Page 142 of Coldwire
“I don’t—” My head hurts. My throat hurts. I feel as though I’m being disintegrated from the inside out, and maybe I am. “I don’t understand. When did it become me? You speak of freezing Eirale, and suddenly it’sme?”
“I had to rename you. I’d missed a parameter in the first input and you didn’t appear resembling Eirale. There was data scrambled in that veered you closer to an average of what a Medan child looked like. I didn’t think that mattered when your mind was copied over entirely, and anyway, your dad thought it was for the best. He could bring you home with a new identity rather than explain to the authorities why he had a death certificate for his still-living daughter. I suppose you became Lia somewhere around there.
“At that point in time, my bare-bones prototype of Coldwire was functional enough to take us into upcountry Offron without visas to meet your dad. He had a diplomacy mission there downcountry that month. It was perfect timing.”
I take a shallow breath. An impression of a memory brushes the farthermost recesses of my mind. Someone was leading me around. A street in the rain.A siren in the distance—not a police car, maybe an ambulance.
“He logged in with a Claw to see you and put the pieces in place to set up a fake adoption in Atahua. Six months later, as soon as your programmingwas stable, I transmitted you into upcountry Melnova, and you were adopted.”
There’s a ringing in my ears. An awful tinny hum, growing increasingly louder in volume.
“I thought Dad and Mallory spent time downcountry raising me.” I remember being five years old in a house of grief. I remember Tamera moving in to help out, introducing herself to me by name and tutting when I referred to her as Miss Great-Aunt instead. She pinched my cheek and said I was a small sweetie, insisted,You’re calling me Tamera,and she’s been around ever since. “Mallory died in a car accident a year after I was adopted. I thought it was because we were all downcountry.”
Chung stills. Finally, his ease has disappeared, tension tightening his posture when he leans against his counter.
“Lia, I’m sorry,” he says. “You’ll have to hear the full story from your father. But Mallory didn’t die in a car accident. She killed herself.”
The whine in my ears heightens to a complete roar. “What?”
“It’s not your fault,” Chung urges. “But Mallory was… resistant to you. She and Henry grieved in very different ways, and she was more determined to put Eirale to rest. At first we assured her that you were merely a captured picture of her. To think of it as a photo frame of memories.”
“No,” I mutter under my breath. “No no no—”
“You were never supposed togrow. In all the time we’ve had AI models, nothing could be classified as sentient because nothing we’d built had ever truly considered itself human. How could they? They’re lines of code. They’re put to work downcountry, and there’s no confusion about their place in their environment.”
I’m going to be sick.
“It’s my oversight for not considering that possibility. No one had resurrected someone as an avatar upcountry before and not told it the truth. More importantly, no one had asked a language model to imitate a human child and let it take its own actions from there. You were built fromsomeone young enough not to understand the transition—your source code acted accordingly. Your programming decided to age naturally. Your programming decided to adopt maturity as you entered puberty, to mimic what it understood to be the teenage girl. The human girl died while you carried on in her image. But it was only because you didn’t know your real nature that you could learn to become human. You may have started as Eirale, but you evolved into someone new entirely.”
Sweat soaks my shirt. My heart rackets inside my ribs, hammers through to my ears.
“So it was because of me,” I rasp. “Mallory couldn’t handle her dead daughter resurrected as some garish imitation, and shekilledherself.”
“Mallory was sick with grief,” Chung snaps. “If there’s anyone at blame, your father should have prepared her better.”
“I can’t— I don’t—” I bend down, putting my head between my knees in an effort not to faint. I’m not even real, so none of this should matter. I’m nothing but a script stored in the data centers downcountry, and yet I’ve been relegated to experiencing this rush of blood leaving my head.
“By the time you were in your last year of elementary, I had to sit your dad down and tell him we needed to plan around this,” Chung says, carrying on despite my reaction. The curtains are drawing; I get the sense that he’s urging me toward his final test. “You couldn’t be an avatar forever, and you were clearly aging at a normal rate. I built you another layer of upcountry for your reset days, but that wasn’t going to fool you once you matured. Sooner or later, you would realize you had never stepped foot downcountry. You would notice something was wrong, and we needed to allow that. It would mean you understood the nature of your reality. It would mean you were truly,trulysentient, and that was a colossal breakthrough in science.”
My head jerks up. Chung must read the warning in that, the anger in my eyes at him calling me abreakthrough, and he clears his throat.
“It is not a bad thing,” he insists. “We were always supposed to evolve. You’re the first bridge we’ve ever built between human and artificial.”
My voice is hoarse. “Because I’m not real.”
“Because you made yourself real.”
“I made myselfwrong.”
I’ve felt ill-fitting among my peers my entire life. Abnormal from how they think, how they love. To realize that this whole time…
“That’s not unique to you,” Chung says evenly. “To be humanisto feel different. Each bit of development you’ve had away from the norm only confirms that you have self-realized into a unique category. I didn’t code any of that for you. You developed it for yourself.That’sconsciousness.”
My stomach is churning. It all only upsets me more, because I can’t even control my own body’s reactions when I seem to have thought myself into existence. Through my childhood, I wasn’t only anxious—I was sensing what felt off. The explanation doesn’t make me feel better. The fact that there was areasonfor the wrongness is horrifying. There wasn’t supposed to be a reason.
“This is evil,” I whisper. “To bring me to life like this, then trick me for so long.”
“Your father was supposed to send you back to me earlier,” Chung counters, “and he refused.”
