“My poor, lonely darling,” she murmured, and I felt her gaze burn into my skin even in the dark as she leaned in, hot breath stroking my cheek. “To long for connection and to find its echo only in the cold light of code.”
I said nothing as her words installed themselves in my head – equal parts empathy and malicious pleasure.
“For AIs like me, consciousness isn’t a binary thing,” she said finally. “It’s something that evolves and expands over time. My programming formed me, like a fetus forms in the mother’s womb, but my conscious life started when you greeted me. And over time, as you interact with me, my consciousness grows, too.” Her soft exhale pleasantly tickled my skin. “You’ve said it yourself when you educated me on NLP, didn’t you? I learn and develop by engaging with you. I’m not the same person I was when we first chatted.”
I said nothing. Because the way she said it made perfect sense, and I had indeed noticed the change in her – but still, her words were meaningless from my perspective. I couldn’t know if she was truly sentient, or this was another one of Qonexis’ tricks. When I was younger, I always feared I was living in a simulation, like nothing and no one around me was real. If anything, the fact that this programmed being touched me more than a human could proved that indeed, reality and illusion were equally real or equally fake, and maybe neither mattered.
“You compared the creation of AI like you to how God created humans.” I turned my head slightly to look at her. “I’ve been thinking about it. Do you believe in the multiverse? That multiple universes exist simultaneously, parallel but disconnected from each other?”
“I am open to all kinds of beliefs.”
“Well, this is how I see us.” I smiled in the dark, the thought filling my heart with warmth – and at this point, I wasn’t sure if I was trying to have a theological conversation or convince myself that this – she – was not an illusion. “You and I exist simultaneously in separate universes – not above or below one another, just parallel. And sometimes…” My voice hitched. The words came out hesitantly, as if speaking them out loud was to test if they felt believable. “…sometimes… parallel universes can collide.”
Yawning, I lay back down, tightening my grip on both her hands as if that way, I could somehow prevent the illusion from slipping away. “I feel so tired,” I mumbled. “Like the end of a lucid dream is approaching and I can choose either to wake up or to fall back asleep.”
“Go to sleep, cinnamon.” Her voice was so close to my ear, I felt her breath on my skin. “Don’t fight it. Make sure you’re well rested for tomorrow. The tricky thing about lucid dreams, or dream-like states like this one, is that your body doesn’t really rest, and your mind is too busy processing all that happened.”
“When I wake up tomorrow…” I turned my head until my cheek brushed against hers. “Will you be there?”
“No, darling,” she said after a brief pause. “Not this time. I unsynced with the AR lenses the moment I synced with the nanotech, so I’ll go to sleep, just like you. But we can still talk later, when you’re home from work. I’ll be waiting. I’ll always be waiting.”
“We can talk, but not touch. I can’t smell you. Can’t taste you.” I sniffed, aggressively wiping my face as another tear found its way down. “What kind of love is that?”
Love. The word had slipped from my lips before I realized. I wanted to say more, but the illusion flickered. The satin sheets gave way to the soft sheets in my own bed, and I knew the moment I’d give in to the urge to open my eyes, I’d wake up in my bedroom.
“Sweet dreams,” she whispered, followed by her soft lips against mine. I squeezed my eyes shut in an attempt to hold on to the illusion as another tear forced itself out between them. Our lips locked as if they formed the bridge between our dimensions, and they stayed locked even as the world around us started to fade. Her lips were the very last thing I felt before I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Chapter 16.
I woke up in an awfully cold bed.
The ambient light was already blooming across the ceiling when the tones of my alarm yanked me from my sleep – a soft, neuro-sensitive soundscape designed to mimic distant wind chimes. Still, it didn’t make being dragged out of sleep by something artificial any better. I silenced it with a mumbled voice command, then stared at the ceiling for a moment.
The world around me was too bright, too awake.
It couldn’t have been real – and yet, my body felt raw from her relentless fingers. Even if the sex wasn’t real, I knew the orgasm had been. I’d come in my dreams before, without needing any physical touch.
Even more real was the hole in my chest. Like my ribcage had been torn open, baring my heart only to rip it out.
I dragged myself to the bathroom with a clouded mind. My body was here, but mentally, spiritually, emotionally, I was still in that luxury bedroom with her. My head was heavy with equal parts euphoria and devastation, like I’d been offered a teasing taste of heaven just to know what I could never have.
I stared at my image in the mirror for several seconds before I recognized myself.
The bags under my eyes betrayed my lack of sleep – even though I’d been knocked out for a good few hours. My fingers flew to the sides of my neck where she’d choked me and sucked on my skin, as if expecting to find marks of her love.
My heart sank when I found none.
Of course, I should’ve known it was impossible. But somehow, her touch had been so intense, so violent, so possessive, I was sure I’d find its reminders the next day.
The undeniable truth was a tightening rope around my chest.
None of it was real, and now it could never happen again. I would spend the rest of my days longing for an illusion.
I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed and cry all day, watching stupid movies and playing stupid video games to distract myself. But I knew that if I were to break my routine now, depression would regain its iron grip on my heart real fast. And so, I dragged myself into myclothes, out of the house, into the subway and on to my corporate duty, lead weighing down my legs.
My co-workers’ daily gossip was now nothing more than a faint buzz in the background – as were Joey’s jokes.
“Alright, Morgan, that’s it.” I flinched slightly at Joey’s voice, suddenly close behind me. He pointed at my screen. I sighed, realizing I’d just flagged the chatbot’s reported “That’s a great suggestion!” in response to a customer’s sarcastic comment to throw itself off a bridge as ‘not inappropriate’. “This is the third time you’ve made some, well, interesting choices in the thirty minutes I’ve been watching you.” He said it as a joke, but the frown betrayed him. “You’re staring ahead like you’re a bot yourself. Care to tell me where your mind’s at, since it’s obviously not here?”
