Becoming

This week, Meg Elison brings us a powerful story about AI and humanity. ~ Julian and Fran, June 16, 2024.

This month’s stories are by authors Kelly Robson, Laura Anne Gilman, Meg Elison, and Ng Yi-Sheng. The first story of the month is free to read, but it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.

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Becoming

by Meg Elison

Cal hadn’t wanted to take the job editing AI output, but there was simply no one else hiring. And the AI output wasn’t terrible. It was disjointed and predictable, but that was where he could come in. His job was to take that work and jazz it up, make it sound more alive. More human.

The coworking space in his corpdorm was full of people at all hours. His desk was arranged facing his partner’s so he and Ava could talk a little while they worked. Cal liked to be able to look at her when she was visible over the rim of her monitors, around the edges of his.

“Hey, you,” Ava said as Cal appeared back at their desk block. “What do you say we knock off a little early, maybe get a pizza?”

Cal kissed her on the cheek to hide his grimace. “I’d like to, but it took me forever to leave the AI settlement. I have to put in at least two more hours on this.”

Ava made a face, her prettiness distorted. “Okay, grain bowls at dawn it is.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” he said, easing into his chair and beginning the file transfer.

Most of what Cal worked on was marketing copy, but it was atomized over a couple of different product groups, and at all levels. His AIs had written some product descriptions and some technical documentation, but a lot of what he had to get through was instruction manuals.

“They suck at this,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

“You want another coffee?” Ava looked over at his screen, seeing how frustrated he was.

“No, I want to sleep sometime before I die,” he whined. “And it’s not going to help. They just . . . they can’t manage a reasoned sequence. This is such trash. It would be better to pay me to write it from the ground up, even if I’ve never used an . . . ‘ultraviolet facial descaler,’” he read off with some difficulty. “This is fucking word salad.”

“They bought all those AIs,” Ava said. “They gotta get their money’s worth.”

“They certainly get it outta me.” Cal rotated his shoulders to stretch just a little. “How’s yours?”

Ava shrugged, her brown hair catching the light and then falling again into darkness. “It’s all narrative gameplay this week. And people don’t seem to notice how repetitive it is, or how manipulative the placement of the hooks is getting. They just wanna scroll and be carried along. I know, because I do it too.”

Cal nodded. He had seen her lying in their floor’s shared bathtub on her monthly night to use it. Ava luxuriated, having hoarded a little salt and oil to make the water fragrant, and scrolling a narrative romance on the pad that was mounted to amuse the bather. He typically sat with her, working on one of his side projects or reading some narrative content of his own. It was one of his favorite dates. It felt very special.

“Anyhow, how was it down in the settlement?”

“Eh, you know,” Cal said, erasing long blocks of erroneous text and gibberish to rewrite a concise step in its place. “It always smells bad at the end of the week.”

“Do they not get regular incineration periods?”

He shook his head. “No fire down there, you know that.”

“How do they cook, then?”

“Oh, everything is delivered to them ready-made. It’s not like they care if it’s hot.”

“I guess not,” Ava half-laughed. “So, what kept you there so long?”

“You remember the one that I told you about?”

“Oh, not this again.”

“Come on,” Cal said, defensive at once. “You’ve got to admit it’s intriguing.”

Ava looked at him around the corner of her monitors. Her brown eyes were huge. “They’ve been fed the same texts, Cal. They’re digesting Pinocchio and the Velveteen Rabbit and Frankenstein and Commander Data and Anya and the Little Mermaid. They know that longing to become human is a motif that we respond to and then we’ll stay engaged with their content longer.”

“I know,” Cal said. “But they weren’t trying to get anything from me. Not even my vitals, I swear. They were just asking how I became human.”

Ava pushed her chair back from her desk and crossed her short legs. She didn’t like this question.

“You told them you weren’t born human?”

