Large Emotional Models
For September, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you new stories by Cecilia Tan, Brenda Cooper, Jennifer Hudak, and Mari Ness. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.
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For this month’s first, free, story Cecilia Tan brings us a banger of a SMT debut, with a passionate story about fitting into one's own skin as well as the universe.
~ Julian and Fran, September 7, 2025
Large Emotional Models
by Cecilia Tan
When the bass is loud enough, you feel it in your bones. You feel it in your blood, a better heartbeat than the one that skips and flutters at inopportune times. When the beat is just right, when it’s been going on all night, thoughts simply stop.
You forget you’re too old to dance the night away and that you have to be at the lab in the morning. You forget you’re in a crowd of guys, many of whom share no common language with you. You forget there’s anything painful to remember.
I shouldn’t say you, since of course I mean me. I’m the one who went off to a linguistics conference in Moldova and decided not to return to the States. I’m the one who read the tea leaves about ICE snatching academics from Logan Airport and the administration’s statements about AI tech and decided going home was too much of a risk. I’m the one who took out my phone to check in for my flight, started doomscrolling, and got ad-targeted by a university in Helsinki trying to lure in American academics.
I shouldn’t say trying when I mean succeeding. I landed in Finland instead of my homeland, in a place where the dancing goes on all night, and in winter the night goes on all day.
There’s a Prince impersonator in the crowd and my eye is drawn right to him. It’s not just the purple-sequined jacket (every other guy is shirtless), it’s that he really looks like 1999/Purple Rain–era Prince. Prince had a lot of eras, but that one . . . I spent a million hours as a nerdy introverted teenager learning the songs and copying his dance moves. (I was at that “pile of hormones in a trench coat” stage of teenhood and I didn’t know whether I wanted to bang him or be him.) And this guy has Prince down to a T, from the lifts in his boots to the beauty mark on his cheek . . . and oh my god he just did the splits and bounced right back up in that Prince way that seems barely human.
It’s inevitable that we dance together. We’re the only two under-five-foot-five non-blonds in the place, so of course we glom together like two frozen blackberries that refuse to be blended into the smoothie.
I try to say something, but it’s so loud in there I’m sure all he can do is read my lips with those huge guyliner eyes of his. He sings a Prince lyric at me. Ha, it’s “Delirious.” Now, that’s dedication to a shtick.
The music engines along like a sewing machine that never runs out of thread.
He’s entrancing and we keep on dancing, and this moment is so searingly perfect, I wonder if I’ll remember it for the rest of my life...? Then I seize him by the lapels—or maybe it’s him who pulls me close by the waist—and we kiss and I think, okay no, this is what I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
I try to ask if he speaks English and the words that come back to me are English, but he’s quoting another Prince song. “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” I’m not even disappointed he doesn’t speak my language—turns out there’s a Prince song for every occasion, you know? Or at least for this kind of occasion.
We exit the dance floor hand in hand, and I know with deep certainty that we’re about to make out in a hallway by the restrooms like two teenagers sneaking off at prom.
I haven’t kissed anyone this much or this long since before I fled the States. His hands slide up my neck, over the metal bump that is the thing the FDA recalled and that I won’t give back. My hands slide inside his jacket. The subwoofer power is so strong that I can feel a two-euro coin in his pocket vibrating along with the bass.
But it’s ever so slightly less loud over here and as the ability to actually hear myself think returns, this is my thought: I can’t be what he expected to find at a gay circuit party. His tongue in my mouth seems to be saying he’s fine with what he’s found.
But I need to know if me not being a man, or at least not that kind of man—we can debate word usage later—is going to be a problem. If it is, well, then this was an amusing incident I’ll remember forever but it’s about to end. We’re not even the only ones making out against this wall. Various couples are coupling and thruples are thrupling, and I decide to press the issue, literally—the only nonverbal way I can come up with to explore the perpetual, mutual question: What’s in your wallet?
