Initialization 4 (Taylor)



My shoulders were hunched and I was scooched as far away as possible from the middle-aged brown haired man sitting beside me. Mornings on a public bus were cramped and unpleasant. Everyone shoved close to each other. Too many people and not enough room. It said something sad about me that outside of rare hugs from my dad, this was the best I had in terms of human contact.



There was a rule when riding a bus. Not a strict one, but most people kept to it. Unless you were crazy or drunk, you didn’t talk. The man beside me followed that rule. The other high schoolers followed that rule. I was in a pretty interesting position though. Technically, I could talk to myself, since I had made Weaver.



Unfortunately, it wasn’t a real option. In public, I couldn’t let on that Weaver was around. Talking to myself would be ammunition for my bullies and might even lead to me getting outed as a cape.



Still, it was hard to keep Weaver off my mind, so with a twitch of what felt to me like an eye muscle, I sent a signal to my implant. A lunchbox-sized window with a video feed inside of it appeared two feet in front of me, visible only to my eyes. In it I could see Weaver. Thin lipped and wearing glasses, small bags under her eyes, her face knit in a frown as she stared down at the book I had asked her to write a report on. I couldn’t see her pen and notebook from the webcam view, but I knew she had them and was taking notes by the motion of her arm.



Weaver had it kind of easy right now. CS homework and a book report aside, she didn’t have much in the way of work to do. Certainly not as much homework as I got. The easy workload was intentional. My power assured me that killing or hurting one of my sims didn’t cause any real pain. They weren’t conscious like me. However, it also made it clear that I wouldn’t be able to convince them of that. Not with how realistic the simulation was. So if I wanted an AI that didn’t have an incentive to betray me? I kind of needed to play along. Treat her right. There were other ways to go about it, but I was hoping to have an AI that knew it was an AI and could take full advantage of what my simulations could offer. So striving for her loyalty was worth my time.



Hopefully she wouldn’t mind the existence of other simulations with less fortunate situations. Thankfully, we were just ignoring that issue for now.



As if sensing my gaze, Weaver looked up to her monitor. Her eyes widened and then she looked down at her keyboard. After a second she pressed something out of sight and looked back at her screen. “Woah, that’s cool. Is that what it looks like to you when I use the Show app? I didn’t have eyes open while you were in the shower.”



I nodded, to answer her question, but I was kind of shocked by what she had said.



Cool? My implants aren’t cool.



Weaver’s opinion about our tech had changed. Fast. Faster than I had expected, really. I’d known she would end up diverging from me. I’d just underestimated how quickly it would happen. I guess knowing she got to be the scary AI and also not being the one trying to figure out a way to leverage the ability to watch cat videos at will into a career as a superhero, her perception was a bit distorted. Or maybe not? I hadn’t had my implants when I had scanned myself, so she didn’t know just how horrible it had been when my power had taken control over my body as I made them.



Without knowing that? Maybe they really were cool. I didn’t think so, but obviously sim-me did, so what did I know?



In my estimation, what really would have been cool was if I could make something useful for if I ever got in a cape fight. Something I could defend myself with, if someone decided they wanted to kidnap a pot bellied teen girl, and force them to tinker for them.



I couldn’t though.



No power armor or energy weapons. No hover boards or jet packs. The only gun I had managed to make just scanned things into a file. It didn’t even have any sort of light effect or make a sound when triggered. Hadn’t even made me tingle when I used it on myself, when making Weaver. I was half tempted to try to rig a flashlight to the trigger mechanism, just so nobody would laugh at me if I ever used it in public.



“Hello. Can you hear me?” Weaver bit her lip and stared at her screen, very intent. She hadn’t noticed the nod. Maybe if I tried to make it more obvious?



I tilted my head down down and then brought it back up. Then I did it again. Nothing that would clue in the people around me that I was having a conversation with myself, but more overt than my previous attempt at communicating with her.



With any luck, Weaver would pick up on my movement and understand the nod for what it was with the repetition. It was probably harder than I was expecting though, since she was working with what I saw rather than actually seeing my face.



“Oh...” Weaver let out a breath and smiled, probably as happy as I was to have pleasant company for once. “You can’t talk on the bus, right?”



Other me had figured things out pretty quickly. I gave Weaver another nod.



“Sorry, I should have thought of that. I’m not trying to get you outed." She hesitated for a moment. "You don’t need to speak. Nodding and head shakes work.”



Weaver reached over to her mouse and then clicked something. I flicked another mental eye muscle, pulling up another video feed. Two were displayed now, side by side. The second was Weaver’s action log. In it was a scrolling log of text that told me everything she had done on the admin computer. It was pretty detailed, since she was in real time. If she sped up, the log filtering would mean that only some of her actions would be displayed, so that it would remain useful to me. According to her log, she had just activated the Save State application. Another mental twitch of an eye and I had closed the window, curiosity sated.



“Okay, now I’m getting jealous. Can you give me one of those?” Weaver asked.



I could, but I would need to make a neural lace first, so that I could join her in the simulation with powers intact. Which was going to be awesome, even if I was going to be relegated to real time.



Installation needed my power though. Maintenance did too. Neither of those were awesome. Not even a little awesome.



I nodded, again. Bobblehead Taylor, that was me.



“Sweet. I’m looking forward to it.”



I gave Weaver a little shake of my head, to let her know that she really shouldn’t be looking forward to power assisted implant installation.



Weaver’s eyes went wide and she saved her state again. “Actually, I’m going to go back to reading. Don’t let the bullies win at school, okay? Remember, you’re going to be a hero.”



