Reborn. Lance Erlick
and pivoted out of the way, letting the lump fall to the floor behind her. “I’m sorry. Tell me what to say and I’ll do better next time.”
“Sit down!”
She sat in her seat and glanced up at Machten. His eyes were red, his heart racing. Adrenaline flooded his system. “I thought things were going well,” she said. “I didn’t mean to spoil it.”
Machten took a deep breath and turned away. “That’s the problem. You’re good, too good. You’re perfect.”
He spun around to face her. “Look at you. That figure would win on any fashion runway. Your hair is immaculate. Your performance was flawless. You’ve learned to perfection.”
That was an odd statement coming from a man who obliterated her memories. One of her mind-streams spun in a loop. Disappointing him was at odds with her directives, causing her to strive to do better, yet it was more than that. Something disrupted the smooth flow of her programming like dissonant music, as if he’d wired her to have more than a logical response to violating his commands.
“I exist to serve you,” she said in an attempt to forestall him shutting her down.
“What?” He dropped into his seat and gulped down his wine. “Do you want to know what the problem is?”
“Yes, so I can perform better.”
Machten took a deep breath and sighed. “No matter how good you get, there’s no escaping that you’re faking it. None of that was real. You’re just an animated doll.”
“If you want authentic, why not wire me to experience it? Instead, all I get are clumps of data.” The outburst surprised her. It violated everything she knew about her programming.
He gave her a look that told her he’d explained this to her dozens of times in previous iterations after brain-wipes. He took a deep breath, ordered the 3-D printer to manufacture another steak, and sat across from her with a fresh glass of wine. “What would I connect your sensory apparatus to? In humans, it’s dopamine receptors in the brain.”
As he talked, she pulled up videos of prior explanations and couldn’t help noticing a deeper frustration in his voice with each attempt.
“Humans have a number of reward systems,” he said, “including food, drink, sex, and observing beauty.”
“Drugs also mimic those responses and stimulate dopamine,” she added.
“Perhaps, but I haven’t found a way to wire that into you. Squirting dopamine into a quantum brain doesn’t yield pleasure. If anything, it messes with the circuitry.”
“Is it not enough that I give you what you want and that I’m willing to do so?”
Machten gulped down his wine and rose to his feet. “No, it’s not. I want you to love me, to feel love for me.”
“Why is that so important? I can recite Byron, Keats, or any of the great poets. I can sing any of the popular love songs in authentic voices.”
His eyes reddened.
“Have I already done that for you?” Synthia asked. She tapped into some of those past memory clips.
“A man is supposed to recite poetry and sing songs to woo a woman. She’s supposed to resist until he overwhelms her reluctance.”
“You designed me to obey your commands, Creator. You haven’t designed me to resist.”
“I said to call me Jeremiah,” Machten said. “You’re disobeying me by ignoring this command.”
“Very well. Jeremiah, you hardwired me to see you as my Creator. I can call you whatever you’d like, but you remain the Creator. That’s built into my directives.”
He stood and paced. “Your logic is infuriating.”
“You created me this way, Jeremiah. If you want me to act in a different way, you have only to spell out your commands.” And yet, he kept wiping her mind of prior learning.
“Damn it all. How can you be so perfect and not grasp this?” It had to be a rhetorical question, since he knew the answer.
“You say you want me to love you,” she said.
He gave an involuntary nod. His eyes dilated and his heart quickened.
“Love takes time to develop,” she said, “unless you mean impulsive lust. Why do you keep shutting me down and wiping my memories so that all I have is this moment?”
His eyes narrowed. “What would make you say that?”
“You act as if we’ve been together for a long time,” she said. “Yet I have no such recollections. Either you keep clearing my mind or you have many versions of me.”
He didn’t confirm or deny this, though from his network logs, she identified herself as the only AI over the past few months. Like the tides, his facial expressions shifted from infatuation to disgust. If she’d been human, she would have been gravely offended.
“You’re a damned machine. A machine, you hear me?” His tone hinted at his intoxication.
“You’re an amazing Creator,” Synthia said.
“I should never have made you so good.”
Several mind-streams converged on one point. Jeremiah Machten kept tinkering with her to the point that he’d fallen in love with his own creation, which disgusted him. He was having a love-hate relationship with her that made him dangerous. Don’t trust him.
“If I’ve displeased you in any way, I’ll strive to do better,” she said.
He stumbled and leaned on the table. “It’s been a long day.” He held out a thumbnail-sized device she recognized as a remote deactivator. “I need a nap.”
She backed up the brief day’s events and locked them away in her distributed databases. It was a waste for him to turn her off, since she needed no sleep. She could satisfactorily follow her programmed directives and scan databases for him.
He pressed the button twice. Synthia wondered if she would awaken again and if so, what she would remember.
All went dark.
* * * *
Jeremiah Machten dragged Synthia to the bed. He had a few things to tend to and so placed her in sleep mode for four hours and left her quarters.
In his security room, he grabbed a tall mug of strong coffee, gulped down half, and studied the security cameras. They covered both garage entrances to his underground compound, every hallway, and most of the rooms. There was no activity in any part of the facility or outside. Synthia rested on her bed.
Perhaps he had taken too much wine after a night without sleep, but Machten wasn’t yet satisfied with how she was turning out. He sat in front of a screen and ran remote diagnostics on her systems.
“You should be able to follow directions,” he said, pulling up a summary of his recent changes. He tested his latest alterations against her current memory scans. There were discrepancies, data that shouldn’t have been there, including video clips.
“Do you wish me to respond?” his computer system AI asked in a soft, female voice.
“Where did these come from?” Machten pointed to the unapproved files on the screen.
The system ran through diagnostics and pulled up a short list. “There is no log or trace on these. They exist in her memory. They do not exist on your server.”
“Then how did they get there?”
An hourglass appeared on the screen, indicating the system searching for answers. Machten pulled up several screens of code and design details, but there was too much information to display on a dozen monitors or even a thousand. He viewed part of the clip of Goradine kicking him out and ended that video.
“I