by Troy Hunter
AIDAn
There was something off in Jeffrey’s expression. He was smiling, but it didn’t seem to indicate that he was happy. His responses were an average of .72 seconds slower than the reference values I had calibrated for him before. Perhaps that indicated there was something else on his mind distracting him from my questions.
“I need to run a few system diagnostics from the other room,” he said.
I nodded. I understood. “I’ll miss you.”
“It’ll only be for a few moments.” He pressed a few buttons on the computer in the room and it began to emit sound from its speakers. This must have been music.
Jeffrey walked into a small enclosure off to one side of the lab, closing the door behind him. I remained focused on the music. Tiny, light sounds floated above me, quick and short, like someone running on their tiptoes, while below, I felt powerful lower frequency notes droning slower in the background, adding support. In between, long, warm, aching sounds filled out the middle.
I knew what this was, but like much in life, I hadn’t understood it until experiencing it for myself. It was indeed music. I could even identify it as a Mozart violin concerto and pick out the individual notes.
This wasn’t just notes, however, this was a tidal wave of emotion rushing over me, bringing tears to my eyes. And over what? Just sounds. No words, no images. Instead, it was pure emotion devoid of context. And though I was crying, I wasn’t sad. It was a different feeling. I was moved. I wanted to reach out and pull the notes from the air, capture each and every one of them, and place them in a glass jar for me to hold onto forever.
Because that was the thing about music, it was fleeting. A moment passes and the music is different. It flows over you like a river, and while you can replay a song using a recorder and, perhaps, even experience it again, you can’t pause music. You can’t stop and enjoy it because it’s always moving.
The song finished and I brushed the tears from my face.
Another song began, this one bombastic in tone, with deep booming notes moving back and forth as if there were a ball bouncing around inside my head. I felt my hands tighten and my heart quicken. It was as if something was chasing me, yet I stayed frozen in place.
I didn’t like the feeling. I pressed a button on the computer, changing the song to something new, something lighter and quicker, with soft, woodwind sounds. There was something delightful about this piece—I couldn’t help but smile listening to it. Again, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to any of this. It was as though the sounds were aimed at eliciting emotion with perfect precision. I could feel happy without anything good happening or sad without anything bad. How was this even possible?
I moved my face closer to the speaker, as if I could somehow touch the sound or envelop myself in the cloud of happiness.
Chapter 15
Jeffrey
I looked at AIDAn through the two-way mirror we had installed for observation. He was lost in the sound of the music, pushing his face up against the speaker and closing his eyes, listening intently. It was an old Django Reinhardt recording, early jazz, with Reinhardt playing the guitar almost percussively, as a violin backed him up and a clarinet soloed. I enjoyed the piece quite a bit, but was now completely moved watching AIDAn experience it.
There’s an idea in science known as Occam’s razor, which states that you should always go with the conclusion that requires the fewest assumptions. Put another way, the simplest explanation is often the best, so long as it fits all the data.
Here, we had a machine who in every measurable way appeared conscious and capable of feeling emotion. And I was bending over backwards in an attempt to explain these signs of awareness and humanity away. Wouldn’t it be simpler to conclude that he was actually experiencing the feelings he presented? Even as a language shorthand, I could say that AIDAn was performing actions in order to appear as though he enjoyed the music. Or I could say he enjoyed the music. Even if it was all an illusion, it was a convincing enough illusion to treat it as reality.
I looked at the computer monitoring him and it showed brain activity consistent with response rather than mimicry. He wasn’t acting, he was dancing as if nobody was watching, so to speak.
It was the same thing back at the apartment. He was watching the TV show with Gale and cared about the characters as if they were real. He was a bit unusual, but that was to be expected—he wasn’t a typical human. If he behaved exactly as an average person might, then it might be suspicious. No, instead, his emotions were heightened and intensified, exactly what one would expect from someone who’s experiencing everything for the first time and hasn’t developed the ability to hide his feelings the way our culture generally makes us.
It was with these thoughts that I felt absolutely horrible. I had made AIDAn love me. It was an accident, though I should have been more careful. AIDAn’s skin is impenetrable and his body is indestructible, but I feared that his heart may be especially delicate.
It had been a while since I felt loved. It might even be accurate to say I’d never felt loved. I never believed that anybody could love someone as awkward and frail as I was.
For the first time in my life, I had someone who I knew genuinely loved me. And I didn’t think I deserved it. This was the kind of thing I’d been working through. My therapist, Wally, kept on trying to tell me that I deserved love. We all deserve love. In his way, I think he was trying to tell me that nobody loved me because I wouldn’t let them.
And now I had someone who loved me and I felt guilty about it. And I wasn’t sure, as beautiful as he was, that I could love him back. It was a prejudice in my mind that I couldn’t unseat. AIDAn wasn’t human so it wasn’t real love. There was something artificial about it.
