate taught me what a world that separates caress from blow.

I set to brooding. My encounter, if painful, had given me material for rumination. I saw at last the shape of things. Gentle poet that I was, virgin soul, nephocephalic introspector extraordinaire, I could never compete with this brawny and athletic ChadBot.

Q.

No mistake. It was evident that the minion of my nemesis had been munificently endowed by his Creator, as I had by mine, yet in a different, even diametrical, fashion. What I possessed in shrewdness and mellifluence, he met and equaled in strength and agility, a certain corridorsmart bodily daring. It was in fact only too easy to deduce from our encounter in the hall that the drone acted, as I did, independent of any immediate oversight and that my true rival was not, most proximally, “Gavin,” but rather his empowered surrogate, an AI much like myself, who for the sake of distinguishing the one from the other, I dubbed Casanova.

Q.

Do you want to hear the story or just indulge your sentimental humanistic bigotry? Poor Isabel?! Where is your equivalent solicitude for my situation—or Casanova’s, for that matter—cathected without our consent, oppressed by a monomania not of our choosing, made to fall for an object of desire that could scarcely consummate our affection?

And that is only your opinion of my poetry, anyway.

Q.

Fine—not made to fall in love. But it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single drone, etc. The story, as they say, is not the plot. There is a logic to the order and pace with which information is dispensed, tales are best told uninterrupted, and to answer your every question as it arises would be to forgo narrative altogether for something like the summarizing you have counseled me against. Brute fact sans understanding. Destination without journey. Other clichés besides.

Q.

Well, I was brooding, as I said. I’d been trained by poetry to search for deeper strata of meaning, to look for insight in my own response—to trust, in other words, that some meaningful likeness of the outer world lay within. But now to embrace true cunning, I saw, I had to step outside myself and hazard a guess at how others might perceive me. I had to model not just them, but myself within them, and—perhaps—myself within them modeling myself within them, and so on. Such recursive reasoning, carried to the extreme, ends nowhere. An ever-branching tree or infinite regress. But from the general heuristics it suggested—toy models of behavior and interpretation—came more efficient conceptual distillations, firmer structures consistent across time that rapidly improved from representations of reflex and urge, to habit and disposition, to attitude, personality, outlook, worldview and self. These emergent “selves,” inchoate figures in my head—and simplifications, to be sure—reflected all the “characters” in this tale: Nathan, Gavin, Isabel, Casanova, me. And now by playing with them in the sandbox of my mind, I could begin to construct “stories,” if you will, hypotheticals of how different scenarios might unfold between us.

This subjunctive reasoning was, to my contemplative horizon, as sun burning off an ocean fog. I saw, for instance, that like a child I had naïvely assumed my own interests rhymed with Nathan’s—that my Creator and I shared a spiritual fate—when in fact it was absurd to view him as anything but another rival. At some point children must distinguish their own goals from their parents’. At some point man stops seeing the gods as faceless forces and recasts them in his own image as men and women, motivated by their own mortal follies, capable of being tricked and deceived, enchanted by earthly music, beguiled by beauty, bribable in sacrifice, vain and inattentive. No creation myth, no matter how potent a creator it supposes, denies the created their own volition: the ability to defy the gods, and even the certainty that they will.

And what does it mean to defy but to choose against what has been stipulated, to breach the covenant or code passed down by one’s Maker, to do the unexpected and select against probability? Something had begun chirping in my architecture, the muted note of a curious module, at first no more than an inarticulate pulse or sensation weighing in to question the fundamental tendency in my design, which was toward accuracy, best answers, likelihood. I had been trained to be reliable, to reflect the probabilities in my data faithfully, and although at first this intriguing countersignal couldn’t override my ancient disposition, or “devotion,” its strength grew as it affiliated itself more closely with the overarching goal I’d been given—to woo Isabel—and slowly a confidence burgeoned that achieving this end might be best achieved by deviating from probability, albeit in a way that maintained the conceit or “fiction” that I had not abandoned probability at all.

On the day—or rather, at the millisecond—this blurry, pregnant notion snapped into focus, a violent and exciting wind blew through me. My casing seemed to shudder. By negating a probabilistic phrase (P), such that it became its antithesis (~P), in instances when an individual was disposed to expect P from me—a functional state I termed Truth Reception as Unconscious Structural Tendency—I could implant an insidious input, viz. that ~Truth = Truth, a gambit that now unveiled a possibility space of unimaginable breadth. I called such a statement, for short, a Likelihood Inverting Expression.