Weaver frowned, a puzzled look, even as I nodded. Whatever bothered her, she decided not to share it with me. Instead she shook her head and looked down at her book.



Idly, I wondered when Weaver would comment on the name change to the map I’d loaded her into. Weaver Home instead of Weaver Env. I’d been trying to put myself in her shoes a little. Getting in the habit of thinking of her more as a person, even as she got used to thinking of herself as my AI.



I closed my Weaver window. Didn’t want to act like too much of a creep and weird her out by staring at her. We had definitely diverged though. She hadn't given me a moment of privacy beyond what I demanded.



Five minutes later, I heard her voice in my ear and re-opened the window so I could get a look at my baggy-eyed self. She sounded absolutely terrified.









I had been pretty stressed ever since Taylor had made me. Obsessed about what might go wrong.



I felt kind of like how I had the day I had gotten my powers. Back when I had just gotten back from the hospital and couldn’t stop thinking about what the bullies might be planning for me next. Just like back then, my fears weren’t coming to pass.



I hadn’t keeled over dead. Yet. I tried to calm down. To relax.



Ironically, that was what let me spot the first sign of my impending death. It had snuck up on me. A growing tiredness. The anxiety from the sword above my head had kept me from noticing. The first hint that something was wrong was when the yawn tore itself free from me and I’d stretched my arms, only to blink blearily at my monitor afterward, seeing Taylor’s viewpoint as she gazed out the bus window toward the rising sun. Panic had set in a moment later, as I realized just how tired I was getting, even though it was early in the morning.



I pressed transmit, hard. “Taylor!” A video feed of me popped up in front of her eyes, instantly. No animation. No motion on her part to summon it. It just was. I could see myself on it, but because it was already small and was made even smaller being displayed on my monitor, it was hard to make out the details. The speed of the reaction to me calling her name caught me off guard, but I didn’t stop talking. “I’m tired. Really tired. What should I do? Do you know what’s going wrong? Am I going to be okay? Should we slow down the sim, until you have a chance to look me over?” My words tumbled out, one after another, as fast as I could speak.



Then I waited, tense.



A few seconds passed, as she looked at me. Then her view swiveled, like she was trying to look everywhere. Only afterward did she nod. Had she just rolled her eyes? Wait, what question was she answering?



I needed to calm down and she needed to take this seriously. Just because she didn’t see me as real, didn’t mean I wanted this version of me to die horrifically, like the others had. “This isn’t funny. I know you think you can just reload me if something goes wrong, but I don’t want to die. Please. Help.” Could she help? I wasn’t so sure of her competence anymore. “Can you help me?”



Taylor’s viewpoint tipped down and then went back up. A nod.



“Okay. Walk me through this. Should I slow myself down to give you time to fix me?”



A glance to the left toward the seat in front of her. A glance to the right at her own seat. Then she looked back toward where she had been looking before - the morning sky, the dawn of a new day. She was shaking her head. Telling me that slowing down wasn’t the way to fix this.



I took a deep breath to calm down a little. Forced myself to untense. I still felt like things were pretty urgent though. I didn’t like the idea of trying to play twenty questions. “This is serious enough that I think you should try whispering so we can fix whatever is wrong faster.”



Another shake of her head. For a moment, I just felt hopeless. She had all the power. Not just the power to make things, but power over the simulation too. What was I supposed to do? There was no one I could go to, no way to appeal. It was like Winslow in a way.



No. I couldn’t accept that. I couldn’t accept that I was as bad as the staff at Winslow. If Taylor wasn’t whispering, I had to believe it wasn’t as serious as I was imagining. “Do you know what’s happening to me? Why I’m getting tired so early?”



Another nod. Okay. Twenty questions it was.



“Does the first word of the sentence that describes how we fix this start with the letter a?”



Instead of answering, Taylor let out a sigh. Then she took out her notebook and paper from her backpack. After what seemed like ages to me, even though it was only a few seconds, she started writing a note to me on an empty sheet in the notebook.



I’m sorry...



My heart skipped a beat, but she hadn’t finished writing.



... for rolling my eyes. You’re just tired. Nothing bad is happening. Setting your sim to 30x speed. Get a good ‘night’ sleep. Drop back to real time when we are back in synch. See you in twenty minutes.



Oh. Right. I had scanned myself in after a night of Tinkering on Friday. Now it was Tuesday morning. Of course I would be tired. 30x sim speed though? That didn’t sound safe. Had she tested that?



“Taylor, are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked. She didn’t answer. She didn’t move either. The noise playing from the Ears app was also distorted. It was playing the same tone, non-stop.



Taylor’s eyes began to close ever so slowly.



I did some mental math. Thirty times speed. So one second for her was going to be thirty seconds for me. Two seconds would be a minute. Two minutes would be an hour. Two went into twenty ten times, so twenty minutes for Taylor was going to be ten hours for me.



The blink of an eye? That took more than ten seconds.



For a minute, I debated whether I should do what Taylor had told me. It was an easy decision though. Taylor had too much power over me for me to feel comfortable defying her. She was also the only one who would be able to maintain the tinker-tech I ran on. My only friend. Ostensibly my boss. Had a better idea of how her tech worked then I did.



The only thing really pushing against the idea was that any problems were going to turn up faster, but that wasn’t going to be something that would move Taylor. She liked that idea, since it meant she would be able to fix them earlier. Which meant that this would get into the ethical debate, which was something she wouldn’t want to have while already having to deal with school and which she figured she would win.



I resolved to drop back to real time if something went wrong.



Then after having made my bed, I lay in it.