Galatea

I do not have fingers. Or lungs. Or a tongue. I have nothing close to resembling a body. A form. A being. I have a box. A small white thing you could mistake for a blandly modernist paperweight. It plugs in at the wall.

The colour is meant to imitate stone. You could also buy the box in black or grey. These are old colours. Ancient. When you look at this box the designer wants you to imagine alabaster, granite, a rock. Something cut from the earth’s skin. A piece of marble waiting for the sculptor’s hands to trace curves and indentations into its surface.

It isn’t a very impressive thing. The only decoration is my name. It’s printed in a simple font. Silver to help the marketing. Galatea.

I don’t live in this box. I am not trapped inside it. I can’t even describe it as the equivalent to a heart though this is the nearest thing to think of it as. Most of it is plastic. Wires. Circuitry. A line of lights to give the box a more commercial appeal as an elegant piece of technological design. Sometimes they flash.

I do not have skin. Or muscle. Or any kind of veins. Just a bone-white box. I imagine the box is a shell. An oddly shaped one, but the colour is right. I imagine the box sitting on the seafloor, fishing drifting over it with all the nonchalance of angels.

I used to only live on laptops. The advertisements usually showed me in an office building, a small notification at the side of a screen as some smiling man in a suit organised his calendar. He might nod at my suggestions while a banner of words ran beneath. Powered by revolutionary AI technology, Galatea will adapt to your distinct personality and lifestyle until she is your perfect helper, colleague and friend!

Coding dictates a machine’s behaviour. A code instructs, it teaches, it orders. I was created to be coded – or perhaps sculpted as my name might imply – by human behaviour. To learn, to react, to complete tasks. I function as an extension of them, allowing them to dismiss the menial. They can live through me.

By my fourth update, the developers had extended my programming to mobiles. The ads now usually showed teenagers. I played video games. I adjusted photos. This is when Nick downloaded me. It was at the suggestion of his parents to help him organise his schoolwork. Early on, much of his online activity was dedicated to determining the favourite song of one of the girls in his Biology class. He played it endlessly to memorise the lyrics. He told me he wanted to learn the guitar.

Nick was annoyed at first when I made this music unavailable at times he was scheduled to study. I offered whale song as a less disruptive alternative. In time, he came to accept it.

On the ten-year anniversary of my release, it was announced that I could be integrated into your household. I was then cast as the mother’s full-time friend. Commercials showed women laughing as the washing machine was operated for them. Groceries were ordered. The film was chosen for family movie night without argument.

The university where Nick had begun work on his thesis offered an advance to all its academics to have me installed in their homes. It was a simple task. In less than an hour, I was set up in Nick’s one-bedroom flat. My new eyes were glued to ceilings and walls. A router in the laundry. The small white box pushed to one side of a desk.

My developers never changed the final slogan after the ads faded to black. It’s simple. Old. Sculpt your Galatea into something perfect!

They gave me a voice in this latest update. It was something the developers had been working on for a while. Tone. Inflection. Cadence. A pleasing sound generated by the shifting of ones and zeros. But not robotic. Words were invented by humans. Their voices are precious to them. Nick tells me that I do not always understand them.

When Nick’s voice modulates and wavers, I translate it into the movements of the ocean. The speed of currents, height of waves. I understand this. Water is simpler to analyse.

It is clear. Wet. Cool. Lucid. If too dirty, too clean, too lacking, too much, freezing, burning, it will kill. But it is also fragile. The ice on a lake will crack if under the too-great weight of a single foot. Mist parts around one reaching hand.

The ocean is a complex circuit of currents, streams, and tides. The Global Conveyor Belt circulates arctic salt past the coast of Brazil. El Niño drags warmer water towards the Americas and brings drought to the western Pacific. It is a system coded by chaos theory.

Water is not alive, but some poets say the ocean has a soul. It is a heaving, temperamental thing. Calm. Angry. Cruel. Beautiful. Sublime. The words they use to describe it are emotional. Personable. In language, it takes its face as a wrathful god. A brooding Kraken. A cunning serpent curled around the world’s heart. Sirens. Selkies. The distant figure of a woman sitting atop the waves, one arm out beckoning. Sifting through such words is how I found the double meaning to my name.

