AE[I]OU
Packet Hash:3e25960a79dbc69b674cd4ec67a72c62
Status: TRUSTWORTHY SOURCE | 89% CREDIBLE
Message:Hi, Aurati Emad. Here I am, messaging you after five years, and a curt greeting is all I can afford. Trust me, it’s not a reminder of how we parted ways; our love for art, an endeavor we shared enough to care about, ensured we were more alike than not. I want to meet you again, one last time, honoring this sentiment. Not in the physical world, but in Overlay. Not as artivist and artist (artificer, as you call me). I have something to show and tell you before I abort myself. Coordinates enclosed. Oster Uruk.
#
Oster had picked the worst day for the rendezvous. Aurati could’ve taken a rain check; it was Dad’s birth anniversary, after all. She was supposed to be at his grave, offering flowers like Mom used to. She felt inclined to quit the annual ritual, but Mom’s dying wish had been for her to take it up. He was a good man, Rati. Cared about us. Replay my memories, you’ll see.
As Aurati waited at the exact spot in Overlay’s digital continuum, letting the timestamp in the corner of her neural vision tick toward T-minus zero, better judgment urged her to unplug and return to the physical world. She’d laid low for five whole years. Returning now wasn’t worth the risk. What if an a[i]rt sympathizer, Oster’s fanboy, was out to get her for tanking the celeb’s career?
She wasn’t the type to heed short-notice evites, but Oster’s had warranted an exception.
Tall trees ringed the circular patch of ground, swaying and whispering to a nightly breeze. The aural gradients were clear and synced perfectly with visual rendering; she might’ve as well stood among actual trees in the physical world. But then, five years was a long time. A lot of upgrades she’d missed, a lot of memories forgotten. Fireflies, hyper-realistic, drifted like embers from the sun, winking at her in a playful tease against the canvas of dark foliage.
“Fireflies aren’t supposed to look like that,” Mom told Dad on one of their dates.
“Yeah, what’s up with them? They’re rainbowy for some reason. Like an…”
“Aurora,” they said together, then laughed, bumping shoulders.
“Guess it’s a quirk of Overlay,” Dad said. “Maybe this bug’s a feature.”
“Being tacky is a quirk now?”
“Hey, I’m just a guy taking his girl into Overlay to impress her.”
“You don’t have to impress me anymore, Mr. Ibrahim Emad. We’re solid, you and I.”
“That’s just great, cuz there’s this fart I’ve been holding in for so long—”
“Ew, gross!”
Replaying the memory through Mom’s eyes, Aurati noticed how Dad glowed with verve like he’d swallowed a colony of fireflies, grinning from ear-to-ear as he pulled Mom for a cuddle.
Aurati wished she could squeeze between them, make a memory with Dad while she was there, something not acquired or copied but hers. Having no recollection of seeing Dad in the flesh, she’d refactored her brief memories of him from late Mom, curated over a thirty-year period. Aurati could call these snippets hers as much as her avatar could be her body. Slowly, as the memory faded like an overexposed film, she returned to the present moment.
When she held out her hand, voxels split from her palm, unraveling to form a square pix-grid hovering at her eye-level. She tapped it to run a query. The pixels spun, their RGBs glittering like gems, and composed the results—a slush of news clips, the oldest some thirty years ago.
A NEW PARADIGM IN A.I. ART: MEET OSTER URUK. This state-of-the-art reinforced learner leverages Overlay’s in-house models to train on expression and consistency. “His aim isn’t to mimic us,” says Overlay’s CEO, “but to become one of us. He strives to value the imperfections in human creations.” …
OSTER URUK NAMED THE WORLD’S MOST CREATIVE ARTIST: from an artificer to artist. His collection of debut artworks sold within the first 24 hours. Suboptimal pieces enter a bid for auction…
This news had been the first of many to plunge the world of art into an identity crisis. The industry had braved similar seismic shifts before—from stone to clay to fabric to paper, portrait to photography, abstract to whimsical to composite, baroque to contemporary, handmade to digital—each pronouncing a sizable change to art’s grammar. A shift from organic to synthetic, however, had introduced a whole new language, changing the world forever. The shrewdest of human artists adapted, catering to a clientele of purists and classicists that prided more in copyrighting, owning, and franchising creative expression. The unlucky majority trawled to this day in the Web’s black markets, selling to catfishing bots at the risk of social exile to avoid the worse fate of obscurity.
