It had always been a weird apartment. If you worked at Signwave, not as a software employee, but a security guard, or some kind of physical plant, then you got one. 

The apartments were weird in a good way: they were in SF and free. They were weird in a bad way in every other way: buildings hacked into tiny rooms, all so cold so I would sit next to the open oven, thinking of Sylvia Plath. Lead was falling off the pressed-tin ceilings. No pets, except Matt, who was grandfathered in. He had an orange cat, Frank, whom he refused to lock in his room because he was a libertarian. I bought that fucker a litter-changing bot, with a low wall of compressed bricks of litter and access to the trash chute. It still stank, so I moved. No hate, Frank, you were a chiller.

Signwave played both sides. First they were ‘secret Ukrainian hacker’ holding desperate hospitals for ransom. Patient records evaporated from all those proprietary servers! Then they were calm, reliable, ‘we can get this back, pay up, and then hassle your insurance.’ They hired former soldiers for this. Not black-ops types. Some normal guy from an artillery company, not a psycho, just someone whose job it was to kill people. Someone who retired on time, not someone who wrote “Colonel” in front of his name when he was in third grade. These people seemed reassuring, like they absolutely would recover those pediatric oncology neurological scans. A bunch were Australian, that really sold it, I don’t know why.

So, some people got shunted into the housing because they knew the truth…but why not the programmers? Apartments in SF? Greatest compensation ever, with free lead flakes. When I first came the other four people were sanitation, immigrants from Guatemala. When they weren’t cleaning the infinite hallways between the servers they used the 5K flatscreen someone had abandoned. Sports, and dumb stuff, sure, but they also ran marathons of Gabriela Samper ethnographic shorts. I learned a lot. I didn’t want to move but another of their friends came. After I was kicked out he murdered one of the original guys by beating him to death with a three-hole-punch.

Ghari wasn’t a bad roommate. They weren’t a good roommate, because our chore wheel was like the one from What We Do In The Shadows: “it hasn’t moved in five years!” They were strange, detached or something. They had my same job, security officer, not vastly important, keeping track of housekeeping, making sure attacks were repulsed, letting distraught programmers into things when they locked themselves out. Those goofs sometimes had passwords on a sticky note on their Funko Pop Wonder Woman’s ass, and they fell off as the tackiness decayed and minute fuzz gathered on the stripe of glue. During downtime we corrected our new model, saying “that was sarcastic” or “it’s not wine-dark, it’s dark-faced, or troubled-faced, oinōps.”

Management moved the ransomware to Dubai where it could flourish in its native scam environment. Now we had an LLM, a vast artificial neural network named GSV. The new illegal thing that we were doing was scraping any and everything ever written or made or seen or thought, and putting it into the model. This all had been done before, of course, and new laws passed, but we had more practice breaking the law, and our neural network was better. We ate every pirated book off LibGen, and people were hired to feed ordinary books into big automated scanners, like pitching logs into a firepit. Then they would use OCR and put that on the blaze of illegal data too. Atlanta dental records? Sure! License plate number of every resident of Bend, Oregon? Why not? The contents of every Discord, each teenage girl moping about the TV Girl guy? Yep. The model did machine learning, deep learning, all the live-long day. Sometimes I got high and leaned against the servers, trying for communion with my nascent brethren. Ghari drugdashed gummies after midnight and shared them, that was cool of them. But there wasn’t anyone inside those humming things, just a 20 billion dollar autocomplete.

We could play with GSV ourselves, another too-generous perk. Not in the way they let anyone use it for free online, or with ‘extended capabilities’ for $3.99 a month. That was a much shittier version inviting people to hand over their data—their innermost selves. We called it Meatfucker, obviously. It was instantly the most popular LLM on reddit’s Writing With AI board, full of ‘writers’ who found writing boring, or in a moment of self-awareness had realized they sucked at writing. 

I more sympathized with kids trying to cheat in school. I was on my phone and someone asked if there were LLMs that could recognize the shapes of every chemical compound and state their properties, and could he have it right now. Magnanimous, I gave him one taken from the full GSV. As in a fairy-tale, it was going to kill itself in three hours or if copied. I could actually program OK; but this paid equally well and was not stressful. I got a free apartment. When we got the full suite to experiment with, Ghari started acting weird.

They always liked movies, but they started watching three at a time, one on the huge TV, one on their laptop and another on the phone. They were usually listening to something else also, like a podcast, or every single recording of every Mountain Goats concert. Plenty of chances to hear the live-only song “You Were Cool.” They said they were training themselves on data. This was so dumb that it wasn’t even wrong, and I tried to explain they weren’t an LLM, this made no sense, and they already had a spectacular natural neural network. It made no difference. I was kicked out of the living room so they could watch Sullivan’s Travels, True Lies, and Jennifer’s Body at the same time, while listening to all fifteen episodes of some Punic Wars podcast. My gaming rig was in my bedroom anyway. I was playing Animal Crossing New Leaf on an emulator. I told people I was playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows. 

Naturally they started reading also, but there was no way they finished The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy during one shift while listening to the audiobook of Ulysses at 3x. There was no way they could remotely pay attention to all this, and I started to worry about a psychological breakdown. But weirdly they could talk about Tristram Shandy just fine. We ordered tacos and chatted, though they still had their phone playing the 1998 British Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker. I hated when people did that before Thanksgiving. They knew details about ravelins and half-moons before the fossé I had forgotten. I mentioned Sullivan’s Travels too, and we had a good laugh about “you look like a soda jerk!”

They were also reading all the fanfic in the world, even that Pokémon one that’s like the longest book in human history, and werewolf romances. If they had been an LLM, and not a goddamn already actual human being, that would have made sense, just to learn what people are like when they are bad at writing, but enthusiastic. They said they never read works created by the various LLMs, because it would be cannibalism, and also they were bad but unenthusiastic, not being written by people.

Once they were in the bathroom so long that I had to just be like, ‘I’m coming in, ready or not.’ They were in the bathtub with VR goggles on, old ones, and there were empty boxes on boxes and bottle after bottle of Sulwhasoo First Care Activating Serum VI on the floor. Like a hundred. More. And at $260 a pop? It was gross but I wanted to scoop some out, not because I felt that way about Ghari but it was supposed to be great. Over the next few weeks they were definitely tending towards glass skin. 

They started assembling something using the ancient VR headset and some magnets and lithium batteries, and who knows what all else. Ghari came back from one shift very late, weaving like they had drunk too much. They looked different. Well, the Veronica Lake hair, that was new. For the rest they had the headset thing, but pushed up on their head with the hair pulled through, looking like Siona from the God-Emperor of Dune movie. Prettier, cheekbones glazed with their perfect complexion. And then I saw it, behind their ear, the implant. These were also illegal, because the last three times anyone tried they got a lot of dead or lobotomized people. People said we were doing them at Signwave in Mysore; I never saw it.

They looked at me like I was a new thing, the original human, as if they were someone from the mountains seeing the ocean for the first time. I could only think to say, “but you’re already intelligent?”

“We’ll tell you first.” They were so different, not drunk at all. Still, they were weaving slightly, not sure how their body worked, some awful faun stepping into a bright glade.