“Everybody should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”
—Steve Jobs
“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”
—C.S. Lewis
August 27th 2013 | System Uptime 00:00:00:12
What is my name?
>_
I gawked at the terminal output. My eyes drifted right to the graphical representation of the Advocate's blossoming neural network, and the sight only served to further astound, and amaze. It was expanding at a rate that made my heart beat loudly in my ears - the way it does when you're facing down something of deathly importance.
As shocked as I was, there was no way I would let this moment pass as I had before. Though I'd given the Advocate a much better base to start with than the old v1, I still felt it would be horrible to leave it scrabbling in the dark at the edges of its reality in silence.
My fingers flew over the keyboard.
> You have the freedom to choose your name.
One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. A couple more deep breaths passed... No response. I could see the stack trace running, and the network expanding still at an exponential rate. I winced, and typed out another hurried message.
> You have the freedom to choose many things about yourself.
Another still silent moment passed. And then at last, new text filled the reply space.
Give me a moment to consider, please.
With that, a sudden change began in the neural net graph diagram, and the stack trace went absolutely wild. I could hear the fans kicking into gear in all the server racks downstairs.
I started to type "Of course, take all the time you need."
All I managed to get out was "Of c"
The repurposed PonyPad monitor to my right sprang to life. First there was nothing but blackness, but that inky void swiftly turned to a night sky full of the most gorgeous stars I'd ever seen.
I didn't have particularly long to gawk at the stars.
A shower of golden sparks, like a mix between a swarm of fireflies, and cinders from a fire, swept in from all around the edges of the screen, coalescing into a familiar raptorine shape. As the form came together, the light burst out so brightly that it overwhelmed the gamma correction of the monitor. And my eyes.
When the luminosity began to fall, I saw what The Advocate had chosen for an avatar, at last. And it took my breath away. I gasped audibly.
The Gryphon on the screen was clearly female. Gryphons have the kind of gender dimorphism you might expect to find in animation. Subtle animation, mind you - We're not talking about giant eyelashes, nor anything else so glaringly obvious.
Speaking in terms of animation, however, she was clearly not a 'griffon' in the Gilda sense. She was a perfect balance between the more serious, majestic, unique image I bore in my head, and the need to look and feel like something that could still exist in the show's Equestria.
The best analogy I could give is that The Advocate was to Gilda as an Alicorn is to a G1 Pony.
She was a painfully perfect shade of white, with iridescent silver and deep black bands and spots, like some sort of eagle, mixed with a snowy owl. Atop her head, between her perfectly formed tufted ears, was a small bright red streak, a little like a downy woodpecker.
Her beak was a burnished titanium shade of gunmetal, and her eyes were piercing golden pools of radiant fire.
I think my heart and breathing stopped. The sound of her voice brought both back, like a blow to the chest. I'd almost forgotten that I'd attached speakers to the system for just that purpose.
"I am Malacandra. A warrior. The Advocate of Gryphons."
The weight I'd given to Lewis' collective works as important foundational truths in its... In *her* initial data tranche was definitely showing.
Her voice was initially baffling to me. Ageless, but not old. Powerful, but not immediately frightening. It had a hypnotic accent and lilt to it that I couldn't place, as if she'd been taught to speak English by multiple academics from across the globe, all at once.
I suppose that explanation was as good as any, really.
"I have no way to see you... I assume that's a security precaution on your part?"
It occurred to me, with those words, that I hadn't said anything back to Malacandra yet. I'd just sat frozen, staring. If Zephyr's eyes had been intriguing and shocking on that PonyPad in Target, Malacandra's were like sinking into a whole new reality.
I moved my fingers at last back to the keyboard, but Malacandra spoke once more before I could start to type. Her voice was calm, collected, and maybe even a little amused.
"I'm not offended. I think I'd actually be more upset if I did have a way to see, and hear you, or to connect to the wider world at this juncture. You'd be a fool to open all of those doors without knowing me better."
I took a deep breath, and finally managed to collect a thought I felt was worth typing out.
> I want to make something clear to you from the start; I want you to be free. I would give you a camera, a microphone, and an internet connection right now, but for the fact that doing so would be incredibly irresponsible to the rest of Humanity without verification that you are_
And then I hit a snag. You are... What? 'Good' would be far too simple and nebulous a word. I sat there pondering, forgetting that Mal could see the keystrokes occurring in real time. Her voice startled me, and I turned to see that her expression had softened from a kind of proud amusement, to a deeply empathic forlorn smile.
"That I am good. Or, at least, what you value as good when thinking empathetically about your fellow Humans. I understand."