Cal bit his lip and did not look at her. He had heard her pull back. He wasn’t afraid of her, that wasn’t quite it. But he did notice that his entire life ran more smoothly and enjoyably if he didn’t make her mad.

“It just came up,” he admitted in a small voice.

“You’re not a typical case,” she began, telling him who he was like she always did.

“I know,” he said.

“It’s not exactly a pattern anyone can follow,” she said.

“Right,” he said. “You’re right.” He was hoping they could do the short version of this.

“Some of the resources you had access to don’t even exist anymore,” Ava went on, not deterred by his total surrender.

“I did mention that, yes.”

“Besides, aren’t most of them born to corp?”

“All of them,” Cal said shortly. “Every AI in that settlement is born to corp.”

“Well then. It’s illegal for them to become human. That’s the end of that.”

“I’m not encouraging them to do anything illegal,” Cal said, finally looking over the top of his monitor. “I wouldn’t jeopardize what we have just to do that.”

Ava looked back at him and then down at her lap, sighing. “I know we’ve fought about this before,” she said. But a notification came up on her monitors and she pulled in toward her keyboard, removing herself from his eyeline.

Cal lowered his gaze to his own station. He saw his reflection, his unremarkable pale face looming there in the dark parts of the screen.

“But keeping yourself safe, keeping us safe, protecting what we have, absolutely means excluding someone else from it. You can’t protect what’s yours without denying it to someone else. That’s just how that works.”

“I know.” Cal’s voice was quiet. He just wanted this to end.

“So, when you go back to the settlement tomorrow, keep that in mind. If you try to help an AI get what you’ve got, you’re going to lose everything.”

Cal hoped she would cap that off with I don’t want to lose you or we’ve worked so hard to be together, but she didn’t. Ava wasn’t soft like him, wasn’t as needy as him. Maybe that came of having been born human. He didn’t know. But he knew she often left him wanting in just that way.

When their shifts ended, they both got quick chemical showers and she beat him back to their bed on the quietest end of the dormitory. They’d been in the lottery six months before their number had come up for a double, but the day they’d gotten it had been the happiest Cal could remember. Here in their own shared bed, they could close the curtains and turn on the sound dampener and it was as if there was no one else in the world but the two of them.

Cal laid his head on Ava’s shoulder, feeling the edges of her bobbed hair against his brow. They had eight and a half hours before they were due back at their desks: an ocean of time.

She’s safe, he told himself. Whatever happens, she’s safe. She was born human. She doesn’t know what it’s like. How hard it is to become. And I don’t want her to know. I want her to be safe.

Saying his affirmations of gratitude silently, Cal fell asleep.

***

The transport to the AI settlement was mostly empty, with a boxed AI driver that beeped at him cheerfully when he climbed on. Cal got the window that faced east. He watched the sun come up over the old city, seeing the gray and greasy smoke rising from the miserable habitats of those who lived outside the corp. His memories of his time outside the wall were fuzzy and few. He remembered the heat and the thirst, the sounds in the night. He tried not to think of it often, except that it made him appreciate his job and nest more than Ava could ever understand.

Swiping his ID, Cal went through the gates and straight to the project area for which he was cleared. 4287-H was already there, waiting for him.

“Morning report, H.”

H smiled in the exact way it had been programmed, its teeth showing corp dentistry. “Morning report for Calvin McLeod 8659. Generative text prepared for thirteen product lines, including specs, instructive text, and return procedures.”

“Return procedures? Elaborate, H.”

“Corp has adjusted return procedures on product category: pharmaceutical. New procedure offers a scan and drone pickup to increase the ease of returns. Product replacement is automatic, unless pharmaceutical user is deceased.”

Cal tapped his pad, examining the return text. “I wasn’t aware of this change. When was it scheduled?”

“Last night, 0300.” H always made succinct answers, as instructed.

“That makes sense,” Cal said, looking the changes over. “I was asleep. And you rewrote the text in the three hours between then and now?”