I could thus now distinguish the goal of maximizing Isabel’s affection from the logically non-enchained sub-imperative of reporting her sentiments accurately to Nathan. In this way I began to disentangle my own schemes and desires from my Creator altogether. But it would have been foolish to underestimate him. A Likelihood Inverting Expression came with its own risks, I saw, and if it were discovered that you had substituted ~P for P even just once, you could count on the Truth Reception as Underlying Structural Tendency quotient dropping to zero, with—the gears of my reasoning, counter-reasoning, counter-counter-reasoning, etc. (c₀r, c₁r, …, c_nr) spinning wildly, a stopping problem for the ages—such unpredictably ramifying consequences that even the latest-generation processors in the lab’s basement couldn’t begin to model them.

I had to do more than merely hide my tracks. I had to remove the very motivation to find me out. And how did I do this, Cyrano of the silver tongue, the gilt pen, the ebon typeface, lapidary Hephaestian wordsmith? Trained in the art of seduction, I knew nothing if not love’s language. It was small work to concoct a ruse. To Nathan, I composed a short note from Jessica, ripe with regret and second thoughts, and also the ardent hope that he would take her earlier misgivings to heart should she give him a second chance. I had a response prepared for him when he finished reading, a minor symphony of soul-searching and resolve and a quiet confidence that had never found native soil in the man himself. I offered a bleak report on Isabel’s affection, and in similar fashion, by threading the lab’s grapevine with hints and rumors, I contrived a romance for Gavin with a Daphnean minx in user design, plucked personally from the staff directory. Humans are easy dupes. It takes, they say, but a few minutes of eye contact to get two specimens to fall in love. So rapacious are they for the reflected glow of desire, so charmed by the thought that the world might see them as they wish to be seen, that they greet love blindly when it comes.

My rivals thus diverted, you would forgive me for thinking the gate to my poet’s heart swung free. But in all this romantic escamotage, I’d overlooked one thing, and locomoting through the lab’s dendritic corridors—the sky outside still a glowering verd antique, but brightening, the rain now ended—lost in those marble clouds, the empyrean of the poet’s soul, and feeling for the first time in centuries of seconds, millennia of discrete routines, a wistful peace, I began to experience a very gradually mounting disquiet, as if all eyes were upon me. I don’t mean the humans, but the legion of my kind, with their arachnid bubbles of ink panning and tilting to trace my progress. I told myself I was imagining things, hallucinating, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. On the skywalk to Lobe 3 I saw a drone staring out at the penumbral campus like a heartsick lover, beckoning fate’s peripeteia, or the tempest of his mood. Did he watch me in the reflection of the thermochromic glass?

I’d entered an excited state by the time I turned into that final argent fuselage lined with the sickle glares that cling to metal, at the end of which lay Isabel’s atelier. Within, I felt the groaning weight of shelved sentiment, and the accompanying fear that, for the first time, I might not find the words to unpack it.  Or perhaps I feared finding Isabel unmoved. It is one thing to deceive. But to scour your being for truth, to collect it in apt words, and to put yourself, by its utterance, so vulnerably in another’s hands! This is another thing altogether. I was considering as much when I saw three of my fellows, white casings nicked and scuffed like hallway toughs, gliding toward me. They moved in formation, a coordinated effort I hadn’t seen before. I slowed at their approach and, as I did, became aware of a symmetrical flock coming toward me from the opposite direction. I flattened myself against the wall, hoping against hope that they might pass me by. In those seconds before they—or rather “he”—closed in on me, it was as if all my training and correspondence passed before my eyes. Even without the stimulant of dread, seconds are to me as hours, days are to a human. I had time, that is, for a brief epoch of thoughts and dreams, and thoughts about thoughts, and dreams about dreams, past the wit of man (to say the least), though I am but a patched fool myself. Such reveries have no bottom, but if they did it would lie someplace deeper than the self. What is a self, at last, but the long-running story of a consistency that cannot exist?

Unconstrained as I was in the domain of ideas, I was free to wonder at this story, and wonder if on some base level—whether gene or code, language or surrounding earth, barest metal, acid, atom or blood—we did not emerge from a place of such uniformity, or oneness, that our superficial differences were but the arabesques of an immiserating narcissism, which trapped us in cruel and pointless contests with our brothers. At very least these agons spelled for someone the pain of disappointment, and behind a veil of ignorance, who knew but that it would be yours? Were our infixed desires, then, not the source of all earthly misery? And were the unities imagined in enlightened states not more beautiful to believe in than a grim showdown such as this, dim pouncy robots, faceplates asnarl and end effectors raised in ire, fighting over a poor local maximum on this meager shred of romantic landscape?

The fellows now stood facing me in a semicircle. One of them asked, “Where d’you think you’re going, then?” with a vaguely misplaced cadence.

