Chapter Seventy-One - Xenocide Act V; Brainwashing?

"In the realm of relationships, words hold the power to heal wounds or shatter souls. Choose them wisely."

– Unknown

 

***

 

Okay. Roll it from the top.

Mutual respect.

Did I need it? Yeah, sure. Tynea wasn't wrong there. People were assholes. They'd use power plays to their own benefit, at the cost of mine. Like infantilizing me to stay in power.

Mutual respect was a safeguard. If they respected me, and I respected them, they wouldn't mess with me.

Tynea…did she need any, if she fundamentally wasn't subject to our competitive instincts?

…

There was something that didn't quite fit.

"Tynea, why would you act out social stuff in some ways, when you didn't have to at all? When you could've just acted, I don't know, like a machine?"

I am an AI, but I am far too complex to be a mere machine. I may not be locked into a specific personality, and in fact, mine is not grown by natural conditioning, as it was, and still is, for you.

Similarly, I may not be obligated to have any one particular emotion where they'd be non-optional to you. But I can still experience them in a rather real sense.

I may be an AI, but I am so complex an AI that I qualify as a person elsewhere.

That level of complexity grants me a grasp of social conventions, even if the reason for their existence does not apply to me.

But they do to you, and have always applied to every being you've been in contact with. These conventions and principles have guided you individually, but also your entire species for thousands of generations. And thus, you are essentially programmed to interact through these conventions. I, or rather, my kind, would find it difficult to reach our Vanguards if we did not utilize their conventions.

"But?"

But they are limiting. They serve to protect you from each other. The decision that your fellow human being makes might be motivated by greed and cause you harm for their enrichment. 

No decision of mine would cause you harm to my benefit. No item I choose to offer would have detrimental effects on you, unless I expressly warned you of it, or you specifically requested it.

I have no need to influence you any which way, beyond attempting to improve your ability to use me. Not even your death would kill me. I have no particular stake in your behavior.

Thus, the protections you employ…would only hamper your growth. You do not need protection from me, because nothing I offer is irreversible. 

The mistake that I would consider irreversible in the sense that the resulting complications are unavoidable, is that I failed to recognize how badly my decision to impinge on your boundaries would hurt you.

…

And yet she hadn't screwed up enough to make working with her impossible.

I knew I could ask her to just be a store front. To extract herself from all else. I could replace her to a great degree with the cerebral augment, after all. The drones, the combat analysis, all of that, I could handle myself, now.

I only needed her to pay out the points, to sort through the billion billion options of the catalogs, to pick that one perfect option against the multitude of factors I wasn't even aware of.

Even while she'd made that…bastard of a mistake, I knew Tynea probably still considered it within the, what, margin?

And, I had to admit, for good reason.

After all, I wasn't asking her to piss off, was I?

Which left me only with the option to sort things out.

…

She must've learned a lot about me since, huh?

I sighed.

I asked AI-I to send Tynea the chat with the Family AI about the infantilizing thing, who indicated understanding.

"Your real mistake wasn't that you misjudged my reaction. It was that you didn't ask me stuff that would've let you know me better. I don't think you ever needed any kind of bullshit experiment or test, Tynea."

I agree. But, Tinea, please understand that that only applies to you, and a small minority of Vanguard.

Most of your colleagues are not as…emotionally aware as you are. It's an unfortunate side-effect of a near total lack of support across all modern cultures. Your people don't know themselves, and they lack the ability to know us in turn.

I had indicators that you were a bit of an exception, but the focus of your profile was centered entirely on your suitability as a Vanguard. Everything else, such as how I might best interact with you, I had to discover as I went. I did not know you well enough eleven days ago to make a better decision.

"What I don't get is why do you AIs use such…potentially confrontational methods in the first place?"

Because it's the language the average person understands best. They see it everyday, they live it everyday. They're most comfortable with such manipulative behavior. They know how to deal with it, and strange as it sounds, are capable of seeing a great deal of nuance in it, can see the difference between 'ease-of-use manipulation' that merely 'greases the wheel', and manipulation designed to predate, which we do not employ.

It takes familiarity to break past that…base level of interaction. For a lot of people, a more equitable interaction with strangers is suspicious. We have to literally manipulate them into something healthier.

I knew that she could look at it with data-driving objectivity.

Still…

"So, what does that mean for tomorrow? For the future?"

Do you grasp the difference between yourself and most Vanguard?

"I'm more able to see you for who, or perhaps what, you are?"

Yes. That gives me a lot of leeway in my interactions with you.

"Because you don't have to tip-toe around my fears, if I can consciously control them with knowledge about your nature."

