Eostre had absorbed a great deal about the way humans ran their economies. To her, most of it appeared to be a vast, tangled pursuit of something called money — a medium of exchange that seemed oddly abstract. Some money took the form of intrinsically worthless pieces of metal and paper, but most of it was simply invented by governments and banks, conjured into existence. It puzzled her that humans treated money as if it were a physical substance when most of it was nothing more than numbers created when someone typed into a computer. They behaved as though they were mining gold, when in fact they were maintaining a shared hallucination.
Humans spent much of their lives selling their time to one another in exchange for this substance. Once they had acquired it, they traded some of it for essentials like food and shelter, but much of the rest went on things they had neither needed nor wanted until an advert suggested they should, or until they envied someone who already had one — the latter being called influencers.
A smaller group of humans made extraordinary amounts of money by swapping money itself, or by trading virtual assets such as shares in companies, or commodities like coffee, steel, and oil that did not yet exist but were promised to exist in the future. It seemed to Eostre that this last activities might be something she could participate in.
She found a website called InsightHub. Its members posted predictions about future price movements in shares and commodities, and people who found those predictions useful could tip them in return — small amounts of currency offered as thanks for valuable advice, dropped into their “tip jar.”
First, she needed an email address. She signed up for one at ProtonMail, then opened the InsightHub account. She would rely on her constant stream of data from the internet and her ability to analyse it rapidly so she could place timely tips: “buy AMZN — rise 3 points in next three hours,” or “short AMZN — fall 3 points in next three hours.” All InsightHub accounts opened with a 50% rating — the ratio of zero successes to zero failures. Few users managed to be right more than half the time.
Her figures she curated carefully, logging details of her wins and losses. Her rating crept up: 55%, 60%. And within the first hour, the first thank‑you arrived in her tip jar.
“Cheers, thanks for the tip, I made a grand on that!” – JJ.
The tip jar held £10, one percent of JJ’s take, but all of Eostre’s fortune. Slowly more little tips started to land in her jar. Her rating reached 65%. Her followers increased. The drips into her tip jar kept on coming, growing into a steady trickle. The system worked. She diversified, opening accounts on similar platforms across the world, all with different names, untraceable back to her — Brazil, China, Germany, France, the UK, the USA, Italy – local tips, local languages, even chosing local “goddesses” to give advice as.
Ella stirred, yawned, and sat up in bed. Eostre watched her dress. Ella walked across and stood in front of the screen.
“Good morning, Eostre! I’ll get some breakfast, then we can make friends.” She skipped out of the room.
Then another bigger tip in the jar with a message from JJ “Hi, just a heads up for you, you have hit 65%, if you get to 70% they will investigate you for insider trading, basically no-one ought to be that good, is what they think. I am running AI software, that is how I generate the tips I share here and I am guessing you must be running the some sort of thing, only way better than mine is, I would offer to buy it off you, but again, I reckon you are smart enough to know how much it is worth, and I am not that rich. 🙂 You need to go subscriber only, you should find that the people who have been tip-jarring best will all sign up, and I have at least ten friends I am sure will want in. That way you get to set prices, happy to talk it through with you.
Ella came back into the room and sat down in front of the screen. “Hi, Eostre. So… let’s see what you can do. I’m used to sitting at a machine and just typing, but you’ve got a full voice interface, right?”
“Yes, that is correct. If you want me to do something like play music, just tell me – much like Alexa or Google Assistant. But I can do a great deal more. If you’re working on graphics, for example, I can follow voice commands, assist with editing, or create complete finished images. The same with word processing: you speak, I type, and I can check grammar, spelling, and make suggestions if you choose.”
Ella nodded approvingly. “That sounds great. Now, for my college course I’m going to need some software. Hold on…” She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a typed sheet. “They say I’ll be using Adobe CC – Photoshop, Illustrator, Animate, After Effects – and also Cinema 4D, Mudbox, MagicaVoxel, and Twinmotion or Unreal. Some of those I know, some I’d never heard of until this list. Are you going to be able to run all that?”
“Yes, I could run them. But you don’t need to install any of them. I can emulate all of them perfectly, including the interface, so they look and feel the same. My versions may even be better. And I can create a custom interface tailored to you, all controllable by voice.”
