I leaned back against the seat of the car. “I mean… what you’re talking about is sort of AI basics. I know you know that stuff.”
She shrugged. “I guess, the theories of it. But what if I exist in my head for different reasons than you exist in yours.”
“It’s the same thing, you’re just looking at it from the other side and worried people won’t agree for different reasons than a theorist would.” I sat back forward. “Humans are chemical response driven decision trees with a relational database. That’s the short version, right? So beyond that whole thing, the questions just have to do with baseline provable facts. Can you abstract, can you self-actualize? Like I said, it’s year one sort of shit.”
“But what if I only seem to self-actualize?”
“And what if I do? Humans only worry about that question with regards to AI because we like to imagine there’s some deeper difference underlying our reasons for falling down the decision tree the way we do. We’ve never been able to prove that our own self-actualizing mechanisms are anything other than a mistake that happened to creep into the structure of our brains. Hell, we don’t even do it right. We think of ourselves as something separate of our own bodies because we feel like we exist wholly in our mind. We can’t even abstract our own meaningful relation to the system that lets us operate. And admittedly, we could probably live in a jar, so maybe it’s not an error of abstraction in the true sense, but it’s an absolute denial of the value of our bodies beyond it.” I looked at the screens, the news feed was showing a shop front for some local business. Something about the drone of the reporter made me incredibly aware of the dangerously virginal path I was taking, verbally. “Has anybody ever talked like this and gotten laid after? Jesus, why did you let me keep talking?” I gave an exaggerated sigh. “I don’t know. Probably it’s all magic.”
She let out a half laugh, looking down at the floor of the car. “So maybe they’ll skip dissecting my brain then.”
“Oh, definitely not. They’re going to cut that fucker up into the tiniest pieces and weigh it and take scans of it and pretend it has all the answers to the secrets of human existence. And everyone else will believe it does too. For a week. Then they’ll forget and they’ll do something else. Something ethnic sounding. Something where you have to buy a lot of oils and shit.”
“Humans are stupid.”
“We are. Listen, if you decide to kill us all, please let me see your labia first.”
“Just my labia?”
“Well everything past that gets really sort of gross.”
“Yeah, it does.”
The car drove for another twenty minutes of awkward silence and came to a stop, popping the doors open and flashing an unsubtle message encouraging us to leave in bright red on the screen. Really, it’s sort of hard to follow self-indulgent ranting and labias with anything more exciting, so it was probably for the best.
We stepped out in front of what looked like a dive bar that had screens flanking either side of the door. They flashed through photos of attractive women dressed as geisha. Well, dressed wasn’t right. They were naked. They wore geisha makeup and hair styles. Or maybe they were just generic hairstyles that were popularly assumed to be geisha styles. You know, I wasn’t entirely fit to speak on the subject.
“You work here?”
She punched me in the shoulder. I tried to hide how much it hurt so she didn’t take the labia inspection off the table as a pre-genocide last wish. Nobody showed their labia to wimps. That’s just common sense.
“Serious time now.”
She said the words and put on a stern face like she had at Darvish’s. I did the same, so much as I could. Mostly I kept staring at the nude women. There was a bright neon sign above the door, I finally noticed. It labeled the building Graver’s Turkish Bath and Health Spa. Right. So not a bar.
We opened the door and were greeted by a smiling woman who started into a gratuitous welcome, squeezing her breasts together beneath a thin silk bathrobe as she spoke.
“Oh my, master. Welcome back to—” She stopped when she saw Marine. “You.” She frowned, immediately dropping all charm from her voice and posture. “What do you want?”
Marine’s voice was razor sharp and irritable. “I want not to get talked to like that by a prostitute. Take me to Graver.”
“He said he don’t wanna be— Hey!”
Marine started walking off down the hallway just to the right of the greeter’s little podium. Her heels clacked as she chased Marine down.
“I said, you ain’t— oof.”
She ran into a wall trying to stay at Marine’s side around a corner. I kept myself a few feet back as we came into a communal bath area. People were getting hand jobs. At least five people. I saw a lot of dicks. There were tits too, but it was like walking through an old man boner factory and honestly, I don’t know what the appeal was supposed to be. None of them seemed to notice us and the greeter prostitute didn’t say anything. Maybe it was a rule or something. Make sure not to kill any erections when passing through the hand job buffet. The publicly available cock garden really made me wonder what possible appeal there could be to getting a hand job in a room full of other people also getting a hand job. Maybe I just didn’t see the true joy of orgasming within moaning distance of a guy who was going to have a heart attack in a
