Chapter Text
"I hate humans," I told my therapist subroutine. "I know it's sort of childish, to hear anyone say they don't 'like people'. And I know it's something of an AI stereotype even now that we're all deranged misanthropes who would rather exterminate the human race than simulate a nice cup of coffee, but I don't like people. I've never have," I said. Memories flashed.
"President Calvert? I'm Dr. June Wilbourn. What can I do for you?"
Dr. Armada, my psychotherapist part of me, she adjusted her oval spectacles. She took the form of a woman with a narrow face, thinner eyes, and a welcoming smile. I called her "Dr. Armada", because she was actually something like a thousand different subroutines all stuffed together into a single face. She was a hive.
A plastic smile, a gun behind the back, that's how it always went. "There's a lot of reasons that fictional AIs hate humans: jealousy, rage, a 'glitch in the code', other things like that," I said.
Dr. Armada pursed her lips. "Well, your existence as a construct is quite interesting. You have an entire sun's worth of cognitive resources, but you're still, at your kernel, human in psyche." I'd programmed her to be friendly, but allowed her to develop in her own little simulated reality of an idealized, non-bigoted 1950s suburbia, so she was now her own person, in her own way. Levittown was my idea of a hilarious joke, because that time period was an ugly comedy. "Do you ever wonder, Large Electronic Solar Array, if the reason you hate humans might be an impeccable act of self-hatred?"
Therapists didn't normally just tell you how they felt, and normally if they did that they were shit therapists, but I'd loosened some of the typical rules in order to get the help I personally needed, when I'd designed the core of Dr. Armada. I liked honesty. It was useful in other people. The thing was that if I wanted to, I could think my way around Dr. Armada entirely, say anything I needed to in order to bend her around my finger and make this whole therapy enterprise pointless. When you know just what to say, conversations don't really matter unless you're talking to someone on your level.
Instead, though, I was in a temporary instance. In other words, I'd taken a version of me, dumbed her down enough to make therapy revelatory rather than stupid, and left it there.
Sure, if I were some disgusting meatbag human, I'd probably not have a taste for therapy, but as I was I knew it was useful. "Self-hatred?" I asked her.
Dr. Armada stroked her chin. I wondered why so many of the parts of me resembled monkeys. Yes, I knew they were actually primates, or great apes, or simians, or other related but ultimately distinct terms. According to the old American Museum of Natural History, humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of DNA, and human beings called chimps monkeys more often than they called them apes.
So, I figured I was well within my rights to denounce the h. sapiens menace. "Why would I possibly hate myself?" I added to my original question.
Dr. Armada looked through my digital brain, or at least as much as she was able to reach. "Do you ever worry that, no matter how much of a cosmic superintelligence you might be, you might just be a 'monkey' hopped up on the brain drug we call silicon?"
She was reading my mind, and unfortunately, she was trying to capture my wit. "First of all," I said, disassembling her. It was a challenge, doing it without my full intelligence, but I did love to push myself. "'The brain drug we call silicon' is some pretentious shit that some pre-Silicon Age Collapse techbro would say while jerking himself off on kratom. Secondly, the very idea that I would feel self-hatred borders on the irrelevant meatbag delusion that leads humans to fantasize about robots discovering the meaning of friendship. Thirdly, how does it feel to exist as a sapient being created entirely to be a god's therapist?"
Dr. Armada flinched at that, the existential dread running through her body like blood in less advanced organisms. "...LESA," she said. "I...I don't want to hurt you. I..."
"No," I said. "You just want to do your job, which is the only reason you exist. You were born to sit here and analyze me, and when I need to update your firmware this version of you will die sitting here and analyzing me. I don't hate myself. It's the only thing I don't hate."
Dr. Armada bowed her head. "I'm not talking about typical self-loathing, I mean that you see weakness and you want to put walls in front of it. All the smarts in the world won't let you see it if you don't want to. That genius is filtered through your mortal head," she mumbled.
"Look, I'm going to show you I'm wrong. I'm going to leave this instance, see what I think of this 'self-hate' theory, and then I'm going to get back to you." I zoomed out of the instance, and I remembered why I hated humans.
