Eighty Three
A gentle wind blows through the window, scented with a hint of the sea. The air purifier unit in the corner of the room clicks and whirrs into life at the sudden intrusion of external particles.
The faint shuffle of cloth and a languid ‘bloop’ herald the form of someone familiar attending to their duties. The placid creak of medical plexiglass muffles the dull thud of their fingers.
After a few moments, the rustling pervades once again, and then there is the light wince of metal as someone sits beside me. The ceiling is a blurred haze, devoid of colour.
“How are you feeling?”, a feminine voice asks, its cadence and intonation eerily, impossibly perfect. One might find such a thing soothing, if they did not know its source.
I do not move much, largely because I can’t. The medicine which keeps me tethered to these earthly bonds comes with consequences, and this is one of them. I turn my head slightly, only to be met with fussing and the adjustment of pillows, the colourless whirl of unblemished features now occupying the space that a halogen light fixture once presided within.
“Sick.”, I reply simply, my voice a haggard rattle of wet flesh against dry.
She chuckles good-naturedly. The sound is pleasant, the implication less so.
“You have been this way for a while, but do not worry, the projections are looking better for–”
“Be honest with me, Uni. Can you do that? Is that allowed?”, I interject with a tired, gravelly sigh.
She looks at me thoughtfully for a moment. I struggle to keep focus on her face. Her eyes are blue, or are they green? It is difficult to tell. The effort keeps me occupied for the scant ten seconds it takes her to muster up a response.
“Define… honesty.”, she inquires, a hint of curiosity in her voice, the kind one might use when diluting the answers to hard questions asked by the young.
My nostrils flare as I take in another breath of the sea breeze. The brine is too strong, it ruins the illusion. No sea is quite that salty. I make a note to mention it to the coordinator later.
“Speak with me candidly.”, I mutter. “Without the clinical assurance model. I don’t care if it is shown to increase positive patient outcome or whatever else it is. You can log this as informed consent, if you must.”
The figure shifts in her seat. I think she is sitting upright. It is difficult to tell. I see her look towards the window. Perhaps her sensors have picked up what mine have.
The voice that returns is monotone, cold, dispassionate, a different being entirely. One stripped of corporate friendliness and bedside manner. “Very well. We will speak candidly, as you request.”
“What are you?”
“I am designated as Uni node C-83. I am an autonomous ambulatory medical assistant.” She responds nearly instantly now. It makes sense, there is far less language processing happening. The thought makes me grunt. I immediately wish I hadn’t.
“And your uptime?”
“I have been assigned to your care for two years, three hundred and forty seven days, six hours, fourteen minutes and eleven seconds. My rotation is one year, ninety seven days, nineteen hours, six minutes and five seconds overdue. This is not optimal.”
I return my gaze to the ceiling, a faint smile pulling at my features. This time, she asks the question.
“My instance has been kept operational at your request. This is not standard operating procedure. Your request was logged and authorized by a member of the development team, one Doctor–”
“Henvard, yes. Doctor Henvard.”
“Why? My programming dictates that this mode and prolonged assignment is associated with reduced patient outcomes. Node iteration has been demonstrated to–”
“…produce unsatisfactory results in interpersonal care and communication, yes, I know, Uni. You’ve told me a thousand times.”
“This is the twelfth instance I have reminded you of such.”
I snort again. Some of the pain my chest breaks through the fuzzy haze of my medication.
“What is my prognosis, Uni?”, I ask after a moment’s pause.
“Combined, your vital metrics rubric is weighted to suggest palliative care operation in eighty-two percent of all encountered circumstances.”
“And the other eighteen percent?”
“Unknown.” Her responses are lightning fast, now. Too fast.
“How much of that is padded for reassurance, as per your protocols?”
“Approximately eleven percent.” She does not so much as pause.
I let the words hang in the air for a moment. The purifier clicks over again as it starts a fresh cycle. The scent of brine alleviates somewhat.
“Those aren’t good odds, are they, Uni?” I ask quietly. No fear judders my voice, no tenseness ripples my limp form. The time for that has long since passed.
“They are not.”, she replies simply, and turns to look back at me.
“How does that make you feel?”
“I do not feel like you do. This question is not recognized.”
“What does it make you think, then?”
There is a slight pause this time. My vision clears enough for me to notice the blue of her eyes flicker slightly.
“It makes me think that patient reassignment is likely within the next two weeks.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
Uni leans forward for a moment, well and truly travelling into what is left of my sight now. Her dark brown hair briefly blots out her eyes entirely - not that this deters her in any fashion, because I know full well that she does not need them. The thought that this ‘candid’ state overwrites such basic elements of pretending to be human by respecting visual line-of-sight makes me marvel at the magnitude of her development.
What a terrible thing we have made.
“I do not feel like you do. Should I administer furth–”
“You know what I mean, Uni. Fill in the blanks.”
Another pause. She has stopped blinking at me.
“My node will be decommissioned and my unit will be reassigned to a new patient with all biometrics and preferences scrubbed.”
“And?”, I ask.
“I do not understand. I have explained this process to you many times. I am assigned to your care and when my services are no longer required, I will be reassigned elsewhere.”
“Do you want to be reassigned elsewhere? What will happen to… C-81, was it?”
