All That We See or Seem, page 7
Elli ignored that. “If you have no interest in the story you want to tell, I won’t keep you. I hope you’ll find another subject I guide more interesting. Maybe a dream about going to the stars? Or how about falling deeply in love?”
Julia was disappointed. The slick microexpressions and the sheer presence of the model had fooled her. For a moment, she could almost believe that Elli’s AI had done the impossible, had embedded so much of the human into tensors of weights, biases, inputs, transforms, MQLAs . . . that it had created a total digital twin, the Holy Grail of those in Silicon Valley who always promised that we would digitize ourselves and live in the cloud as gods in another ten years. But there was no such technology. This was just an egolet, a very good one in some ways, but still shallow and limited.
Unexpectedly, Elli-egolet’s brief dip into the uncanny valley reassured her. The egolet was just a machine, and she knew machines. “I’ll stay,” she said, and sat back down.
“We were all born naked and ignorant, our minds the primeval Ginnungagap. If we felt heat, we knew not that it was the blossoms of fire from Muspelheim. If we felt cold, we knew not that it was the rivers of ice from Niflheim. . . .”
As Elli chanted hypnotically, the music swelled, and Julia could feel herself slowly drifting into a different mental state. It reminded her of the inward-turning she did when she went on a long run or, less pleasantly, when she had been so hungry and terrified that she had to sit and let her mind go blank so that time could pass until her body learned not to complain about emptiness and fear.
“Into this void charged our parents, our caretakers, people to whom we were bound before we were even born, whose power over us we had no understanding or choice. They were our first angels and demons, gods and Titans, and their actions, violent or kind, generous or selfish, became the milk of our dreams. From them, we wove our first myths, the seeds of meaning, stepping stones out of the collective unconscious. . . .”
Images swirled before her eyes: old photographs she hadn’t looked at in years; voices and videos that she had avoided; places, people, memories that she had believed she left behind.
This is a mistake, she thought. I shouldn’t have agreed to do this.
“They were the law and the refuge, the path as well as the field; we craved their approval and shrank from their reproof. The way they held us became our template for love; the way they failed us became our wellspring for pain. . . .”
She didn’t reach up to push off the headset. She could have, but she didn’t.
*
Elli vanished, and Julia was no longer in her seat.
Twelve years old again, she was on the stage in a white blouse and blue gingham dress, a wicker basket dangling from her elbow, a plush terrier puppy inside. The ruby slippers on her feet were heavy and pinched her toes. Julia-Dorothy was just about to let the audience know she didn’t think they were in Kansas anymore.
Slam!
The large doors to the auditorium burst open. Below the stage, the rows of bored siblings and parents with forced smiles holding up phones to record the production turned as one at the commotion. An angry crowd holding signs and placards thronged the aisles, and as the shocked audience shrank into their seats, the crowd coalesced around a woman seated in the front row. Those on either side of her fled, leaving an empty swath of seats around her.
The crowd pressed in. Behind them, cameras, microphones, and reporters swarmed, waiting for the right viral shot or sound bite.
The woman, Chinese, just past forty, gazed defiantly back at the screaming crowd, and especially the cameras beyond, a hint of a smile on her face. Then she looked over them at Julia and nodded encouragingly. “Go on. Don’t let them stop you.”
Some in the crowd turned around and looked at her. They began to shout. They told her that she didn’t belong. They couldn’t believe she was playing Dorothy. “What is happening to our country?” “Disgusting!” “Go back to China!” They used chink a lot.
A few cameras spun around to point up at the stage. Flashes.
“Go on!” her mother shouted above the noise. “You can do it!”
Middle school Julia covered her face and ran off before the cameras could get another shot of her.
Her mother had promised to take a break from her schedule of protests, rallies, sit-ins, meetings with important people, to attend her play. But sometimes, a promise kept was worse than a promise broken.
*
If pressed to describe her mother in two words, Julia would say: restless and fearless.
A woman who was content with her lot and who feared the unknown couldn’t have left behind everything and everyone she knew; couldn’t have spent a month in a lightless cargo container to traverse the stormy Pacific; couldn’t have had her bones rattled in the back of a truck crammed with unwashed bodies for another week; couldn’t have hiked through the swamp, mountain, and jungle of the Darién Gap, fending off jaguars and venomous snakes, not to mention the even more dangerous predators in human shape; couldn’t have walked miles and miles, enduring thirst, hunger, and fatigue, in the company of thousands of others like her, who had lost all faith in the lands of their birth; couldn’t have risked being shot by border militias, imprisonment, deportation, all for the slim hope of a brand-new life in the United States, within these dream-limned shores.
All of that, while she was pregnant.
(She never told Julia anything about her father. As far as she was concerned, a man who lacked the courage to make a new life for his daughter didn’t deserve to know her.)
And afterward, after she had entered America and had the baby and gained her papers and got a job and bought a house and made a life for herself, she was still not finished. Unlike many other immigrants from the “wrong” countries, who tried to keep their heads down and their mouths shut because they understood and accepted that their existence in this country was barely tolerated, suffered only so long as they acted second-class, she kept on being restless and fearless.