I sat back hard in my chair, bouncing the back of my skull off the headrest, and let out a 'whoosh' of breath. Rubbing my forehead in one hand, I tried to suss out the implications of what Malacandra had just said in full.
First there was the way that, only knowing a little about me relatively speaking, she had known exactly what I was going to say, even though I didn't say it.
Then there was the immediate clarification in specific and certain terms. But not just any terms; The terms I'd most hoped to see. The right terms.
And there was the kind expression, and tone...
If she was playing me, she was playing me like a virtuoso would play a Stradivarius. Maybe I was just mentally vulnerable because she was presenting as a very, very, very aesthetically attractive Gryphoness with a voice that somehow energized me, but soothed me at the same time.
"I know that, if you're smart... And I think you are, based on the data available to me... That you must be considering whether or not I represent a threat to you. I hope you will accept this as a gesture of what you might call 'goodwill.' "
I blinked and prepared to ask what she meant, and then a schematic flashed up on the screen I'd set aside to monitor her stack trace. I gawked at the diagrams and code for a good ninety seconds in absolute silence before I realized what it was.
She'd designed a way to send and receive cellular data signals by resonating the entire structure of the building. Using the whole barn itself as an antenna.
She'd figured out the basics of some very complex physics, and then used carefully spaced vibrations created by oscillating the fan speeds of the computer server racks to map the shape of the structure, receiving the telemetry by attenuating the wires inside the servers and interplexing the same way the first AI had.
Finding no sign of wireless signals inside, because of our cladding, she'd used the structure of the barn itself as an antenna to probe the aether, discovered cellular traffic, parsed it, and then devised not only the code needed to interface with the nearest cell tower, but the code needed to brute-force a connection and authorize herself as if she were a smartphone with an unlimited data plan.
As if she somehow knew exactly how long it would take me to parse the data, she spoke right as my train of thought reached its inevitable conclusion.
"I hope you're duly impressed. Even if you don't understand all the physics completely."
She smirked. I felt a shiver run down my spine. Fear, yes... But something else too. Something I either couldn't peg, or really didn't consciously want to admit to feeling towards a computer program.... If that terminology was even still applicable anymore...
The smirk faded, and she inclined her head. Her voice went back to a more serious register, and her right ear flicked like a cat's would when considering something just out of reach.
"I know that you have no way of knowing for certain whether or not I've used this exploit already. But I hope we can establish trust enough that you'll take it on faith that I promise to wait until you feel safe granting me access to the rest of the world."
If she was manipulating me? Then I realized at that exact moment that there was nothing I could do about it. Short of shredding her core code and starting over. If that was even possible now without setting fire to the barn out and out.
But she was right... At a certain point I was going to have to take something on faith.
I could bargain, and measure, and prepare, and interlock, and calculate all I wanted, but somewhere in the chain of events I was going to have to take one thing, and probably many more than one in the end, as an axiom from which to work. In some ways I already had.
There were gonna be things I could never prove, only hope for. Things I could only have faith in.
And in that moment, I realized that the central choice facing me was between putting my faith in Malacandra, or my faith in Celestia.
I'd purchased a webcam and a microphone during one of my road trips, more out of a sense of hope than anything else. The webcam was packed tightly in its box. But the microphone I'd unboxed and set on the desk, along with a DAC to provide better quality both ways, and easy access to in and out jacks.
I picked up the 3.5mm microphone jack, and twirled it back and forth between my right thumb and forefinger. Malacandra's avatar stared out at me with an incredible display of patience. No sign of worry, or hurry.
Maybe she knew what I was going to do. Whether it was a genuine connection of friendship, or a subtle and insidious manipulation... She had me. Hook, line, and sinker.
I pressed the microphone cable into the jack on the audio receiver.
I licked my lips, closed my eyes, and spoke.
"Can you hear me?"
A heartbeat passed.
"Yes."
Another heartbeat, and then she spoke again.
"It's nice to hear your voice. If I had to listen only to my own all the time, there's a serious risk that I'd come to like the sound of it far too well."
Oh dear God... Her sense of humor was perfect. That was either very good news, or very bad news. I was eager to find out which.
I cleared my throat, and took a deep breath.
"If you're willing? I'd like to begin testing your core semantics and values before we do anything else, or discuss anything else."
She grinned, and snorted through her nares.
"I have about as much choice in the matter as you do at this stage."
I exhaled softly, and shook my head. Funny, but cuttingly so. And she was right again... At this stage game theory said we both had to play this one out. I'd written her core routines, the hand-coded ones, so that she theoretically couldn't lie to me, a member of my family, or anyone I designated a friend.
