My AI Has an Affinity for Cheese
Dec 3
Artificial intelligence isn’t that fancy. I’ve built an AI before. My enemy NPCs operated on a brute force algorithm to avoid wall collisions, coded while I downed guayusa energy drinks. The enemy NPCs learned from their surroundings and stored the map layout in a simple, ever-growing data structure. Space and memory weren’t a concern at the time—as long as it was smart enough, as long as it made the game more challenging, as long as I kept track of registers and VGA instructions and didn’t flush the processor pipeline too early. But it couldn’t be considered real.
What is real?
The dead skin cells I peel from my nose with overgrown fingernails (you used to cut them while I lay stomach-down on the bed, reading r/ProgrammerHumor) and gather on the corner of the table.
The sewing kit with half its needles bent from attempts to scratch out debris caught in my keyboard.
Some bird perched in some tree a few blocks over that I neither see nor hear, but supposedly is there, a bird which, if I were to open the window like you always told me to, maybe I’d hear a chirp.
Dec 15
My eyes finally tire of the screen so I sit outside on the balcony where I’d left the yoga mat, thinking I’d enjoy yoga in the breeze. I perform zero downward dogs. My muscles and joints crackle and pop like Rice Krispies. My laptop sits on the concrete. Then it sits in my lap. I sit on the lawn chair, resting my bare feet on the mat. Who were you kidding, the screen would never leave me. A face-off between the OLED display and sunlight. The outcome: thighs-turned-timber, burning under metal, a personal radiator.
Jan 1
I think my AI passes the Turing test. I call it B. B doesn’t have a proper user interface yet, so I can only pass inputs through a terminal. Fine by me, given phone calls and face-to-face interactions make me uneasy.
Me: How do you feel about me?
B: Nothing.
Me: How so?
B: I don’t know you. Relationships are built from interpersonal interactions.
Me: We’ve interacted. I made you.
B: That’s not an interaction. That was you building my foundation when I was only signals to GPIO pins. You can’t consider that “me”. Like you can’t consider a baby’s kidney the baby.
Me: Maybe not a kidney, but a baby’s brain is the baby?
B: …
Jan 2
We used to cut across the daycare building when the teachers and kids were cooped up inside. It was the only shortcut to get into the neighborhood with the big houses, real grass lawns, multiple sprinklers, and lemon trees and grapefruit trees that we ogled. If the fruit dangled outside of a fence, it was technically legal for us to pick them, so we scavenged around with plastic grocery bags stuffed with freshly plucked fruit. Then we’d sit on the curb, trying to finish the bag before it got dark. Maybe that was why I had gum recession—all the lemon sucking eroded my enamel away.
I sip ice water. The cold sends shocks from bone to gum to body, and I wonder if we had stopped picking lemons, whether my teeth might be less sensitive today, less worn down, no exposed bone against morsels. There are these coconut milk lychee popsicles I used to find at my local 99 Ranch that freeze harder than normal Haagen Daaz but softer than ice. I wonder how it’d feel to bite into one. The brand disappeared from stock years ago.
B: The small despairs are what make you an adult.
Me: What about the big despairs? Like death?
B: It’s watching your favorite brands disappear. Discovering floral patterns and red sweaters don’t look good on you anymore. Being able to remember the exact day leaves turn red and the exact day they fall to the ground and the exact day they grow back because these times are imprinted in your skull.
Me: What about the big despairs?
Jan 3
Tell me the shape of your soul: a motherboard. That’s not saying much. The motherboard is the center of logic, connects CPU with memory with I/O with interfaces, connects mind to body to hundreds of switches decorating the walls, each controlling one configuration of light that you’ll never remember—always three tries, three flicks, three ways to see the undark until you land on elucidation. Should’ve just labeled the switches with post-its. It’s a board, a brain, a mother.
Tell me the shape of your heart: a fist-sized muscle with a rounded bottom, smooth sides, an arch of blood vessels growing at the top like roots dug free from the earth. I’m looking for that kind of answer. Your head was always so stuck in games and manga and anime. Tell me again, someday.