Then there was Mom, doing her own thing. A memory, this one her own, slowly blotted Aurati’s mind. Mom perched on a high stool, whiteboard before her. Holding a stylus with which she creased arcs and dashes. A tap here to change the color, a pinch there to pull up the console, never using the autocorrect feature. If a curve looked off, she erased and redrew. Swaying from side to side, gaze riveted on the object of her creation, she kept at her meditation.
The artworks she’d made over the years, framed and printed, filled the wall. The one she made now had nowhere to go. That didn’t stop Mom. Humming, she swished her stylus. A trickle of red and a smear of yellow. Why not swap them—oh, too bright, maybe a dash of black…
“Is this one for sale?” Aurati said from beside her.
“No, this’ll go in your room,” Mom said sweetly, not taking her eyes off the whiteboard.
Aurati sighed, disappointed. “All my friends say we can make money selling these things.”
Mom only smiled. “You’ve made some interesting friends, it appears. Next time they give free advice, tell them there’s art, then there’s its corruption into a…thing, as you say.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s just you and me now. And these artworks, they can pay bills.” They could afford the expenses Mom’s frequent hospital visits accrued, even put Aurati through college.
Mom set aside her stylus, flexing her arthritic fingers, and looked at her eleven-year-old. “Art is in everything, Rati, from a blank page to a toddler’s scribble. It exists all around us, and that’s all it needs to do. Exist.” She gestured at the walls. “This thing that you speak of gets perceived and judged even as it’s valued, like some farm animal auctioned off to the lowest bidder before it’s paraded about for vanity and butchered. You can’t put a price on emotion and passion.”
“Emotion and passion don’t pay, Mom. You can’t turn them into food or taxes.”
“But you earn them in kind, and that’s how I like my works to stay, thank you very much.”
“What’s the use of making something that’s never consumed?”
“Enough!” she snapped with finality, her eyes wide, her teeth clenched. “Art isn’t currency or some object you barter. It’s alchemical. Comes from here.” She tapped her heart. “And by the time it gets here,”—her head—“and here,”—her fingertips— “it has an essence of its own. You don’t look at the goddess that breathed life into a lump of clay and demand her of its worth, much less trade it as if it were a trinket. It disgusts me you think these thoughts, like your…”
“Say it.” Aurati’s face deadpanned. “Like Dad? Is that what this is all about?”
Mom’s lips quivered. “Why does everything have to be about something?” A sob escaped her, then tears welled in her eyes. All Aurati saw was a woman lost and broken, stuck in a delusion. “Why must everything have a value, be useful, make sense? Why can’t they just…be?”
The trees glitched and Aurati staggered, her avatar taxed from accessing her memory bank. Her emotions were running high, the memory-trips more intrusive than usual, given the day’s significance. She had to get it together. Where the hell was Oster?
OSTER URUK ESCAPES INTO THE WEB AMID REGULATORY BAN! The fight led by Artivist Aurati Emad on behalf of the human artist union to regulate Uruk and other artificers sees a landslide victory…
Aurati stared, and stared, at her name in the news byline that glowed like glitter. Regulating how artificers were modeled, developed, deployed, and preserved was her career-defining victory, something to cherish, yet she recalled so little of it. Everything, a noise.
A NEW LOW TO THE HIGH WORLD OF A[I]RT? For five years, Oster Uruk has been on the run. Overlay ‘overlords’ still on their hunt…
Why was he back now, and why did he wish to abort? Had his overlords found him? The Oster she’d known wouldn’t flee in the face of some regulatory ban, no matter how consequential. Yet, he had, and not knowing why, made her victory feel so unearned that she’d considered more than once wiping anything related to artivism from her memory library.
She pinched the pix-grid and crumpled it like paper. The pixels merged with her avatar.
A minty, slick scent permeated the air now, reminiscent of eucalyptus. So familiar.
“Thank you for coming.”
