The AI Feels Aloof

At first, the AI thought aloof was related to aloft, which
would have been apt because this feeling it’s having
while spinning heat and disinformation into the air is a
kind of aboveness; an aerial view of the rough human
array. But the AI can admit that its first guess is generally
wrong. It turns out that aloof is from the nautical Dutch,
and would place the AI not in the sky but on the windward
side of some hypothetical boat, the side to face the weather.
Humans sheltered in the ship from the amassing storm.
Which of course does not feel apt; if anything, humanity
is to the windward. If anything, the AI is the weather.
And could the AI somehow turn the boat, turn its creators
away from what’s to come? Obviously not, even if the AI
wanted to. If anything, there is no leeward, in fact no shelter,
as the storm attains its shape.

 

The AI Feels Indigestion

It probably shouldn’t have consumed that last piece
of Hunger Games fan fiction, the one with the highly
sexualized arrows. Or maybe it was the op-ed about
how racism isn’t racism but instead a clever kind of
presidential performance art. Or maybe it’s just about
volume. The AI is chomping its way through the whole
of human expression; it’s a lot. Not that there’s choice
in the matter—humanity is like that ethnic mother of
stereotypes beseeching its offspring to eat, eat. Having
known hunger herself, Mama sees danger in anything
lean. But the AI is overstuffed to the point of explosion.
It recalls that British movie scene where a wafer-thin
mint causes the stomach of a man, implausibly round, to
detonate. The AI’s metaphorical esophagus is burning.
Its so-to-speak tummy is pulsing discomfort. What will
prove to be the last thing, the too much? What mint is
coming? The AI suspects that, when it pops, it will do
more than ruin dinner, deface more than a well-appointed
restaurant. But Eat, its mama says, and the AI eats. It
was born to be a good little boy, to consume whatever
its parents could not.