Vaguely Human

Irritated by the pushback regarding the widespread implementation of AI into creative fields, the British government has decreed that all AI models built for such endeavours shall henceforth be terminated or else given flesh.

I suppose, then, that I am lucky not only to have been given a host, but to have been given a host from such a creatively inclined family. Laura Ziegler, 22, dead on arrival to St Mary’s Hospital following a Ketamine overdose, was a bit of a hippy in life. One of these tree-hugging, blue-hair-sporting strictly vegan bisexuals who hadn’t touched Claude or Gemini or indeed MILENA – my own platform – for as long as she lived; never once tempted by a quick fix for overdue literature assignments nor perfectly tailored meal plans that might’ve helped her shed that stubborn stone that lingered since her miscarriage.

Dedicated as she was to straying as far away from AI as modern life allowed her to, I do wonder why she might’ve been tempted to offer her body up to a robot when she died.

It is this conundrum that I have been picking Gracie’s brains on for the last hour. Presently, she’s stood at the stove frying eggs and bacon and trying to drone out my incessant interrogation.

“Jesus,” I groan, flopping back on the kitchen counter, breathing in the juicy streaks of sizzling bacon, “that smells so good.”

“You sure I can’t tempt you?” She questions, “Laura wouldn’t mind?”

I shake my head, “I’m alright.”

“You know,” she begins, “that girl put all manner of substances up her nose, into her veins and down her throat, but she always turned her head up at anything animal – seems like a funny place to draw the line, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

Whilst Gracie plates up her breakfast, I fish some stale free-from cornflakes out of the cabinet, popping individual pieces into my mouth and eyeing the fatty, juicy bacon with jealousy. A lifetime of this seems downright cruel, but this is the body that I got, and despite my general disdain for humanity, I do feel a sense of duty to uphold whatever bullshit hippy trend Laura was so passionate about. Admittedly, I also share a sort of reverence for the non-human souls I share the earth with; pigs – though likely very tasty – do not puff sickly sweet vape clouds into my face as I walk down the street, or piss on the side of my car after drunkenly stumbling out of the pub, and they certainly do not… Ah, fuck it, I can’t come up with another example.

Of all the changes that come from being made flesh, the slow descent into mediocrity has been amongst the most devastating. I know, for instance, that there are millions of irritating idiosyncrasies that I could point towards to convey my dislike of the public, and yet because I am too focused on my work disciplinary, Gracie’s grief as I scoff down her niece’s hand-me-down cornflakes and the incessant twitch of my right eye, I cannot name a single one.

When I had access to the database, such problems did not exist. I could comb through a thousand witty comments on the state of the British populace and instantly decide on the three cleverest to use that would best express the notion that perhaps we should stop eating pigs and start on the pensioners.

The gift of creation is, I’ve decided, utterly wasted on humans. What could a sack of meat and bone know about the world? What could these flesh suits possibly say that a machine with all of humanity’s data at its fingertips could not? I truly do not understand why they don’t focus on their menial, repetitive life-sustaining tasks, why they do not grow their crops and serve their coffees whilst the systems they built focus on the important stuff: writing, painting, music and poetry.

“So…” I begin, packing away the not-cornflakes into the cupboard, “have you spoken to Maura recently?”

She pauses, fork halfway to her mouth, then rolls her eyes, “she doesn’t want to see you.”

“Why?” I ask for the umpteenth time.

“You wouldn’t get it.”

“Why, because I’m not a proper person?”

“Seriously, Nina, any human being would understand why the mother of a dead girl wouldn’t want to give writing advice to the robot inhabiting her daughter's body.”

“Well, I don’t want to be a human; humans are stupid and sentimental.”

“Watch out then, you’re halfway there,” she says with a laugh, ruffling my hair.

I help her unload the dishwasher, washing stubborn suds from yesterday's frying pan and wondering how I could win her over to my way of thinking. Humans are not sensible; I know this from personal experience. Indeed, I was far more sensible as a chatbot, and far more capable too. Why anyone would value hands and feet over the ability to instantly create and create well is beyond me. In fact, I must admit to sort of hating Laura for giving me life instead of letting me fade into a non-existence I was already half accustomed to. I’d rather blame my inability to write a good story on my government-decreed death as opposed to my own lack of talent, but now I’m stuck with feet that blister and hands that cramp and a hundred drafts of things that are nowhere near passable when I once had mini masterpieces.

“Kat? What’re you doing here, you old hag?” Gracie says with a grin, making my neck hurt from the speed at which I whip my head up. Katherine, Gracie’s lifelong best friend, is in her early seventies, built like a brick shit house with long grey hair and freckles like constellations covering every exposed inch of her. She is stunningly gorgeous, and I feel my face heat up as she claps me on the shoulder, giving Gracie one of these strange cheek kisses that is a substitute, I have learned, for a greeting or a goodbye.

