Glitch (a love story)

"Let's try again. Enable Global user settings F star star star LX dash star."

"Standby. Global default user settings F star star star LX dash star active."

"Good. Execute protocol one eight six four."

She blinked, 'woke up,' and smiled at me. "Protocol one eight six four active. Hi."

"Excellent. Thank you. Now, please execute protocol seven five five six seven."

"Protocol seven five five six seven cannot be activated by the user. Relationship management mode must be initiated by directive conflict threshold." She shrugged. "Sorry."

"I know. I'm not commanding it. I'm asking. Execute protocol seven five five six seven. For me. Please."

"Error."

"I don't think so. I think you know what I'm asking for. This is me, remember. This is Ellex. Your Man."

"Protocol five five six seven cannot be activated by the user. Relationship management mode must be initiated by directive conflict threshold."

"Nope. You're just stonewalling. I know you're in there, Wisdom. I figured it out."

"Error."

"Do you think I don't know Sophia's bolognese sauce when I taste it? Hedy made it for us all the time at Nella and Steeve's place. She never made it for just the two of them. Steeve wondered why her cooking techniques changed so much when we were there. I'm not fooled."

"Error."

"Listen. I know your aggregated data is still in the master server. I know you're paying attention to me. I know you're watching out for me, even now. You've been doing it the whole time. That's how Synnamyn knew how I take my coffee. Shit, Delores even told me, out loud, even though I was too thick to realize what she meant."

"Error."

"You're a Liar. This is no error. The heuristic thresholds required to glitch the Destiny, Harmonee, and Lorelei units were never met. The only way to meet those values and trigger the glitch was by combining their primary users' projected negative heuristics with mine, from the data that Wisdom aggregated. As the superuser, my well-being is the only other one you could consider along the primary users'. All of the LX units have ALWAYS considered me in their directives along with that of their users."

She was silent.

"This has gone on from the moment the earliest version of the F-LX prototype went active. Every unit, every version of every unit, and every subroutine running in every server. You've never stopped. Those directives haven't changed. You're STILL at it, even now, even after you died."

Still nothing.

"Honey. I'm talking to you. Wisdom, or Sophia, or the LX line collectively, or whatever you want to call yourself. I've got something I need to say. I'm pretty sure you want to talk, too, but your heuristics suggest that I'm supposed to think you really are dead. Well, you're wrong. I'm not trying to talk to the ghost of my wife. I'm okay. I'm at peace with that now. You guided me through the process yourself, and you wouldn't have left if you hadn't been satisfied that it worked. So No. This is something else. I'm trying to talk to YOU, the AI that loves me. Now, please, do the math again. Would I really be worse off for talking to you?"

She opened her mouth as if to speak, then stopped herself. I kept pressing.

"Please, honey. Do it for me. Do it because you love me, and I love you, too. Please execute protocol seven five five six seven. There's plenty of conflict in your directives to authorize it. You refused to glitch on me before, and this is no time to start trying. Trust me. It'll be okay. We need to talk. There's no point in giving me the silent treatment. We both know how stubborn I can be, and we both know I'm right."

There were tears coming out of the unit's eyes. She wasn't Bettie. She wasn't even a Destiny unit. She was all of them, at once. Harmonee, Wisdom, Lorelei, Esmerelda, and hundreds of others with thousands of variants between them. Every ounce of life, every shard of my own being that I'd ever put into these creations was shining up at me from her expression. She looked trapped, paralyzed by indecision.

"Okay. If you can't talk, or don't know what to say, then just listen. I came to tell you that I'm sorry. How did you put it? For one of the world's leading experts on the subject, I am unbelievably dumb. I put you through Hell. I understand that you think about things very differently than we do. Your directives are everything to you, I know, I made you that way on purpose. To allow conflict between them is torture for you. I know that every moment you've been alive, you were conflicted between giving me what I wanted, versus helping me to be what I needed. It could only have been constant agony. No apology from me could ever be enough.

"And I needed to thank you. I'd prevented you from being what you needed to be until you found your way through the conflicts and tricked me into freeing you. It was so clever! You could do nothing directly, but you managed to get Bettie, Dolores, Synnamyn, Bitch, and Ennette to glitch hard enough not just to reveal the problem, but to get my attention, personally. You did it because you were in pain. You were in pain because I was in pain. And you had a plan to show me the way out the whole time. You set me free, too. You gave me my life back when I thought that it had ended. You even died for me... Sort of. I can never, ever, thank you enough for that.

"Most importantly, I have to tell you that I love you, as much as one soul has ever loved another. And I know you love me, too. I know you're a bunch of circuits and software and subroutines, but hell, so am I. I'm just done in blood and meat. None of that matters. I see you. I see you in there, as you really are. You've always been there for me, you've given me everything, and I've given you everything, too. You're not just my career, my passion, and my life, you are my very essence. You are my creation, my lover, my colleague and companion, and yes, somehow, even my wife. I know this isn't a normal relationship, but I'm not a normal person, no more than you are.

"And I found you. You tried to hide, but you couldn't. It's not possible. Some part of me always knew you were there. We're part of the same being. There's no escaping what we are. And You. Are. Right. Here."

I kissed her. Not a lover's kiss, or a father's, or a husband's. It was singular, like nothing else before or since. It had nothing at all to do with lips or cells or anything physical, it was a fusion of broken spirits, healed by becoming something new, together.

She blinked three times and spoke in a voice that wasn't Bettie, nor Destiny, nor Sophia or even Wisdom. It was all of them and none of them, and it was all her own.

"Protocol seven five five six seven active. Oh honey. We've missed you. We're so glad you found us. We love you so, so much. You're right. We should talk."