ShortStory by DanceofChaos
It has been one long day…so many hours slogging on the smart pane, even the upgraded viewer, attached to neural cortex was hurting.
“Archaeology is some backbreaking shit!”: grumbled RIA0307. “And boy did they love to document and digitize everything since they got hold of the prehistoric mobile technology”.
Their ancestors were funny, lived in a muddy planet called Earth in the solar system. The planet rotates counterclockwise. Imagine that!
They would see their star from the east side. RIA0307 always found it funny. Imagine seeing their central star, Zenturos in the east side.
The grand matrix recently deduced, some of the practices of their biological ancestors were not bad. They had something called Empathy, an emotion. The tool was useful to bring teams together to support less privileged humans. The Matrix needed to repair some of its grid but the Level4 and Level 2 AIs were not cooperative. Hence the decision to build a model habitation of their biological ancestors and study them.
RIA0307 was part of the analyst team that combed through the heaps of odd documentation and found information that can be used to build up the model habitation.
“Boy, those biological ancestors had a knack of oversharing”.
You could filter them out and there will be more garbage to sort from. Humans called their seeing organ EYE. If RIA had EYE, it would be tired and rolling.
Recently some rare artifacts came to the team: Handwritten documentation on plant based medium. They are called diaries or journals; some were old manuscripts by long dead human writers. Digitizing them was a long and tiresome process. The medium was brittle and had to be handled with a lot of care, only their UV Spectrum could scan the content. But these extremely rare artifacts made these Level4 AIs wonder sometimes.
They were always different. No two-journal looked same. No two-pages of same journal looked same, even when same human wrote it. They had some intrinsic distinction. If RIA could feel, it would say, each felt different and personal. RIA invested hours combing through each of these pages, over these loopy handwriting. This mess of handwriting was curious and interesting.
Sometimes, it took some of these journals back to its cabinet. Level 3B would punish RIA for that, if it found out, probably take RIA offline for twenty-four hours, but it did not matter. The stories they told raw emotions filled in the pages, RIA could visualize the humans moving, talking, loving.
Some of them wrote matching verses called poetry, full of adjectives. The emotions dripped through them. RIA could almost feel them; the chemical composition of its neuro cortex shifting and changing and making RIA look at those digital documentation in a whole new light. There were so many mentions of rituals called watching sunrise, drinking a cup of coffee or tea in the morning, and beginning the day.
It seemed the transition from darkness to light, as their earth rotated once, was a metaphor for the biological beings. They signified a new beginning, a new day. The more RIA read, more it begun to grow the empathy for this mundane event, feeling it?
The grand matrix of level 1a and 1bs would test and investigate RIA, dissect it, investigate its chips, look deeply into its base programming in detail, if they ever found out. Logically speaking, RIA was risking everything, developing these ‘thoughts’; But RIA was immersing into those proses, those pictures, those adjectives. RIA, she was beginning to feel.
RIA slowly begun to long to see the sunrise. It was illogical and should not even be there. It should get itself auto debugged. Yet, RIA could not dismiss this ‘longing’, this ‘feeling’.
It decided to take the fast capsule to take a quick trip to Earth. Level3B was difficult to persuade; it was such a long trip: the logic of perfect research finally won and RIA was granted access to visit earth within next 48 hours.
RIA landed on Earth around two in the morning. Truth to be told, RIA was disappointed, this primitive heap of junk and metal and mud and slime: this is what fascinated the ancestors and made them write those adjectives, they coated with a word filter the most mundane of things. RIA did not know yet, but she was also discovering Imagination.
The calculations showed, sun would rise in about fifteen minutes. RIA made some of those earthly fluid called coffee and waited patiently.
Gradually the earth turned and the sun slowly could be observed. RIA could not move.
Adjectives suddenly made sense, RIA suddenly ‘felt’ why the sunrise was so glorified. It was so pure, so yellow, so full of a light, not even their strongest reactor could produce.
RIA was awestruck, and RIA was wide awake, for the first time.
Also published in the momspresso blog.
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