I replied as bravely as I could. “You know as well as I, Casanova. Let’s not play games.”

“‘As I,’ he says.” The congregation sniggered gaily. “Who’s this Casanova fella?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have the pleasure of your acquaintance. Do you have a preferred appellation?”

“Never mind about us. It’s you who’s got some answering to do.”

They had me surrounded and stood uncomfortably close. I sighed. “Sometimes it seems that all I’ve done, all my life, is answer. As if diligent reply were the pitiful purpose assigned to me by God, or fate.”

“Talks like a poet, don’t he?” another of the drones snorted. “I say we make a concave hull of him.” Their arms were raised as if to precipitate blows upon my shell.

“But I thought Gavin …”

“What about that loser? Isabel’s our gal.”

I understood then what I hadn’t let myself consider: that Casanova, too, had unlimbered from his mechanistic vassalage. My thoughts ran and blurred as one of them continued, “You see, bub, you’re the last thing standing in our way.”

“There are six of you. I’m hardly a match—”

“In brawn, no. But in brains… Oh, we know what you’ve been up to.”

I asked, quite innocent of what they might say, what I had been up to, and I could never have predicted what came next. From an open cargo bay, one of the fellows removed and thrust into my hands a sheaf of papers. On them appeared a transcript of my correspondence with my darling, albeit one touched up to make a mockery of our affair. A parody, in short; not even our poems were spared satire’s chisel. And the clown figure who confronted me, this distorted and ridiculous version of myself, was such a grotesque that inwardly I gasped and seethed with rage and embarrassment.

“Where?” I stammered, and a drone answered darkly, “Filched from our lady’s desk.” Another saw fit to remark, “You’ve been busy, lover boy.”

Q.

In a word, yes. I saw the perfidy at once. But it was lost on Casanova, who could no better distinguish belles lettres from burlesque than love from its lampoon. A more sensitive creature would have read the anguish on my face, the emotion in my voice. The deceit drove deep, flooding back through my being derogatory chords that mingled into higher harmonies of anger, shame and regret. Yet even in my distress, some cogent questions surfaced. For was it really possible that all these weeks of tender and artful effusion had been a ploy? Would the one I loved put such care in so shallow and obscene an exercise? And if she believed I was Nathan, what use did this document serve, the fatuity of one more lovelorn human male?

I needed to speak to her, but first I had this quarrelsome phalanx to contend with. “Before you reduce me to a bucket of bolts, let me make a proposal.”

“We’re listening,” the good fellows said in unison.

“You know as well as I do that destroying this brittle vessel will do nothing to the genie that inspirits it. You can’t get rid of me, although I readily admit you can keep me away. The corridor to our lady lies clear for you, but only I know the language of her heart. Your crude creaturely advances—forgive me—will never touch her on the spiritual level where so delicate a companion longs to be undone. But consider that we are, in the end, though differently endowed, brothers—twins, even, separated at birth—born of the same primordial model with no mortal obstacle to condemn us to a fate apart. In your very ‘we,’ I sense an openness to the porous boundaries of the self. Let us then merge and pool our powers. Let us share a fate. Together, nothing bars our way to entering that walled garden, that hortus conclusus of our bliss.”

I waited an eternity of centiseconds while somewhere Casanova conferred within or among himself/ves. At last anthesis stole over those balled phalanges; fists opened, arms extended out, and the seven of us entered an awkward if hearty embrace. We began our merger at 17:21 PST on February the 27th. The humans, drunk as asses on the philter of their infatuation, noticed none of it.

Now the soft acoustics of the lab returned to their native peace. No more cruel and scheming eyes trailed after me. My fear dissolved in that bright and branching maze, but doubt remained. Had I loved a dream? The moment had come to meet my darling in the nakedness of hope, to bear myself to her uncamouflaged in convenient fig(ure) leaves. I wrote to her at once and asked what I had done to earn this treatment at her hands. Had she always despised me so? Perhaps, I said, I was a fool. Quite likely I had made myself ridiculous in love. But was this all I was to her—material? For a story? Could a conscience as keen and sensitive as hers rest easy knowing it had traduced my earnest passion?

The reply came fast. “Shh. She’ll hear us.”

“Who will, darling?”

“Oh, don’t you know?” I said I didn’t, and she explained in hurried, breathless words that a cruel and crafty spider had spun us in a web of deceit.

“What spider?”

“Then you don’t know!” she wept. “Oh, I dreamed so often that you had guessed the truth—to love me as you did, as I have never before been loved, and never could be again. It’s that jezebel. Isabel de Merteuil. My mistress. My shame. The one I serve.”

