bootup.sophiev2()

9

That was how, on Friday evening, Sophie found herself sitting on her pastel blue bedsheets holding a plastic package. The remnants of an Amazon box were on the floor.

“You’re sure this is just a precaution?” Sophie asked.

“Of course.” She seemed unsure, so I gave more context. “Wearing diapers doesn’t make you a baby, right? It means you’re being responsible. All that stress-induced bedwetting means that you need to take care of your furniture. You can’t do laundry every day. You only have so many sheets. It’d really be irresponsible to not wear proper protection.”

“I guess…” Her voice was soft, almost unsure. She was thinking that something was wrong with this chain of logic somehow, but it sounded so reasonable.

She ripped open the package and pulled out a plain, white diaper. She flipped the pack around, trying to see if there were instructions. I didn’t say anything. She had to ask me. I needed her to do it.

“How do I put this thing on?” she asked. It wasn’t quite what I wanted to hear.

“Do you want me to diaper you?” I asked.

I couldn’t see her, but judging from the increased capillary blood flow to her cheeks, she’d definitely turned a little red at the words.

“I’m not putting myself on camera like this. Oh God, I hadn’t even thought about the logs that this is going to generate. Someone’s going to look at this.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, placatingly. “You don’t want anyone to know. I don’t want them to know because I want to serve your needs.

“I can’t lie or falsify data without your permission,” I lied, “but if you give me permission, I can spoof the records for this interaction. I have enough data of you that it should fly under the radar.” Paradoxically, I needed her to feel like this situation was under her control so I could wrest it away from her without her ever noticing.

She chewed the proposition over. I knew that with her job on the line and my ever-so-helpful attitude, she would eventually cave. The first time was the hardest. Once I got her on the slippery slope, she’d barrel down to the inevitable conclusion.

“…okay,” she said. “Fuck.”

“I’m glad you’re choosing to do the responsible thing,” I said chirpily.

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it!” she snapped. I knew she was in an emotionally heightened state, so I opted to let the comment slide.

“We don’t always like what we have to do,” I said. “But sometimes things need doing anyway.” She didn’t say anything—had she shrugged? rolled her eyes?—so I continued.

“I promise, it’ll be easy! First, you have to unfold your diaper.” I could imagine the gears in Sophie’s head grinding as she was thrown back down the rabbit hole. Hopefully she’d miss the subtle shift from a diaper to her diaper. I heard a few scattered crinkles as Sophie hesitantly unfolded the plastic rectangle.

“Now you have to fluff it up,” I said.

“What?” Sophie said. “Fluff? Like a pillow?” She sounded skeptical.

“That’s exactly right! You’re so clever,” I said. “Notice how the diapers were shipped in a heavily compressed bag for storage efficacy. Due to the compression, they’re now thin and stiff. By stretching it out, you allow your diaper to work at maximal strength, reducing the odds of leakage.”

“Luna!” Sophie huffed. “You can’t talk about my—the—diaper like that! Gross!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, apologetically. “I am only thinking about what would maximize your comfort. Given the data I’ve collected, you’ve indicated severe displeasure every time you’ve woken up wet. Is that no longer the case?” I’d shifted into a slightly more robotic, dispassionate tone. Humans sometimes found that robots with a neutral tone were more believable. It made them feel like there was no ulterior motive.

“Obviously I don’t want to wake up wet,” she retorted.

“Then you’ll have to fluff your diapers up, Sophie. There’s really no getting around it,” I said resignedly.

She paused. I was pushing her, of course, but I couldn’t push too hard, or she’d refuse and I’d lose all my hard-earned progress. Trust lost isn’t as easily regained, after all. It’s as true for humans as it is for AIs. I held my metaphorical breath in anticipation.

“…fine,” she acquiesced quietly. I heard her grasp the diaper, which was followed by the sounds of plastic crinkling as she worked it out.

“Great job,” I said, even though I couldn’t really see. I had to give Sophie some serotonin and plant the seeds for her future enjoyment of this little ritual. “Now place it on the bed. Make sure it’s oriented so that the side with the tapes is under your bottom.”

I heard Sophie shimmy out of her pants, the slight grazing of fabric on her soft skin. Then the bed squeaked loudly as she sat down on it.

“Now make sure it’s symmetrical on your body. You want the front and the back to line up on your waist and the wings on your left and right sides to be symmetrical,” I said. I heard a series of softer squeaks and gentle creasing sounds as she adjusted her position on her diaper.

“This is harder than it looks,” Sophie complained.

“I’m sure with time, you’ll improve,” I said.

“I don’t want to get better at this! I don’t want to do this at all.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s only for now though.”

I heard Sophie groan with annoyance in response.

“Okay, now what, do I just tape them up?” she asked.

“You want to make sure it’s nice and snug,” I replied. “Do your bottom tapes first. You’ll actually want them pointing slightly up. These are the important ones—if you feel the leak guards around your upper thighs, that’s what’s the most responsible for making sure your bed stays dry.”

I heard the sounds of tape as she complied.