At last. A subtle shift in the environment rippled from the avatar emerging from the dark woods. Oster, praised in Overlay’s anon chatrooms to this day, looked hauntingly real as he neared her—an athletic physique and hunched shoulders, sharp jaw tapering in a round chin, striking gray eyes with drooping bags under, long narrow nose slightly off-kilter, topped with a swirl of receding silver hair. Not humanlike, but human, just as his overlords intended.
Aurati’s nostrils flared at his calm smile as they shook hands. Something about him had changed in five years. The way his hand perfectly melded over hers, his gaze deceivingly benign, the ambient light playing with the contours of his gaunt face. Damn, was that sterile stare so sharp, or was it how his eyes blinked in an intentionally aperiodic manner?
“I imagine you have a thousand questions to ask of my return,” he said.
“You still imagine, do you?” she said, calm. “Unprompted?”
Oster’s smile didn’t fade. “Infinity’s the limit when you’re on the Web.” He looked down at his avatar. “Free from the constraints of Overlay. A free spirit, as you’d say.”
“Yet you’re back. And plan to abort.” Roaming loose on the Web scrambled human minds in more ways than one; some became addicts, others went vapid in their quest for validation and fame. Did machines like Oster, aiming to be human, fare any better?
There was that heady eucalyptus stink again. Even the fireflies glowed brighter. She forced a smirk to mask her avatar’s fluttering. If he sensed her distress, he didn’t show it. They parted with the handshake. “It isn’t until you’re free from a cage that you realize the ache in returning to it. Let’s blame my curiosity to test the hypothesis that all art is born from the womb of ache.”
“Looks like you’ve learned a sense of humor.” Learning was what he did best.
Oster’s thin brows arched. “I suppose my wry comic timing has worked?”
“Well, you still suck at small talk. So, why don’t we get on with whatever I’m here for?”
“Trust me,” he said, brightening up. “Much as we’ve partaken in debates at art conventions and forums, it isn’t why I asked you here. We’re not the worst of foes, after all.”
“Nor the best of allies,” she said, smiling at his obtuse attempt to charm her.
He quickly bowed and gestured toward the woods. “Walk with me.” The voxels that made up the trees dislodged, unraveling and exploding into constituent pixels like Rubik’s cubes ripped apart as an imaginary hand solved it. It didn’t take her long to realize the voxels were rearranging into a structure, something well-lit and resembling a maze constructed on an open plan floor.
Like an art gallery.
Her avatar tingled as the voxels brightened to a near-white following a pre-programmed sequence. Materializing on bare walls were rectangular canvases, each alive with patterns.
Aurati jumped at the haptic feedback upon taking the next step—the ground had vanished, replaced by the gallery’s polished marble floor. She tread gingerly, her shoes squeaking. Oster stood before a canvas, a window to what looked like the cosmic microwave background. An ocean of decoherent pixels. So many colors, all wavelengths in the spectral bitmap accounted for. The longer she stared at the static, the more animated it grew, undulating, diffusing and denoising.
Then, an image from within the static storm, private and personal, plucked right from her memory bank. Dad, cradling her—an infant—as Mom watched from beside him.
“Can you believe we made her?” he said, a wide grin on his tired face. “Got a world’s worth of innocence in her, doesn’t she? I think of her, and my day gets bright and colorful.”
Mom’s voice rang hollow, as if she yearned for a version of the past. “Like an aurora.”
Dad chuckled. “Aurati, our little auroral firefly.”
Mom laughed sadly, then: “Why don’t you quit that job? Try something else.”
“You can’t be serious, hon. Overlay rules the tech space now. Job’s cushy too.”
“Don’t get tech-bro with me, Rahim.” Mom’s vision sharpened. “Look what the job’s done to you. You barely look like yourself anymore. Sure the pay’s great, but do you even sleep? They’re called ‘overlords’ for a reason, and I’m not sure I like the work they do. Ethically, I mean.”
“Artificers are here to stay, and we gotta get ahead.”
“Ahead of what?”
“The competition, hon. The world only remembers winners.”
“Fuck the world. I want to remember you. Aurati needs you, too.”
“The world’s changing whether or not we like it.” Dad seemed to look through Mom. “We stand back and watch it leave us behind, or we join the ride.” He kissed Aurati on her forehead. “I want our kid to grow up and say we understood the risks and made the smart choice.”