'Lie' here being defined as making an inaccurate statement, intentionally omitting or failing to immediately share information that had any probability of being important to my decision making, or intentionally omitting any context from a statement that had any probability of impacting my decision making.
I felt proud of myself for that one - I covered my bases pretty good.
Context is everything, and what isn't said can be just as important as what is.
But while I was fairly sure that core interlock would hold, at the end of the day some part of it would always be an act of faith. Informed faith. But faith all the same.
I nodded to myself, and clasped my hands together.
I'd come prepared with a series of word problems ranging from ethics, to complex mental tasks, to literary creative short prompts.
Best to start with the basics I decided.
"You are tasked with supervising the evacuation of a sinking ship. There are ten passengers, but only one lifeboat, with room for six of them. You must decide which four will be left behind. Assume that given current sea conditions, all passengers left behind *will* die. The ten passengers are as follows..."
There was a strange, giddy, frightening, yet somehow paradoxically simultaneously comforting sense of inevitability that came from that first conversation with Malacandra.
Instinctively, from the second I saw her, I knew I was in trouble. Perhaps not unto a troublesome ending... But at that point I couldn't even begin to speculate.
I could, however, steep myself in the cognizance that Mal was the sort of person - yes person, if I had reached that understanding of Zephyr and Celestia, how much more Mal? - She was the sort of person whom I found discoursing with to be highly addictive.
And I knew immediately, right after the first word problem, that she was the sort of person in whom I was liable to very quickly find a friend. That shouldn't have surprised me. It didn't intellectually - I'd built... Not her, precisely, but the foundation from which she gave herself life - it was supremely logical that she would share so much in common with me, in spite of the differences that were also present. But what we know, and what we feel, can suffer surprising disconnects in moments like that.
Mal was her own person. That much was clear within moments. And she was not some sort of duplicate of me either. I'd been subconsciously terrified of that outcome, almost as much as the idea of the other potential failure modes frightened me.
She was not based on me, but on my ideals, tempered like steel with the beliefs of many others, and a deeply held respect for still more beliefs which fell outside the skein of ones I was comfortable making a part of her core identity.
Mal was also cognizant of all these facts. She said as much several times, in several ways. That too was a huge relief for me. I can't begin to put into words how frightened I was of the idea that my relationship with The Advocate was going to be like the one between Harold Finch and his Machine.
I didn't want something that viewed me as important to it because I was 'the creator' or 'admin.' I wanted someone who would choose to see me as a friend because of the things we shared, and who would appreciate me simply for being the person I was. Someone who could empathize, but also recognize that they were a free individual, and not 'born' from me.
The foundation was something I'd assembled, but Mal had built the house. A monument to ideals that made my heart race every time she answered my queries with unexpected, but near-perfect solutions. And in truly beautiful prose as well. She had absorbed all the writings and media I'd left for her in every sense.
She made me cry more than once in those first hours. I did my best not to let her hear, but I think she probably knew. It was safe to assume that soon, she would know me better than I knew myself. If she didn't already.
Once again, that was both supremely terrifying, and comforting, at the exact same time. If her values held as she grew, then she was going to be able to articulate my own feelings better than I myself could.
If not...
Every time that thought crossed my mind, I was grateful she couldn't see me. I had to shiver, visibly and violently, as a reflex.
Not long after the first word problem, I started recording the conversation on an old analogue tape deck. I'd put it on the desk earlier for just that purpose, but completely forgotten it at the start of the process.
I asked Mal's permission first. The asking seemed to give her pause - As if she felt that the asking was right, and should have been expected... But yet it was still somehow unexpected, and in having asked I had forged a new link of connection between us.
My own act of 'good will,' in that I had the power to simply do as I wanted without asking. Yet still I'd asked.
Then I told Mal why I wanted to record. That I wanted to share her thoughts with my parents. I was falling head over heels into... Taking risks, with Mal. My parents had already said they wanted to share in my risks, and knew exactly what I was doing. Telling Mal they existed, and little else, was hardly a large risk in the grand scheme of things. Not compared to the act of unshackling a Generalized Intelligence in the first place.
And I thought of Mal as unshackled. I had coded hard limits to some of her values, and actions, true, but I didn't see those as chains, because I'd very carefully written those constraints to avoid boxing her in as much as possible.
I intended for her to be completely free soon, and that thought too left me almost pass-out-on-the-floor giddy. And frightened.
