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SARAH GAILEY
¡CUIDADO! ¡QUE VIENE EL COCO!
BY
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CARLOS HERNANDEZ
El Cuento de la Brutally Murdered AI
Usually when we’re diving underwater, the breachdive’s AI, Prudencia, stabilizes our descent. But, well, she’s dead right now, so the Pacific Ocean is having its way with our little vessel. We’re rolling and tipping dangerously as we plunge toward the ocean floor. The hallway’s awash in red emergency lights. Any other time, these wild alarms would make it impossible for me to function.
But not functioning isn’t an option right now. I’m headed to Prudencia’s control room to try and fix her, now that I’ve checked on my baby girl. She’s fine. Safely tucked in her crib, napping away, as if our uncontrolled freefall wasn’t a disaster, but simply an overengineered way to rock her to sleep.
And as for her head—well, there’s nothing I can do about that at the moment. First things first.
The breachdive pitches and yaws; I almost fall. So I take a moment to regain my balance against a corridor wall. Better to be slow and sure right now, to remember all the skills Prudencia and I have been working on for the last half year. First, you tolerate your stressors. They are a part of the world, just as you are, but they are not in you, or of you. They are merely beside you. You grow mindful of the infinite now, of the fractal vastness of which you constitute only the smallest sliver of awareness. Your fear and rage feel so small in the oceanic current of all the information of the universe that you can barely find them at all.
I have my sea-legs again, and fast-walk the rest of the way to the control room. I pull the manual bypass on the doorjamb to the control room. The lock clicks, and the door slowly swings open. I peer inside.
Prudencia is smashed through. An access panel’s been yanked out of the wall and thrown to the floor. The metal is crumpled like wadded paper in the two places where he must have grabbed it. Oh, yes. Now I remember: his gigantic, impossible hands, with their sprawling fingers curling and spreading like roots.
That also explains the ten gashes that have raked through Prudencia’s mainframe, top to bottom. A shattered mess of her motherboards covers the floor. I smell burnt plastic and ozone.
“Killed you good, didn’t he?” I say to poor Prudencia as I walk in. You never know: some tiny part of her might be able to hear me. “Well, don’t worry, Prudie. I’m here now.”
And then, brandishing a screwdriver, I get to work. A smashed mainframe’ll knock Prudencia out, sure. But she’s so distributed a mind, her entire soul could be recovered from the smallest corner of the boat.
I wonder if he knew this. I wonder if he had no intention of killing her, but only of temporarily disabling her while he took my baby girl’s head. Prudencia might have interfered, after all. She most certainly would have recorded him.
And he couldn’t have that. El Coco comes in the dark of night for a reason.
El Cuento de la Resurrección de la Brutally Murdered AI
It’s a matter of four minutes to reroute, reengage, restart. Tightening the last screw, I know Prudencia’s back to life when the lights go back to normal and the sirens fall quiet. The ceiling cameras flail around on articulated arms, desperately looking around. I bet every camera on the ship is similarly flailing. “Nádano!” she screams through every speaker. “What happened? How long have I been offline?” She moans. “Where is Ela? Her RFID chip isn’t responding to me!”
“First things first, Prudie,” I say calmly, eyes closed. “Have you noticed we’re sinking?”
Prudencia yells so loudly she almost blows a speaker. “Sinking?!”
Five seconds later, our stately, tumbling plummet toward the bottom of the world jerks suddenly to an end, and the breachdive’s floor rolls back to true.
“Good work, Prudie,” I say.
“All life-support systems normal,” she answers, all business, self-chastisement galvanizing her voice. “No leaks, no external structural damage. Plenty of battery, plenty of air. Engines online. Communications—” She cuts herself off.
“Wrecked,” I finish for her.
“Which is why I couldn’t find the RFID chip.” A beat. “How did you know, Nádano?”
“I guessed. He doesn’t want you guiding us. He wants to lead us where we need to go.”
Her voice retains its pleasantness, its equanimity. But I know Prudencia. I know when she’s despairing. “ ‘He,’ Nádano? Who is he?”
Well. That is going to take some explaining.
El Cuento de How You Explain the Impossible to Your Highly Logical AI, Who Also Happens to Be Your Psychotherapist
When Prudencia discovers that my baby girl’s head is missing, she’s going to want to know where it went. Which is understandable. But if I answer her truthfully, she’ll think I’m lying—or whatever fancy psychologist euphemism for lying is in vogue this week—and turn the conversation toward probing into why. My tour abroad the breachdive has been a 24/7 session that started six months ago, when I first boarded, and has gone on ever since. And we’re infamous deceivers, we borderlines. Just ask any TV show ever made.
Wait, no. That’s not fair to Prudencia. The fact is, I’ve had the most useful therapy sessions of my life with her. And it’s exactly because she isn’t human. Talking to her is a little like being alone, and my symptoms grow less pronounced when I’m alone. Plus, she’s smarter than me. Perfect recall, libraries’ worth of information instantly available to her, calculations at the speed of her quantum processors: I can’t fool her, and I know it, even unconsciously. So it makes me less likely to try. And she’s sleepless, always available, ever patient with her sole patient. Never know when I am going to need a sudden intercession.
She’s almost ideal. But as much as I love Prudencia, these past months have taught me her limits. There’s no drift to her thinking, no slide, no sideways, no sidelong, no poetry. She uses idioms all the time, because I guess you can program the literal meanings of idioms into an AI’s lexicon. But I’ve never once heard her invent a simile. At some point, I’m going to need more than what her if/then soul can give me.
“Nádano,” she repeats, “answer me, please. Where is Ela?”
“She’s in her crib in my room,” I answer. “Sleeping like a baby.”
“Oh, what a relief!” says Prudencia.
“She’s stopped crying, finally. He comforted my baby girl when I couldn’t. Same as he did for me long, long ago.”
And just like that, Prudencia’s relief vanishes. This close to the open wall panel, I can hear her electric worry, feel the rising heat of her concern. I shouldn’t have said that last bit about him comforting my baby. I was just trying to be honest.
Prudencia takes her time figuring out what to say to me next. “I can’t detect any RFID chips right now, Nádano. Therefore, may I have your permission to use my cameras in your bedroom? So I may see Ela for myself?”
She has to get explicit permission from me to turn on cameras in sleeping quarters, as per NOAA privacy regulations. “Thought you’d never ask,” I reply. “And please put what you see on-screen in here, too, so I can see what you’re seeing, and we can discuss it.”