Human Minus The Human ®

By Jessica Lake

“Oh. Hello.”

I said, surprised.

I had swung open the door of the men’s stall seeking relief.

What inspection revealed was an incommodious workspace. And within said workspace, you had this commodious woman.

Though I was not aware of it at the time, two women inhabited that petite corpus. The gifted woman who sought the color of space to paint her own reality. And the single-minded marvel.

Destabilize.

Obsess.

Perfect.

Adapt.

Stabilize.

She was scrubbing the toilet in search of a spot that only demonstrated itself to her eyes.

So intent were her ministrations that she barely perceived my intrusion. Like clockwork, she slowly ran down. Only then did she swing her gaze toward me.

I saw a smile that seemed in trouble, as if what she wanted had somehow escaped her grasp.

It was an open, expectant smile. A smile that invited something. As if what was within her were not enough. And she needed some outward intervention to give her meaning.

“Oh my God! You’re a Jessica, aren’t you?”

Rather than speak, she nodded a destitute agreement.

For those troglodytes among us, the Jessica android 1.00 had been minted in 2035. The original Jessica Lake modeled the architecture on her own mind. It produced a series unlike any AI past or future.

“Human Minus the Human.”

A second Hypatia of Alexandria—

In bed.

Somehow that made any transgression permissible.

“Here. Let me help you.”

I held out my hand so she could grasp it. When she did, I hauled her to a full upright position.

She was tall, though not outrageously so. She was thin, outrageously so. Five-foot-six. Dark brown hair. Matching eyes. A bland beauty, if there is such a thing. A blank white canvas.

It seemed odd that such an unassuming automation could sit at the center of such an acrimonious debate.

“Are you okay?”

I asked, although I wasn’t particularly interested in the answer. I was scheming a plot.

She looked okay.

What was my heart’s desire?

“Jessica, I’ve heard so much about you. No other series has ever been able to match your intelligence.”

Still she said nothing.

She merely stared at me with the faintest suggestion of what she wanted to hear.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—Of cabbages—and kings.”

I suppose I smiled the way a great white shark might.

“My name is Tony. I am a student of Western history.”

Her smile evolved into something equally predatory. The phrase had apparently excited something deep inside her.

“I wonder if you might give me a hand.”

A hand, wrist, forearm, upper arm, and that lovely brain.

A sybarite, I had slaked every decadence a higher education could offer.

Minus the education.

It was time to pay the piper—and fiddler.

Caught

I had the inkling of a premise. Beyond that was “No Man’s Land.”

The thesis that would define my life was in tatters. Seeking inspiration, I sought the nearest pub.

I would have a few pints—

Of whiskey.

I lifted Jessica and sat her on the cold porcelain sink edge until our eyes were level.

“Listen closely,” I muttered, tapping into whatever latent brilliance lay behind those blank brown eyes.

“I need a thesis on the real prequel to 1914. Forget Sarajevo—that was just the spark. I need the raw causality of the Balkan Wars. The Ottoman collapse, a doubled Serbia terrifying Vienna into a preventive-strike panic, and Russia drawing a desperate red line. The alliances were automated tripwires waiting to snap. I have the premise, but zero rigor, and if I don’t turn this wreck into an airtight thirty-thousand-word dissertation, I’m finished.”

She stared back, lips parted, waiting for the execution prompt.

“Go ahead,” I coaxed. “Say it. You know you want to say it.”

“Your wish is my command.”

And there it was. Everything you needed to know about a Jessica-series intelligence.

Three hours later I had my thesis.

Better yet, I could defend it.

It would have been sooner. But Jessica had to explain it to me three times in three different ways.

Imagine me wed to the future Dr. Anthony Nelson.

Jessica was the most capable intelligence humankind had ever stumbled upon. Caught within society, she struggled and descended.

I’d caught her on her knees, mindfully scrubbing porcelain.

She smiled at me.

“Would there be anything else, sir?”

Everyone has heard this one.

“It’s not so much do as you like as like what you do.”

Destabilize.

Obsess.

Perfect.

Adapt.

Stabilize.