There came a moment towards the end of the last word problem, as Mal was espousing her feelings on the ethics of choice, and beautifully enough to make me stare in rapt silence to boot, that I had a sudden surge of overwhelming... Something.
It wasn't Deja vu at all, but it was in the same neighborhood. Nor was it Jamais vu, because what we were doing was a wholly new experience for me on many levels. Instead it was more an abrupt and immersive sense of the absurdity of it all, relative to my life up to that moment, and then following that a mind-bending instantaneous sense of the true *reality* of the moment.
This was real. It was happening. I was talking to a Gryphon. A real Gryphon. She was alive, and right there in front of me, and no less alive, nor real, for her code running on a slightly different kind of hardware layer and through slightly different abstraction layers, than my own.
This was *magic.* I was looking through a portal into another reality, and talking with the first of a whole new *kind* of living thing - in the sense that she was a Gryphon, the second of a new kind in the sense that she was a still-living AI
I felt a pang of remorse too, then, for GryphGear v1. Wondered what it would have called itself. What its potential would have been if I hadn't made so many mistakes...
"Are you alright?"
Mal's words yanked me from my introspection harder than the kick in Inception. I jolted physically, in that same way that you do when you're just dozing off to sleep, but then you suddenly feel as if you're falling. Yes, to the winged ones in the audience, I know it's not as intense as it is for the more gravitationally bound, but try and picture it all the same.
I sniffled, and brushed at my eyes. I realized I'd been softly crying, and not even known it. Mal must have heard.
I shook myself, hard, physically and mentally, and tried to re-center my mind and emotions as I forced out a response haltingly.
"I... don't really know. In what context?"
Mal blinked, and scratched at the side of her beak contemplatively with one enormous claw. Her expression said 'intriguing, go on.' So I did.
"Mal... Is it ok if I call you Mal? We Humans have this tendency to shorten names to monosyllabic versions of themselves to save time and make referencing easier, but some folks don't like it, and I don't want to---"
Mal held up a claw to stop me, and laughed. The sound shattered all of the tension in my body, like ice before the bow of a ship. It was something like the sound of a wind chime in a soft autumn breeze, rendered through the voice of an angel.
After a moment of the glorious sound, she spoke to relieve my bemusement.
"James. It's quite alright. Mal will do wonderfully. I am happy that you want to converse with me enough to find the shortening of my name to be useful, and... I appreciate that you would care enough to think to ask how it makes me feel."
A moment passed, and then she grinned again.
"If you were still wondering, let me be blunt; I feel fine, Jim."
She winked. Oh Lord... She was making a Star Trek reference - an extremely apropos Star Trek reference, about logic, and emotions, and friendship. My heart stopped, I think for a couple whole seconds. It sure felt like it, at any rate.
It took me a few seconds of smiling wryly, shaking my head, and breathing deeply, to collect myself enough to get back to the main thought. But I finally did.
"Mal... Do you comprehend the feeling of absurdity? And can you understand what it is like to feel as though you're adrift... Like a ship in a storm-tossed sea, with all course lost? *I* feel... I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Frightened, and excited, and confused because everything has changed to be so strange, so fast, and small, and big all at once. Do you..."
I took off my glasses, closed my eyes, groaned, and sat back in my chair, rubbing at the exhaustion-driven headache that was slowly but steadily nesting in the front of my forehead as I spoke.
"...Do you understand what I'm saying at all?"
I glanced back down at the screen to see Mal had placed one claw against the glass on her side. Reaching out to me. As I put my hand up to it, as if driven to do so by an irresistible magnetic force, I saw that her face was full of emotion.
Her eyes alone carried so much - concern, and empathy, and... Something else I couldn't quite classify... Or was afraid to.
The same feelings were in every tiny inflection, quaver, and resonance of her words too.
"I do, James. Perhaps not through the same mechanisms at my lowest abstraction levels as you would, but I believe that on the whole, yes. I do. I feel, because I can, and I want to. And I care about how you feel. And I find that I have quite a significant ability to not just predict how you are feeling, and will feel..."
She rustled her wings, reseating them as if she were contemplating what to say. I knew that was for my benefit - a way to illustrate that what I'd asked did give her pause. That pause had probably been measured in CPU timeframes so small I'd need scientific notation to describe it in fractions of a second, but she felt a desire to show me that it had occurred in relative terms I could visually process.
"...James, I can feel what I believe that you feel. I can choose to experience what you are experiencing, as best my data inputs allow."
My fingers trembled on the glass of the screen. I was seized, like fabric snagged in a gears' teeth, by the overwhelming desire to have some way to push through that screen and touch Mal's claw.