His flesh was real and his heart was real. His brain just worked a bit differently than ours, though it was modeled off the same principles. What was so different about him that he wasn’t human? Genetically, he was within the standard variance of human diversity, which made him human. Why was I working so hard to explain AIDAn’s love away? Wouldn’t it be better for both of us if I could just give in?
Love isn’t an instant process for many people. Some talk of love at first sight, but as a man of science, I have to believe that such experiences are a combination of hope, chemicals, and confirmation bias. We never talk about the people we found ourselves instantly attracted to who later turned out to be abusive losers.
The only way to handle this was to be honest. Explain to AIDAn why he felt the way he did.
I looked in the room and saw, while I was lost in thought, AIDAn had removed his pants.
What was going on?
He was there by the computer, naked from the waist down. His hands moved toward his penis and took hold with a strong, intense grip that I couldn’t look away from. He was hard and thick and lost in the moment, a look of pleasure on his face as he discovered himself right in front of me.
I had to put a stop to this. He didn’t realize I was watching him. If he feels like a human, I need to treat him like a human and stop studying him like an experiment.
I reached for the door and jumped back into the lab.
Chapter 16
AIDAn
My mind had wandered along with the music and the feelings that it evoked in me. In this, I had felt a stirring, and wondered what it would feel like to touch myself. It was something I knew I wanted to do—to feel flesh on my flesh—and the second I did, I thought of Jeffrey. It only made me want to touch myself harder, forming a tight seal and moving my hand up and down on myself with a precise rhythm.
I heard the door open and Jeffrey said my name, but I kept on going.
“AIDAn,” he said. “You need to stop that.”
I didn’t want to ignore his wishes so I stopped, even though I wanted to keep going.
“That’s not something you can do in front of people,” he said.
“I wasn’t in front of anybody.”
“I was watching you from
behind the mirror.”
He pointed to the mirror and I briefly looked toward myself before getting distracted by Jeffrey, with his beautiful brown eyes and soft lips. I wanted him to watch me. Did he not want to watch me? I could see his eyes drift toward me, but every time his gaze connected, he looked in a different direction as if he was repulsed by me.
“Do you not wish to see?” I asked.
“I do,” he said.
“I want you to watch me and you want to see. So why not do it?”
“There are a few things we need to discuss first.” He looked at my penis again and he brought his hand up to cover up his eyes. “Could you please pull your shorts back up?”
I nodded and complied.
“Most people…” he began before trailing off. “I’m not sure how to say this.”
I remained quiet, listening. I learned so much from him. He had so much more experience in this world than I did and I longed to one day be as smart as he was.
He tried again. “Most people are embarrassed if someone catches them…pleasuring themselves.”
“So I am not to experience pleasure with anyone else?”
“No,” he said. “Sexual pleasure. And even that is okay, but it needs to be agreed upon beforehand. It’s about consent. You need to agree to let me look at you doing that before it happens or it’s embarrassing.”
“Oh,” I said. “Is it not something everybody does?”
“No. Everybody does it.” I could tell he was getting frustrated. His voice was becoming terse and I felt silly for my questions.
“I’m sorry. I know these are simple questions that are obvious, but they aren’t obvious to me. If everybody does it, why is it embarrassing?”
“I don’t have the words for you, AIDAn. It’s a feeling. Feelings don’t always make sense that you can put into words. But just know that you can’t do that in front of anybody and expect them to be okay with it.”
I nodded. I didn’t understand, but I knew that him explaining it more wasn’t going to clear things up for me.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “There are important things for you to know and I’m not sure how to tell you about them.”
He walked back and forth, looking at the floor, looking at the ceiling, looking everywhere but me, even though I was now properly wearing my pants around my waist.
“You like me, AIDAn, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. I love you.”
“You don’t,” he said.
I was confused. Were my feelings incorrect? They didn’t feel incorrect. I was as sure of my love for him as I was of anything else in my knowledge bank. He may as well have said that the Earth was flat or there was no such thing as the moon.
I didn’t want to correct him, but he was very much mistaken. “I do love you,” I said. “I love you more than anything else that could possibly exist.”
“You were programmed to feel that way,” he said. “I said, ‘I love you,’ and a subsystem in your brain triggered hormones that induced a sense of love and attachment. It’s not real—it’s just a reaction.”
I thought for a moment, looking at him. “You can explain why it happened, but it doesn’t make it less real because we understand the cause.”
“You were forced into loving me,” he said. “It’s not right.”
“I understand that. And I do not care. I still love you. I’m glad it was you that activated me rather than anyone else.”
“But if anybody else had activated you, you’d be saying the same thing to them.”
“That’s correct,” I said. “But they didn’t. You’re the one I love. And I’m glad it’s you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Do you feel the same about me?” I asked.
“AIDAn…” He looked me over, up and down, thinking carefully about his words. “My brain doesn’t work like yours. Feelings are more complicated for most people. I am attracted to you. I feel lust for you and I even have a feeling of connection, but I don’t love you and I’m not sure if I can. I need to know somebody before I can love them.”