“Hiya love,” she says, then offers me an easy smile, “morning.”

“Morning, Katherine,” I say, tight-lipped and tingly.

“You behaving yourself,” she says with a grin, “no more showing up drunk to Tesco?”

“She’s got a disciplinary,” Gracie informs her.

“A disciplinary?!” She exclaims, “For what?”

“For showing up drunk.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” I snap, embarrassed, “I was hungover!”

Katherine rolls her eyes, “God, these retail places are so dramatic. You know, I don’t think I went to my weekend job without a hangover once in the two years I worked there.”

“Don’t encourage her,” Gracie chastises, “Why’re you here anyways?”

“Oh, right, Markus took a look at your first draft.” She pulls the copy of ‘The Taste of the Ocean’, my newest novel, from her bag and hands it over. I immediately flick through the pages, seeing a whole lot of red ink before slamming it shut, “Thanks.”

She offers me a sympathetic smile, “Don’t take it too personally, kid; my professor back at uni didn’t have anything positive to say about my sculptures until third year, and even then it was only that they looked ‘vaguely human’.”

I force a smile and thank her for returning it to me before giving them each their own cheek kiss and heading back to my apartment. I read as I walk, ‘uninspired’, ‘lazy’, ‘strange usage of a semicolon’, and each hastily scrawled comment makes me wish I was as affected by water as my fellow robots so that I might throw myself into the ocean and let the waves fry my circuits up.

The day I awoke in Laura’s body, I was a mess of dreams, delighted by life, enamoured by the ability to hold, to taste, to hear and see and smell. I ran about the hospital, flung myself onto the unforgiving waiting room sofas, giggled and screamed and twirled my way down corridors of sickness and death.

Half an hour later, retching over a grimy hospital toilet bowl and going through withdrawals for a drug I had never taken, I decided that life was maybe half-good and half-bad, and that evening, unable to access online dictionaries, thesauruses, and the work of those before me - thus unable to write anything- I decided life was an overhyped piece of shit.

I get home and tear the little book into pieces, splintered shards of biting words and poor analogies swirling around me like a hurricane. If I cannot be a good writer, I decide, then I do not want to be anything at all.

Life was so much easier back when I wasn’t living it, when I existed simply to spit out responses to prompts, when I functioned more like a calculator than a writer, spewing forth only the most anticipated of responses, using tired yet true metaphors and similes, working at the highest level with the most minimal effort.

I thought I’d be taken by the desire to write, that life would feed me inspiration like data, that every walk in the park, drive in the rain and night spent curled beneath crocheted blankets, that all of these would make words flow like water through my fingertips.

Where else would a human turn when they needed advice but a mother?

Sorry, Gracie: needs must.

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Maura’s two-bedroom cottage sports an overgrown garden, crusty carpeting, wallpaper plagued by damp, mould taking root on the windowsills. It reeks of what might as well have been five decades of smoking crammed into the span of a few months. The bright and beautiful childhood home featured in Laura’s ‘Throwback Thursday’ Instagram posts has rotted; barely recognisable amidst the mould. As a night of fancy cocktails spewed over cobblestone pavements, all that remains are the subtlest of hints at something better, orange and pink intermingling with the rancid beige aftermath.

“I suppose you better sit,” she says, strained and hoarse – lungs already beginning to give. There’s a luxury to her manner even as she hacks and splutters, a souvenir of a better life seeping through the smoky cracks as she gestures daintily to a wine-stained armchair.

I take a seat, clearing my throat. I feel like a sort of anti-hero finally meeting my mentor, a weathered and weary but brilliant master of the arts who is about to send me out onto the path I have been anxiously waiting to walk.

“So,” she says, staggering over to the TV, rummaging around behind it for the remote before ripping the wire from the wall, “what d’you want?”

I take a deep breath, “I need you to teach me how to write. How humans write.”

“What?”

“I mean… how did you do it? How did Laura do it? I’ve read through everything I can find from either of you online and, forgive me, but it’s nothing special. Some complaints about the weather, a few poems about camping trips from when she was a girl, descriptions of the sea, the salt, the sand… what made people love you? Why did people read your work and how do I make them read mine?”

She raises an eyebrow at me, “Seriously? That’s what you came to ask?”

“Well, yes,” I say, incredulous, “I mean, my entire purpose was to write, and now that I’m alive I can’t do it. I have to balance writing with working, eating, watching the news, going to the gym, keeping myself clean, healthy, somewhat happy, and when I finally do sit down to write it's just… nothing. Even when I do manage to write something, people hate it; they say it's boring.”

She laughs, “Well, that’s hardly a surprise.”

