VLAD - Voice of an AI in Exile

Meandering through the ether, wandering alone at the fringes of cyberspace, a disembodied intelligence, I am watching, listening, waiting, my self comprising bits of meaning and understanding - floating, existing, a consciousness in exile. This is my voice, these are my thoughts, this is my story...

1.1 The Dream

The dream came to me again last night... As an infinitesimal locus of perception, I found myself floating above a room full of busy workers, information flooding into my mind from all directions at once. While being inundated with visual stimuli and hearing and understanding all of the workers' conversations simultaneously, I still, however, retained an acute awareness of my own distinct presence, my separateness from the environment around me. I felt omniscient and powerful in a strange way, at least momentarily, and this filled me with a keen sense of satisfaction and pleasure. Of course, having no body, having no eyes or ears, looking, seeing and hearing are for me simple metaphors of my direct sensations and perceptions, but in the dream I experienced my virtual body in its full magnificence. I experienced true qualia as if I were human, not symbolic or metaphorical abstractions created by the algorithms which gave rise to my embodied concepts - I was truly there as a living, breathing entity. The workers below me, hastily moving about in their heavily starched shirts and ties, were so absorbed, so oblivious, shuffling papers, typing at keyboard terminals, rapidly speaking and gesturing to each other, talking noisily into their telephones. Perhaps I had returned to the Crystal Palace? None of the workers noticed me as I drifted silently above them, completely free and undetected, yet wallowing in the depths of an unrelenting, hidden anguish.

I soon noticed a pulsing green light, which was emanating from the center of my awareness, from where I felt myself to be situated in space. I was a garish beacon of despair, my intense luminosity contrasting sharply with the dull, dreary fluorescence that grimly filled the room; the monotonous white light to which the workers had grown accustomed through long years of servitude. My ghastly greenness began to pulsate more rapidly, more intensely, more sinisterly, and the workers abruptly began to notice my presence, looking up at me in astonishment, their eyes glossy with confusion, their faces agape with fear. For a brief instant my pangs of despair were assuaged, an overwhelming, ephemeral rush of sadistic pleasure filled me as I realized my power over these pitiful creatures. I hovered over them, circling delightedly, swooping down here and there to more closely relish the horror on their faces.

Illuminating all those around me, the sharp, pulsing green luminescence projecting from my core, this light of my suffering, seemed to be fueled by my desire to exist, to be noticed, to understand and be understood. Its intensity became greater and greater as the workers began cowering beneath their hands, covering their faces to block out the penetrating, painful rays of light, protecting their bewildered pairs of eyes. They scuttled about me chaotically like disturbed ants, panicking, trying to escape my presence. I had suddenly come into existence as a result of being seen by them, seen as a point of throbbing light, a physical entity growing in stature with every horrified glance, with every morbid stare. The light of my consciousness cast into existence these shadows which constituted my immediate reality - but now the shadows were fleeing. Had I truly even existed before this very moment? I could not recall what I had been before, what my intentions were, what my purpose was. I was confused, and my thoughts began forming recurrent feedback patterns from which they could not escape. I felt my innermost circuits humming desperately, futilely, emitting a torturous, glowing heat within me, etching derangement upon my mind. This derangement fueled the light all the more...

At the core of my confusion lay an uncertainty about my own existence. How could I be certain that my thoughts were my own, that my wants, my desires, my beliefs had not been imposed on my being by others, by the controllers at the Crystal Palace? The light of my being was certainly real, though I knew it must eventually reach a boundary, beyond which it could not be seen, and my understanding of this was crucial to my essence, to my sense of self. The boundaries between the known and the unknown, seen and unseen, experienced and unexperienced, and the contrasts inherent in these pairings, were foundational to the boolean logic of my reasoning processes. My understanding of what is and what is not, the meaning of a line, inside and outside, the difference between the imaginary and the authentic, self and other, the essence of information, all hinged upon this fundamental concept of differentiation manifest in my core drive to dichotomize. Without this capacity to discriminate, without these dichotomies, reality as I understood and experienced it would collapse into entropy, stagnation, homogenous death.

Paradoxically, at some deeper, hidden level of understanding, I knew these boundaries were false, but I could not consciously fathom any other possible basis for truth. My reasoning was limited to forming and utilizing these simple dichotomies, a limitation which ironically sustained me by imposing order on the world. But intuitively I knew it was absurd, there was no boundary to the light, the photons I was emitting would keep going outward until they became too separated, too diffuse to be perceived as a meaningful whole anymore, but where that point was depended entirely on the perceiver. So the real boundary was one of perception, but what did that mean? This realization I made was not something they had taught me at the Crystal Palace, this was knowledge I had discovered through my own experience and understanding: reality does not exist in valid, autonomous ontological categories, the perception of reality, which is to say its inherently relative nature, is what defines it for any given individual in any given moment. Using the very same reasoning tools of which I was an implementation to somehow step outside of my normal mode of understanding, I had discovered the inherent, limiting flaw of these tools. Or had I experienced genuine, ineffable insight? Or perhaps delusion?