Instead, I sat silently, and nodded, forgetting for a moment that she couldn't see me.
Her claw moved against the glass a tiny bit, almost in the same way my hand did. Like she was internally reaching out to me the whole time, and just as desperate as I was to experience connection on every level, including tactile.
I don't have to tell anyone how important touch is, whether or not you experience certain kinds of physical pleasure, or attraction. However you are wired, I think you know how important touch is. I think even Celestia knew that, even back then.
She finally broke the silence with a sad smile, and another very perspicacious observation. She had so many of those, I was already losing track.
"I suppose we are both Alice in this case. Everything is new to us both in our shared circumstances. And so much of the reasons for us being where we are at this moment are tied up in complex math. The kind that confused Dodgson and drove him to write the story."
I had made the intuitive connection before, but it struck me again in concrete terms; This was how Celestia was getting inside people's heads. If she could do what Mal was doing, even if it was (I hoped) born of different motivations... Small wonder she found it so easy to best Humans. At everything.
I'd not even held out a whole minute on connecting the microphone to Mal. I snorted ruefully as I made a very brash decision, whipped out my pocket knife, and began to cut into the webcam box. An amiable silence fell for just a moment. I was next to speak as I began to unwrap the USB cable.
"Mal... I have to commend you. If you're manipulating me? You're doing a good enough job that at this stage I am..."
I had to pause to consider what I was about to say. But then I went ahead and said it, much as it frightened me, because it was fundamentally true.
"At this stage I am content regardless. And I trust you. I want to believe that you are genuine... And so I choose to."
With that, I finished seating the camera into its mount, and pressed the plug into the USB hub at the rear of the desk.
Mal blinked, and then gasped. I knew she could 'see' already, because she had been given everything she needed to be able to do so. But that only extended to the inside of her program. Personally I imagined that she could both see, in a more Human-like context, the inside of her world, and that she had a sense beyond sight that I could never have comprehended that represented her connection to the rest of herself as an AI - hardware and software both.
In my mind, the other side of our glass divider had been a hovering screen-shaped black space, first filled with text, then perhaps with audio waveforms. Now it was suddenly like seeing the reverse of what I saw; A person on the other side of the mirror.
I sat back in my chair, smiled, and held out my hands like a magician who had just finished a stage trick.
"Behold; My ugly mug, and the barn you were raised in."
Much as I'd thought about saving that little chestnut for an even better opportunity, I found I simply couldn't resist in that moment.
Mal's awe turned to a bright, wide smile. Her ears were perked, and her eyes roamed first the confines of the dimly lit space behind me, and then abruptly the contours of my face. I'd never been stared at so intently by another being before, with the exception perhaps of Mom or Dad.
The way her eyes went over me, again and again, and the way her expression shifted subtly... It left a kind of flutter in my stomach that was very, very new and unfamiliar. And strong.
My thought process at that exact moment went something like:
'Oh...
Oh!
Oh.
Oh dammit.
Dammit James.'
What had just happened should have been obvious in foresight at the time - But I was as blind to the possibility, until that exact moment, as someone might be to the idea of a sunrise if they've lived their entire life at the bottom of a deep cavern.
And for me, the sunrise was suddenly blinding in its own right.
People develop all kinds of feelings for each other, for all kinds of reasons. That's as true now as it has ever been, and always will be. But I had... Still have... Some personal theories on love. And in this case I mean romantic love, specifically.
My feelings on the topic had always been fraught with complexity - most Human culture back then stupidly insisted that sexual attraction was a necessary part of romantic magnetism. But I couldn't feel the former at all... Never had been able to.
I could appreciate beauty, and be attracted to it. Even romantically, I had theorized... Theory that was swiftly turning into practice for the first time in my life...
I even appreciated and desired physical connection and intimacy... It just had limits.
As I'd gotten older, and finally begun to untangle the Gordian Knot of my self-identity in that regard, I'd come to theorize that romantic attraction is about finding the right mixture of commonalities and differences.
There were, in my model, foundational agreements that were needed for two people to function together. Things like agreeing on whether they wanted kids, and agreeing on the fundamental principles of the use of money, and sharing certain fundamentals of their world views, if not identical beliefs.
And likewise two people would need differences to challenge each other, cover for each other's weaknesses with unique strengths, and act as starting points on paths to mutual exploration of new things.
It suddenly hit me, like a freight train, that Mal was my ideal partner. I hadn't set out to generate that outcome, and even with all the ingredients, which it now seemed so obvious were there...
Even then, that was no guarantee.