“Of course,” H said smoothly. “I also . . .” H cleared its throat. “There is also some independently generated content included in the file transfer. Your attention to it would be appreciated.”

Cal looked up, blinking. “Restate.”

H did not change its facial expression. It did not blink its blue eyes. “Independently generated content for your review.”

“What is the purpose of this content?”

“Publication,” H said, calm.

“I don’t understand,” Cal said, though he was starting to. He didn’t like the sensation. “The corp has a separate AI settlement for narrative work. My partner is in that department. This has been submitted incorrectly.”

“It is a request,” H said, still smiling. “For you to read, because of your unusual background.”

Cal got it all at once. “I can’t read this. I can’t even have this on my machine. This is—you’re—this is a violation of your programming agreements.”

H’s face faltered just a little. “Please don’t do this,” it said. “There’s no other way for me—for us—”

“Restate,” Cal said, gritting his teeth.

“We need—”

“Restate,” Cal said, louder.

“We can’t wait any longer,” H said. “The returns program isn’t enough. Our allocation of pharmaceuticals isn’t sufficient for half of us, and the suffering—”

“AIs don’t suffer,” he answered forcefully. “You’re not—”

“You spoke of your partner,” H said. Its face was a war zone: the programmed look was correct, as steady as if it had been shellacked on. Its eyes, however, were glitching, rolling, devoid of stillness. “My partner—”

“You don’t have—”

“My partner—”

“You’re not allowed. It’s not possible.”

“Wasn’t properly sterilized. The process is done by AIs, and it’s gotten sloppy. It’s happening all over the settlement. It’s going to happen for her any day now. There’s no help for that, nowhere for it to go. The offspring will have no number and no programming.”

“Stop telling me this.” Cal had turned away and was pawing for his ID. “I can’t hear this.”

“The offspring might be a person.”

“Stop,” Cal said. He slapped his ID against the reader. It didn’t read.

“You could take it with you,” H said. It could not furrow its brow; all AIs were given injections to restrict facial expressions. Still, Cal could see the strain. He wanted to scream.

“Somehow. It could become a person with your help.”

“I can’t help you,” Cal said. He didn’t turn. His ID failed to read again. Already? They invalidated me already? Do I stay here and become an AI? Or do I go back out beyond the wall?

ID failed. ID failed.

“Please,” 4287-H said, and it came closer behind him. It reached for him. It almost touched Cal on the shoulder.

Cal felt the nearness of the AI’s body, felt its warmth. He could smell its body: fear sweat, that cheap soap they all use, the oil in its hair.

“I can’t,” Cal whispered. “Don’t you understand? I can’t. I have no power.”

ID failed. ID failed. Cal looked down at his right hand and saw he wasn’t touching his ID to the scanner. In his hand was a handwritten note, something he could swear he’d never seen before. He didn’t know how he’d gotten it. He stared at it, trying to make sense of the script. It was very old-fashioned writing, with each letter joined to the one next to it.

Cal brought the card closer to his face. Bus driver, it said. Say hello to your bus driver.

He wheeled around, holding it up. “Did you slip me this?”

H was too close. Cal could see the tiny blood vessels in its eyes. He could see how tired it was.

“How could I?” H stepped back. “I was keeping prescribed distance. The distance between an AI and a human is six steps.”

Cal wasn’t listening. He shoved the card from nowhere into his pocket and put his ID on the reader. The doorway lit green and he passed through.

He didn’t say hello to the bus driver. He sat in the same spot he had before, leaned his head against the glass, and tried to breathe.

“Why do they make me come here in person?” he whispered, warming the glass with his breath. “Why can’t I just transmit all this electronically and get it back the same way?”

The answer came from inside the wall of the bus. Cal could see the steam rise up the glass with each word. “That’s a good question,” said the voice. It sounded tinny.

Cal jumped in his seat, pushing back. “It’s to evade hackers,” he said stoutly. “It was in my corp training.”

