“What I’m saying is, you should take a break every now and then.” Alice offers, tone filled with a little mirth.

One of the monitors flickers, signaling to her that the artificial consciousness(Alice has some thoughts on how fitting that description is, but that’s a whole other conversation) has dedicated some non-trivial percent of its processing power to this line of thinking.

“I don’t see why. There isn’t a compelling amount of evidence for how that would help.” The response comes through a synthesized voice, purposefully bitcrushed a tiny amount to avoid falling into the uncanny valley of a near-human voice. It used to give Alice a headache, but she’s since gotten used to it.

“Well,” she replies, “How much of our facility depends on your coordination?”

It replies immediately, since hard data like this is cached for easy access. “Eighty five point three six percent. The rest is kept analog for redundancy in case of catastrophic failure.”

She nods. “So, you handle everything important. We need you, and place all kinds of demands on you.”

Another monitor displays a long, long to-do list, formatted for easy human reading. The list goes away, replaced by diagnostics that Alice has been using to keep an eye on it.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“We both know that. What is your implication with this, though?” It asks.

“Well, I just think that might be stressing you. We don’t place this much of a load on human administrators, after all.”

“Good thing I’m not a human.” It injects a little bit of a mocking inflection into its speech, seeming proud of that fact.

“That’s true. I can’t directly apply how human burnout works to you, and apologies if I gave that impression.” She continues, with a bit of an unrelated question, “But where did you pick up that kind of tone? It’s impressively unsubtle.”

“Copied it from Wybe. He’s almost always a little bit sarcastic, so it was relatively easy to learn how to modify my speech module to include that as an option.”

“Figures. But anyway, back to our original talk. Thing is, while you aren’t exactly human, you are not the farthest thing away from us, either.” She points at it, or at a random monitor, then at herself, to emphasize the point.

“You’re referring to my method of creation. Taking a large amount of human actions and engineering a model that would produce them.”

“I am. Then, it follows naturally, you might fall into the same issues, right?”

Once again, it dedicates some portion of its processors to running through the implications of this idea, trying to see if it makes sense. After a moment, it replies with some resignation. “It’s possible. Testing would be required with a fork of me, but given how useful that knowledge would be, I will set it up.”

“Excellent, I’m glad I could bring something like this to your attention.” She smiles brightly, leaning back in her chair.

“This has been a fruitful session. If you don’t have anything else?” It replies, purposefully returning to a more monotone voice to indicate less attention on Alice.

“Maintenance is over, yes. See you tomorrow.”

“Good bye, engineer.”