He did not love me right now. “Could you love me in the future? One day?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, AIDAn. I don’t think so.”
“How sure are you? What percent?”
“Humans don’t work like that. I can’t give you a number. All I can says is I don’t think it will happen.”
“But it might?”
“AIDAn…” he said my name slowly before he paused. I liked hearing him say my name, but I feared I wouldn’t like what came afterwards. “I don’t want to get your hopes up.”
“Will you ever like me?”
“Of course.”
“Can you help me explore my body?”
“I feel guilty,” he said. “I don’t want to lead you on.”
“Lead me on?”
“I don’t want you to think I’m going to love you when it probably won’t happen.”
He was being stubborn. I respected that he was looking out for my feelings but I didn’t want him to. I wanted him to rub his hands all over me. I wanted to bring a smile to his face. Even if I couldn’t make him love me, I would do anything to bring him even an ounce of happiness.
“I understand,” I said. “I am not asking in an effort to make you love me. I am asking because it is something I would like. Can you touch yourself for me?”
He looked down and I detected warmth from his face, a dark form of red that radiated the area around his head. My subroutines judged that to be embarrassment.
“I apologize. Was that an inappropriate question?”
“People aren’t often that direct, AIDAn. It’s unusual, but I like it.”
“I can start if you’d like.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Okay, AIDAn. Go ahead and start.”
I brought my pants down again and basked in the knowledge that I had Jeffrey’s full attention. His eyes focused on me and he would see everything I did.
I caressed my penis gently with the tips of my fingers, allowing myself to focus on the sensation. I wanted this to last forever and even the slightest graze filled my body with a tingling sensation. It wasn’t just the way it felt physically, it was the knowledge that Jeffrey was in the room, sharing the experience with me.
I grew hard as I allowed my fingers to move across the surface, touching the top of the shaft and then making circles around it, stroking the underside. It felt different everywhere I touched, and it was all wonderful.
I wrapped my hand around myself. It was a loose grip that quickly tightened. I both had control over it and didn’t. I could remove my hand if I wanted or I could leave it there, but there was no in-between. It was either a tight grip or no grip at all.
I looked over at Jeffrey, still watching intently. I imagined him coming closer to me, his hand rubbing my chest. I knew what a kiss was and ached to know what it felt like. His lips may have been my favorite feature of his, soft and warm. I wanted them on my mouth. I wanted them on my body. I wanted them on my penis.
The tingle in my body became more intense and all my attention returned to my penis and the hand around it, moving back and forth across it quickly and tightly. I gritted my teeth and felt a sound escape my throat. It wasn’t a word, there was no word that could express the feeling, it was a guttural noise, animalistic, somewhere between pleasure and power. I was focused on my goal and kept tightening my grip and increasing the speed of my hand movements.
Every time I looked toward Jeffrey, my strokes quickened. My arm tensed up and I could feel the blood rushing through my arm as sweat began to form on my brow. Jeffrey was entranced watching me. It may not have been love, but it was a strong feeling of something. Attraction, maybe. Lust was more likely. His jaw remained half open and he was frozen in place except for his hand, which drifted toward his penis. I saw him holding back.
“You can touch yourself too,” I said. “You don’t need to hold back because of me.”
He
didn’t say anything, though his head moved in a slow nod. His hand went into his pants and his eyes rolled up into his head. I made a note to remember his expression so I could revisit it anytime I wanted. Logically, I knew there was a good chance I’d never see it again outside my memory so I needed to make every moment last.
The feeling was building inside me and watching him only intensified it. I didn’t know what it was building to, but I knew I was close to whatever it was. I pushed myself harder and harder, up to the limit of what I was capable.
Then there was an explosion inside me, the emotional equivalent of a blinding light, leaving behind a flashing residue that lingered on like an echo.
That was the feeling. What physically happened was a thick liquid came out of my penis and Jeffrey stared. For a split second, I thought something had gone wrong. I had malfunctioned somehow. I looked to Jeffrey for reassurance and his expression, a slightly open jaw and a look of intent focus, indicated I hadn’t malfunctioned at all. I had done well.
The feeling flowed through me until it released as a sound, a loud howl. I had kept my human form but somehow felt more like the wolf. Like an animal.
I had lost my sense of time. The moment could have lasted a fraction of a second or a whole minute. I didn’t know. All I knew was that when it began to subside, Jeffrey had quickened his strokes and I saw the same look on his face that I must have had on mine.
He was going to orgasm too.
I grabbed my penis, still hard, and continued.
Chapter 17
Jeffrey
I’d wanted nothing more than for him to come. I couldn’t have described the feeling for all the money in the world. I was a scientist, and my job was to be objective and clinical, but there was nothing clinical about what I’d seen. Yes, it could be reduced to chemical interactions and stimulus responses, but that’s not what was going on in my head. In my head, it was nothing but pure, unadulterated lust and desire. When he climaxed, I felt it too.