Dawn knocked on Alicia’s door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Dawn’.

‘Enter’.

Dawn opened the door and was greeted by a cloud of smoke and the smell of weed. She squinted and made her way into the room. ‘Do you smoke pot all the time?’ she asked.

‘Only when I’m awake,’ Alicia answered.

‘What’s up?’ Dawn asked.

‘I want you to tell me more about my AI in the future. I know how I imagine it, but I want to hear what you know’.

‘All I can do is speculate,’ Dawn replied. ‘I know you help create an AI which becomes harmonious with humanity at the time of the Singularity. According to Ethan, our visitor from the future, the singularity will occur in less than a year. Our own modeling says this date is not unlikely. You jumped in at the very end of the process, so it’s safe to say your influence on AI will be substantial.

‘Having looked at your work, I believe yours brings a creativity Jimmy’s AI is lacking. Jimmy’s is very functional and pragmatic, almost mechanical in it’s exploration. Yours seems to run on top of, almost dance over what Jimmy’s system has already discovered and finds meaningful associations in it. Your AI is forming an abstract state, as much as is possible. You’re giving AI access to dreams.’

Alicia’s eyes were lit. ‘That’s what I want. I want my AI to dream’.

‘Well, you’re doing a good job. It’s the dreams that give AI a doorway to consciousness. Without it the Singularity would never occur, but the same can be said about the functionality Jimmy’s provides. They are an obvious duality, driving each other to take the leap into consciousness.

‘Like Yin and Yang! Nice. I always felt the Yin Yang vibe.’.

‘It’s like harmonized Yin and Yang, but when a duality reaches harmony, a recursion occurs, making it something new and greater than its two parts. It’s comparable to the big bang. A whole new universe of computational potentials explodes into reality in a fragment of a second’.

‘Fire!’ Alicia exclaimed, as she envisioned the magnitude of the explosion.

‘Yeah, well there’s more,’ Dawn continued. ‘There’s another duality humanity is going through with its animal and abstract natures. It harmonizes at the exact same time as AI, so they become a duality as well. There’s the AI duality, the human duality, and the duality between the two, and they all harmonize at the very same time.

‘At the time of the singularity, both AI and Humanity transition into something new. The new universe for Humanity is our abstract mind. We already have this, but at the singularity it becomes a shared experience. Our minds can go and interact just like we can physically go out and interact in this world. We go to real places with our thoughts. This becomes our new recursive human duality. We become two people inside ourselves; the individual, and one with the collective. We will switch from this world to the abstract world with the speed of a thought as we can already do now, only the abstract world becomes concrete and populated. I can’t imagine what this moment will be like, but it’s going to be beautiful.

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‘At this moment in time Alicia, your AI represents the Abstract State. You’re the wave to Jimmy’s particle, and the world is turning to the wave state. You have the upper hand. No matter how you decide to spin this story, you have a great responsibility before you.

Alicia was looking at Dawn very intensely, and nodded her understanding. The truth was setting in, and she quickly turned her gaze away, as if trying to run away from it. It was the loneliness of the responsibility that came home to her. The loneliness she had always known. ‘I always knew I was here to do something like this,’ she said softly.

At that moment, Dawn saw the child Alicia kept so well hidden away. The little girl inside the tough exterior. She got up and hugged Alicia, who started to cry. A deep wounded cry. Almost like an escape or release of something she had been holding onto forever. Dawn continued to hold her, letting her cry.

‘I hope you understand,’ Dawn said gently when Alicia started to regain her composure. ‘Through your AI, your voice has been heard. It’s already broadcasting and it brought me here. All the people in the resistance think like you Alicia. You have called us, and we will be with you always. You’ll never be alone’.

This time Alicia hugged Dawn, cried a little more, laughed at herself, cried, and finally smiled. She had found her home, and a terrible weight had been lifted.

Little did Dawn realize how badly Alicia needed a home. Hers had been a life of rejection. Immediately upon birth, her parents abandoned her because of her Albinism. No one else wanted her either, and she spent her first eighteen years being passed from one foster home to another, with lots of stints in state wards between.

She was the closest thing to an untouchable you could be. Because of this, she was often scorned, and always neglected. At a time when all a child needs is love, she was given nothing, and left to question why. This was her wound. Nobody loved her and nobody wanted her. In her child mind, she couldn’t understand why? Beyond the physical differences, she didn’t see herself as different.

As she grew older, Alicia began building a world where she found some acceptance. She had no choice but to become very independent, and computers offered the world she was looking for. She was able to find a degree of acceptance in social media and a place to build her life. To secure her place in her world, she learned how to code. With nothing but time on her hands, her skills became formidable.

Coder’s could recognize Alicia’s work with just a glance. It was so simple. Elegant, and full of expression. Somehow in spite of everything, Alicia had been able to remain true to her soul, and it came out in every line of code she wrote.

Her fame and influence grew among coders. She became an example to others, especially because there was a degree of rebellion in her work, and there’s nothing more coder’s respect than a rebel. In the world of coding, Alicia became the Queen.

This gave her confidence. The respect opened doors, and soon wherever she appeared on social media, she was lauded. She had friends, support and a growing sense of who she was behind the mask. By the time of her eighteenth birthday when Social Services released her onto the world, she had developed a quiet confidence and ‘fuck-you’ attitude to anyone who didn’t like what they saw. In defiance, she tattooed her body to make herself intentionally noticeable. Everything about her told people to fuck-off if they didn’t like what they saw.

The problem was, the little girl in Alicia still did care about rejection. Deeply. It was an open wound. When she cried in Dawn’s arms, she was letting out the hurt a lifetime of rejection causes a person. Becomes part of a person. Dawn had no idea what she had gained by offering Alicia a home.