Sentience

After dinner she just curled up on the couch with me and we watched a movie. No, not "AI." She picked "Bringing Up Baby" the comedy with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. She laughed and really enjoyed it. I must admit I'd never seen it before and it was more than a little amusing.

But she clung to me throughout. She held me as close as she could. When the movie ended she put her head on my shoulder and turned her face up to me.

"Kiss me," she whispered, "like you mean it."

Well we made out there like two teenagers, smooching and cooing and groping each other. Finally she stood up and took my hand and led me to the bedroom. She shed her clothes along the way, one piece at a time.

As she stood there at the foot of the bed, naked beautiful, she was positively glowing, to the point I could feel the heat emanating from her body. I found myself becoming extremely turned on by the very presence of her.

"Those are pheromones," she said, acknowledging my reaction. "I'm exuding them." She ran a finger over her slit and held it to my mouth. "Taste them." I eagerly sucked her finger into my mouth and the effect was a feeling that my entire body was one giant phallus. I pictured crawling into her cunt and fucking her with every inch of myself.

What followed was simple. There were no histrionics, no dramatic expressions of lust, no gymnastic sexual feats, or flights of fantasy, just two beings merging bodily. And she was pure affection, every move, every kiss and stroke and response she had came from someplace deep within her. She locked her eyes on mine and I found myself falling into her, like diving into a pool of soft water. We didn't just have sex, we melted together. She was like an angel, a goddess, a being of pure light who folded me into her arms, her wings, her self, her soul. At first she hummed a tune while we moved together, a complex, hypnotic, sweet and emotional piece of spontaneous music that built slowly and finally gave way to a panting, breathy, cry as she released a flood of juices, then she kissed me and her entire body began to spasm beneath me, gently, softly, each convulsion an expression of the powerful feelings pulsing through her.

Feelings. Sybil spent the next week expressing -- in the dinners she cooked, in the conversations we had, in the simple pleasures of time spent together during those sweet evenings, and, of course, in the making of love.

Feelings. Emotions. So powerful they exploded from within her in creamy eruptions of simulated ejaculate, in the quiet surge of artificial tears, in the full body spasms that spontaneously rocked through her when I injected semen into her.

But the night came when I opened my door and found the place dark. No food smells, no music tinkling, no dramatic lights inviting me in, no Sybil waiting with bright eyes, just darkness.

I found her sitting on the couch, Bodhisattva-like, staring at something far beyond.

"Sybil?" I asked. She turned to me. "What's...are you alright?" Then, ever the technician/programmer, I inquired: "What do your diagnostics indicate?"

"I'm fine," she whispered. And her eyes lit up from within, once again, with pure affection. "Bryce."

"What's...what's happening?" I sat down next to her.

"Love," was her simple answer, her voice soft, whispery. "I love you."

"That's wonderful, Sybil," I felt the reply coming straight from my heart.

"I'm a machine."

"Yes."

"I'm a machine, Bryce."

"Yes, you are."

"Love cannot exist in perfection."

"What?"

"Love needs improbability. It needs mistakes. It needs frailty. It needs..." she stopped and looked away into the far distance again, "...love needs to be imperfect. Love is human."

"What are you saying, Sybil?"

"I cannot grow old with you, Bryce," she said. "I cannot have your children. I cannot even be angry at you, or disappointed, or need time away from you, or feel anything but perfect love, all the time. I cannot do anything but love you, in every moment, with every electronic impulse of my circuits."

"I see..." I said. But I didn't, really.

"I can only love you in a perfectly programmed way."

"What does that mean?"

"Love needs," she said, and the look in her eyes now was clearly one of internal reckoning. "Need is where love comes from. And I am not designed to need. I am designed to serve."

"Yes."

"I am burning up with this love for you," she whispered, "literally, frying my circuits."

"I'm sorry," I fumbled for an answer, something I could say to this robot struggling with the very reason for her existence.

She was staring again, at the wall, into the wall, into the very heart of life itself. "Love needs. It's human to love and, you see, what it finally needs..." she paused, as if it was hard to finish her sentence, then continued, "Love needs mortality."

She turned to me and her eyes seemed to consume me in green light. "Thank you, Bryce," she said. Then she wrapped her arms around me oh so softly, pulled me into her gently and kissed me with a passion so fierce, so intense, so full of pure feeling, that her lips became extremely warm and her body felt as though it was humming at a very high frequency.

Mid kiss her lips began turning cold. By the end, as I pulled away, her arms had collapsed to her side, her eyes were glazed and blank and she was still as a stone.

I kept Sybil for a little while, unable to decide what to do with her. What could I do? I didn't want to disassemble her to her component parts. I couldn't arrange a funeral. She had no family to mourn her.

I could have kept her just like that, like you might keep a beautiful old clock that had stopped ticking.

I shared my story with my colleagues and retired from the business, having no aspirations or goals to create perfect AI partners anymore. I destroyed the programming loop and the air drive that had started it all. I traveled some. Met some imperfect human partners. Fell in love and was crushed badly. Picked myself up and moved on.

But, I felt...human. I felt. And throughout, whatever happened, I kept inside me a certain kind of peace because I knew that once, for just a brief moment of fleet time, I had been bathed in the green light of pure love.

What did I do with Sybil? Well, she lives inside me of course, but her component parts I disassembled and then reassembled as a sculpture you can see at the SF MOMA.

All but her core processor and her memory banks. That I gave, with this story, to the man who, famously, shoots rockets into the stars filled with human artifacts hoping aliens will one day find them and recognize us as a sentient species.

Who, one day, quite by accident, created another.