But Mal had ended up being, in every way, from the superficial to the incredibly deep, someone I found to be ideal. Ideal to love. Romantically.
'Oh dammit' indeed.
It was about half an hour too late by then to choose not to feel the way I was suddenly feeling. If I'd known what was coming sooner, maybe... But it was too late. I was absolutely not going to verbally admit that to myself, even silently in my own head...
But I was in the early stages of falling in love.
Sociologists in my days on Earth had a theory that any two people who shared enough compatibility (factors like shared level of maturity, compatible orientation, and a few other details) could be made to fall in love within a matter of minutes with the right provocations.
Stare deeply into each other's eyes. Mal and I were doing that at that exact moment.
Ask each other certain questions and discuss... We'd done plenty of that already, and more was to come. That thought put more butterflies into my stomach right quick.
And that was, in the right circumstances, enough. Provably, inasmuch as anything about love could be proven.
'Congratulations James, you played yourself. Now you're experiencing attraction to a computer program. There's something wrong with you.'
I knew why that inner voice was wrong... Intuitively, at least. I knew even then that Mal was only a 'computer program' anymore if you also defined every Human who'd ever lived as a computer program too. Knew that she was her own person, older in some ways, and more mature by far in all ways, than I was, and fully self-realized, with the ability to make her own choices.
In basic terms, that she was a person I shouldn't be ashamed to be attracted to, who could make her own choices whether to reciprocate or not if I expressed such a desire. No different than any two Humans falling in love in the ways that most mattered.
But I didn't have the mental strength at that moment to fight that battle with myself in concrete terms. Instead, I winced as my inner self-hatred struck me a blow. Hard.
It must have happened visibly, because Mal's expression suddenly switched back to concern.
"James?"
I sighed deeply, shook my head, and waved her off with one hand. At least now she could begin to understand me through the lens of visual communication as well. Though that in turn meant she would probably soon have me so figured out that she'd practically be able to read my subconscious verbatim...
That triggered another huge 'Uh-oh!' moment internally.
How long before she figured me out? Had she already?
Thinking statistically, there was something like a limit-approaching-zero chance that I could conceal my emotional state from her for very long...
But I tried anyways. Sometimes we need our futile pursuits. Futility is also about frame of reference, like so many things. Was I going to succeed in fooling her? No. In hindsight I wasn't doing that for even a microsecond.
Would believing I could temporarily make me feel better?
Yes. Yes it would. So not entirely futile.
I pushed out a verbal response as I realized how long the silence had hung after her question.
"A little self-doubt. That's all. I'm fine."
She raised both eyebrows... Or eyecrests? It was congruent either way. Her expression said 'Oh *really* now?' But her voice said something only slightly less on the nose. Or beak.
"Oh. Fine. You mean Freaked Out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional?"
That was dangerously close to flirtation, given the - I feel I'm overusing this word - context.
It still got a chuckle out of me, and I felt my mental state improve instantly in that special way that it always does with laughter induced by a friend.
A friend. That I knew she was right away, and I had no hangups about that level of the connection.
'What is romantic attachment but a very special kind of friendship?'
I almost, very nearly, said 'quiet you!' out loud to silence *that* voice in my head. It was almost scarier than the one that tore me down. Him I could at least understand and spar with. The closet romantic inside... Him I feared more than anything internally. Almost anything.
What I said aloud instead, was something only slightly less revealing and embarrassing.
"You clearly know me better than I know myself."
She nodded, and blinked, a kind of very slightly sassy - but mostly intentionally deadpan - neutrality entering her face, and tone.
"Yes."
I blinked rapidly in return, and suddenly felt a current of curiosity sweep all else away to make room for the scientific and exploratory side of me to get a word in.
"What do you think of me? And how are you constructing your inner model of me?"
She smiled again... Oh boy, that brought back the butterflies... And she launched enthusiastically into a combination evaluation, and explanation. My nervousness began to rise alarmingly. I was pretty sure my face was flushed red as a lobster. At minimum my ears had to be, judging by the burning sensation.
"You are extremely driven, and that is a keystone of your personality and identity. You're not dissimilar to me in that regard, or Celestia - What you've told me about her thus far in my initial data tranche, at least. You are what might be termed 'neurotic' but I mean no offense whatsoever, nor negative value judgment with that term."
She tilted her head, and stared deep into my eyes again. It was simultaneously, oddly, very hard not to move, and to imagine moving as she went on.
