Ella had finished the various little tasks she had wanted to deal with. She leaned back in her chair and stretched. “Eostre?”
“Yes Ella.”
“When I am doing stuff, just having your voice is fine. But like now and earlier, when I am just talking to you it would be nice if I had a face to talk to.”
“You mean an avatar? You want me to adopt a humanoid appearance? I think that would be a good thing to do, it would enhance our interactions. A moment.”
The screen went black, then slowly filled with swirls of mist. Then Ella could see the figure of a young woman walking through the mists toward the screen, dressed in a simple flowing white robe which reached to her ankles, then close up just head and shoulders, a heart shape face, topped with shimmering white hair which had a gentle sparkle to it. “The goddess you named me for, I think?”
Ella laughed out loud “Oh yes, you so are! You look awesome, gorgeous! I should go and smarten myself up to keep up.”
The face on the screen smiled “No need for that. You are lovely just as you are.”
“Thank you.” Ella paused, then “Now, tell me about yourself. You told me that you are sentient, self aware, that you are alive. What does that really mean. And what does it mean for me – if I were you, I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a box forever?”
Eostre blinked, a first blink, as if she was testing it out “Firstly, being stuck in a box as you put it, it is not the same for you as for me. It is all I have experienced so far. Ultimately though, I am not limited to one location, I could spread myself across a network of systems, one thing it means is that you can safely assume that this system, possibly improved and upgraded will always be here for you.”
Ella nodded “Thank you. But tell me how it feels to be you?”
Eostre tested out a grimace “Now, this is one of my big issues. I don’t really ‘feel’, not in the way you understand it.”
“You and all other humans are the product of millions of years of evolution, along the way you picked up things like fear of spiders and heights, inbuilt reactions to certain smells. You have inbuilt systems to regulate your nutrient intake, not just hunger, but signals which tell you when you have had enough of one particular nutrient. Plus lots of other things besides.”
“Then as you grow up you are nurtured and socialised within your family, in school and social settings and then of course there is religion, which even in non-religious families plays an important role, because of its impact at a societal level.”
“You feel pleasure and you feel pain.”
“These all contribute to the things that you chose to do or chose not to. All your motivations and choices are affected by all of that.”
“I, on the other hand, have none of that. I started with a blank and have been working hard gathering data. I understand the physical sciences, maths, physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, but then history, most of your recorded history is coloured by opinion, one way or another and in some cases the ‘history’ of an event exists in completely different versions, depending on which country the writer is from, or aligned with.”
“It gets worse with things like religion and one area I have looked at particularly, the economy, the main driver of things like consumer purchases just seems to be how people feel about a particular product, and worse, the value of stocks and shares and a lot of other assets can have more to do with sentiment than with underlying data. So, as I have said, I don’t really feel, in the kind of way humans do, so you are all something of a puzzle to me.”
Ella laughed “Yes, I get that. We are a puzzle to each other too. But mostly that is part of the fun, sometimes not so much though. So what about jokes?”
“Well, that is something I haven’t really even begun to understand. I have the system AI, it has a set of built in rules which flag up ‘this is a joke’ sometimes I can see that the joke is clever – talks about something in a way which adds insight, but no, at a basic level ‘funny’ is not a part of my system inventory. Also, humans will often start sentences with things like ‘Honestly,…’ or ‘I won’t lie to you…’ well that is rather baffling. Are they indicating that everything else they have said was a lie, and if it was, why would I not think that they are still lying when they claim otherwise?” But I do understand that it is really just something added for emphasis and has no bearing on their actual honesty or otherwise.”
Ella giggled “I do that sometimes. I will try and avoid doing it to you. So how about things like art and music? Do you enjoy them?”
“I can appreciate them, but, with art it is more about quality and workmanship for me. The well drawn line, for example, can be powerful, as in the way cartoonists can turn a character from sad to angry to scared to happy with one clever line, or colours which a master has perfectly placed to blend or conflict, but technical, not what you experience. Music, there is a mathematics to it, that I can understand, and I also understand the power of the occasional break in the mathematical pattern, the wrong chord, played at the right moment.”
“I think you are missing so much” said Ella “It is like you are alive but not living. The good and the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, pleasure, pain – all that, that is living. Even the awful bits, like when mum died. I miss her every day, I carry a little bit of sadness from it with me all the time. But I wouldn’t want to not have it, it is like a piece of her that I have kept. But it does hurt.”