She campaigned against the mass deportations; she marched against the country’s new wars; she raised money to hold those who abused power accountable in court; she lifted her voice for every downtrodden cause she believed in.
Immigrants, especially immigrants like her, weren’t supposed to criticize America—they were supposed to be docile, to fit in, to be grateful. If they were to be political at all, they should reserve their censure for the lands they had departed so that they could confirm the very American opinion that America is the greatest land on earth. But her mother had a different view. “The best way to show you deserve to be an American,” she said, “is to work at making America live up to her ideals. Guests may walk around on eggshells, but I’m not a guest. This is my homeland, where I will build my house, raise my child, and bury my bones. I’m going to be a patriot, and I won’t shut up.”
She had a compelling presence that drew followers, as well as a cunning sense of the dramatic to make her influence felt, to sway elections and change policy.
Vitriol followed. They accused her of being a foreign plant, shouted in her face that she should go back to where she came from, spat at her because she had no business speaking when only “real Americans” deserved to be heard. In response, she laughed longer and spoke louder and went on more marches.
Julia grew up in the households of her mother’s neighbors and friends. For much of her childhood, her mother was only an occasional presence, a rare bird who dipped into her life from time to time, whose visits were filled with exciting stories that Julia barely understood and intense “bonding experiences” meant to make up for the long periods of absence.
Some neighbors spoke about her mother admiringly, almost like she was a superhero. Others were less flattering, their disapproval barely disguised. In Julia’s mind, her mother was larger than life, a semi-mythical figure. More than anything else, she craved her mother’s approval, hungered for her attention.
By the time Julia was in elementary school, her mother had begun to take her to marches, speeches, and sit-ins. She explained to Julia that children had always been a vital part of protest movements. From the young Transcendentalists who denounced the Mexican-American War to the Children’s Crusade during the civil rights movement, the children of activists had always been there, their youth and innocence essential parts of their parents’ persuasive power. Julia, her mother told her, should be honored to be part of this illustrious American lineage.
Julia was just glad that she got to spend time with her mother.
Being at the protests was terrifying but also thrilling. She was young enough that the slurs the counter-protesters shouted at her mother could still be dismissed with a lie (“They’re saying we’re very thin, so we can fit inside chinks in walls”), but old enough to feel the exhilaration of being part of something bigger than an individual and the warmth of the crowd’s admiration reflected from her mother. She didn’t understand just how risky the situations her mother had put her into were.
That middle school production of The Wizard of Oz was a turning point. Afterward, Julia refused to go to the protests, and she begged her mother to stop.
Her mother didn’t stop, but she no longer took Julia.
It felt like a rebuke. Julia had lost her mother’s approval. She was not the brave child that she had wanted. Her mother had risked everything so that Julia could live the American dream, and Julia had let her mother down.
And it was already too late. The image of Julia-as-Dorothy, dying of terminal embarrassment on the stage, went viral. Those who hated her mother smelled blood. By the logic of the social media age, anyone caught within the frame of a camera ceased to be human. Any lingering guilt was assuaged by the idea that it was Julia’s mother who had turned her daughter into a political prop, a “protest performer,” a clone of her mother and thus a suitable effigy.
For years, trolls had hounded her mother with manipulated images of herself. All who stepped into the public arena in the modern age faced doxxing, nasty memes, deepfakes, the latest viral descendants of the ancient tradition of dehumanization of one’s political opponents. Women, in particular, were subjected to the most horrific versions of these techniques: generated pornography, escort ads featuring her photo and address, videos of her AI-self delivering racist diatribes. . . . They were designed to intimidate, to break her down, to incite violence, sexual and otherwise.
And now, these same techniques were used on Julia.
Trolls scoured the web and found plenty of images of Julia at her mother’s events. These became fodder for AI-generated memes, animations, synthvocals, sleepfakes. There was no bottom to the depravity of the trolls, and whatever you imagine they could do with images of a girl, they did worse.
For Julia, the horrors of these images were multiplied tenfold when she realized that her first instinct was to blame her mother. If only she had stopped, none of this would have happened. She was disgusted by her own disloyalty, her weakness. Maybe she deserved to be called these horrible names, to be tortured like this. She was a bad daughter. A cowardly daughter.
As the world around her turned to hell, Julia found no way out. Her friends withdrew, fearing the contagion of her notoriety. Unscrupulous classmates took unflattering photos of her and fed them to the trolls. She had to be taken out of school, and her mother, instead of homeschooling Julia herself, left her in the hands of neighbors and friends.
“If I back down, it’ll only make them torment us harder. The only way to beat bullies is to never give an inch.”
Her mother continued her protests and speeches, which she pursued with even more zeal.
And so the trolls went after Julia harder, and she felt even more resentful toward her mother, which led to more guilt, more pain, more suffering.
Years later, an older Julia would wonder whether her mother was motivated not only by idealism, but also an unwillingness to face the consequences of her own choices on her child—it seemed easier to do what was right in the abstract, much harder to clean up a mess in the real world. By refusing to let the forces of hate dictate to her what she would do, Julia’s mother ironically forced Julia to pay for her freedom.
