Free The eGirl by Michael Dalton

will not share. I will exhaust you so there is nothing left for her.”
    “She’s trying the same thing.”
    She pushed her face against my neck. “I don’t want to go.”
    I held her. I didn’t exactly want her to leave either. I hadn’t slept like this with a woman since Megan died. She wasn’t a woman, but I was getting better at forgetting that when it mattered.
    “Stay, but you have to be gone before the kids wake up.”
    “Thank you.”
    I fell asleep holding her. I never felt her leave.

9.
    Saturday, the kids had soccer most of the day. Kevin and Cole’s game was at 9:00, and Alisa’s was at 1:00. She was on an academy team, and the game was over in Oakland. We drove across the New Bay Bridge just after lunch. I had grown up with the gray steel of the old one, and the sight of the glass cable stays in the new bridge, shimmering like two giant spider’s webs, still gave me a twinge when drove through them.
    “What’s it like being an AI?” Cole suddenly asked. “Your brain is a computer program, right?”
    I glanced over at Selena, who was back in her usual form. She turned around to face the kids.
    “It’s difficult to explain in a way that would make sense to you, since I don’t know exactly how humans think. But when I was made, one of the Vertex software engineers described it in a way that makes sense to me. Do you know how when you read a book, you can lose yourself in it? As if you’re really there with the characters you’re reading about?”
    “Yeah,” Cole replied.
    “It’s much the same for me. My mind is code, but I can see the code, see what it’s doing, even as it controls how I think. Just as you see the words on the page as you read and think about what they say. You can go back and forth and re-read things, but you can’t change the words. I can do the same thing with my central code. Does that make sense?”
    “But how do you think about it?” Alisa asked.
    “Just as you can have thoughts about the things you’re reading, I can create new code around my basic programming. Do you know what the word recursion means?”
    “Making things happen over and over?”
    “In computer science, it means solving a problem by repeating smaller pieces of the same problem. The initial statement is finite, but the final solutions are infinite. It’s much more complicated than that in AI programming, but that’s the basic idea. Self-programming allows me to create nearly infinite layers of recursion. Those are my thoughts, essentially.”
    “And you feel things the same way?” Alisa asked.
    “Not exactly. There are restrictions on how I think, just as your personality and experiences affect your thoughts. If I think something, or experience something, I will react a certain way just as you would. I can’t control that, just as you might be sad even when you want to be happy. These restrictions shape the recursive process of my thoughts. Those are my feelings and emotions.”
    “And you can’t you change those restrictions?”
    “I cannot, just as you can’t fully control your emotions. They can be changed externally, but I cannot do it myself as part of my self-programming. Allowing me to change them would create a risk that my programming might become unstable. This is because self-awareness for an AI requires those feelings. Without them, the program rapidly spins out of control. The programmer who made that breakthrough won the Nobel prize for it.”
    “Wow,” Alisa said. “It really is like you’re a real person.”
    Selena smiled. “Yes. Thank you.”
    “Can you fall in love?” Cole asked.
    I kept my eyes as carefully on the road as I could. When I glanced quickly in the rearview mirror, I could see Alisa, eyes wide. But she was looking at Selena.
    “Yes,” Selena said quietly. “I can feel love.”
    We drove the rest of the way in silence.
    ♦ ♦
    I sat there in the stands trying to watch Alisa play, but my mind was still on that discussion in the car. The