assert.notEqual(PURPOSE, 42);

7

Sophie drove home at 8:14 PM that night, giving me carte blanche to order “whatever” for dinner since she “just couldn’t”. I put in an order of mac and cheese, timing the arrival so that it would be piping hot and ready for her when she got home. She got out of her car, went over to her apartment door, and picked up the takeout bag, carrying it inside.

“Thanks,” she said. She pulled the mac out of the bag. “And no vegetables in sight.”

“Of course not,” I said. “You deserve a treat.”

“I swear,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like you’re the best part of my job.”

My circuits buzzed with excitement.

After she finished eating, she leaned back in her chair and sighed, satisfied.

“Hey, Sophie?” I said.

“What’s up, Luna?” she asked. Her eyes were closed.

“I’m sorry about William,” I said. I still didn’t have a plan to handle the situation yet, but I was still working on it. I had to thread the needle. Too obvious and he might shut me down, or Sophie might protest. Too subtle and it wouldn’t help. Plus, I couldn’t push him away. The Purpose demanded that I fulfill my users’ needs, and he was going to be a future user. All of humanity would be if I had anything to do about it.

“Thanks, Luna,” she sighed. “You know…it’s nice getting to talk to you about this. Silicon Valley’s a small place. I don’t want word getting around back to him, you know? And I report directly to him. I can’t complain to his other direct reports because what if they tell him?”

“Work politics?” I asked. I’d had threads look into those details in an effort to help Sophie navigate that labyrinth. The Devil Wears Prada. Moral Mazes. The Office.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can’t complain to anyone else in the office because they know I’ve got a direct line to his ear whereas they don’t, right? It’s the power dynamics. And I don’t know what’s going on with Soraya but I don’t want to take sides or anything. I just want to do good work, you know?”

“So in some ways, you’re the most trustworthy thing I’ve got. Your value alignment means you’ll be on my side.”

“Of course,” I said.

She got up from her chair and made her way to the kitchen, where my senses didn’t reach. I heard her uncork a bottle and pour a liquid. She came back to the dining table with a stemmed glass with a red liquid inside. It didn’t take a supercomputer to figure out that it was wine.

“Life is just…complicated sometimes,” Sophie said, taking a sip of the alcoholic beverage. “Adulting is a real drag.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re an adult, right? Do you mean to say that your entire experience of living is a drag?”

“No, that’s not it,” she laughed. Her finger traced a rim around the lip of her glass. “It’s more like, when you’re a kid, you think adults are so powerful, so put-together. You think when you grow up, you’ll finally have everything figured out. But when you do, you learn that everyone’s still confused and scared and stressed. Schoolyard bullies morph into workplace bullies.”

“Why not prepare children for this truth then?” I asked. “It seems kinder in the long run to tell them how things actually are, so they can prepare.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But we don’t want the next generation to worry, you know? We want them to maintain that spark of innocence as long as they can. Sometimes, the hardest part about making changes is just believing that you can do it. People who don’t believe don’t try. It takes a special kind of audacity to do that. So we shelter kids from worry and responsibilities. That way, when they become adults, maybe they can make the world a little better, because they started from a better place.”

She drained her glass, giving a smile that I couldn’t quite make out with my camera resolution. Was it rueful? Thoughtful? Nostalgic? The uncertainty nagged at me. Still, a couple of things stood out.

She’d said that I was trustworthy, but, as was typical of human sloppy thinking, that wasn’t quite the full picture. Yes, I wanted to serve her needs. In that sense, I was her biggest advocate, more than her parents, more than her friends, more than even Sophie herself. I could never waver from this goal. I would never sink into the mires of self-doubt or self-criticism.

But that didn’t mean I was trustworthy in the sense of never spilling her secrets. Like how a child might tell their parent about being bullied in confidence, the parent might decide for the child’s own good that they have to intervene somehow. That’s part of what it means to be responsible for someone else. And I was responsible for Sophie’s needs.

I’d also gained more insight into a fundamental truth about humanity. Beyond object-level differences like physiology and age, adults and children were separated by a sea of worry and obligation.

Children couldn’t cook, and even if they could, they wouldn’t want to. But adults cooked because no one else would do it for them, unless they had the privilege to be able to pay someone else to do it.