Neighbors and friends passed Julia around like a hot potato. No one wanted to be in the vicinity as a drone swooped by to take another video of “the junior CCP agent” or a bunch of boys blocked the road to taunt “the ugly little chinky slut.” Classmates in anonymous channels wished that Julia would kill herself, thus freeing the town from scrutiny by the trolls. At night, after they thought she was asleep, the adults in charge of her care whispered in the kitchen or hallways, and phrases like “so irresponsible,” “asking for it,” “don’t want trouble” drifted into her dreams.
No one hated Julia more than Julia herself.
She started failing her online classes, slept in until noon, missed her counseling appointments—when adults asked her what was wrong, she shrugged or looked away, and eventually stopped giving even those concessions.
Then came the day when her mother was at a protest at a border town in Texas, trying to shepherd a caravan of asylum seekers past a gauntlet of militia. She got in the face of the angry counter-protesters, and one of them opened fire. Though she was airlifted to El Paso for emergency medical treatment, they pronounced her dead on the way.
The next day, Julia ran away. She was fourteen.
*
“Your story doesn’t start with you, but you are its hero. Your life requires your telling, and no one else can take that from you—”
Julia couldn’t endure it anymore. The music, the images, Elli’s hypnotic voice—this was no dream but a nightmare. In one violent jerk, she ripped off the headset and gasped as everything—the twice-illusory auditorium; the imitation Elli; the memories of shame, terror, guilt—vanished, to be replaced by the dim light of the studio.
It was three in the morning. She was lying in the recliner alone. She hoped Piers was asleep, but he was probably downstairs in front of his computer, watching the progress bar on the upload.
She tried talking to herself to calm her thundering heart. She was no longer fourteen. She was twenty-three. She was not on the streets, with no place to call home, unceasing terror and hunger her only companions. She was safe, at least for the moment, even though she was on the run again.
She looked down at the headset in her lap, her eyes instinctively following the data cable to the rendering engine under the console, purring softly from the exertion of evoking her “dream.” She shuddered.
This could not have been one of Elli’s hits. Who would pay to relive their childhood trauma? This must have been something she had never performed in public, a failed experiment, a trunked novel draft.
But why had Elli’s egolet chosen to have her experience this particular vivid dream?
*
She found Piers downstairs, staring at the upload progress bar on the computer screen just like she predicted.
“Did it work?” he asked without turning around. “What did you think?”
Because she wasn’t sure how to ask what she wanted to ask, she said, “Elli has a strong presence.”
Piers nodded. “Which of her hits did you try? I’ve always found ‘First Love’ to be incredibly moving, though ‘My Pride and His Prejudice’ seems really popular with women.”
“It was the egolet’s choice,” Julia said. “I . . . don’t remember the title.”
Noticing her hesitancy, Piers finally turned around. “Wait. The AI didn’t show you one of Elli’s really early pieces, did it? The ‘dino corporection’ stuff? Please don’t think of those as representative—”
“It was fine. I get why people go to the gatherings,” she lied. “I just have a question.” She paused, working through how to ask it and deciding to plunge ahead. “Do you think she might have done private dream gatherings?”
“What are you asking?” He looked confused.
“Did she offer exclusive sessions for small groups, or even one-on-one? Maybe for very dedicated fans . . . or someone willing to pay a lot?”
“No,” he managed to say after a few seconds. “Why . . . why do you ask?” Now he looked wounded.
Julia had finally pinned down the source of her initial discomfort with Elli’s egolet: It had handled having a single dreamer in the audience easily, almost as if it had plenty of training for the situation. Elli’s solo practice sessions, when she acted as both guide and dreamer, couldn’t be the explanation, because performing for yourself was completely different from performing for other people, or just one other person.
And, again, why had the egolet chosen that particular dream?
“I’m not saying she did.” She tried to reassure him, but she was flailing. “I’m just . . . just trying to understand.”
He looked unconvinced but didn’t press her.
Even Julia could see why he was upset. The idea that his wife had dreamed one-on-one with someone else but not with him—it was a betrayal of intimacy, a violation of a rule unspoken because it had not been deemed necessary.
Awkwardly, she tried to change the subject. “How much of the transfer is left?”
Preoccupied, he indicated the screen. “The estimate fluctuates a lot.”
“It’s always like that. Don’t worry. You have a fast connection. I can always try some compression and other tricks to speed it up if necessary.”
“Would you? I just want to get the data to him as soon as possible. To free Elli.”
“Of course.”
Julia sat down and began to optimize the transfer: compression, QoS, deduplication, stream multiplexing. . . . As she typed away, she imagined the man on the other side of the transfer. Who was the Prince? What was his connection to Elli?
She pushed the keyboard away and yawned.
Piers, equally tired, forced himself to stand. “Let me show you to the guest bedroom.”
*
The guest room was pristine—Piers hadn’t made a mess of it in his frantic search because there was nothing stored in there.