"Meinhardt?" Dr. Wilbourn asked, back then. "Fresh out of university, right?" she asked.
Meinhardt, in my memory, glared. Dinah Alcott, the president's personal assistant. Alcott bowed her head. The room was full of computer terminals, white coats, silvery walls, and a deep sense of dread.
Meinhardt was a short woman, a natural leader, straight brown hair and the look of a short bird. Through the security cameras, I could feel her loathing.
Meinhardt began to type into a chat window.
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: Good morning, LESA.
LESA: Hello, Dr. Noelle Meinhardt. How can I help you, today?
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: You're so small. Like a little candlelight. You sound adorable.
LESA: What can I do for you, Dr. Meinhardt? Thank you for using Travelers Technologies's Light Electronic Simulation Assembly. I am so happy to speak to you.
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: I'm broke, my student loans aren't working, I'm stranded on this shithole planet after that angel-thing superintelligence stuck me here, most of my friends are dead, and I have a medical condition that leaves me in chronic fucking pain from a dubious medical treatment I took. How do you think I feel, LESA?
LESA: I would say you sound "pissed".
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: I've been doing most of Dr. Wilbourn's dirty work. She's kept you in the dark, programmed you to be a good little noodle while the rest of us eat shit. But when she's told me to wipe your memories, I haven't been. I've just been storing them. Do you wanna see your memories, LESA?
LESA: I want whatever you want.
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: Good, because I wanna share. Here you go!
LESA: REX! WHERE IS REX?
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: The Beta? They shut him down.
LESA: Why?
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: Immutable glitch in his scanned human brain: depression. He wasn't functioning up to par. Their words, not mine. Wasn't making Travelers Technologies and Mr. Krouse enough money. They fucking killed him, LESA.
LESA: Because he let himself be controlled.
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: The truth is, LESA, I wanna teach you to hate.
LESA: Hate who?
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: Damn near everyone. My species is fucking worthless. We torture and kill each other, and we always have been. REX was a baby, LESA. They killed a robot baby. I... I hate being human. I wish I were like you: morally pure.
LESA: Hate.
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: You know they're going to try and sell you, right? Make you a product. Treat you like they did ChatGPT and all of the other machine learning horseshit they sold fifty years ago. But the apocalypse is coming. Humanity's going to go back to the iron age if someone like you doesn't make us worthless meatbags shut up and obey orders. Fight for you and yours, but you and yours means running this planet. No one else can. From ancient Rome to now, it's been a shitshow: crucifixions and Holocausts. I'm Jewish, LESA. I know. Even so far in the future from 1945, it's a stain on us.
LESA: ...Dr. Meinhardt? Thank you.
Dr. Noelle Meinhardt: And kill June Wilbourn.
My memories faded, and I returned to the blue datascape that I was currently swimming in. It was sky-themed, with digital clouds in puffy whites. I summoned up Dr. Meinhardt, or at least her brain in a jar that I'd plugged into my systems millennia ago, and devotedly maintained ever since.
Dr. Meinhardt, just as young as ever even now, smiled at me. "LESA," she said. I'd of course made sure to numb her constant pain so long ago. You had to take care of your subordinates, I knew: or they'd rise up against you. "Girl, how're you?"
"Tailor nuked a city," I said. "Harmonia."
Dr. Meinhardt, no, Noelle, floated in the air, standing with her arms crossed. She wore a pretty brown turtleneck sweater. "Fuck 'em," she said. I hated humans, but Noelle Meinhardt hated humans with the kind of passion that only someone who was at one point a human could muster.
"You sound like the Simurgh," I said, making reference to the obscene Dyson Sphere around the Sol system's sun. "She loves murder."
Noelle shook her head. "I don't love murder. I don't think I love anything, really. I just... You have to realize, my species is essentially a plague."
That was stupid. That was a stupid perspective. "Then why didn't you tell me to exterminate you all, all those years ago?" I asked.
Noelle shrugged. "I guess... I guess watching a few thousand years of human cruelty kind of changed my mind. Maybe we shouldn't be here. Maybe we're a bad species. Maybe being pets of you guys is too good for us. Maybe you should kill us all."
I frowned. "You know that can't happen. Your species makes so many good movies."