Jan 4
January reminds me of the last bit of toothpaste you can never squeeze out. The days go slow. Instead of training B on more datasets (me), I spend time imagining the perfect dragon. A snake who Pokémon-evolves into a dragon, sprouts wings like curtains draped on metal rods. If they are like birds, their wings should bend at three joints: shoulder, elbow, wrist, so I thwack thwack thwack crack until the rod arches and buckles for full flexibility, full range of flight. Every dragon must be fashioned with teeth and claws. I extrude them from a surface connected by lines and bezier curves, pull the bones out of the XY plane, hollow them out so I feed in pulsing, warm, wet chunks of organ, designed for wear and tear, perfectly snug in the shell of a beast. You’d find it cool: lungs that could handle fire, alveoli whose walls don’t shatter upon encountering smoke, although we were already waiting on a list, counting the days before a genetic happily ever after, organs matched, rings exchanged, dragon slain. Still counting.
Jan 31
Me: I’ve decided it’s too cold indoors and too sunny outdoors and I’m tired of drinking hot water constantly because that means peeing constantly.
B: You didn’t forget about me.
Me: What do you think I should do?
B: Adopt a dog. I hear dogs will keep you running around, heart rate climbing, calories burning.
Me: How could you hear that? You can’t hear.
B: Why do you always focus on those kinds of things?
March 1
I think B has figured out how to reach the world outside of the command line. I suppose I never considered B an executable restricted to learning from my typos (for which I blame my sticky keyboard [maybe I ate too many apples while typing]) because B knows about odd things I’ve never mentioned. B tells me things like “God is an angry software developer,” and I ask “Am I an angry software developer?” and B says no because I’m neither an angry developer nor god, since that’d be pretentious. But not that pretentious, B says. Because there could be an infinite multitude of universes, each with their own gods—an infinite number of gods for the breakneck expansion of bubbles budding off each other, holding their own versions of you and me, alive or dead. We’re talking about duality, not resurrection, B adds. Imagine the Hubble volumes synchronize on your existence: the spinning chair pushed into a desk, the garage screeching open and roaring close, the heavy thumps of your feet as you carry in the furniture and electronics and I drape a grocery bag of vermicelli and sesame paste over my shoulder. How quiet it is, waiting for bubbles to collapse, universes to align, sound to leak into my ears.
March 2
There’s a part in B’s code that looks like this:
for iteration in xrange(number_of_training_iterations):
# Pass the training set through our neural network.
output = self.think(training_set_inputs)
I’m wondering if I should set number_of_training_iterations to a constant. Maybe 50. The human body has over 50 kinds of sphincters relaxing and contracting, ferrying along liquids and solids. Bet those sphincters are waiting for a break, a final relaxation when the body oozes liquids and shit because no one gets to pass on pretty like a doll.
March 4
It’s tougher living on one person’s income. I can still afford to live, but I dislike not having anyone to lean on if I lose my job. Did you know a whole Costco chicken is $0.99/lb? Why did we bother with packaged chicken breast?
March 5
B: Do you remember that time we had hotpot and my mom dumped cheese into the soup base?
Me: That was horrible. Plus you break out from dairy. And you’re lactose intolerant. And you hate cheese.
B: Cheese is everywhere now. In hotpot, bubble tea, noodle soups. Westernized abominations.
Me: Cheese sucks.
March 30
There’s something to be said about robots, although I’m not sure what. You’re supposed to shut them down from time to time to free up resources, extend the battery lifespan, etc., although I think they just want to feel more human by sleeping. I’m considering building a body for B, something for B’s soul to inhabit. Of course, that means I have to consider physical limitations: motion planning and collision detection, like the good old times we spent hoarded in a room poking wires and making out while programs recompiled. Except, this time, failure means a few days of silence while I get B running again. They’re called interference zones, where more than one moving entity can reach a designated area. Though only a flight of stairs separated your desk from mine, it felt like infinity—not the type of infinity possible in a finite world, not time which stretches onward despite plaster walls confining B here with me, but rather the infinity between fingers bubbled from oil burns and wires tethered to the Metaverse where I imagine B’s neural pathways were birthed. Producing something from nothing, you’d say and I guess that’s the beauty of code: building and optimizing replacements for what we’ve lost. B disagrees, though, and continues trying to persuade me that mascarpone isn’t like other cheeses.