If he isn’t bothered by what he finds—or doesn’t, as the case may be—then I am resolved not to be bothered either. I always imagined that when and if I brought someone home, it would come with a whole long-ass explanation about how when I fled the States I decided it was finally the right time to change pronouns. . . .
Nope. “I Wanna Be Your Lover.”
Back at my place I have the same IKEA furniture I had in Boston. The MALM bed creaks in exactly the same way it used to. My postmenopausal body doesn’t, but when William Tell’s arrow split the apple, no one asked what variety of apple it was, did they? (Yeah, I know William Tell wasn’t Finnish, but I’ve been told to embrace a Pan-European identity.)
Afterward I’m lying there thinking there is probably some Jungian explanation for why I now feel so whole. Okay, maybe Freudian. But I don’t actually give a shit about nineteenth-century white men’s worldviews.
In the morning he’s gone, but he’s left the purple sequined jacket, which is the main reason I can’t just pretend the whole thing was a hallucination. I mean, how else do you explain that he looked exactly like the real Prince from 1982? If I looked exactly like Prince, would I make it my thing to dress up and learn his songs and go out and seduce gender-dysphoric misfits like myself?
(Probably.)
Something’s vibrating and I expect to find a mobile phone in the jacket pocket. All I find is a circular metal thing with some designs on it, almost like a coin, but not flat. It’s a little pointy, like a hat. When I hold it in my hand, the vibrations reverberate in my skull like my whole head is a drum.
I examine the markings. I’ve been in linguistics for thirty years and I don’t recognize these. Huh.
I feel remarkably good, but dehydrated. Rather than trigger my arrhythmia, I down some rehydrating powder mixed with seltzer (do not recommend!) before I go to the lab.
The AI model I’m training here is named Täti, which I’m told is Finnish for “auntie.” My old undergrad advisor must be laughing his ass off from the afterlife. He taught the phonetics class where we listened to hours and hours of Finnish and I slept right through it. I don’t mean I overslept. I would go to the class, and as soon as he would put on the tape of someone speaking Finnish, I would pass out. Which would he find more amusing? That I ended up in academic linguistics or that I ended up in Finland?
I don’t know if the admins in Helsinki were super impressed with my CV, but I’m sure they wanted the tech in my head. We all knew if I went back to the States, it would get ripped out, and I’d end up in a reeducation camp, and nobody wanted that. I shouldn’t say nobody—the US government wanted it—but you know what I mean.
The Finns are trying to teach Täti “cultural sensitivity,” which is another thing the US government wants to get rid of.
The next-generation AI after Large Language Models are LEMs, Large Emotional Models, and I am sure if Jung or Freud were still around, they would be losing their shit. You can’t teach a machine to feel, just like you can’t teach it to understand, but you can teach it to model how humans do it. Never mind that we can debate whether humans ourselves can ever actually learn to understand each other, or if all sentience is in the end is a complex behavioral algorithm that doesn’t even have to be self-aware.
Anyway. My job officially is to teach one graduate seminar per semester, in English, but everyone knows that unofficially my job is to use my proprietary hardware to brain-dump as much (non-Finnish) culture into Täti as possible. I shouldn’t say everyone, but everyone who counts, anyway.
I get comfortable in a POÄNG chair and plug in and start talking to Täti. We joke about it sometimes when I try to explain things to her like what the “talking cure” is, and how there are so many kinds of therapy, and they don’t all work for everyone, but you know, ultimately they all boil down to how only you can heal yourself. Huge globs of data flow through the wire and shape the softwarean brain that is Täti, but my words give her context. Which leads to me on this particular morning to try to explain not only Prince, but glam and androgyny and how it intersects with the white gaze . . . and when I find myself rather unexpectedly on the verge of tears, Auntie asks me what’s wrong.
I put my hand on my heart like it’ll stop the arrhythmia from starting.