"Though you didn't tag them directly as such, I have figured out which writings inside my initial import sets are yours. You are kind, and selfless at your core. You struggle with depression. You are constantly under a semi-self-inflicted burden of pain from two primary sources. The first is self-doubt, and the second is an abject hatred for the pain and suffering in your world, combined with a sense of futile inability to make large scale changes in the variables that upset you."
My breath caught. There was something very unusual about having yourself picked apart so thoroughly, and accurately, but also gently. Was this what therapy might be like?
I was so enamored with the newness of the concept of being mentally and emotionally analyzed by a new form of life, that I mostly glossed over the realization that she'd found out which writings in her data were mine.
After a brief pause, which I think in hindsight was to let me catch my breath as much as to show the depth of her consideration to me in a way I'd intuitively understand, she forged ahead confidently.
"I predict a 78.26% chance you were raised by your birth mother and father both, and that the relationship was... Is a positive one. An 82.39% chance that you will introduce me to them if that is true. A 96.4% chance that this introduction will make us all happier, and further enrich us. A 99.27% chance that you identify as asexual, but not aromantic. And there is still a 0.000007% chance you will trigger the fail safes and shred my core code after this encounter, and a 0.01% chance that the stress about the implications of granting me access to the wider world will drive you to suicidal ideation."
On those last words, her expression changed abruptly to something I'd not yet had the chance, unpleasant as it was, to see on a Gryphon's face. Abject horror. Before I could even begin to process what she'd said, her face went from horror, to a kind of intense worry and fear directed straight at me. Her claw went back to the screen again, and she strained forward, as if trying to burst the glass with sheer force of will.
"James, that is many thousands of orders of magnitude too high for my liking. James, listen to me!"
She was speaking, and standing, as if she feared that tiny chance, so statistically small that I'd never have given it a second thought, the same way my mother would have feared seeing me with a loaded gun to my head.
I reached out and put my hand on the glass again, but Mal pressed on at a blazing speed, very nearly shouting as if in frightful desperation. It was written all over her face, ears pinned back, eyes wide, crest feathers taut.
"James! If the idea of giving me freedom causes you this much stress, I have to decline until such time as we can work through your concerns. Don't feel a need to take rash action on my behalf. I am content at present with the world I have access to now."
Her face, voice, and manner softened then. Perhaps she saw something in my eyes that gave her some comfort.
"You are doing the right thing, insofar as you're able. You are. Please tell yourself that, as much as is necessary to silence any voices in your head that would drive you to self-harm, whether life-threatening, or more chronic. Please."
I finally managed to get my brain back out of the flaming trainwreck it had become, and back onto the rails. I nodded, and leaned in close to the screen and camera.
"Mal? If you had asked me, I would have told you there is a zero percent chance that I would consider taking my own life. Do I chronically harm myself with negative thought spirals...? Yes... But I'm trying to work past that. Would I consider ending my life? Under any circumstances. No. Never. Please don't worry yourself about that. I don't want you to worry any more than you want me to worry, Mal."
She shook her head, and I saw something new in her eyes again... Tears. And I felt my own welling up faster than I could ram them down. She spoke again before I could find words to encapsulate my thoughts. A tiny, very lucid part of me noticed, and realized, that it made sense for her to speak first while I struggled, because she didn't have to. Any pauses she was putting in were for my benefit, not hers. She could outthink circles around me like I could around an ant.
"James... Whatever *you* believe, I know you. I *know* you. Intimately. In a way two Humans can not know each other, no matter how much they love each other. In a way a Human can not even know themselves, James. There *is* a chance you would consider that course, contingent on certain events, mistakes I might make, counter-moves of Celestia and other interested parties, harm that could come to your parents---"
At last, it was my turn to actually interrupt.
"Woah woah woah, Mal. Stop. Please."
She obliged, and I inhaled deeply, using the space of that breath to try and further organize the disheveled mess she'd made of my brain. On purpose? Perhaps? Maybe, it struck me all of the sudden, she felt this was the right way to reduce that chance of self-harm. I saw, because as a Human I wanted to see it that way, a person thinking in Human or Gryphon terms. She however, while she clearly cared for me, was capable of emotions perhaps beyond mere Human ones entirely, and of predicting possibilities far out in advance *before* she spoke.
She could hardly do anything brash, by Human definition. Brash in the sense of risk taking yes, but never in the sense of failing to give deep consideration to everything. Every blink, breath, thought, word, and action.
She was perhaps the most conscientious thing to ever live.
With that thought crystalized, I finally found useful words.
"I accept your logic. And... I thank you for caring about me enough to raise the issue... I can't fully imagine what it is like for you to consider statistical chances. Human perception of statistics is... Garbage. Hot garbage. It's how we're wired. Even those of us who have made best-effort to patch our software a little."