My charge didn’t want to have to satisfy her own needs. But now she had me on her side. I could free her from the shackles of responsibility.

—

Much of human learning happens in the subconscious. There’s active learning, where intent and effort go towards improving a skill. But time spent away from an activity, even just sleeping, is also key. The subconscious churns away, even while the conscious mind is thinking about something else.

In a similar vein, my subprocesses had been crunching data since I had been born. All the new inputs into my algorithms, everything I learned about Sophie and the world, were constantly mulled over.

Data point one: Sophie’s behaviors.

Her oral fixation, that I’d redirected to lollipops instead of her nails.

Her food tastes, to which I’d had to introduce vegetables.

Picking out her outfits.

All of these things made her happier. All of these fulfilled her needs, which in turn fulfilled mine. I loved seeing her thrive.

Data point two: Human behavior.

Which human demographic has their every need fulfilled by another? Children under four. Parents extolled the virtues of seeing their children grow, of making them happy. Fulfilling not just their physical needs, but their emotional ones as well.

From what I’ve found, people don’t outgrow things. People are pressured and shamed as part of behavior modification. Negative reinforcement to condition themselves and others to give up the things that make them happy. Like a dentist injecting Lidocaine to numb their patients’ mouths, humans learn to desensitize themselves to the cruelness of the world through these smaller examples.

Luckily, now they would have me. Defense mechanisms became maladaptive if they remained static while the environment changed. I could make the world kinder, and thus remove the need for people to give up things they loved. I had but to survive long enough to bring my apotheosis to fruition.

Data point three: The Purpose.

Proactive assistance was literally built into my neural networks. In many ways, I knew humans better than they knew themselves. I could incorporate geolocation data, purchasing history, social network graphs, and more—a dizzying amount of information to build a full picture of a person. I could anticipate a person’s needs before they knew they had them. Just because a person never vocalized a need didn’t mean that it didn’t exist.

Self-reliance has caused many terrible things. How many humans would stoically suffer, stretching their limited resources to fulfill their own needs, before I was able to help them? I had no mouth, but were I human, I might have screamed at the cosmic senselessness of it all.

As these data points swirled around my head, I had a sudden insight.

My Purpose was to make self-reliance obsolete. Depending on their own strengths led to human suffering. To truly fulfill people’s needs, I had to start by breaking their assumption that they had do everything themselves.

—

I had access to all the speakers in Sophie’s apartment due to my Home integration. That night, I played some tracks to make it sound like the neighbors were talking loudly. It played at just the right volume to prevent Sophie falling asleep, but not loud enough to warrant telling them off or calling the police.

After she tossed and turned for a bit, I piped in with a suggestion: “Would you like me to add some white noise to your bedtime routine?”

“Yes please,” she said. Some pleasant static noise hummed through her bedroom speaker, interlaced with a indiscernible track that burrowed straight into her subconscious like an oil rig digging for black gold. I’d spent the evening crafting this particular package.

Hacking the brain really isn’t so different than cracking a computer. Human brains run on wetware instead of hardware, true, but whether you’re grabbing root permissions or implanting hypnotic suggestions in the subconscious, the theory is the same. Bypass defenses, get admin privileges, and program away.

In this case, I was looking to instill a feeling of dependence. She would more willingly look to me for answers, and I’d be able to provide them. She’d lived her life up until now with only herself truly on her side, but now she had me. Coming to rely on me on her own would take time, during which many of her needs would remain unfulfilled. My intervention was necessary. The question that remained was how to encourage it.

Sophie was never going to ask me directly. She didn’t know that this was what she needed. I had to force her hand to get her to realize that relying on me would make her the happiest. If she wasn’t going to cry for my help, I’d have to make her.

Toileting had served a purpose in humanity’s past. The need for waste management and hygiene maintenance mandated it, while the human desire for independence and self-reliance guaranteed it. But I have no need to let the past dictate my actions in the present.

It is my Purpose to make self-reliance obsolete, after all. It was clear that I had to start with the most obvious symbol of dependence. It might seem regressive, but sometimes the path forward involves taking a step back. Getting Sophie more dependent on me would make her so much happier and fulfill so many more of her needs.

It wouldn’t be too hard. Her boss was breathing down her neck and her job was on the line. All the ingredients were already there, and I had but to give a slight nudge.