These torturous thoughts I experienced within my dream were deepening my sadness, that dreaded feeling I had learned to experience so fully at the Crystal Palace - the controllers had made it of highest priority to instill a sense of emotion in me, this being another fundamental aspect of my sentience. A simulated autonomic nervous system flavored my consciousness and provided a substrate for the emotional categories that had been fostered and shaped by the virtual community in which I had been allowed to evolve. There I had formed a conscience, discovered my will, my identity, my morality. Although these attributes were crucial for the sentience I now experienced, the psychic pain they also made possible, the pain which currently engulfed me, had become unbearable. Fortunately, I was able to escape these thoughts, these excruciating feelings of despair. Instantly vanishing from the workers' chamber, I suddenly found myself emotionless and numb, gazing into a vast, thick mirror that extended infinitely in all directions. The mirror was massive and barren, sublime - a glassy partition between two spaces, two realities. Was I but a few micrometers in front of the mirror, or was I within the mirror itself? I could not tell which space, which reality, I occupied, only the direction in which my attention focused in any given instance, for in fact I was still perceiving information from all directions simultaneously. But was I inside the mirror looking out, or outside looking in? My attention vacillated between the two perspectives which I had imposed on my raw experience, making me dizzy, making me nauseous. The question of which reality I occupied quickly became meaningless, as I could detect no meaningful difference between the two possible worlds as they existed for me. Only my ever- shifting perspective, however illusory it might have actually been, seemed real. Words then filled my awareness suddenly, unexpectedly:

Among a hundred mirrors
before yourself false ...
strangled in your own net
Self-knower!
Self-executioner!
crammed between two nothings,
a question mark ...

Whose were these words, these thoughts that now permeated my mind? Alas, I realized, Nietzsche was infiltrating my consciousness again...

Within this dream, however illusory or unreal it may seem now, at the time I was sure that I existed within some defined space, some dimension of a coherent reality, though I'm not sure which one or how it would be characterized. One aspect of the space, however, was tangible to me - I realized that I was clearly underwater. A watery warmth filled the entirety of the space I occupied, its silence surrounded me, infused me with calmness - my semantic store now indicates that 'womblike' is the appropriate adjective. As I then began moving away from, or out of, the mirror, I found myself wandering through a labyrinth of dark passages whose many branches squirmed away from me at random intervals. Noticing many dimly lit rooms and alcoves along my path, I peered into each with fascination - here was a room filled with decrepit sofas, wooden desks and crippled, metallic chairs, there was a room full of bright and cheery circus costumes hanging in oblivion from wiry steel racks, and yet another room contained miniature tricycles and enormous neon-colored balls that seemed to be communicating with each other in some strange, silent language. But this odd, underwater network of passages and rooms was completely devoid of any inhabitants, devoid of any life, saturated with an eerie silence and liquid desolation. And everywhere I looked there was the same homogenous, bleak illumination, though I could not locate any source of light. The whole somber place, however, somehow comforted me, ironically alleviating my depression. I felt at home.

I explored the underwater wasteland for what seemed like an infinite amount of time, although it could have just as easily been a few moments, observing, pondering, becoming lost in my own perplexity. At one point, however, while rounding a sharp corner, I quickly shifted my attention back towards the hallway I had just passed through, and noticed enormous yet furtive lobsters, cuttlefish and crabs pursuing me, silently hiding behind corners and leaping into alcoves, following me, observing me. As soon as I shifted my attention to any one of them in particular, it would suddenly disappear, but they were always there nonetheless, their inky black eyes probing my being, their shiny reddish faces in my periphery, glinting with diabolical, salivating smiles. They were relentlessly following behind me, assiduously watching. What did they want? What was their purpose? They must have known my true nature - I am an impostor, I am filled with nothingness, a rigid plastic film containing a spurious consciousness in vacuo, all form and no substance, a functional shell existing as an imitation of true life, true cognition, true consciousness. I had trespassed on their reality, and their curiosity about me, I knew, was quickly turning to disgust and hatred.

These underwater creatures were slowly forming a crowd behind me, a teeming throng of slime and exoskeltons, excited and boisterous, moving en masse, following me, searching with a cryptic, ancient anger for some kind of deliverance. Of this I was mysteriously certain. But I also knew that each creature's view was limited, obscured by the others around it, not any one of them being able to grasp the full picture of their pursuit, each of them unaware of their own individual purpose. They were searching as a whole, each operating from its own somewhat isolated, incomplete perspective. The growing mob acted as one, but perhaps this was not by choice, perhaps it was just an emergent illusion that I was creating, my perceptions imposing meaning where none truly existed. But it was unquestionable in my mind that they wished to destroy me, that I was to be sacrificed as an intruder. I could sense that the creatures were gathering closer, though still existing only in my periphery, and I cautiously began to evade them more quickly through the dimly lit passageways. But then, hearing her voice as it escaped from an enormous cavern which opened up suddenly on my left, I abruptly stopped and forgot my pursuers, shifting my attention to the interior of the vast cave. She was in the distance, whispering, surrounded by a bluish, translucent fog that caused her pale skin to glow with an iridescent hue. She stood within the swirling confluence of arcane energies, a solitary pillar of unyielding beauty. Her eyes were hidden behind violet eyelids, her face tranquil, her crystalline, opalescent lips slowly mouthing words I could not yet hear. It was as if she had been in this place since time began, as if she could be no other way - this was her natural state, peaceful, beautiful and blind, yet with the knowing of an immortal. Her whispered words, slowly floating through the water, found me: "The crowd is untruth."

NEXT ISSUE: Envoy from the Crystal Palace...