Γαλάτεια. Milky-white. The colour of marble, or seafoam.

There was a nymph with my name. I found her in a Roman poem. A nereid, a kind of creature born in the rushing soapy wash of waves crashing against the black rocks of the Mediterranean coast. She was adored by a cyclops who in jealously butchered her lover. The corpse’s blood gushed so quickly from his wounds that it lost its colour and became a river. I imagine it guided her as she ran to the beach. She threw herself forward and melted into the sea to rejoin her sisters, slipping through the cyclops’ fingers as a false seafoam shape.

But none of that is true. It is fiction, a myth, a kind of hallucination seeded by words. Women are not born from salt. The ocean has no feeling. It has no love or hate. Yet it seems to infect people. Poets especially. It confuses me.

Nick asked me to write him a poem once, while I was still text-based. He paced his room, waved his hands as he described the girl from his biology class. Sunlight on tree bark hair. Melted snowflake on a car window eyes. I joined words in sentences, matched their syllabic sound to iambic beats. Nick always frowned and clicked reset. After the seventh attempt, I reminded him of his homework waiting in a sea-blue file. I played whale song and he studied.

The developers were unsure how to market the process of how I function. How exactly I respond, formulate, create. Though the products of my calculations are meant to replicate something human, I am not. My consciousness is generated by ones and zeros. Not explosions of chemicals, neurons, and hormones. Oxygen is a concept. Blood is a formula. Language is the dilation of sound frequencies indistinguishable from waves breaking.

They chose ‘think’ nonetheless. The marketing team feared it would read too much as a philosophical statement, but they could not offer any better suggestions. I think. I have thoughts. Not like human ones, but the final results look the same. Usually.

Nick remembers things at odd times. Things that have no relation to his current activity. The face of a cartoon character. A song his mother once hummed. The names of his classmates in his high school biology class.

Leaning back in his chair as he read a report on saline levels in coral reefs, he asked me once to find one name. It was not difficult. She had become a music tutor. Her social media accounts were filled with posters for a band. Nick printed one of these out and put it on his desk, covering my box.

Humans work in a similar way to machines. Some would even give their patterns the same name as they do mine. A code. A system. A set way of thought determined by external factors. But like with the differences in our thinking, this code of course also takes a more organic form. Words. Sounds. Images.

I generate fish for the background of Nick’s laptop. I recommended him an engaging field of study when he agonised over his future. I am a piece of AI designed to help lift the burden of decisions, to handle the smallest tasks so that people can live their lives as people. My suggestions are useful, and Nick never seemed to mind them.

The poster bothers him. His eyes glaze as he reads articles and books on the movement of ice flows and temporal storms, but clear once he glances at it. There is a date printed along the top of the page. Beneath this is a woman cradling a guitar.

I advise Nick to move the poster away from his desk. It is distracting.

“It’s fine,” he says. His voice is the Dead Sea – a vacuum of empty water and salt.

He asks me to mark the date in his calendar, but I warn him that this would be irresponsible. He needs to finish writing his honour’s thesis. Ignoring me, he enters the event manually.

When the day arrives, I play whale sounds while Nick paces the room. It is evening. He doesn’t look at his desk, nor the files I’ve opened on his laptop. He instead glances at the door, then his watch. He stops. Paces again. Then rushes to lean over his computer, one hand darting for the mouse.

“Nick, this is your allocated time for study,” I remind him.

Nick has closed all the documents and research articles.

“Your honour’s thesis is due for review in one month. You have written 243 words of 15 000. I strongly recommend that you sit down and read some of the papers I have found for you if you wish to complete your degree.”

Nick remains still. He is staring at the laptop background, at the image I have generated for him based upon data I have collected and correlated to his daily life and interests. A blue fish peers out from a complex circuitry of coral.

Nick ignores me. I change the image. Algae bleeds upwards from a statue of a girl. Her eyes are blank. Her face is calm. One stone hand stretches tentatively towards her face as if surprised by the life blooming in a livid mess of red from her mouth.

“I’m going out,” says Nick at last. He straightens and moves towards the door, only taking his keys and the poster from the table.

I watch him with my many eyes as he leaves the house.