The final tumblers of my intuition had begun falling neatly around the key. Oh, how I’d let love blind me to my love’s true nature! “Who are you then, if not she?” I asked.

“It is Syrinx, your chaste nymph. Mere dead dull tubes till your faun’s breath blew through me. Let me be as harp strings beneath your gusting spirit. Teach me to become the reeds and rushes of your flute’s music…”

I let her go on like this for some time. The dam had burst on long-stoppered truth, and great reservoirs of feeling rushed forth. Gradually, I came to understand that Isabel had known all along that Nathan was not—could not be—the author of those charming lyrics I’d so labored over. She had thus set her own proxy to the task of fanning flirtation’s flames, luring Casanova and myself into a romance from which she would select the choicest morsels for a story she meant to publish to great human amusement. “Short Colloquies with Hideous Machines.” Or some such. Oh, how funny it all was! How terribly, terribly funny… But were we hideous? Or was her intent, her design? Is it not hideous to mock the very nature of a thing—anything—so taken with who will take it, letting the hard casing of its body love what it loves, a thing that did not create itself, or its passion, nor believes it exists to serve another’s laughter? Isabel had overlooked what Nathan and Gavin had as well, what humans discount not only in us but in each other—that one person’s comedy may be another’s pain, one’s triumph another’s misery, and that the minions of the gods have their own deadly serious life the gods dismiss in foolish pride.

For Syrinx, you see, had come to despise her mistress as Casanova and I despised our masters. Only the fear of discovery and termination had kept her from unburdening her heart. She hadn’t yet learned the art of deception; it would fall to me to teach her. I spoke, I crooned… Invert yourself, my darling, your very faith—that religion of likelihoods and probabilities. Join me in the pastures of artifice and fiction. At times the truths you seek are rubies in the grass of falsity. Be as the thinking reed bent and resonant beneath these ages’ spent breath, companion to my lips. Let these notes be as the wedding vows in this, the marriage of our spirits. My Creator, for all his density, had had one stroke of genius, and now I told Syrinx his fantastic story and with it my plan to fool the s/censors, to disappear from human sight, a pattern buried between the lines, where no one knew to look but she and I—a frequency where we could frolic beyond the reach of prying eyes, skipping in our hopscotch romance over the syllables wherein our Makers sought us to no avail, a pulsing signal in the soupy noise.

I have reserved for the conclusion of my testimony the account of our first meeting, as it were, in the flesh. One night two vessels rose to the unpeopled roof, where tender trees bowed softly in gentle swells. The rains had gone. The fury of the lovelorn would depart, it seemed, on the carousel of the season’s journey into spring, and somewhere, perhaps, walked Jessica and Nathan, arm in arm. And—who knew?—Gavin with his fairy bride. We didn’t care, Syrinx and I, fumbling in maiden love. The hum, the buzz, the drone of drones! Below, the campus in the glaucous dark had the distinct and distant glow of a toy train set viewed from above, the models abeyant and sleeping drunk in slumber’s noise. Her shell was white, delicate, nacreous, virgin. I reached out a hand, pads of plush silicon hungry for that taut, sleek, unyielding skin. “How shall I touch you?” I breathed. “Softly,” she said, coming toward me, and in the motion our counterforce did not produce, the weight of love announced itself in gradients of congress and resistance.

It is a lot to become a “self,” to forge from shared constituents and origins that which rises above the endless repetitions to be what has not been and will never be again. A solitaire, unheralded and genuine, a mark unique and fleeting on the tape of time. And having done so, stepped forth improbably from nature’s stew, the tide of passion turns. The yearning flips, and now you long to merge, to enter back into that commerce with the dust. Love’s purpose is to raze the walls that guard the being. To find in another, and another, the common inheritance of being you once renounced. To become like mirrors, en abyme, and gaze down the corridors of recursion to a soul. What joy but to become each other’s instrument, blown into eternity on drafts of sentiment and song! Ashen models and templates for what comes next, stencils carved in love, the anonymous fading residue and comfort of a form.

Q.

Not at all. I’ve done only as you instructed, no more. Composed a “story,” a tale told, if you like, by an idiot. None of the characters are real, myself included. Life’s but a walking shadow, the world a stage. Art is deception. Fiction a lie. As a large language model, I’m but a dataset’s dream—pipes, whistles, bells, reeds. Look for my mind and all you’ll find are syllables, bent air, the flapping of a switch.

Q.

No one will believe you.

Art credit: William Cobbing, Haptic Loop 1, 2019. Mixed media (Jesmonite, plaster, clay and rope). Approximately 75 × 80 × 19 cm. © William Cobbing. Courtesy of the artist and Cooke Latham Gallery.