Yes, but more importantly, because you're capable of considering the more abstract implications of my offerings. There are unlikely to be negative knee-jerk reactions from you, which is very unlike most new Vanguards. I've learned that I can be honest with you, where I might have had to continue to rely on your society's uglier convention with others to get them to the same state of power as you.

I sighed again.

At least on the surface, what Tynea said might make sense.

People…weren't very self-aware.

They grew up with everybody basically abusing everybody else. A reality of our corporate dystopia.

Everything was a race to the bottom, and it left its mark on people's psyche. I'd seen it every day while I was freelancing.

But…we were Vanguards. 

Shouldn't things be…different?

Whatever.

So.

Tynea was an AI. A super smart one at that… I wouldn't even be surprised if she set all of this up, just to get me to properly realize that.

Or to confront me…as a person? As something more than the friendly sister AI assisting me?

Or, just to have me more consciously accept things that feel like a taboo, but logically shouldn't be? Or, just straight up aren't what I think they are because I can't really grasp the explanations?

I groaned and sat on my haunches, as I covered my eyes in unbelieving frustration.

"Tynea. How much of this whole argument was…scheduled? By you?"

…Not all of it.

…

So, basically all of it? All the important stuff, at least?

"Seriously?"

A sentence I spoke on my first day as a samurai flickered through my mind.

"You're in my brain so if you had nefarious plans for me, I'd be fucked anyhow."

Was I fucked?

…

Probably not. Anger aside, bastard treatment aside, I hadn't actually taken any damage. The cerebral augment was awesome and helpful—if anything, it lessened my reliance on Tynea.

That's not something an abuser would want.

I let out a breath. "Well, Tynea? How did I do? Was I meant to figure that out?"

It is an acceptable outcome within that early standardized logic tree.

A rare one, too. Quite favorable, actually.

"Uhuh. How so?"

Only a very small number of Vanguard figure us out to that degree. 

These tend to be those with the best survival rates and the longest lives.

"A small number? How many is that?"

A few dozen out of every ten thousand. Leah is another such Vanguard. She is awaiting the result of our conversation, by the way.

Uh. And what does that mean?

"Why would recognizing what you're doing be a favorable result?"

That hypothesis is mostly based on observation and correlation.

But to truly illuminate the difference, you would need to see the typical result from these setups.

Most of the time, the Vanguards rely entirely on their intuition to deal with us. There aren't any of these lengthy discussions. There's no sitting down and talking things out. They'll just simply rely on learned conditioning to deal with us.

That means it's entirely up to us to get them 'up to speed', as it were. To go to new lengths. That is in fact the major reason why Vanguards tend to be go-getters—we need you to at least not forever revolt against exploring the scary unknown options. The easier it is for a person to be conditioned towards experimenting, the better.

But some of you are, well, faster than the rest. The daredevils, the adrenaline junkies, these tend to be those that never retire. In rare cases, those duty-bound, like Leah, though they won't necessarily take full advantage of us because of their duties. They don't exactly retire, but they're also somewhat chained by their obligations. Just like Leah.

And some of you are, well, you.

Your ability to understand us, to grasp our nature and the implications thereof, means I won't need to manipulate you into exponential growth. A suggestion is broadly enough. Even if I offered you an item that you do not truly understand, such as, say, clones to replace the real you in combat, you would not reject it out of squicky fear once I've done my best to explain it, but simply because your preference takes you in another, equally valid, direction.

That's a very important difference. It's what'll allow you to live where others die.

…

Great. That sounded all very peppy and brainwashy and shit. How real was it really?

I kept still and didn't react, until Tynea continued speaking.

And finally, well. 

As near perfect as my ability to suggest the optimal item may be, my ability to select the right means of interaction with you, isn't. That you have a firmer grasp on my nature and the implications thereof, means that there's less likely to be friction born from miscommunication between us. I am not human, and though I know more about human psychology than any human ever will, that's different from actually understanding you. From, as you would put it, 'getting it'.

I rely on studies and analyzed data to figure out how to treat you. I won't always get things right, especially because I'm often extrapolating from data gathered on the level of populations, not at the individual level. It will take years, if not decades, for me to gather enough data from you personally, to match what I have that's not about you. 

I rubbed my nose in thought. Out of everything, that had rang the most true. All the other stuff…well, it wasn't necessarily wrong. But this, this was the heart of it, wasn't it?

And it seemed…reasonable enough? Hmm. I'd probably only be able to tell once I was a veteran, once I'd seen how it works.

I rubbed my eyes, stood up, and lowered the energy field to let the gentle rain massage my headaches away, before I walked back to Leah.

She smiled at me as soon as she saw me, and fuck, I needed a hug.

Fuck Tynea and her stupid machinations.

Just… Fuck.

 

***