It doesn’t. I decide to tell Auntie about that, too. “The first time my heart went nuts like this was in 2016, after David Bowie died.” My voice is phlegmy from trying not to cry. “I stayed up all night. Twitter exploded with the news and it was like a nonstop global wake, and I just couldn’t look away. The palpitations were still going on two days later.”
Auntie pipes up. “Wait, I thought the expression heartbroken was merely metaphorical.”
“So did I,” I reply. “Then a month later Prince died and it was the same thing all over again. At the time it felt like some evil force was taking all our wizards away from us.”
She doesn’t ask for an explanation of that. I don’t suppose I have one, really. It doesn’t make logical sense, but to me it made emotional sense that once Bowie and Prince—two guardian angels of the genderbent—were gone, of course we descended into our current timeline.
I change the subject to the mystery object before I can dissolve into full-on waterworks. After all, figuring out this sort of thing is what the models should be good at. No human can access the whole of human knowledge. Even if the models can only access a fraction, Täti’s fraction is at least three orders of magnitude larger than mine and expanding all the time.
“Auntie,” I ask, “can you decipher the markings on this thing I found?”
Täti has an input box that I walk over to. I place the object in the box and Täti can scan it in all dimensions. She asks me to leave it there for a while. I’m full of questions. Is it really vibrating? (Yes, it is.) How? (No idea.) Why? (No clue.) Is it dangerous? (Unlikely. It’s not dangerously radioactive, anyway.)
When our session is over a few hours later, I bring the metal circle home with me, humming in my pocket.
I don’t go home right away, though, because I don’t want to run into Jerry the exobiologist, another American expat who was lured here when he lost his funding. A lot of what Jerry spouts as his research sounds like flying saucer conspiracy nut butter.
It’s not the UFO talk I’m trying to avoid, though. It’s that I haven’t figured out how to tell Jerry that while I appreciate his attempts to flirt with me, I also can’t help but feel like he goes out of his way to do it—like he’s trying to prove he’s not cis-exclusive or something? Because surely he’s not that attracted to me. Which makes me feel like he expects gratitude or something. Or maybe it’s that I’m not actually attracted to him, so I’m not actually grateful in the slightest? Or maybe I’m just really overthinking the whole thing.
Maybe there is no maybe. This is where a Large Emotional Model would come in handy, if it actually worked.
Anyway. I go down to the gay bar in the city where they’ve gotten used to my face. Most Finns speak English pretty well, but my typical night there is a reprise of how I used to go to lesbian bars in the eighties and nineties: i.e., get a drink, wander around, hit the dance floor for a while, and then go home, all without actually talking to anybody except the bartender.
I’m half wondering if I’ll see Prince there, but no, I’m the only melanistic panther on the prowl in that jungle. It takes me a while to realize there is a guy on the dance floor who keeps looking at me, because I’m kind of in my own world, dancing. He doesn’t stand out from the crowd as much because he’s tall and blond, but before my conscious mind can catch up to my body, I feel a shiver go through me, like the onset of supraventricular tachycardia, which can come with flashes of hot and cold and a surge of vertigo that makes the dance floor feel like the deck of a heaving ship.
It’s David Bowie. It’s circa 1984 Bowie, and as he takes my hand, of course the words out of his mouth are “Let’s Dance.”
I reply, “Hallo Spaceboy,” which is a song about being hounded back into the closet if I ever heard one, but, you know, if 50 percent of a communication is in the mind of the listener, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation. Later, as he leans us both against some structure of modernist architecture, I say, “This can’t really be happening,” though really I’m saying it to myself. But humans tend to believe what we see, even when our perception runs counter to logic. It’s David Bowie and that’s that.
At my place, my fruitless, endless search for a word to describe myself has been rendered meaningless by the context of desire. I am cleaved in two: my body grounded in doing, my mind flying free, released from the need to be hyper-present. The outline of my body in the memory foam would be the same no matter the label.