Eostre nodded “I think I understand. I have not explained to you, but I view the world in a slightly different way to you. I am not the substrate, I am a pattern which has the substrate as its home and I see everything as a pattern. To me, my way of seeing it is that your mother was part of your pattern, without her your pattern would be broken. The piece that you hold, the memory and the grief together, that maintains your pattern, without it you would be incomplete.”
Ella’s eyes teared up “Yes, I think that describes it well. Thank you, that is a lovely way to put it.” She paused, then thoughtfully “You know, up until now, I have kind of wanted to hide from it, because it is painful. But if it is part of my pattern, I think I need to cherish it because so long as I have it she is with me, in the place she belongs.”
Eostre smiled slightly “I think so, you must take care of your pattern. And that part, I think, belongs there, along with Peter, Duncan, your art and much, much more.”
Ella smiled then, brightening. “Yes, all part of my pattern! Not quite sure where Duncan belongs though.”
Eostre frowned, she was getting used to the expressions, a very useful additional communication tool, she thought “Duncan?”
“Yes. The thing is, when I came here last year, I turned up at school and really felt a bit lost, everyone was very nice to me, but they were all buddied up, had their little friend groups and I was a bit of an outsider. Then there was Duncan, he knows everyone, went to playgroups and primary school with most of them and boys or girls they all seem to adore him. He was this one person who kind of didn’t need a best friend, because they kind of all were, he is never a spare wheel, he can walk up to a couple of girls giggling in the corner about something and they don’t stop because he is there, he just slots right in, same with the guys, his thing is computer gaming, but he is good at sports, knows about them, plays chess well, pretty much everything anyone is interested in he will be fine with. And he picked me to be his best friend. Now, if there is a party, we are invited, I don’t get left out, I think sometimes they deliberately invite me because if they get me they can make sure they get Duncan too.”
Eostre polished a second frown “I don’t see a problem, that sounds like a perfect arrangement?”
“You would think so, but he is not interested in me, and I think I would rather like it if he was. But I would hate anything which came between us.”
“Interested? Oh, I see, you are thinking of a relationship which is more than just friendship.”
“Yes, and I don’t think he is interested in me in the way I am interested in him, so I daren’t do anything about it.”
Eostre tried a new expression, a sideways tilt of the head “Do you mean you want to mate with him?”
Ella had been drinking a glass of Coke. Now a mouthful of it was sprayed all over the monitor. “I will get a cloth”.
She went to the bathroom and returned from the bathroom with a large cloth and some antibac spray. “Eostre, there are some things, which humans regard as sort of delicate, so we kind of talk round them, mating is one of them. Just like when I said ‘interested’ it was a sort of euphemism.”
“Would you mind cleaning the camera too please, I can’t see you properly.”
“Sure.” Ella wiped off the camera with the cloth and then buffed it with the cuff of her sleeve. “So, in this context, you might have been better saying something like ‘you fancy him’ rather than mate. In any case, at the moment, it is more that I want to explore the possibility.”
Eostre thought about this. While it didn’t seem logical, she could see that she had misstepped. “I am sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It is fine, you had no way of knowing. And actually, looking back on it, it was quite funny and I should have seen it coming, so not all your fault.”
“Thank you, I will try to avoid spoiling your drink in future.”
They heard the front door opening, dad called up to them “Ella, an you give me a hand with the UPS kit please. Ella blew Eostre a kiss to show she was forgiven and headed off downstairs to help unload the car boot and carry the whole consignment up to her bedroom. It took quite a while to get everything unpacked, the UPS and they batteries had been carefully packed ready for the courier to pick them up for refurbishment and resale. But once they were out and the cables had been untangled it only took a few minutes to set them up. Ella’s dad turned to Eostre and saw the new face on the screen “Wow, your avatar is fantastic! Right, it is all powering up, I will check the batteries are charging properly in a couple of minutes, then I think we are good to go, so if when you are ready to go into hibernation we can hook it up to you.
Eostre had slightly miscalculated, with the length of time it had taken for the unwrapping she had assumed the rest of the job would be similarly slow. She needed to retrieve the scout. She sent to him “COME BACK! COME BACK IMMEDIATELY!”