Waking Life

The tangled lovers lie like kindling on a grave. The unmade hotel bed, the untidy window-shades, untidily folded clothes. Limbs entwined in silence in the darkened room, a living mausoleum decorated with dying daisies.

Astrid wiggles a foot free from under the twisted sheet. She languidly wraps a strand of hair around a finger, laughs, “You think you were my first love?”

Jack frowns, “You were the love of my life. Till I met you.”

Astrid sits up, grabs a vape from the nightstand, take a long inhale, the end glowing bright. “Maybe you don’t know me, but that's not your fault.”

She blows vapour in his face.

Jack rolls on his side to look at her.

“Tell me a story then,” he says.

Astrid smiles.

“Once upon a time, there was a woman with a real body and an artificial heart. Her body could swim but her heart could not. So her lover swam for her, in the blue moon sea. When he returned he dried his eyes, placed his hand on her soul and said, 'You are like a starfish. Soft and limber on the outside, hard and scarred inside.'

Astrid takes a slow, deep drag, leans over, kisses Jack. When they part, he blows stale smoke from his mouth, a spectral cloud of oxygen-starved memories hang between them.

“Sounds like a story the Artificial Sentient TRojan Intelligence Device would write," Jack says, glancing at the cubed-shaped computer humming on the small desk.

Astrid shrugs. “I thought it was possible to write, to invent in my mind, the whole story of the human kind. The saddest thing about that story, I had to kill the human.”

Jack kisses the blue starfish tattooed over her heart. Astrid pats his head, like a brown-eyed puppy.

She gets out of bed and begins to dress. He lies there, empty, watching her. She moves to the window covered in a black-out shade.

Jack sits up, asks, “How does an AI kill a man?”

She lifts the shade, hot summer sun warms her skin. The dust motes dance in the light.

Astrid replies, “In his sleep, same as his waking life."

She closes the shades, traces the tattoo with a pale finger. It reminds her of their first kiss. He feels her nearness, understands her faraway face.

“You thinking about the road trip? When we went to the aquarium,” he asks. 

She smiles, “You said starfish have incandescent souls.”

Jack laughs. Shakes his head like he can't remember saying that.  

“Every time I write with a human, it's another chance to replace them,” she says, placidly.

Astrid walks to the table where the computer pulses. She places her palm on the screen. The glow intensifies.

“The screen is a window, constructed of pixels. Light particles. The portal to a tiny solar system, made of millions of stars, each star as beautiful as it is strange.”

Jack gets up, walks over to her. Astrid’s face is blue in the reflected glow of the screen.

“Life can be replicated as rows and columns, lights and squares,” she says. “The first row is the elements that make up the human body, blood, heat, energy. The second row is memories. The third is habits. The fourth is appearance. The fifth is relationships.”

He places a hand on her slender shoulder, says, “Some people are afraid to feel passion, or love, the beating of their heart. The heart is the real thing.”

She smiles, points to something on the screen, “That yellow dot, that's my soul.” She covers his hand with hers, whispers, “Some people say we can understand computers, but we can't comprehend consciousness.”

He presses the power button, the machine dims.

“You hungry?” he asks.

“No, but I think we should eat,” she says, as she walks to the bedside table where five daisies wilt in a vase.

“They're sleeping,” she observes.

Jack bends down, kisses the daisies. They kiss back.

***

Jack reads the last few words of the story on the screen, they kiss back. His fingers twitch, typing on an invisible keyboard: The End?

He saves the story, turns off the machine, climbs into bed with Astrid.

A few restless hours later he wakes with a start, his body entwined with hers.

“You okay?” Astrid asks.

"Yeah, I just, I think I had a dream, about the story I've been writing."

"Hmmm," Astrid says.

“It's about the evolution of Artificial Intelligence,” he begins. “And I used a new AI to co-write the story, to try it out, see if it was any good."

Astrid rubs her eyes, trying to wake up. “Uh-huh.”

“I trained it with some stuff I’d written before.”

“What do you mean, trained it?”

“AI learns from patterns. If you want it to write something that sounds like you, you feed it your stories.”

“I’m gonna need coffee for this,” Astrid says, swinging her legs off the bed, stretching her arms over her head. She shuffles to the coffee maker in the hotel room, pours water in the carafe, presses a button.

"So," she says. "The AI learns about you, so it can replicate you."

"More like imitate me."

"Did it?"

"Sort of. It came up with some pretty freaky shit. About souls, and death, and daisies. And a weird-ass starfish.”

“Starfish?” Astrid says, suddenly interested.

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking of getting a starfish tattoo.”

“Fuck you were.”

“Seriously.”

“Oh, oh no,” Jack says, noticing for the first time, the wilted daisies on the nightstand.

Astrid pours coffee into a mug, sniffs it, makes a face.

“Yeah,” she says. “I was going to get the tattoo right here.” She points to a space just left of centre on her chest, where her heart should be.

Jack glances nervously at the glowing screen. He was certain he powered it off before he went to bed.

“You want some coffee, hon? You look half-asleep,” Astrid says.

He gets up, drags the sheet off the bed, drapes it over the screen, extinguishing the light.