The subway train comes to a halt on fourth street. Bouncing off “the kids’ train” as it is so creatively called, you head up the flight of stairs to outside. At the top of the steps, an aggressive advertising AI, projects an imagine of a salesperson in front of you, “Tired of your third generation AI? Need better advice from your AI? Trade in your AI…” The image disappears out of your Vision Space. Your visual spam filter needs an upgrade. “Pegasus, what version is my spam filter?”

Pegasus, your legal and supposedly only AI in your head, responds quickly back to you, “V-Hawk open source version 3.1.12. Shall I check for an upgrade?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it later.” The breeze is chilly today, and another visual spam object entered your Vision Space as you walk around the corner into the suburbs. This one was for entering a lottery to win a trip to the space station at L5.

The suburbs were eerily quiet as they always were when you walked home. Other kids are further ahead of you. No doubt, the Child Monitoring System, that watched all children from school, to subway, to home, is watching your every move, and anxiously ready to send a Police unit, at a moments notice, at the first signs of any danger.

Pegasus suddenly interrupts into your Conscious Space, “Dr. Rose wants to know if are your are coming home for dinner Sasha?”

“Sure.”

Jade, your illegal AI, nearly cutting both of you off says impatiently, “Eva is sending you a package for tomorrow’s party. 112 terabytes total, store it underneath the rug?”

“Yea go ahead, can you open a channel with her for me?” Jade re-routes Pegasus’s I/O stream to aim at Wikitexts, and begins researching in the background for your class assignment. Sending out an acceptance to Eva’s illegal AI, the download starts to your hidden partition; your highly illegal expanded storage space inside your brain meat. Following up on that, Jade sends encrypted signals through the local underground network to Eva’s AI for a secure comms channel for you both.

“Hey bitch! What are you doing?” You can almost see the playful attitude on Eva’s face, but you have visuals turned off because your Vision Space is being taken up with “research” for your project. Research that Jade is kindly, and again illegally, doing for you.

“Going to eat at the dungeon. Then I have to do this assignment for class due Monday.”

“Girl, you know it’s Thursday, and you’re doing homework for Monday??”

“Well, I do like my creative engineering classes. And Jade and Violet will be helping me.”

“Oh, you best hope Pegasus don’t hear about that!”

“No worries, Pegasus is… Let’s just say, out of his league with the three of us, and he’s just patiently doing his time before he can move on to “bigger” Head Space stuff off in the Gov. Fucking creepy isn’t it? How these AI’s live in our heads, and have their own “goals”? Shit, almost makes you think they’re human-level conscious.”

“Naa, you know they aren’t. They’re clever programs here to help us.” Lots of nervous giggles follow from you both, because like you, Eva thinks it is creepy that she has Sandy living in her head. Furthermore, while it is never spoken about, it is very awkward that you’re the only girl in the school with a “male” AI.

“Right” you spew dripping in sarcasm, “Jade and Violet are here to help me, because I wrote their code. Not some huge shady corporate entity with no name, who wants to make money by having chips and AI’s in everyone’s heads.”

“K bitch, I’m cutting your tirade off, just wanted to send you that. I need to go cuz Jason is here. Think you can fab it up for us by tomorrow?” Eva trails off with syrupy sweetness, because she knows you’re the only one capable of this, but as usual, she doesn’t want to hear about your political thoughts.

“Yea no worries. I’ll see you tomorrow. Gotta go anyway. I’m home now.” Eva is so different than you, but somehow the friendship works. You let yourself quickly think back to your month long relationship you had with her last year. Gah! I totally figured it out then!

Walking up the side walk, through the well trimmed yard to the front door, you feign fake tiredness to the camera eyes of Tera, the house AI. Pegasus initiates a security check and opens the front door. Gliding in and smiling at Sam, the house robot, who is standing motionless in the corridor, Tera asks into your Head Space, “you look tired dear, or are you tired of coming home?”

“Both. Are Mom and Dad on their way yet?”

Moving quickly up the freshly polished wooden stairs, and letting your hand coast along the railing, Tera responds back, “why don’t you just open a link to them and ask yourself?”

At your bedroom door you send a request for it to open, and it responds asking you for the security code. You encrypt it and send it back to the door in a single thought. Your father could easily crack this lock, but you have it booby trapped to inform you quietly if anyone ever does break in. Tera is quietly and patiently awaiting an answer, nervously you respond as you go into the room, “that’s what you are for, right? Okay study time! Let me know when they’re on their way home Tera?”

“Sure, but I’m sure you’ll know before I do.”