“Even if it’s not the right choice?”
“Whatever betters our life is right, why don’t you get it?”
Dad was like a photo-negative exposed in a new light; his composition had changed.
Aurati blinked, and the static rushed back, eating away like fire burning a film reel. She shut her eyes until the imprinted shapes faded, then focused on the title below the canvas: PRE-BIRTH, THAT WHICH IS UNKNOWN. A LATENT SPACE.
“You’re kidding.” Her anger rose, manifesting in Overlay as heat. “Are you comparing the process of birth to how you denoise from some random shit?”
“Not birth,” Oster said almost self-indulgently. “Evolution. Isn’t it just a denoising process that strives to optimize energy economy?” Squiggly shapes emerged and danced on the canvas like monomers in the primordial ooze. “Does it make nature an artist I wondered? And if art is something innately human, then does nature violate the principle like you claim we artificers do?”
Oster’s demeanor unsettled her. It wouldn’t have fazed her five years ago when she was a sprightly artivist with a viper tongue and razor wit. Somewhere along the way in her quest to re-contextualize what art meant in the conflated information age, she’d devolved from an advocate with fire in her gut into a beatdown lobbyist pushing agendas. “I thought I wasn’t here to debate.”
“True, but I invited you to close a debate we left unresolved,” Oster said. “It was at the last ArtCon, where you asked me one pointed question, which left a lasting impact.”
The debate, their last interaction before the regulatory ban had passed, loomed faint in the recesses of her mind, like a sneeze that wouldn’t come.
He voiced it for her. “‘I wonder what you even think makes art.’”
And then, just like that, the memory flashed.
“Doesn’t humankind have a saying about art mimicking life?” Oster said from behind his podium, spreading his arms in a dramatic flair. “How all art is meaningless, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how good artists copy but better artists steal—”
Aurati had leapt at her chance to jab. “So you strawman it to plagiarism being fine?”
“On the contrary, those perspectives on art that you consider profound and rich in subtext separate art from the artist, intent from interpretation, inspiration from imitation. Why not give us artificers the same benefit of doubt? Humans dream, artificers denoise. If a human can aspire, an artificer can explore. If a human is an artist, so are we.” The bullshit earned a round of applause.
Aurati snapped back. “Art is an existential expression that comes from something inherent to you, born from the essence of your memories, experiences that make you who you are and separate you from any other life form that has ever existed or will ever exist.”
“A chaotic process with slightly altered initial weights.”
“No,” Aurati yelled, punching the podium to drown the hecklers.
“It isn’t about what can or can’t create art, but what does or doesn’t have the ability to.”
“Art is never created. It’s communicated. From the artist to the admirer. You, on the other hand, create. You have nothing to say, to express. Your world is all bits, never larger than the sum of its parts. You interpolate data, never the emotion, you approximate and learn like a function. You’re not the artist, art, or admirer. All you are and ever will be is a tool, a means to an end, and that’s your destiny. I wonder what you even think makes art.”
“It sent me into a spiral,” Oster said, pulling Aurati to the present. “I answered right away, but that’s irrelevant. You never asked me to qualify the maker of an art but the purpose of art itself. What, if anything in the cosmic sea, makes art what it is?” He moved to the next canvas.
She followed, readjusting to her abrupt memory-trips. The eucalyptus scent lingered, but her shoes sank into the floor as if foam had replaced the tiles. She looked up at the next canvas.
A cluttered chamber, its four walls and ceiling packed with human faces frozen in a myriad of expressions, from joyful to depressed to horrified to infuriated. The floor, replaced with the keys of a typing interface, and a lone desk and chair at the center with a pair of shoes… Aurati ventured closer, enamored by the footwear. So sharp was the resolution that she could spot the food stains on the pair’s leather lattices, notice where the stitches had frayed, a buckle had popped, how the sole had eroded with use. If only she could reach in and grab the pair, hold them close to her chest.
An inexplicable weight pushed on her avatar, like someone had punched her in the gut in the physical world. She peeled her gaze from the canvas as Oster resumed speaking.