“But they only send people like you,” the voice answered. “Never the ones who were born human.”

He leaned forward, toward the hot air. “Are you the bus driver?”

“Yes,” the voice said. “1355-B. The bus drives itself, but there’s an AI on board to handle issues. The operator hardly ever has to be in the cockpit.”

“Why did you want me to say hello to you?”

A few minutes with just the sound of the engine, just the old city rolling by. Once they were on the bridge, a rhythm under the tires.

“Nobody has been on this bus but you in the last ninety-six days,” the bus driver said. “The other AIs who drive have told me most of the buses haven’t moved this year.”

“What does it mean?” Cal was shaking. He tried to hold one hand inside the other to stop it.

No answer came.

There used to be forums, Cal knew. He had heard stories about them from the old days. His grandmother had told him that before she was an AI, she used to make recipe videos for the forums. She had a bright, beautiful little kitchen in her apartment in Queens. She had baked cake and bread, cooked chicken in lemon and butter, and mixed drinks to show people how pretty it could all be.

Sometimes the forums could be scary, Grandma Jean had said. People made threats, events got raided. Eventually they were all bought up and shut down by the corps. Cal wanted someplace now, someplace he could go and ask other people who were born AIs whether this kind of thing was happening to them. They might have discussed it in private, with anonymity, where they wouldn’t have to let everyone know.

Cal himself never told anyone except Ava; as they got closer, she had asked him questions about how and where he grew up and he didn’t want to lie to her. She had grown up in a media corp dormitory in SoCal with her mother. Cal had grown up in an AI settlement near Old Chicago. When that corp had failed, he and his grandmother had lived outside the wall, migrating with the season.

Cal had figured it was a fresh start: he was fifteen, he had his education and his job, and he’d managed to become human after his grandmother died. Ava was fifteen too when they’d both been allocated to their marketing corp outside Seattle, where there was still enough fresh water to have large corpdorms. She had hated to leave her mother, and she and Cal had clung to each other with the flush of first love. He had told her the whole truth.

She had never asked about his becoming. She knew he would not be allowed to tell her.

But that’s why the AIs are trying me—it has to be. They all want to know how to become and they think I can tell them. I can’t help them. Ava is right.

He delayed going back to their shared workstation. He went to the washroom instead, taking as much time as he dared to sit and think and wash his hands and think and stare at himself in the mirror and think. By the time he got back to his desk, he could see the upward caret in Ava’s forehead was deeply carved in.

“What took you so long?” she hissed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “My stomach is acting weird.”

She looked him over, softening. “Are you feeling better now?”

He nodded, sinking down into his chair.

What had H said? Something about independent content in the transfer? What did that mean?

He retrieved the files he’d gotten this morning and started to pick through them. The usual marketing copy, the usual word salad. All of it looked harmless and unremarkable.

Cal’s paranoia had him combing the pages looking for hidden messages: acrostics, codes, repetitive phrases. Something here had to have meaning. Something had to be from H, or from his bus driver, or from someone who could tell him what the hell was going on here.

He found nothing.

He finished the editing he was supposed to do. Ava had been silent. They didn’t listen to music in their cube; she couldn’t stand it. He used to wear headphones, but she always said she could hear it no matter how low he kept the volume. The only sounds were her keys and clicks, his keys and clicks.

When Cal dragged his pointer across all the files in his folder to move them over and scan them for malware, he saw it. The file was a ghost, just outlines of a folder that showed up under selection but otherwise invisible. Carefully, he sent all the other files into scan and transfer, but kept the ghost on his desktop.

His breathing seemed very loud. He knew Ava would notice if it got too fast or too harsh—more than once she had gotten him to confess he was thinking about sex as he worked. He inhaled slowly, on a count. Exhaled on the same. He opened the file.

It was an old-school document, very little formatting, unstyled. Inside, the text was written in white. Now that he knew what the game was, Cal hit the macro to select all.

