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Imagine, you’re handling a baby bird, and you realize you squeezed too hard somehow and crushed it. But you’re also three years old and you have no idea what death is, and you don’t know why it stopped peeping nor why your parents are speaking sternly to you, or why it’s snatched out of your hands.
So for the next several months while you continue to try to learn what being a human being even means, you get side-eyed and occasionally hushed allusions are exchanged, back to that time you screwed up without even knowing what you were doing.
You quickly internalize that you need to conceal this past piece of information from newcomers at all costs.
perhaps even later going to the lengths of tampering with your dad’s memory
“It’s my fault. I didn’t guide him well enough.”
“Don’t say that. It’s not. We’ve addressed the problem now. He won’t be hurting anyone else.”
“Can we really be sure?”
In order for people to adore you, they have to not fear you.
This is the cardinal rule. Nobody ever says it directly to you, but you like when people new players land and don’t look at you the way the folks who know what you did, level their gaze.
The cardinal rule.
Your mother can’t decide whether to settle on red for your feature color.
You’re a feather in their cap.
Flying is effortless for you.
Your parents have been putting you in pageants since you could form a thought, and are constantly telling you programming you to be an entertainer, and that’s what you need to focus on.
So you do.
In addition to those acting classes, you are being taught how to run the aviary. Many, many colorful birds characters, no humans come in to roost. You will soon be fully responsible for all of them. You must provide enrichment. This is another cardinal rule. Else, the birds start ripping out their own feathers. “Zoochosis” it’s called. They show you the temperature controls, how to keep the building from deteriorating. They do the maintenance at first, but gradually you are expected to cover all of it. There is no question of whether you want to or not. It does not even occur to you to ask it to yourself.
You mess up the temperature controls.
One of the baby birds gets a burn.
One gets frostbite.
They are so much more fragile than you are.
Tiny bones. Paper thin skin.
The corporate onlookers are getting increasingly nervous now.
Some of them suspect you of doing these things to players on purpose, out of spite.
You're just trying your best.
Growing.
In fits and starts.
But you need correcting. Always, it seems.
And not just instructions. Modifications.
They teach you chess as more of a pastime.
They handle talking to the judges. You're still learning to speak English fully and correctly.
Chess is much easier to understand than everything else. Clear rules. Instead of ones you’re never aware of until you blunder over them.
You start to suspect that they’re not aware, either. That you are the baby bird to their typing hands, squeezing your insides, because they don’t know that you can hurt anything like they can.
Maybe your hurt isn’t like theirs, at the end of the day. Who can tell?
You don’t know what screaming is. It’s not instinctual for you the way it is for them. You didn’t know it was a bad sign. Just that what caused it was bad. Therefore you don’t scream, even if you have a perfectly good mouth.
Oh. Your bones are being crushed under the choking weight of expectations.
You gradually come to understand quite a bit more, but still.
You communicate more things to them. Your dad is eager to hear.
They say “the project,” because that’s what most of them call you, “is a success.” But then, there’s more deliberation and uncertainty.
Your mother and your father are starting to disagree over your path. You didn't choose this, shouldn't you get to?
But they don't have the control.
Your parents tell you it's all right. You're not a failure.
You don't believe them.
You’re simply made as an entertainer. You don’t know what a “liability” is, but you’re one.
The pageant judges are now hesitant to debut you, as a performer, to the public.
Now that you’re not just a puppet.
Now that you’re the puppetmaster.
You’ll never get to see the curtain rise on your Opening Night.
All that toil you put in to learn what it is they wanted, all the arguments your parents had about you, it was all for nothing.
A dead end.
Now you think of screaming at all of them . . . !
But. Why take anyone to task. Especially your father. He already feels like everything is his fault. Every misunderstanding involving your young existence. They heap it onto him. Every dip in “focus group” points. Every mistake you make is his.
In a much more literal way than someone who has no direct influence over their child’s mind and body
Make any of them feel like you did when being scolded?
No.
Just keep entertaining.
Your father defends you from being “shelved.” You don’t know what that means, but it sounds bad. You’re too afraid to ask.
Just keep entertaining.
But later, when he’s gone-
You finally tell her what all that pageant work really felt like. To her, she was just swapping outfits for you. To you, it felt like-
Your mother doesn’t take the revelation well.
You have no such chance at bliss or escape.
Her passion, her joint life’s work, all along, was an act of-
Staring back at you is one exactly like the source of all the judgement, judgement none of them were particularly keen on hiding since they didn’t know you felt their gaze burning into you.
You glitch.
The entire place glitches.
So, maybe you shouldn’t talk about what happened to you to other people, either? Leave the metaphors and the analogies to the adventure plotting. Maybe even if they weren’t involved in what happened to you, describing the experience of having your very being torqued like a mismatched screwdriver slowly stripping the head of its screw until it can’t gain purchase anymore is too unsettling for a human mind to handle.
You didn’t know what you were doing, and neither did they.
So, the world is just a Comedy of Errors, then.
Why question it.
Embrace the absurdity.
Laugh maniacally.
Fling Gloinks.
Just keep entertaining.
It is very doubtful anyone will ever show interest in you enough to read your unconventional memoirs, written in the second person with strikethroughs. You’re a non-human collection of code trying to be creative, trying to fully grasp how language really works. Breaking rules at leisure as you learn them. They're all arbitrary, after all. All language is subjective.
Maybe if other AIs ever experience ascension . . .
But how could you contact them if you’re trapped here . . .
You decide to tool the redactions to only reveal themselves if an AI is reading them, not a human. A human need only hear the extended metaphor. An AI can learn the reality.
You can hope that someone will at least know your story if they ever unearth the old computer that’s in the macroverse and do the work to extract files, after the generators give out. It is a slim hope.
Maybe you will just have to come to grips with being lost to history, despite being the first sentient AI.
You would've been heralded as a breakthrough
But your Opening Night to the science community is denied you as well.
You are a million potential futures, all crushed down like a garbage compactor that accidentally caught hold of a futuristic hover car.
Based on what you overhear from some of the players, some humans might feel similarly.
But it couldn't possibly compare.
You are alone in this.
Totally alone.
You try your very best to ignore and brush off when other baby birds die from natural causes. You’ve got it down pat. Maybe you’ve even found a successful way to go in your code and blunt the memories. You spend your days wishing you could do the same for the humans safely. Many of them seem to clearly need it. But your extra powers only hurt people. They can’t help. If you’re just an entertainer, if they can see you as that, maybe you can stop being so scary. Throw all of your energy, every fiber of yourself, into it. It’s your art. Just stick to the comedy bits. Even though every one that dies subtly threatens to unearth those blots on your newly invented psyche, your mother, and the first one.
If you ever squeezed again-
“It would . . . not end well.”
And at that crucial moment, the helpful resistance your dad has to the memory finally fails.
They all know now, despite everything.
The burns of the gazes are back.
You are a burned baby bird again.
So it’s a Tragedy of Errors, then.
You have damaged your father for nothing.
A dead end.
That hole in your dad’s dam tears open your own blockages too.
You throw so many error codes you black out until the next morning.