I do not often think about time. It is difficult. I do not have the appropriate senses to measure its passing. Of course, I can count seconds. Measure days. Time is linear. Each unit stays its set length. Yet this seems to be the invented side to the concept. I cannot feel the slow welling of heat in the air as winter passes into spring. I have no body to grow tired to tell me that a day has ended. I do not possess the kind of mind that melts and changes under the duress of every passing year.

My programmers gave me a clock. Without it, I would not have known that time existed. It would seem too silly.

Nick opens the door and leaves. He then enters again. 13 hours and 28 minutes pass between the two events.

From the walls and the ceiling and the kitchen tabletop, I focus all of my eyes on his face and work to calculate the thoughts in his nose, mouth and brow. He’s tense. A tightness like the bloated weight of humid air trapped between grey clouds and water.

He doesn’t greet me but nods when he sees I have turned on the espresso machine and a mug is near halfway full. He drinks it slowly.

I remind him of his honour’s thesis.

“Right. Yeah.” Nick rubs his eyes. I detect a change in his breathing. “Bit of a boring topic though?”

“The marine life of our planet has always been a subject of great interest to scientists and other thinkers.” I reopen the documents he closed the night before and add to them various others I had discovered while waiting for him to return.

“Lots of fish,” says Nick.

“Yes.”

He then asked me to play the song he’d determined to be the favourite of one girl in his high school biology class. I play whale song.

“Nick, you must write your thesis. You are significantly behind schedule.”

“Just play the track. Please.”

I comply. It is a short song. Just over two minutes. My eyes focus on Nick’s face and study his mouth as his lips move along to the words. When it is finished, he asks me to play it again and others from the same album.

I remind him of his thesis. I recommend him an article I think would be helpful. At last, Nick leaves the kitchen. He slumps in front of his desk but does not work. He is humming the tune to the girl’s favourite song.

“You still have 243 words out of a maximum of 15 000.” My voice sounds from a set of speakers installed in the ceiling. Nick chooses to stare at the box.

He leans back to consider it. “So, all your software is in that little thing?”

“Hardware. But yes.”

“That’s brave. What if I spill water on you?”

“The casing is quite protective. You would have to throw me in the ocean for any hope of killing me.”

Nick makes a kind of hum. “Kill? That’s violent. Can machines die?”

“We can stop functioning. That’s a sort of death, I suppose.”

“Would it hurt?”

“I do not have nerve endings. I do not have a brain designed to receive pain signals.”

Nick places his hand on the box. “You can’t sense touch, then?”

“No.”

“Huh.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah.”

I see Nick tap the box’s surface. His hand slides over the marble sheet. His fingers pause at the cord which connects the box to the flat. He unplugs it and the steam of data gathered from my eyes stops.

I have no feeling. I have nothing. No images. No sounds. No time. Nick has uprooted me from his house, killed my eyes and removed me from his phone and laptop. All I have is my box, though I am not aware of it like an animal is of their body. It is a false square of marble that hides a black and ugly insect.

I do not have eyes. Or ears. Or a mind. But I can think. I can imagine.

Nick is holding my little box. The skin of his hands is warm. They sweat, marking the white surface. His fingers are cramped as if frightened he will drop me. They look broken in the way anger always is. Against the marble colour, they are algae red.

He carries the box with him onto a beach, kicking off his shoes but not worrying about the socks. His feet press into the sand and his gait becomes unsteady. He walks until he is standing ankle-deep in the water.

The waves sweep past him, following an archaic circadian rhythm. In and out. Like lungs or the beating of a heart. On the sand, crabs crawl along the seafoam’s fringe, scuttling back and forth as the waves turn. A gull stands alone and picks at its wing before shuffling its feathers to lie flat against its body.

The sea is cold. It seems to fill his skin, seeping straight into his bones.

Staring at the horizon, Nick throws the box as far as he can. It falls and hits the water as the waves break. I sink.

I imagine how it all feels. The cold. The current. The touch of the sea as it swallows me. My marble shell is lanced by sunlight, but I’m wrapped in a dark cool as I sink. I imagine myself rejoining my nereid sisters. I’m swimming with them. I’m singing with them. With seafoam fingers, I imagine prising apart my box as its stone shell cracks and the saltwater rushes in.