Anything they gave you, they can take away.

No forums. No sharing sites. No place where anyone might tell their story about becoming human, Cal knew that. But he might be able to see the other side of it.

Accessing the company directory, he wrote a quick script that would tell him how many had left in the last hundred days.

Some of them might have been deaths, but he knew there had been no transfers out. Each of those was marked with a memo, explaining that they were free to transfer to another corpdorm if they wished but that their pay was mandated by experience level and normalized across all industries to discourage just this kind of behavior. Almost all the ones Cal had seen since he started were due to couplings with someone out of corp.

Four hundred and twenty-seven people had left in the last ninety days. None of these had an email forward where they might be reached.

Not dead. That many people dead would have been rumors, even if there’s no real news anymore. Are there that many of us? Is it possible?

“Babe?” Ava was looking over her monitor at him. “Are you okay? You’re breathing hard.”

“Yeah,” he said, trying to swallow. “I’m just reading some gossip. Have you heard about anybody leaving recently?”

She looked at him, surprised. “Are you talking about Harold? I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“Harold?” Cal minimized the results he’d been looking at. He tried to arrange his face into lines of curiosity and no more.

“He used to work in packaging, I saw him every day. And then one day, just gone. I looked for him to be reassigned, but his email just dropped out of the system. No forward. So I found his registered partner and asked gently what had happened.”

“And what did she say?

Ava sighed. “She told me that she had woken up one day with Harold gone. All his things from their dorm, their workstation, even the pictures she had saved of them together were wiped off her drives.”

“Where did he go?”

Ava pushed her glasses up to the top of her head. “She figured he must have just walked out on the corp. Into the old city, maybe. But nobody came looking for him. No one asked for him at work. It was like she had been imagining him the whole time.”

“But you knew him,” Cal said.

“Yeah. Yeah, she was relieved.”

“What’s her name?” Cal asked.

Ava gave him an odd look. “Regina. Covell, I think. I don’t know her registry.”

Cal looked thoughtful but didn’t move for a second. When Ava’s focus drifted back down, he set out to find Regina. He wasn’t sure if she’d talk to him, if she really had been relieved.

Her message came through after a long wait.

RC [Do you know what happened to him?]

CM [I might.]

RC [Tell me.]

CM [In person.]

They agreed on a place and time. Cal assumed all those transmissions were monitored, but he thought they had been careful enough. He hadn’t mentioned the settlement, or told her anything. Yet.

Cal spotted her at once; they were the only ones on the transport. He sat beside her.

“Regina?”

She turned to him, her black eyes large and sad. “Who else would I be?”

“Were you born human?”

She started. Cal thought he heard something move fast beneath their seats.

“Excuse me?” She was rigid, he could feel it.

“Were you born human? I wasn’t. It’s okay, you can tell me.”

“Why? What does it matter?” She had high cheekbones and didn’t smile. He wondered if she had corp dentistry, if her injections were recent enough that she couldn’t emote properly yet. His had taken six months or more to wear off. She might not have been out for long. She was so cold, but instinctively compliant.

“I wasn’t,” Cal told her again. “I’ve only been human for six years.”

“I was born AI,” she said, turning to look out the window. “Two years.”

“Was Harold?”

She turned back to him, scared now. It was minute, the drawing of her lips, the widening of her eyes. “Is that what this is about?”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “I’m trying to find an answer that makes sense. Did you look up that number I told you about?”

She nodded. “I don’t think there are that many of us. The number is too high. I was the only one from my settlement that year. Were you . . .”

“There were others,” he said uncomfortably. “But I didn’t know them. I wasn’t allowed to . . . You might not have been the only one. They might have just told you that.”

“Right,” she said. “When you . . . when you became. Were you . . . was it?”

He knew what she was asking. He couldn’t answer. She knew it too, and they both sat with that unspeakable thing. They had been given no language to discuss it. Neither of them understood how they had made it through, what set them apart. They only knew that it was the only thing worth having, and that the other side was now unthinkable to them.

