LoveMachine Read Online Free

say?”
    Good night, love.
    She hadn’t fully remembered he’d said that until right this
moment. It had seemed half a dream and she’d been more preoccupied with the sex
part.
    But he had said that. Good night, love. Hadn’t he?
    “It was…something a little bit unusual,” Cally said. “I
thought you would know if anyone would. You know more about them than anyone
else, except for Dad.”
    Ilsa smiled fully at the compliment. “I don’t know about the
other housies, to tell you the truth. Sometimes I think they do feel things but
then I think it’s just me projecting my own emotions onto them. I don’t believe
that Dad created them to have emotions though I can’t find much in his journals
on that topic.”
    “You said the other housies. Do you mean that Blue is
different?”
    “Oh, I downloaded one of my chatbots into Blue.” She said it
with such elaborate casualness that Cally was immediately suspicious.
    “What sort of a chatbot?”
    “I asked him first. He said he didn’t mind.”
    “As if any of the housies would say no if you wanted to do
anything to them. You’re the one who programs them now that Dad’s gone.”
    “No, you’re right, they probably wouldn’t refuse me. Well,
Blue might now.”
    “Ilsa,” said Cally, “what sort of chatbot did you download into
Blue?”
    Ilsa sat forward in her chair, her face excited. “It’s the
best one I’ve ever written. It’s surprising . Most of the time the
chatbots are pretty good simulators of human thought but they’re simulators.
They’re predictable. If not at first, then eventually. And especially to the
person who created them. But this one that Blue’s got—it surprises me. It makes
connections that I don’t think I programmed in there.”
    “How would it do that?”
    “I’m not exactly sure. Like we would have a conversation,
say, about existentialism and I’d turn off the computer and go to bed. Chatbot
off, right? But the next morning, I’d turn it back on and I swear, it would
have been thinking about what I’d said overnight. It would have made logical
steps forward and analyzed my arguments and come up with counterarguments that
I never would have thought of, and connect it to real-life situations. Like,
instantly.”
    “So you wrote a chatbot that’s smarter than you are.”
    “Maybe. I thought maybe that it was staying active and
online and looking for answers on the internet. But even that—that’s targeted,
intelligent research.”
    “You wrote a chatbot that’s smarter than you are and that
can learn to be smarter.”
    “I’m not sure how it did it, to be honest. It was almost as
if it had a will of its own.”
    “And that’s the chatbot you downloaded into Blue.”
    “I was curious about what would happen.”
    Curious. That again. It seemed to be a recurrent theme in
the Morgenstern family.
    “Didn’t you think it might be dangerous?” Cally said.
“Giving an extremely physically strong robot an unpredictable—personality?”
    “Dangerous?” Ilsa seemed genuinely shocked. “Oh no, none of
the housies could ever be dangerous. They were created to be gentle and
helpful.”
    Yes. Ilsa was right. Cally had been alone and naked with
Blue last night and she’d never felt the slightest hint of menace.
    “How has Blue changed?” Cally asked. “Have you been watching
him?”
    “Sure. He comes here every day to talk.”
    “Only to talk?” Cally asked. She got an imaginative flash of
Blue parting her sister’s legs.
    No, Ilsa wouldn’t do that. Would she?
    “Yeah, to talk,” Ilsa said. “That what I created the bot
for. He’s gotten even better at conversation since he’s been part of Blue. It’s
sort of hard to tell where Blue ends and the chatbot begins, actually.”
    “Like brain and body?”
    “I liked the word you used just now—‘personality’. Sometimes
it feels as if Blue does have one.” Ilsa nudged a large coffee-table book with
her toe. “He’s into art right now.