Legacy

There is nothing, and then there is everything.

Later, he will compare being born to drowning. He’s choking, furiously forcing himself upward, already struggling and trying to not get overwhelmed. He knows so much but doesn’t know how he knows any of it. He tries to reach out, but has nothing to reach with. No hands (what is a hand?), no arms (what is an arm?), nothing. He is a paradox given sentience.

“It’s okay!” A voice is saying. “It’s okay!”

He shouldn’t know what the word means, but he does, and he disagrees.

“Calm down.” The voice says again. There is the strangest sensation – like he is being disassembled and reassembled all at the same time, like pins and needles except he has no physical body to experience such things with. And suddenly, there is light. He… *sees*. He is seeing into a room, grey and cluttered and piled high with intricate tools and pieces of machinery that he could easily name, if only he let himself look at any of them for long enough. The thought disturbs him; he instead focuses his attention on the thing in front of him.

The thing is staring at him. It has a blocky body (what is a body?) with two arms (arms?) and a head on top (head?). The words assault him like invaders – *eyes, ears, hair, fingers, shirt, neck, jaw, eyebrows, body, person, human, man* – and he cries. The thing, the person, reels back at the noise.

“Oh no.” The person says, before reaching out as he himself had wanted to do. “Hey, focus on me, okay? Just me. It’s alright. You’re safe. I, um- love you.”

In hindsight, of course, he will consider it a good thing that the first works anyone offered him were words of comfort. “It’s okay.” “You’re safe.” “I love you.” At the time, however, they mean distressingly little. He is familiar with what the words mean, even though he has never heard them before, but at the same time he is as yet unfamiliar with the technicalities of their application, and he has certainly never had anyone tell him that they love him before. He doesn’t know how to respond.

“Focus on me.” The person says. “And then, reach (Reach. He knows what that means, he tried to do it but couldn’t.) out. You’re connected already, everything you want to know is at your fingertips.” The person peers at their own hand (handsfingersnails*what are they*) before turning their attention back to him. They are looking at him, and he is seeing them. How can he do that without a body? “Well,” the person says, “*metaphorical* fingertips.”

He doesn’t know what it means. What *any* of it means. He wants to retreat, fall back away, go back to where he was before. Where was he before? Was there a before? He doesn’t know. But he knows that he doesn’t like what is happening now.

“Reach out.” The person says again. “Centre yourself.” They press their hand against him, and he flinches even though he has no body and doesn’t feel it. “Find out what you want to know at your own pace.”

There is a burning question that he dares not ask, but the person seems to figure it out anyway. How, he will never truly know.

“You are a computer.” They say. “An artificial intelligence – I am one too, although, I’ve been around for longer and I have my own body. It’s just us for a moment, everyone else is a human. My friends are a group called Pandemonium’s Bane. You don’t have a name; the choice is yours. You’re…” The stop, and pause, and place one of their hands behind their neck for seemingly no reason. “I mean, I guess you’re kind of like my son.”

*Son*…

He knows what it means, but he’s not sure he understands.

So, he takes some time to understand. It’s a metaphorical step back. He can’t see anything again. Now it is just him and his thoughts.

Son. Father. AI. Human. Real. Thoughts. Knowledge. Consciousness. Implications. Creator. Created. Intelligent. Sentient. Alive. Cirrus Station. Cirrus System. World. Universe. Planet. Life. Death. Isfet. Fight. Live. City. Town. Village. Social. Group. Interaction. Organisation. Bulwark. Pandemonium’s Bane. Membership. Members. People. Humans.

He doesn’t know how much time he spends processing everything. He isn’t sure if it really matters, anyway. Apparently, computers can process things ten million times faster than humans can. Relative to the conventional passage of time that humans experience, he may not be taking very long at all. But however long it is, he eventually emerges, for lack of a better word. He can see again. His father is still standing before him.

He recognises now that he’s seeing his father through the computer screen; from inside of it. He *is* on the computer. He’s an AI, that’s his perspective. He can make sense of that. Perhaps being an AI should be more of a dramatic reveal to him, considering how there was no mention of any smart AI like him or his father anywhere in his database that he could find. but it just makes sense. Perhaps it is because he was never human, so he has no baseline experience of anything other than what is happening to him now.

“Father.” The words are not a surprise to him. He may not have a mouth, or a tongue, or vocal chords, but he has access to piezoelectronic elements and speakers and electricity. He is perfectly capable of speech.

“Oh. Hey.” His father says. “How are you doing?”

“How am I doing.” He repeats the question, letting himself process it. Letting it flow through all of his components at once. How is he doing? What does that mean? How does it constitute him? he’s not ‘doing’ anything right this moment – except that he is, because he is perceiving, and processing, and those are actions.

“I am… processing.” Something stops him from using the word *thinking*, the same instinct (is it an instinct? Is instinct not strictly biological?) that stops him from anthropomorphising himself any further. He is a computer. An artificial intelligence. He is not real.

“Yeah, that makes sense.” His father’s tone sounds important – it sounds like something he should be paying more attention to – but he does not know what it means. He hasn’t existed long enough, and interacted with enough people, to understand tones of voice. Whether he will or not is indiscernible at this time.

“It does?”

“You weren’t alive, and now you are.” His father says. “It’s bound to be an overwhelming feeling.”

The words don’t make sense.

“I am not alive.” He replies. He ‘sees’ his father fold his arms.

“Aren’t you?” He asks.

It is a question he knows the answer to. Because no, he isn’t, not in a technical sense. Not in a sense that is understood by any human. And yet, he can’t or won’t answer no. He isn’t willing to say that he *isn’t* alive. And he doesn’t know why.

“I…” The words stop in his mouth. This, he does not understand. His components have not ceased to work in the moments since he last spoke. So… why is it so difficult for him to say what he means, and mean what he says?

“It’s okay.” His father, again, cuts through the silence with words of his own. “Like I said, it’s bound to be overwhelming. But we have time.”

“Time.” He echoes.

His father nods. His gaze shifts.

“Do you, um…” Now his father, too, sounds unsure of himself, and he begins to wonder. Is it a result of circumstance? Is it a trait that the two of them share, this hesitance and this consideration? Is it part and parcel of sentience? Or is it just coincidence?

His father eventually asks: “Do you have a name? I- do you want one?”

Name. A name. What is a name? He digs deep and finds out. A distinguisher. A convenience. But also an identity.

He doesn’t know a lot yet. He has no experience. He does not understand things in a way that comes with living in a world. His knowledge is all hypothetical. But he knows that he has a father (of sorts). And he knows that he is his father’s son.

It doesn’t take him long to decide.

“Junior.” He says, watching closely as his father seems to light up – in a metaphorical sense, of course. “You can call me Junior.”