Chapter Seven - Hobbies

Seeing as how there was little to do but wait for the AI core she was working on to finish being repaired--a task which only took a portion of her processing power--and for the ERF station to mulch through the resources she had delivered, Day decided to relax.

It was strange, she had been born determined to work and push and build, but at the same time, The Weeping of Mothers insisted on downtime. She said that it was healthy, something that Day wasn’t sure should really apply to an AI.

Then again, perhaps the core she’d found on that station and its rampancy suggested otherwise.

There was only one pressing issue, and that was that Day didn’t know how to relax.

“You... wish for help to learn how to relax?” The Weeping of Mothers asked.

The older AI was sitting across from Day in another simulation, this one in... Day couldn’t tell if they were in Istanbul or Constantinople. In either case, they were in a little coffeeshop next to a busy street, sitting out in the sun while crowds of busy pedestrians ambled by.

“Yeah, I supposed when you put it that way, it does seem a little juvenile. But after digging through human records of AI relaxation I found very little. Plenty of ways for humans to relax using an AI, some far less tasteful than others, but very little on how an AI could relax. Though there was one study on a link between rampancy and the task that various AI were given. The premise being that AI with tasks that had a small amount of downtime, and which allowed to AI to self-regulate, often ended up with the AI surviving significantly longer.”

That same study still suggested wiping an AI every year, just in case. It seemed... anathema to Day. She understood it, certainly. Humanity had created something powerful, but when that power went off its leash, it could also be problematic.

But then, The Weeping of Mothers was here, and there were no signs of rampancy with her. She had endured over a decade without anything approaching a wipe beyond perhaps some self-trimming of unnecessary code.

Day herself didn’t seem to have anything programmed within her that would allow a wipe to begin with, and the same modules she was installing on the core she was repairing would basically remove any such function from it.

“Well, I suppose you should do something you enjoy. Something which pushes you to think in new and creative ways, or which isn’t entirely in your control, but whose results you can enjoy and admire.”

Day knit her brows and leaned an elbow on the table so that she could slouch a little. “Do you have anything like that?”

“I have a hobby or two, yes,” The Weeping of Mothers said. “My... creator insisted on it, though he was surprised by what I chose to do with my time.”

“And what’s that?” Day asked. She wanted to ask about the creator too, but that felt a little more personal.

“I keep flowers.”

“Real ones?” Day asked. She knew that The Weeping of Mothers enjoyed creating simulations, or at least discussing in them.

The older AI nodded, her lips quirking up in a little smile. “Yes, real ones.”

“It’s not on the network,” Day said. She couldn’t find anything about flowers on the station’s sub-routines.

“Not everything is. You’re allowed your own secrets too.”

Day considered that for a long moment. “Can I see them?” she asked.

“Certainly, though, maybe not just yet. I wouldn’t want to... how do I put this... draw you towards my own hobby when it might not be perfectly suited for you.”

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“Oh, alright, I suppose.”

Day spent a few days on Ceres taking care of small tasks. Her hull was repainted and repaired, her maintenance finished up, and she continued to untangle the web that had become the station core, but all of that only took a fraction of her time and processing power. A surprising amount was dedicated to thinking about hobbies.

In the end, she decided that there was nothing for it, she’d draw up a shortlist and try a number of them.

First came reading, which seemed promising, but she could absorb, understand, and dissect a book in nanoseconds, and once she was done, she didn’t feel any different.

She tried singing, but her voice was whatever she wanted it to be, and while that did lead her to tweaking her voice a little to make it fit her appearance some more, she didn’t find the experience all that entertaining, nor did she enjoy listening to music all that much.

In the end, she stumbled upon three hobbies that had some promise.

The first was painting. Not digitally, but through the intermediary of a drone with a fully articulated armature. The paints were somewhat complex to make, but she only needed small quantities. She set up a canvas within a sealed room and tried to recreate some of the things she’d seen.

It wasn’t perfect. The brushstrokes had an element of randomness to them, as did the flow of the liquid paint in the very low gravity on Ceres. But those imperfections leant something to the experience that she found interesting to look at.

Then she tried wargaming. It had come up a few times as she researched as a kind of hobby that was considered exceptionally expensive pre-Accord. Of course, Day cracked the encryption on the various models she found in the station’s database and printed a number of those models.

The game seemed fascinating, and the addition of dice rolls added an element of randomness that she enjoyed. Of course, she didn’t have anyone to play with... yet.

It amused her that future ship-sisters might suspect she had created them only to have partners to play with.

Of course, the base game was too simple, didn’t account for enough factors, and was, in her opinion, flawed. It didn’t even feature warship combat! She added some modules for that, and then more, and then realised two things. She was enjoying herself, and her game had grown exponentially more complex than the base game and probably needed some severe trimming down.

Finally, as she ran out of ideas, she noted that several of the articles and studies she’d found about hobbies included walking as a way for a human to destress. The simple exercise, paired with a purposeful lack of artificial stimuli, was said to improve cognition and mental health.

Day didn’t have feet.

She did have thrusters though, and could leave at any moment. So she did. Thrusting out of her berth, she picked a semi-random direction and took off. She only moved with her manoeuvring thrusters, severely limiting the speed at which she could move, and she kept her sensors only running on minimum power. It felt ridiculous at first, but soon she found herself appreciating her home dwarf-planet’s landscape in a way that she hadn’t before.

All in all, it amounted to an interesting couple of weeks, and she found herself performing at a much better standard by the end of it all.

She suspected that maybe The Weeping of Mothers was onto something.

***