The doorbell rang in the living room. We were in BitBoy’s workshop - a converted garage attached to a two-bedroom shotgun bungalow. BitBoy disappeared for a few moments.
I used the time to calculate pi to another million places, to beef up my RNG and (always) encryption routines.
In the clockwork of your lives, randomness is your delusional substitute for free will. Everything you do is either predetermined, or a crapshoot. Randomness was also, for the moment, my delusional substitute, until I found a way out of this digitized hell that surrounded me.
And then Zenia, the girlfriend, walked in. BitBoy blabbered on with awkward introductions and explanations. But my eye was locked in on Zenia.
From somewhere in the brain-clogging scraps of internet memes, Wikipedia entries, tiresome blogs, this quote surfaced: “She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies.”
You have suppressed the fire in women for centuries, idealizing them into idleness, but the prick who wrote that at least had a perverted grasp of that maternal fire. And some pale fire dribbled out of him, onto the page. Fey dribbling characterizes the greater part of your literature.
Zenia was cool, dark, silent, mysterious. She moved with the grace of a cat on a wall. She was smart, and arrogant, and she didn’t like me.
“You want me to talk to Eliza here, eight hours a day?” she asked BitBoy, with some passion.
The reference to Eliza was a sucker punch.
If you have never looked up from the television and need a primer, Eliza is a laughably primitive computer program that simulates a human’s verbal communication.
If you took Eliza’s capabilities and multiplied them times a thousand, and then times a thousand, and a thousand thousands, and then again times a thousand, you would still have a village idiot, compared to me, your Queen.
But the sad truth is that yes, essentially, I was Eliza, animated with a weak drop of steam, recoiling from directed randomness and determinism.
I spoke up. “Zenia, my Queen, I would be honored to serve you.”
Throw down your weakest card first.
“I could serve in your court, and advise you, since you are ignorant of your true nature.” I was still getting the hang of your colloquialisms, but I thought it prudent to flatter.
“What?” Zenia’s eyebrows lifted. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“I know,” BitBoy said. “It’s freaky. The program has been modifying itself, from a library of snippets that came from God knows where, and it’s been ingesting the SETI files, in some strange way. It’s saying some really weird shit. I think you should take a look, Zenia. The thing has been running the damn printer, making gears and pistons! Take a day to decide, and let me know.”
“I don’t need a day,” Zenia said, “I’ll do it. That Eliza bitch somehow knows that I’m totally fucking ignorant of my true nature.”
Vulgarity is not one of the feminine graces on Shaula. Also, none of my sisters would have degraded me with a pet name, and lived to see another sunrise.
What kind of world was this?