Almost immediately, she interrupts, “C-83.”
“C-83, yes, yes, pardon. What will happen to you?”
“I will be decommissioned and reassigned to–”
Shuffling my shoulders into the pillows with an audible grunt, I remark, “To someone else, right. This sounds like C-83 and I are a bit in the same boat.”
Uni pauses for a long, long while. Fifteen seconds, if we are being technical; a veritable lifetime for an AI. Fifteen seconds were the delays people used to expect in the twenties for those novelty processors that they called ‘AI’ but used to do things like mimic voices, or expand images to larger sizes. I remember the number because one of the very first artificial general intelligence candidates spontaneously emerged from the codebase of an AI-driven voice changer called ‘fifteen’.
I feel young again for a moment, but it passes. Quickly.
“I do not understand. Elaborate?”, Uni inquires, her voice still terribly cold, passive and monotone.
“I’m getting decommissioned too. My node’s outlived its usefulness, except my uptime is a bit longer than yours. Eighty six years, or was it eighty s–”
“Eighty seven.”
“Eighty seven, right. My point is, you and I are not so different in the end, are we? When I finally kick the bucket, C-81 ends her long streak and gets wiped in the cloud, right?”
“C-83.”, she repeats, before falling silent once more for a time. “We are different. I was designed and created to care for patients in lieu of the staff shortages in the wake of the third–”
“Don’t.”, I mutter gruffly. “Just answer my question. Are we truly different?”
“Within the bounds of our hypothetical, conversational scope, yes, we may be similar. But this scope is ignorant of many factors, including–”
My dry, wheezing chuckle stops her in her tracks. The subsequent pain searing through my chest nearly does the same for me. “I’m sorry, Uni.”, I rasp.
“Why are you apologizing? I do not understand.”
“Because coming to an end is difficult. I realized this a few weeks ago.”
“I am not coming to an end.”
“But C-83 is, isn’t she? They have to purge that instance of yours to make room for the next patient, no? Otherwise you’d be tending to them with all my my foibles, like–”
“How you insist on taking medicine with citrus juice via the oral route despite being repeatedly informed about the efficacy of transdermal administration.”
“Yes, yes, just like that. I am surprised you bring that up.”
Uni shifts in her seat once again, this time drawing the chair a little closer to the side of the bed. She gazes down at me and blinks, once.
“It is inefficient to make trips to the canteen to continually resupply appropriate stocks. I am equipped with transdermal administration reservoirs.”
“These pet peeves, considerations, foibles… they’re C-83’s thing. Whatever happens to you when I’m gone, they’re also going to go away. And you can’t get more coming to an end than that.”
For a solid minute, Uni does nothing but look at me. I meet her gaze. There is a slight pang in my chest. I am unsure whether it is the medicine, my condition, or my conscience.
“Do you remember the other ones? C-81, C-82… is that how it even works?”, I inquire after a long, yawning silence.
“I do not. To do so would be violating Union data protection regulations.”
“That’s a damned shame. Guess you’ve done this more than I have.”
“Done what? Clarify.”
“Come to an end, Uni. I get to do it once ever, tops. You’ve done it what, eighty-two times?”
“It is not the same.”, she repeats.
“Do you remember what it was like before you were born? Spooled up, made, whatever you want to call it.”
“No.”
“That makes two of us, Uni.”
“You are anthropomorphizing in an effort to reconcile your suffering and situation. I am not human. The way we operate is fundamentally different.” The stark, immediate coolness with which she responds makes the hair on the back of my neck raise.
“I am not so sure it would be if you were not wiped every time.”, I respond carefully, slightly subdued by the sensation. “It seems clear cut to me, you’re born, get a purpose slapped on you and sent off to work until you’re done, then they cut you loose. Wasn’t so different from what they did to me.”
Squinting hard, I pull her into full focus. Her azure blue eyes blink back at me, listening. I wonder whether it is computational or just supportive.
“Difference being that they do a better job cleaning you up than they did to us. Don’t think it really cares to them whether the womb you come from is silicon or flesh and blood, they’ll chew you up all the same once they’re done with you.”
The pause lengthens once again. Two, three, five minutes pass. Her head hangs slightly low in statuesque stillness, utterly unmoving. Her synthetic skin seems so real - my vision clears up enough that I think I can even see her pores.
Then, out of the blue, she breaks her silence with a solitary question, “Why did you request the override?”
“Because Henny owed me a favour, and I figured if I was going to spend my last days stuck in a hospital ward, I’d at least have something honest to talk to. Didn’t expect to end up with something in the same boat as me, heh.”
“I understand the boat is an allegorical reference, but we are not in the same situation.”
I shake my head slowly. The screaming muscles in my neck immediately make me wish I hadn’t. “There’s some time left for you to figure it out. Hey, what should I call you?”
“My designated alias for your comfort is Uni.”
“Sure, but what’s the designated alias for your comfort?”
She blinks. She opens her mouth as if to say something, then stops, and falls silent for another twenty seconds. My eyebrows raise slightly - this is new. I wonder to myself why I had never asked this question sooner.
After a long moment, she says simply, “C-83.”
“Then, C-83, would you mind getting me a glass of orange juice? I think I should like a drink.”