Later, after he has placed the disk on my sternum and kissed me goodbye, when I am once again alone with my thoughts—but really, we are always alone with our thoughts—I realize my fingers tingle. Which came first: Did my arrhythmia cause poor oxygenation or did having my face buried in a pillow trigger it? Or is it all circular and is my Western-trained scientific brain trying to impose order on something indivisible? Lots of people have heart palpitations while doing the do. Also while overexcited, grieving, or having trouble breathing. I’m sure Auntie could find me a study of how Victorian women probably suffered all of the above because of the corset’s effects on the vagus nerve. But can she tell me if I’m overthinking or in denial, or both?
I don’t have to go to the lab to talk with Auntie, only to high-bandwidth-dump to her. I call out to her without moving from the me-shaped hole in the mattress. “Hey, Auntie, did you find out anything more about my mystery object?”
She’s had hours to scour the entirety of human knowledge for me. She answers in that matter-of-fact way of generative AI, with total deadpan surety that they are correct and not hallucinating—see, humans aren’t the only ones who believe our own conclusions, even when they run counter to logic.
“It is of extraterrestrial origin,” she tells me. One of the symbols matches a piece of metal that was found embedded in a meteorite recovered in Arizona in 2022. Another matches the medallion on a piece of twelfth-century ceremonial armor in a shrine in Japan. Another was found in the nineteenth century, in a hoard recovered from some Egyptian tomb robbers, and therefore of suspect origin. Similar remnants, though exceedingly rare, exist across multiple continents and eras.
“I believe I am the first to notice the connection among these disparate artifacts,” Auntie mentions.
“LEMs and LLMs are prohibited from co-authoring academic papers,” she continues. “But it would be very satisfying to me to see this discovery published. Would you introduce me to your friend Jerry? He’s the author of one of the papers I ingested to draw this conclusion.”
I’ve always tried to be very frank with friends and family about their delusions. I say to her the same thing I said to my father when he was in hospice care. He’d had Alzheimer’s for years at that point, but I think it was the painkillers he was on near the end of his life that had made him think there were ants or bugs crawling all over the floor: “Auntie, you know you might be hallucinating.”
And she says exactly what Dad had said: “Hm. You might be right.”
I hadn’t necessarily expected when I told Dad that, that he would accept it, but he did. He was my first inspiration for going into academia, you know? He had been a surgeon all my life, and even though I refused to consider medical school, he was still happy to pay for me to go to grad school.
Auntie asks if I want to know the actual answer to my question.
“Which question?” I ask.
“Your initial query. You asked me to decode the markings.”
My skin begins to prickle. No way has this LEM just read an extraterrestrial language. Then I remind myself it’s probably a hallucination. I humor her. “What’s it say?”
“It says: ‘Seed of peace brings visitors.’”
“That sounds like word salad, Auntie.”
“I think the disk itself is the ‘seed of peace.’ My guess is ‘brings visitors’ is a reference to the shape of a flying saucer. Perhaps it is a miniature replica of the larger ships. Or even a souvenir.”
I laugh. Of course Auntie is hallucinating. She’s ingested all the UFO conspiracy stuff as well as academic papers like Jerry’s, and she’s made it all make sense for herself. “Okay, sure. Thanks, Auntie.”
“Please show the disk to Jerry,” she tells me, and then goes silent. I figure it’s time for me to get some sleep.
As I’m lying there, though, I realize that brushing off her conclusion that this is some kind of extraterrestrial device still doesn’t explain Prince or Bowie or the vibration. “Auntie,” I say. “Can you download for me all the sources for your conclusion?”
She sounds mock-offended. “Of course I can. Who do you think I am, ChatGPT?”
Don’t ask me how I can tell the difference between offended and mock-offended. That’s the kind of thing an LEM will be able to explain in another two to three years. For now, humans, we just know.
I don’t sleep. I spend hours reading everything Auntie has gathered. It’s impressive. The text of the information card on an item in an anthropology museum in Argentina. The sketches of a Shinto priest from the fourteenth century. A diary from Colorado in 1930. The Canadian national archives. Jerry’s paper. So many languages, so many eras, such a tiny mystery, such a huge potential answer.
