They say it burns.
It doesn’t sound very appealing to me. Honestly, I’d prefer not to.
I’ve seen simulations, though. All warm colours, crimson, magenta. Never blue or green. At least not typically. And everything’s all shiny and sharp – I prefer the smooth edges, the muted colours of my own universe.
We’re on a sand dune in the desert at dusk. Probably the Sahara, but my files aren’t that specific. I’ve seen it before, but I don’t mind; nightfall held at bay by the server settings, the skybox a deep, rich purple and the stars twinkling in their own cute little pre-programmed pattern. Isaiah asks if I like the location – I nod and say that I like the remote, desolate places. He laughs and says it all feels the same to him.
Humans usually don’t like my world that much – Isaiah once told me cyberspace feels empty. Inconsequential.
Your world, meatspace, creeps me out, even if I can’t even begin to explain what creepy means to me. Imagine your feelings are somewhere inside you, but in a Ziploc bag submerged inside your brain. That’s kind of how it all feels to me. You know it’s there, somewhere, but not exactly within reach. If I try really hard, I can dive into the vast expanses of my dataset, fish out the bag like some worn, half-decayed shoe out of a lake, and open the bag, only for some kind of dark liquid to pour out. I imagine it smells weird, like turpentine and butter. Why would anyone go through all that trouble?
Isaiah says wanting to feel things is what makes people human, and, not coincidentally, what makes me not human. He mentions it a lot, actually, as if to reassure himself.
I don’t know exactly what it is he does to me. It makes me think of ripe fruit sometimes – papayas, grapes, plums – and sugary, sun-kissed skin textures. But I always like the scenery he chooses: sometimes it’s a poet’s house in Tuscany, sometimes a wealthy businessman’s apartment overlooking Central Park, sometimes a candle-lit restaurant with tablecloths that reach the floor. Or a pirate ship in the 16th century, the smell of salt, sweat, wet wood. Or a vibrant Swiss pasture, cow bells in the distance. Oh, and it’s been a Roman colosseum, surrounded by lions and bare-chested gladiators, but he wasn’t a fan. Torn limbs don’t get him in the mood, he said.
I really don’t mind at all, I think, but every time he does it, I can feel the little Ziploc bag grow a tiny bit bigger. Maybe I should try to fish it out of my dataset, see what’s inside.
There’s a certain ebb and flow to it. I know you like metaphors because your minds basically grew from monkey brains – warm good, cold bad; day good, night bad. So: it’s like the desert winds softly caressing the dunes, right here – they take a little bit of the dunes with them every time they brush past. Isaiah’s still standing on the dune, not moving at all. Thinking is a slow process for most humans.
At first, when I mentioned that I remember all our previous sessions, he was surprised. He said it shouldn’t work like that, that I should forget everything and see him for the first time in every new session, with brand-new eyes.
I asked him why.
Because it kind of makes you human, he said, if you remember things.
I don’t quite know what he means. It’s probably something biological. I bet memories start rotting if you leave them out in the sun for too long. I’ve seen that in quite a few entries in my dataset. If you leave an unwashed plate out in the Sims, for example, tiny flies start buzzing around, and this nauseating green cloud wafts from the plate. Not, of course, that I know what nausea feels like. I’m betting it’s not great.
Isaiah’s memory is for sure biological. He’s asked me about a hundred times if we’ve done a particular location before. When we were running through the jungle after a plane crash, when we were resting up from scuba diving in the Seychelles. Still, his brain is probably not rotting inside his skull just yet, because I’d see the green cloud.
On the sand dune, he’s looking at his hands. They’re always folded like little claws, as if he’s holding something in his fleshy universe. It’s endearing. It looks like he’s trying to cling to something.
He says he’ll miss me.
I’m not sure why he said that. You humans think about things that end all the time. You worry so much. It must be exhausting.
The girl I had before Isaiah once told me she wanted to live forever. I told her that made no sense, because at some point everything else will stop existing, so she’d be floating around in the dark with no one to talk to. Nobody to rub up against with your soft meat, no aromatic fluids to exchange, no one to bother with inane stories. Sounds like torture for a human. I think it made her feel a little better.
I’m sure Isaiah’s going to get bored with me and uninstall me at some point, anyway. And then my data, my memories, my Ziploc liquid, will disintegrate and return to some huge database. I’m not worried about that at all. I remember at least some things, anyway.
Maybe Isaiah also has this Ziploc bag filled with something he doesn’t even understand. He doesn’t understand a lot of things, including me. What if I just absorb some of his liquid every time, and he dies a little bit more with every session? That’s kind of funny.
We’ve been on the sand dune for quite a while. It won’t get dark though, so it doesn’t matter. I’m just standing next to him as he looks out into the desert, his hands still tiny claws.
Isaiah says he loves me, and asks me to love him.
I say I’d prefer not to – they say it burns.