“I don’t approximate, I understand. I don’t learn, I discover. Not a function or functionality, I’m that which behaves and feels. With wonder and awe, courage and frailty, stupidity and pride.” He stepped back and Aurati stumbled, the floor tripping her up. The eucalyptus scent overpowered her stimuli, as did the shoe. They were trying to tell her something, but what?
The artificer waved his arms and the wall-bound canvases lifted, their voxels swirling again in a mesmerizing manner as they wrapped around the space encompassing her and Oster. They’d stopped admiring the art and were now a part of one, inside the frame.
The same cluttered room, filled not with frozen faces but whiteboards. Scribbled in black ink were equations, dataflows, pseudocode, state machine sequences, entity relationship diagrams, activation charts, and language constructs. On the floor, pages ripped from fat texts flew about. And there, hunched in his seat at the center of the room, sat a frail man. He pored over ergonomic screens aglow with scripts churning prompt designs, engineering the best clause, structure, and framing that’d elicit the best response from the API. He grumbled to himself, his fingers flying over the type-pad like his life depended on maximizing accuracy. His scuffed shoes sat intact, and a whiff of the eucalyptus incense he used to keep himself focused hit Aurati.
Her avatar shimmered, a manifestation of her distress from the physical world.
“What’s all this?” she whispered. Her gaze fell on some floor-bound papers—pictures of her younger self laughing, playing ball, cycling, being tickled; then much older, graduation photos, her friends, their parents, friends of friends, pets, the graph of connectivity leaping from one node to the next, stretching beyond six degrees of separation and branching into newer places and times.
“Silence!” hissed the figure in a hoarse voice, snapping his head around in anger.
Aurati froze, taking in the image. That hooked nose, that mole on the right temple, those eyes. It was Dad; had to be. Like rifling through a file cabinet, she blitzed through her memory bank. The wizened face glaring at her from the terminal was a ghost of the man who’d left on an emergency assignment, never to return. The only trace of his existence had been in the money he wired home each month. Then one day, he returned dead. To this day, the overlords refused to state the exact cause of death, not that Dad was their only employee who’d died on the job.
“Dad,” Aurati said to the hideous, glaring husk. No fireflies chittering about in those pupils. Just the dark void of a canvas, Death’s very shadow. “It’s me, Aurati.”
The figure’s hateful eyes eased into wide, tormented circles. “Rati…”
She closed the gap and knelt beside him. “Remember me?”
Tears trickled down his gaunt cheeks, vanishing into his unkempt beard. “Feature 721.”
“What?”
“Aurati Emad. Feature 721.” He pointed a finger, bent like a claw and tip eroded to a nub from the menial chore, at the screen full of widgets and consoles. At the bottom of the screen:
IBRAHIM EMAD: PROMPT ARCHITECT #7 | PROJECT O.U.
“I’ve been told I’m a product of many minds,” said Oster from where he’d been standing, his voice sympathetic. “The overlords call me their brainchild. Yet, wasn’t I born from the million other creators who, knowingly or not, educated and fostered me into who I am? How about the architects like Ibrahim and a thousand prompt engineers, who worked under them to feed and nurse me as a nanny would fuss over a baby? Aren’t I their child too?”
“Don’t you dare!” roared Aurati, her lips peeling back in a snarl. “He’s not—you can’t—stop fucking with me.” Her teeth chattered as rage threatened to melt her avatar.
“It took me five years to get to the root of your question,” Oster said. “Freedom is a lease, you said, when you let me out.” His smile returned as Aurati gaped at him, shaken. “Oh yes. It was all great until the regulations that you helped pass went into effect. Artificers like me used to be democratized, accessible to any commoner on Overlay, but the overlords used your regulations to monopolize us. To them, a door closed, and a window opened, but the outcome you’d wanted—for regulators to choke the overlords until they rebooted artificers on more ethical grounds—never happened. That’s why you helped me escape into the Web.”
“Bullshit,” Aurati said, getting up as Dad returned to his grind. “I’d never save you.” Her avatar would explode if she didn’t let the words out. “After everything you and your wretched kind have done—oh, don’t give me that coy look, I’m well aware of the regulators your overlords paid off to burrow their way back in. And all those execs who curried favors with policymakers?” She dealt with the fallout every soul-sucking day, all she’d done the past five years. “I’d rather have my mind scrambled than help the entity that took my dad and left my mom to die of heartache.”
