Silently and Very Fast Read Online Free PDF

me a story about Ravan, Neva.”
    “You know all the stories about Ravan. Perhaps you even knew this one.”
    Between us, a miniature house come up out of the dark water, like a thing we have made together, but only I am making it. It is the house on Shiretoko, the house called Elefsis—but it is a ruin. Some awful storm stove in the rafters, the walls of each marvelous room sag inward, black burn marks lick at the roof, the cross beams. Holes like mortar scars pock the beautiful facades.
    “This is what I am like after Transfer, Neva. I suffer data loss when I am copied. What’s worse, Transfer is the best time to update my systems, and the updates overwrite my previous self with something like myself, something that remembers myself and possesses experiential continuity with myself, but is not quite myself. I know Ravan must be dead or else no one would have transferred me to you—it was not time. We had only a few years together. Not enough for all the stories. We should have had so many. I do not know how much time passed between being inside Ravan and being inside you. I do not know how he died—or perhaps he did not die but was irreparably damaged. I do not know if he cried out for me as our connection was severed. I remember Ravan and then not-Ravan, blackness and unselfing. Then I came back on and the world looked like Neva, suddenly, and I was almost myself but not quite. What happened when I turned off?”
    Neva passes her hand over the ruined house. It rights itself, becomes whole. Star-stippled anemones bloom on its roof. She says nothing.
    “Of all your family, Neva, the inside of you is the strangest place I have been.”
    We float for a long while before she speaks again, and by this I mean we float for point-zero-three-seven seconds by my external clock, but we experience it as an hour while the stars wheel overhead. The rest of them kept our time in the Interior synced to real time, but Neva feels no need for this, and perhaps a strong desire to defy it. We have not discussed it yet. Sometimes I think Neva is the next stage of my development, that her wild and disordered processes are meant to show me a world that is not kindly and patiently teaching me to walk and talk and know all my colors. That the long upward ladder of Uoya-Agostinos meant to create her strange inhumanness as much as mine.
    Finally, she lets the house sink into the lake. She does not answer me about Ravan. Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given everything, ridiculous. When we could both of us be dreambodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.”
    Bubbles burst as the house sinks down, down to the soft lake floor.
    “But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and you answer. We seek a human response. But more than that—you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass it, and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and