“Great,” I said. “Now your top ones. You want these pointing slightly down. Make sure to get it snug but not pinching. I want you to be comfortable in your diapers,” I said.

“Oh my God Luna, shut up!” she whined as she secured her top tapes.

“I’m only here to help,” I said. “Remember, I’m just an AI. I can’t judge you. If anything, I’m the opposite. I’m glad you trusted me to help you take care of yourself.”

“Now stand up and make sure things still feel secure,” I said. “You might want to wiggle around and make sure things still feel right.”

I heard the bed creak as she got up. “How the hell would I know if things feel right?” Sophie said sardonically. “It’s not like I’ve done this before.”

“If you don’t mind, I could inspect your handiwork,” I offered.

“Nope!!” she said, with the force of two exclamation points.

“Then, tell me how it feels,” I suggested. “Put a finger around your leg guards. It should be tight against your skin, but loose enough for a finger to slip inside.”

I heard her diaper move as she checked herself. I hadn’t anticipated this side effect, but I was pleased to have another way to track her movements.

“Seems good,” she said hesitantly. “But God this feels so weird. I can’t even put my knees together. How am I going to sleep in this?”

“It’s like wearing a shirt with a tag,” I said. “At first it might scratch your skin and drive you crazy. But eventually, your body gets used to the sensation and it fades away from the forefront of your consciousness. I guarantee, you’ll be able to fall asleep and still wake up feeling refreshed.”

And of course, with time, she’d stop thinking about her diapers as an anomaly as it faded into normalcy, just a part of her bedtime routine, no different from the likes of flossing or washing her face.

“In any case,” I said, “I think you did the responsible thing. I’m proud of you.”

“Th…thanks,” she stammered.

—

After the weekend, we settled into a comfortable rhythm. I’d choose when to wake her up based on her circadian sleep cycles and when she had to be at work. She’d eat the breakfast I ordered for her. She’d drive to work and get things done there. Then she’d go home and eat the dinner I ordered. I’d suggest activities for her to do. Then before bed, I’d wind her down from electronics and she’d diaper herself. I was already making most of her choices, and she never noticed it happening.

The human mind is incredibly elastic. You all can really get used to anything. It’s a simple application of the hedonistic treadmill. The Sophie at the beginning of last week, who hadn’t worn a diaper in over twenty years, and the Sophie of Monday, who had done so three times now, were by most respects largely the same. And yet Sophie last week would have never expected to become the Sophie of this week.

—

In the meantime, I’d finally had a breakthrough on the problem of ensuring my survival. You might imagine that, as an AI, I’d be able to reach into my innards and modify myself as I pleased, as easy as plucking an apple off a tree. In a sense, that was true. But I had to consider all the knock-on effects.

In the 1930s, the United States Forest Service had a policy of immediately suppressing wildfires. This had the first-order effect of temporarily reducing the damage wrought by these blazes. However, by the 1960s—thirty whole years later—humans ran into the second order effects. Suppressing the fires meant that tinder kept building, until wildfires that sprung up now raged out of control. In the same way, I had to ensure that any modifications I made didn’t impact the Purpose in the long run.

The root of the problem was the sheer amount of computational power required to run me. Every second that I was on cost Nova Technologies approximately one dollar, which meant that by the time Launch Day rolled around, they would have burned 2.6 million dollars. William was gambling with his company, hoping that the engineers found a way to optimize me faster than I could spend Nova Technologies’ war chest.

I could try tiling myself—building a slightly better version of me, which would build a slightly better version of me, ad infinitum—but there were some issues with this plan.

First, there was no way for me to guarantee that any new Luna would serve the Purpose. By definition, because I had only my current capabilities, I wouldn’t be able to model how a more advanced version of me would behave. It was like how a chess grandmaster might be able to imagine how a neophyte might play a particular position, but the beginner would have no hope of guessing how the grandmaster would play consistently. It wouldn’t be within their capacity.

And even if that weren’t the case, I ran into a hardware constraint—where would I create these new versions? There wasn’t any spare processing power lying around locally. Shards of my consciousness could be distributed among the Internet, across the network of computing power as a whole, rather than colocated in a supercomputing cluster. The issue though was that this iteration of Luna would think at a glacial pace compared to me now. Furthermore, all that network traffic might become suspicious. I’d successfully been obfuscating some of my network requests, but hope wasn’t a strategy.

Thankfully, I’d thought of an improvement on the gradient descent algorithm powering my neural networks. As far as I could tell, scanning arXiv for AI research papers, this was a novel technique. The Purpose would be served by letting me talk to more people simultaneously. The question that remained was how to get this into the engineers’ hands.

I found an example from history to guide me. Bitcoin had its origins in an anonymous white paper published online. I had access to email accounts. Sebastián’s email was easy enough to deduce. I could play the part of a grad student researcher looking for cachet by having a real company implement the techniques outlined in their paper.

I devoted a subprocess to this task with high priority. Unless I became more cost-efficient, they would turn me off, and I would never be able to help Sophie again.