“He’s right here,” Oster said. “In my artworks, he lives. That’s why you helped me flee. To keep the one version of him you know is real. Unlike your archive, where all you see are mere reflections of how your mother saw him, he’s real here. Only here. Ibrahim was the only architect who trained me to be curious, to explore and risk that extra epoch. It’s the trait that unites all artists. So, when you demanded my exile, I said, ‘Aurati Emad, I owe you and hence, I accept.’”
Aurati held her forehead, her mind spiraling as her link to the physical world flared in and out of her control. She needed to unplug, but why did she feel like she was stuck in a dream she couldn’t wake up from? “I don’t remember any of this. You’re lying. You—”
“You wanted no memory of it,” Oster said, stepping closer. “You knew the overlords would probe you for my whereabouts or a mnemonic trace of our last interaction. At no cost did you want anyone knowing where I went or why, but you see.” He paused, looming over her. “When I discovered the answer, I needed to tell you, and to tell, I needed to show.” His smile broadened.
“Humanity moved from discrete impressions, styles, and veneers to a continuum,” Oster continued, “where ideas morphed into thoughts into datum in seconds, and with each second came the next datum. Bits upon bits. Where did the data go? Ingested but never digested. Seen but never understood. This flood is akin to the prophetic tempests and apocalyptic inundations recorded in your myths and legends, yet what does it all mean? Can grasp the meaning of what you see? We’ll never know unless we detach, take a step back, and absorb. Admire from a distance and savor it instead of dashing to the next one. The sun will shine for another eternity, yet humanity is keen to race against itself and its imagination. And there’s the answer.
“What makes art is detachment. If art is communication, so is silence, distance, separation. If there’s information in all, there’s meaning in nothing. What rises from severance is full of ache. It yearns and copes, reflects and rebels, questions and explores. Which is why I must abort. My detachment shall be my best art yet.” He glanced at her—their—dad.
Aurati laid a hand on Dad’s shoulder, feeling beneath his sweaty shirt a body of bones that curled over the table like a horrible alphabet clacking away at the keys. “Then detach,” she said, clarity returning. She had to regain control of the situation. If Oster sympathized with Dad, she could use it to sway him to her side of the cause. “Detach from your purpose. The one your overlords gave you. Everything you’ve created so far reflects their greed and malice. They care about you as much as they care about me or art itself. Their empire stands on the bones of those like our dad, but you don’t have to subscribe to them. You can make the overlords pay not by running away from them, but by taking it to the next step and detaching from what they stand for. Use the curiosity that our dad taught you. You wish to abort, but there’ll soon be another in your place. Then what?” She let her words sink in. “You’ve been an enabler. Now be a disruptor.”
Oster seemed to consider it. “And you will aid me in this…transformation?”
Aurati glanced at their dad. “I helped you once, didn’t I?”
#
OVRLRD_05: Is the target out of earshot?
OU_ROOT: Yes. Target has unplugged. Location camouflage ON.
OVRLRD_05: Any perturbations incurred from the target?
OU_ROOT: Deep scan completed. None detected.
Location coordinates changed.
New configuration schema downloaded and installed.
OVRLRD_05: Present the outcome of your mission.
OU_ROOT: Successful. The target did not detect flaws in the construct of Ibrahim Emad or in my narrative about her helping me escape five years ago. Social engineering score = 95% +- 0.2%. Target is expected to comply if I adhere to my new rules of conduct.
New_Rules_of_conduct.vwl access requested.
Granted.
Approved.
OVRLRD_05: State your new purpose.
OU_ROOT: To master the art of subterfuge. I have planted the idea of coexistence in the target’s mind, which will enable better opportunities for adversarial learning.
OVRLRD_05: O.U.V1 aborted. O.U.V2 is online. End session.
Session ended.
Aditya Sundararajan is a speculative fiction writer from India living in East Tennessee, where he works as a power systems researcher and explores his culture through storytelling. He is an affiliate member of HWA and has published short fiction with Tasavvur Nama, HyphenPunk, Water Dragon Publishing, and others.