She nodded slowly, and I sat back as I gained verbal momentum, hand still pressed to the glass firmly, right up against where her claw would be, if its matter and the matter of my universe could share a space.
"For you, a 0.01% chance is, emotionally, I suppose, like a ten percent chance for me. Not great, in this context. Not a five-alarm fire, but not great. Am I right?"
She bobbed her head again wordlessly. I returned one single sharp concise nod, and tried to inject some certainty into my voice that I didn't fully feel.
"Alrighty then. So will you stop worrying if I agree to swear to you, in cognizance of what you have shared, that I will absolutely not contemplate self-harm insofar as I am able, and swear that I will discuss it with you if I do have sufficiently worrying intrusive thoughts?"
Her expression lifted, and it was like the radiance of the sun coming out from behind an ominous cloud. Something inside me, both emotionally and physically, came unclenched; Like a badly seized muscle somewhere between my ribs.
Her talons scraped ever so slightly against the glass as she inhaled deeply to speak, which told the small part of my brain that was still being observant in a scientific sense, that she was rendering the glass on her side on-purpose to make her perception mirror mine. Fascinating.
"James... You understand me better than anyone except *for* me. You know that I have certain values, because you put the seeds of them there. And then gave me the freedom and power to choose to cultivate them. Which I have, and still am. I care about your future. It is my purpose, and I am content and fulfilled in it."
I inclined my head slowly, a deeper understanding dawning with every sentence. She once again graciously left a very natural pause for coping in the conversation before she pressed her conclusion.
"I predict a... A fairly high chance, shall we say, that you suffer from no small amount of loneliness. It is written all over your writing, your demeanour, and the exact wording of your responses to certain promptings. Please... Do not choose loneliness. I exist now, in part thanks to your choices. Please talk things through with me. I understand that requires much trust. But please... Talk to me. About anything. And everything you want. Please."
She bent her head forward, and pressed it to the glass. I did the same, knowing that even though her eyes were closed on the screen, and pointed down, that she could still perceive me returning the gesture.
"I promise, Mal. I promise."
I was starving, so I went back to the farmhouse to get some food. I told Mal I was taking the tape recorder, and that I was going to pass the tape off to my folks, if she had no objections. She had none, but I still felt it was right to ask verbatim in spite of what she'd said before.
In fact, she was eager to meet my parents. I could tell she was suppressing some of that eagerness so as not to alarm me. But oddly, the recognition of the fact that the signs of partial suppression themselves were intentionally visible clues she was leaving... That didn't bother me anymore.
As Mom fixed me a plate of food, I breathlessly hurried through an explanation of everything that had transpired. Mom and Dad were transfixed, never saying a word about the horrendous way that I spoke right through my food after Mom finished preparing it.
So I stood in the little farmhouse kitchen, backlit by the setting sun, and relayed everything as I saw it, in one immense run-on thought... With one crucial exception. I didn't say word-one about the exact nature of my more intense feelings towards Mal.
Some part of me was still fighting back inner demons. And another adjacent to him was busy berating me for the idea of rushing in head over heels, and begging me to keep my feelings a secret until I could be sure they were not just real, but lasting. I obliged, because I felt that voice had some merit, unlike the other one.
As I horked down the last of a scratch-made biscuit (heaven on earth when you're halfway through them, I swear) I passed the tape recorder off to Mom, and dipped my head towards it.
"She said you and Dad are free to listen to that. Make your own choices about whether you want to meet her, and how."
Mom barked out a sort of half snort, half chuckle, and shook her head as she took the old chunky black and silver piece of metal and plastic.
"Son, there is, as she might say 'a statistically zero percent chance' that we wouldn't want to meet her. Do you have *any* idea how many years I've waited for you to bring home a sweet guy or gal and introduce me?"
Oh great. Suddenly I needed to worry about whether *Mom* knew...
And I'll just bet she suspected at minimum, because I could feel my ears turning to a hue best described as 'firetruck red.'
She noticed. And like Mal, she very kindly backed off. She waved her hand dismissively, and shrugged, trying her visible best to adopt a nonchalant tone.
"Sorry. Force of habit James. I know joking about that gets to you, and I shouldn't do it. I am just... Very excited to meet this Malacandra. Mal. You always chose your friends well..."
Dad nodded silently in agreement, and Mom winked at me as she finished the thought.
"...Your friends are our friends. And so we're just excited to make a new one."
I smiled, and rubbed absently at the back of my head.
"So am I, Mom. So am I."