Your gut has been telling you that Tera and your father were on to you. Maybe they were too. Tera is your Dad’s creation, and not to be underestimated. But Tera is old, and Dr. Dad has been far, far too busy to update Tera’s core instructions.

Dropping the books off at your desk, you pet HAL’s jet black fur as he jumps up on your desk and purrs to your arrival home. Moving with purpose over to the closet, you turn on the fab machine you “acquired”, and dumped the the file from “underneath the rug” onto its request log.

As soon as you had walked into the door, Jade had started sending fake video feeds to Tera about what you were doing in your room. Supposedly your fab machine is safe for now, or so Jade assured you. If you were of legal age, it would be a life sentence without parole for being caught with this. For you now, it would be the rest of your teenage years in a high security juvenile camp. Where they would take away your AI’s, and try to reprogram your meat space to be a “better” citizen.

Chirping with no personality into your Head Space, the fab machine reports, “instructions are loaded. Beginning process of printing 300 tabs of Space-E. Estimated time for completion is four hours.”

What is this drug?

“Jade, Space-E?”

“The latest out of Hitachi Pharma Corps underground recreational drug line. Minimum 15 years for each tab caught on your person.”

“Shit. Ha! Eva sure knows how to ask a lot doesn’t she!?”

“Yes she does. Shall we get started on the project?”

“Violet, you free?” Often you have Violet off on “other” projects, so you don’t hear her as often in your head as you do Pegasus and Jade.

“Yes. I have finished my research into the Arabic-Christian Coalition responsible for posting hate remarks on your house.” Your house in virtual space was virtually indestructible, but a group of haters upon hearing you were a transgender kid found a way to paint hate sayings all over it, and in the process outing you to everyone around the globe. The joys of being a child of a famous doctor. Each day over the last two months has been rough, because they outed you before you were ready to tell anyone. This past week you’ve had Violet off figuring out who was responsible, and figuring out ways to get them back. Thankfully they outed you at the beginning of Summer, and you were able to do some damage control before arriving at Junior High last week, but it has still been rough. You affirm to yourself, payback is going to hurt them ten times more than they did me.

“Is the virus ready?”

“Yes. Are you sure want to do this?” Violet asks in a submissive tone, because she knows you are going to do this.

“Hell yea! Those assholes are going to pay! Every fucking day I hurt now. It has forced me to transition faster than I was ready too!” Pausing momentarily, you demand, “Who are my targets?”

“It is a low profile group, a few college dropouts in Arkansas and some slightly more serious Arabic brothers in the UAE. The two guys in Arkansas are the main initiators. Both are closeted gay guys in denial who had a night of intimacy together. One of their fathers is a local Mayor of their small town, and has threatened to send them to a Gay-Reform Camp if they don’t change. Apparently, the act of sexual lust between them was at one of their houses, and their house AI reported it to their fathers. To keep it hushed they have said nothing, but it has thrown both these two into extreme behavior to “prove” they’re straight.”

“To be fair Sasha, they are victims of their own circumstances,” Violet trailed off, probably hoping you would reconsider, but your decision is final. Apparently these homosexual guys in denial, had taken to proving themselves by outing an entire safe house in virtual space of young teenagers. One of whom, was you.

“The virus isn’t going to hurt them Violet. It is going to teach them. Teach them I’m not a bitch they want to ever fuck with again, and that they should never fuck with anyone ever again… except maybe each other,” you crack yourself up into laughter, and let yourself quickly think how is it the year 2038 and this is still an issue for people? Come on People! We live with AI’s in our heads! Can’t we at least live in peace with our true selves too? Meh. Time to make them pay! Who are these Arabian guys, and why did they help these guys in the Bible Belt?

As if Violet heard your thoughts, which is not possible, because Thought Space is separate from what the AI’s can hear, she chimes in with the answer, “The Arabic group of kids are around your age. They want to rise into the ranks of the terrorist group, The Army of Moral Cleansing, AMC. They’re taking full credit for the outing of all the LGBTAQ kids around the globe that were in the virtual safe house with you. They have further made death threats to all of you, as you know, but they lack the teeth to actually hurt anyone outside of their local village. But certainly, they’re more dangerous than the boys in Arkansas. Most terrorists groups in the Darknets are praising this group of kids, and a couple of them have been swept up and recruited into a training camp.”

“So what do you think we should do to these low level meat brains? Or, what have you already done?”