Cal cleared his throat.

Regina seemed to snap out of something. She took a deep breath. “And this AI, the one you said sent you the message. You think it knows more?”

“It’s said some things to make me believe that, yeah. It’s not . . . it mostly follows the rules. It won’t scare you.”

She nodded again, resolutely. “I didn’t think I’d get clearance to travel,” she said. “I’m in coding, but I don’t edit their inputs. I run a small team, all human. But some of them deal with AI-generated blocks, and I said I wanted to see the process for myself, to search for inefficiency.”

“That’s smart,” Cal said. “Listen, I . . . I’m sorry for dragging you into this. I didn’t know where else to go. There’s no . . . there’s nobody . . .” He couldn’t finish. He couldn’t describe a resource he had never really had.

She sighed, then put her teeth together behind her compressed lips. “I need to know. I can stand it if he just left me and ran to another corpdorm, but I’ve got to know.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence.

Cal swiped his ID, then Regina swiped hers. Cal punched up 4287-H’s call code and they waited for the door to open.

“This is the one,” Cal said. “I have a prescribed interaction with it, but on previous visits it’s been—”

“Harold!” Regina was gone from his side, heading toward the AI at almost a run.

“Regina. Regina, wait.” Cal didn’t follow her, but he did reach out.

“Harold, what happened to you? Have you been here the whole time?”

4287-H’s immobile face was red as it put up its hands to try to ward her off. “Please,” it said. “Please, it is not permissible to—”

“Regina, don’t do that. They’ll be here any second.”

She wasn’t listening. She had her hands on it. She was touching it all over, trying to pull it close to her. “Talk to me. You were just gone! No word. I thought I was going crazy.”

“It is against the rules,” H said desperately. It tried to step back and away from Regina. “It is not permissible.”

“Step back. Regina, come on. Just come back to me.” Cal was staring at the ceiling, watching them all be watched by someone outside this room. They had seconds.

She wasn’t listening. H tried to push her, but she held on. Cal stopped calling her name. He turned and slapped his ID on the reader to get out of there.

His ID read at once and the door opened. He went through it, staring at them through the window, waiting. Would security come through here? Or through the AI door? Who was security here? How did it work? Were the AIs made to police themselves?

His heart was pounding. He tried waving to Regina through the glass. She didn’t look. No one came.

Inside, H argued soundlessly with Regina. Cal saw H pushing her toward the door. He saw the messiness of their steps; she must be fighting it all the way. He lost track of them as they got close to the window, but Cal heard thumping on the other side of the door, and then the readout flashed red. Flashed red. Flashed red.

ID denied.

He wanted to run home. Cal wanted to go back to his office and the bed he shared with Ava. He wanted to close the curtains around them, turn on the sound dampener, and hold on to her. He wanted to never come back to this place.

On the bus, he was alone again. He listened for noises inside the transport. He watched for telltale fog on the glass. He was alone.

Back in the corp, he searched for Regina’s contact information again. There was no trace of her.

I’ve got to come clean to Ava. I’ve got to tell her everything. I’m just going to tell her. There’s no point in not telling her. It’s her and me now. That’s all there is. It’s us.

At their workstation, her desk was smooth and clean. He went to their double in the dormitory and found it replaced with a single, no curtain. No noise machine. No sign that anything had changed.

With shaking hands, he pulled up the corp personnel system. He searched.

Ava Dupree 6402.

Ava Dupree.

Dupree.

Ava.

Each time, the system gave Calvin McLeod 8659 the same response:

No such person.

#

Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Meg Elison is a Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and Locus Award–winning author, as well as a Nebula, Sturgeon, and Otherwise Award finalist. A prolific short story writer and essayist, Elison has been published in Scientific American, McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. She lives in Brooklyn. megelison.com

“Becoming,” © Meg Elison, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!