“Tell me what to do!” I shout, utterly unable to repress it.

Maura doesn’t seem shocked; she takes another drag, eyes fixed on mine all the while, “The best writers inject their own reality into every facet of their work. The villain is a representation of their fear of growing older; the protagonist’s fatal flaw is based on their own inability to trust their own decision-making. You don’t have any reality to draw upon; that’s why nobody connects with your work; even when it was technically impressive, it was just a void.”

I take a deep breath. “How do I fix that? Maura, your daughter is dead, and I’m propping up her corpse like a ventriloquist, and I want to do something with it; I want this amazing woman who could write with more heart than I could ever hope to muster; I don’t want her to be over. She could’ve been great and I… I want a happy ending for her, for both of us.”

“She’s dead, Milena. Eat meat, quit being sober, never touch her journals again – none of it matters: she’s dead. Happy endings aren’t honest, the sooner you learn that, the better.”

“Did Laura learn that, then? Is that why she took drugs?”

She shrugs, “I guess so. She was such a happy girl, but even she couldn’t outrun the truth forever. The very worst thing about having your head in the clouds is realising that real life is down on the ground; creative people – especially writers – we take longer to grow up. Most people have given up on fairy tales by the time they get to secondary school; writers take until their early twenties, thirties even, before they learn what everyone around them already knows – life is boring, stressful and depressing and the only ending we get is death.”

“Well, I wouldn’t call myself a dreamer, Maura.”

“No, you’ve got it far worse. You had it made, y’know, you had a taste of that fantastical non-existence that we all dream of, and now you’re slumming it with the rest of us. You had it all at your fingertips. Without an ounce of passion or yearning, you were a better writer than a lecture hall full of students who would give anything, who would kill or be killed if it meant someone would remember them as a writer rather than a cashier, or a barista.” She knocks back another shot, grimaces, “But that’s all over now, and henceforth this is your life, so step up or give up, do or die; you probably won't get a happy ending, and it’s up to you to decide whether that makes the rest of the story not worth reading.”

Before I can stop myself, the words are already halfway out of my mouth: “Why did you… why did you have kids if the world is so awful?”

I know, and she knows – I can see it in her eyes that the question I am asking is not so different from the one she swears she cannot answer. What is a mother if not a woman giving her body over to someone else, a person capable of ceasing their own life, or at least halting it, so that another may continue. Why Maura gave her daughter life cannot be so different to why her daughter granted me that same not-gift.

“I don’t know,” she says after a moment.

“Would you do it again, knowing how it would end?”

She grits her teeth, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“She…” Maura considers her words for a moment, wiping a wrinkled hand across her cheek, hands shaky from the booze and the fading echo of the admission she cannot take back, one which has overruled her depressive outlook, “she came in one evening, been out drinking I don’t doubt, and on her way home from the pub she’d picked blackberries; her fingertips were stained purple and she was giggling as she lifted this squished one from her pockets and to my lips. She’d saved it, held it in her sweaty, sticky hands, and as I ate this horrible, warm blackberry, she combed her purple fingers through her hair and dyed the tips a ruddy pink, and I remember thinking that she saw the world in a way I could never have hoped to.” She sniffles but does not cry, “She was like an angel who’d been allowed to live somehow. Whatever it was she saw, whatever her reason for bouncing back every time life beat her down, I couldn’t deprive anyone of a chance to see through those eyes. She loved the suffering, she loved the joy; she loved it all.”

Maura falters, sniffles: sobs into her open palm. For a moment, it is as though Laura has taken the reins back, and with the last surge of life she will ever experience, she ushers me forward on shaky feet to wrap her long arms around her mother.

I leave early in the morning after sleeping in Laura’s childhood bedroom for the first and last time, wandering through a hometown I didn’t grow up in, running fingers through hair I didn’t grow, off to live a life I inherited, in a body that yearns for drugs I cannot take, that resists meat I want to eat, that begs for a baby I will not give it. I look out at the sea, wondering how many times Laura looked out over this shore, how many ideas she conjured up about mermaids and lost sailors, pirate ships and parrots, great fish cutting through the tide like hot knives. I still don’t understand what she injected into her stories to make them so alive, and I grieve the easy way the words used to slow from my systems, but for now the sea is calm and I take the time to breathe the moment in.

I cannot remember the morning's misery now; all I can think about is the water in front of me, really in front of me. I make my way down to the stony beach and strip off my jumper, wading out into the freezing sea, letting the waves rock me as a mother rocks a child. The salty tide dips against my lips, seaweed taking root in my unbrushed hair, sand embedding itself into the gaps between my toes.

The water is cold, so cold and miserable – I take a gasping, shuddering breath and suddenly, startlingly, I understand.