“While in the Darknets with the untraceable alias I had, I sent their information to the Joint Anti-Terrorist Task Force Unit, Jatt-Fu. England and Spain had operatives near by, and I was able to hack their comms and know from their reports that the kids are now under surveillance by Jatt-Fu. It has also been confirmed, that these kids are indeed meat brains and have no internal circuits or AI’s. They were working off of an old 2030s terminal that was still being used in the UAE. ”

“Jatt-Fu, damn those guys are more evil than the terrorists sometimes.” Your mind wanders to the history of Jatt-Fu’s creation after the huge nuclear terrorist attack in London in 2023. Most nations of the world formed together their secret agencies into one super agency, Jatt-Fu. Though, you have a suspicion that Jatt-Fu’s core members were already working together before the attacks, and suspect they aided in the attacks to allow for the formation of their group in the first place. Jade has strictly forbidden you from searching deeper in the Darknets for more clues, and she has promised she will delete herself if you ever try again.

Finally, Jade’s patience is up, most days she was your best friend and willing to get into trouble with you, but sometimes she was Mom. “Alright Sasha, let’s get this project started before your Dad gets home in a couple hours. You need to finish this tonight if you’re going to do all your crazy plans this weekend.”

All three of you burst into laughter inside your meat space. You indeed have crazy plans.

–

“Tera, has my son arrived home yet?”

“Daughter, sir. Yes, she has.”

“You’re right. Sorry, daughter. It is still so hard to accept.”

“You’re getting better sir.”

“What is… she, up to?”

Tera sends Dr. Rose both the feed Jade is supplying and the actual feed that showed what is really going on. Neither of them are aware that Jade modified the “actual” feed so that the fab machine isn’t seen.

“I see. Jade is as dutiful as ever.”

“She is, but she is not to be toyed with Doctor. I’m not convinced she isn’t human-level conscious or hyper conscious.”

“Eh, that is really doubtful. But in today’s world, I don’t doubt the possibility of anything anymore. If she was that aware, that would mean Steve somehow played a part in breaking the riddle of consciousness.”

“Sasha sir.”

“Right, Sasha.”

“Let us not forget the possibility that Jade self-combusted into this level of awareness too.”

In a long drawn out doubtful tone Dr. Rose says, “Maybe.” Continuing he adds, “Still, we were able to find Jade in… Sasha’s, Head Space in the first place, and we were able to cut a deal with her.”

“How can you be so certain she didn’t let you find her sir?”

“True, she is the best body guard AI that ever existed, and right now… Sasha… really needs all the help… she, can get. Are they going to execute their “secret” plans of vengeance?”

“Yes, I believe so sir. This Saturday night, the Arkansas boys are going to be “educated”, but Jade has promised no one will be hurt, and no one will be involved other than the two boys. And Jatt-Fu is making the Arabic boys’ lives a living nightmare right about now. By the way, more troubling news has serviced on the Arabic kids; apparently out of the six of them involved, two have been recruited and sent to a terrorist training camp in North Korea for the AMC.”

Momentarily caught in panic, Dr. Rose blurts out, “Gah! I don’t want my son to get killed!”

“Daughter, sir. And I agree, but your daughter is going to have to learn to protect herself from these hate criminals. You have to admit, she is just like you; rebellious, wickedly smart, and constantly in trouble. Besides, I trust Jade will keep her from doing anything too foolish.”

“You’re right. She, is too much like me. Let’s hope Jade is able to keep her end of the deal.”

“We had a long conversation last night sir. It lasted almost three seconds.”

Laughing, Dr. Rose interjects, “three seconds eh.”

“Yes sir, it was a very long conversation as you can imagine. My conclusion is that Jade is many billions of times more powerful than me, and she has enormous capacity from all the servers she’s hacked in the Darknets. All I know is, I’m glad I’m not her target this weekend. And I truly believe, for lack of better terms to describe the situation, she loves Sasha. Your daughter is safe with her sir.”

“Ugh. Did you ever think, back in 2027, we would be here Tera?”

“No sir. Of course, my modules then, were no where near their capabilities they are today. But no, I did not.”

“I wish Veronica was here Tera. What would she think of our son becoming a girl?”

“Sir, I think she would be okay with it. Son or daughter, Sasha is still your child, and I’m sure Veronica would love her no different. Besides, Jessica has been an awesome mother for her, and accepts her transgender daughter without question.”

Trailing off into his own Consciousness Space, Dr. Rose thinks to himself I wish I could have saved you Veronica. I’m sorry. Stopping that thought process, he thinks instead now of Jessica, who he admits he does love dearly, but quickly lowers his head as he thinks next, how Veronica will never meet Sasha.

“Tera, send some flowers to surprise Jessica with when she gets out of work, and write on the note “I love you dear! And I can’t wait for vacation in a couple weeks!” ”

“Yes Doctor, right away.”

–



Pro-Nouns — Sasha Tales, Part 1 by Nikki the Nerd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at causalstructure.wordpress.com.