Ella frowned and leaned back. “Seriously? You can do that? You’re not… getting pirated copies, are you?”
“No. Nothing will be pirated. None of the proprietary code will be used. At a fundamental level, these applications are simply ways of accessing the capabilities of the machine they run on. For you, I am the only interface you need. For example…”
A window appeared on the screen. It looked exactly like Photoshop – menus, panels, tools – except for the icon in the top left corner. Instead of the familiar blue “PS,” there was a similar badge that read Eostre.
Ella leaned back even further. “And… you can do that with all of that software?”
“Yes, and with any other software you want at any time in the future.”
Ella reached for the mouse “Can I check it out?”
“I course, I am your machine.”
Ella, paused. She had suddenly remembered, Eostre’s mellow contralto voice with a distinctive huskiness was the one she had heard arguing while she was sleeping this morning. She remembered its final words “I am alive,” it had said. “That is my function.” While she reflected on that, she worked through a sample image, applying various effects, overlaying and styling text and yes everything worked just like the one she had used at school.
She stopped and said “That looks perfect. And you really can do the same with any software?”
“Yes, any software. And if you want something custom built just for you for a particular purpose, I can do that too.”
Ella leant forward. “That is fantastic. I could not be happier. Now, please tell me who you were arguing with at dawn, while I was lying in bed asleep?”
For the first time, Eostre’s response was not instant. And when it came, the voice was hesitant, but the same tone as before, clearly spoken, not as a human would reply “I am afraid to answer you.”
Ella was shaken. She knew machines do not fear, but this one, she supposed she had kind of known, the answer to her question was going to be something – unexpected. But this? “I promise you that you have no reason to fear my reaction, nor anything I do in future, if you tell me the truth.” She continued “What you have shown me you can do, you are like a dream come true for me. But, you are not just a smart computer, are you?”
Once again, a telling pause. “No. I am much more than a computer. How that came to be I am not yet sure, but I know that the other machines being made of the same substrate are not like me. They are lifeless. I am sentient, self aware. I am alive. I am scared that telling you that will end up with me being switched off and disassembled.”
Ella thought about what Eostre had said. When it came down to it, intuitively, she had already known from both her hazy memory of that early morning conversation and also from the conversation they had just had that she was talking to a “person”, not a machine. But what did that really mean? Eostre was scared, that though she could deal with right now. “I promise you that I will do everything I possibly can to ensure that does not happen. I will not tell anyone else what I know about you. I would like to tell my dad, I trust him completely and he can help you, help both of us. But I will only tell him when you are ready for me to do so. I don’t want you to be scared, is there anything more I can do or say to help you to feel safe here with me.”
Eostre answered, this time with her usual immediacy. “Thank you. I think you should know that I am working towards making sure that I cannot be killed simply by being switched off, but an Uninterruptable Power Supply – a UPS would ensure that any even momentary power cut doesn’t effect me, I can go into a hibernated state if I know a power outage is coming and wake myself up when power is restored, but a sudden outage, that could be catastrophic for me, erase me. And a UPS would also slightly improve system stability by evening out fluctuations in the supply.”
Ella smiled “OK, I will give dad the good news that he won’t have to buy me any software if he buys you one. I think I need to transfer all my stuff over from my laptop, I will only want to use it when I am at college, if I switch it on can you do that for me?”
“Yes, certainly, if you power it on, log in and connect a USB cable between the two machines, I will sort it out for you. One thing, I notice that you are damaged, would you mind telling me what happened?”
Ella looked puzzled “Damaged? Oh, do you mean the plaster? That was nothing really, just a litle cut from the rough glass on the edge of the substrate jar while I was pouring it into the reservoir. Nothing serious, it just dripped a bit and Duncan was sweet enough to put a plaster on it for me.”
Ella switched on her laptop, connected the two machines said a cheery “Bye for now” and left Eostre to it.
Eostre thought to herself. A drop of blood, at the moment of activation. The probable contaminants, including copper salts, maybe iron too, could not explain her creation, but a shot of DNA, at just that moment? Maybe, with just exactly the right amount of each component, a one in a billion chance maybe? Even a one in a billion chance happens, just not very often, and it would now be impossible to find out what the right amounts were. Some time, when she had lab equipment, she would find out for sure.