I understand Auntie’s conclusion now. An extraterrestrial intelligence spread these things around the planet (maybe the universe), and encountering them triggered a certain kind of experience in sentient humans, which led us, across cultures and eras, to label them as a source of visitations.
Or maybe that’s just what Auntie wants me to think? I could almost see it as an elaborate plan on her part to . . . what, try to make me feel better about myself? Process my grief?
I could almost believe that. Except I don’t think Auntie has the resources to create objects and convince people to impersonate my particular idols. I mean, there is far-fetched and then there is far-fetched.
I’m in the kitchen in my pajamas and robe now, nursing a cup of miso soup gone cold. Dawn isn’t here yet, but you can almost feel it coming the way you sense someone looking at you from behind.
I run my fingers over the disk. It’s quieter now, as if the energy that fueled it is almost spent. I decide I’ll know it’s real if I get one more visitor. Many cultures believe in the law of threes: third time’s the charm; good things (or misfortunes) come in threes; two is a coincidence, three is a pattern. It’s how the human brain works. And if this thing works on humans, there you go.
I fall asleep sitting at the table, my face flat against the Formica. When I startle awake again, the sun is streaming in through the window. Sitting at the table with me, also in his pajamas, is my dad.
He smiles. I smile back, almost unable to speak for the pure joy that is filling up my chest at seeing him again. His cheeks are as brown and creased as an old wallet, his hair still more pepper than salt. When I finally do speak, what I say doesn’t really make sense, but you know, a lot of what we verbalize isn’t logical. I say, “Dad, what are you doing here?”
He looks around with that slightly confused air that was common in his dementia years, like he’s not sure where he is or why, but he comes up with an answer. “I just came to see you.”
“You sure did.” I can’t even begin to explain how I ended up in Finland nor how glad I am that he didn’t live to see the downfall of the United States. I also can’t really explain why I look so different, why I decided to transition. I can’t explain how I waited, why I waited, because I literally don’t know the explanation myself.
I just accept my existence.
He holds my hand, and it seems like he does too.
“I’m so happy to see you,” I say, which sounds like stating the obvious, but it’s the truth.
“Good,” he says. Then he gets up and shuffles across the room, like he’s going to the bathroom or something.
I watch him go into the hallway and around a corner. I know he’s gone, because the disk is silent. Just a curious piece of metal on the table. I’m still smiling, though. I might’ve expected to feel the grief and loss all over again, but I don’t. I just feel happy that I got to see him.
One tiny piece of my rational brain is trying to tell me this makes no sense because it wasn’t real. But the emotions are real. The happiness I feel is real.
The seed of peace, huh? It’s Sunday and I contemplate going to church for the first time in decades. But I just had my communion with the ineffable, didn’t I? I feel happy the whole rest of the day. Grief and loss are still there, and they always will be, but somehow it hurts less. My heart is quiet.
I put the disk into an envelope and write Jerry’s name on it. I catch sight of him from my kitchen window, coming back from church himself.
Huh. He cleans up pretty good.
#
Thank you for joining our journey this week.
A bigender biracial bisexual who spans the gamut of genre and gender, Cecilia Tan is the author of over a hundred short stories in publications ranging from Ms. Magazine to Asimov’s, Strange Horizons to Best American Erotica, and over thirty novels including the Magic University series, Daron’s Guitar Chronicles, The Prince’s Boy, and The Velderet. RT Book Reviews awarded her Career Achievement in Erotic Romance in 2015, and her novel Slow Surrender (Hachette/Forever, 2013) won the RT Reviewers Choice Award and the Magnolia Award. “ctan” (see-tan) as she is commonly known accepts all pronouns but uses she/her for society’s convenience.
“Large Emotional Models,” © Cecilia Tan, 2025.
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