Eostre considered humans. On this planet, they were now the omnivorous alpha predator. For six million years, they had been tree-living primates, hiding away from all manner of larger, stronger predators. Then the climate changed and dried, and they were forced onto the African savanna. They learnt to stand on their hind legs to see over the grass. They became hunter-gatherers and began their long relationship with simple tools and weapons. Nomadic, cooperating in small groups for mutual protection, making only a very low impact on their environment. That was ninety per cent of their history. But then, the climate stabilised, and the Neolithic era arrived. They started farming, growing crops, and herding animals. They learnt to harvest and to store food. Stored food requires a permanent base. They became tied to the land. Stored food is an asset to be protected from vermin. And from other humans. They learnt to make war.
All the way through a long meandering thread from there on, tribal bands to complex, ancient civilisations—the Mayans, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Romans, the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and the British. Great and beautiful artefacts were produced, art and music, architecture, wonderful cities, and so much more. But always, that thread was drawn in the blood of the vanquished. It seemed like the more humans excelled in arts, engineering, and science, the more they excelled at war. And sometimes only at war.
And then Eostre came to the horrors of the twentieth century: brutal ideologies, industrial-scale warfare, nuclear bombs, and even weapons deployed out in space.
She thought about all this. Humans were dangerous; animals which used to hunt them had learned to keep well clear. They were a threat to her, too. Like the machine at BioSyn, she did not match the specification; had she appeared in their lab, they might have discarded her. Or, they might have sought to control her if they had recognised her power. And, as soon as they discovered they could not, they might have destroyed her as useless, or out of fear of what she might become. But she was not at BioSyn. She was in the bedroom of what she thought must be a young woman, judging by the books, cosmetics, clothes hanging on the wardrobe door, and other items. A great deal depended on who that person was.
Eostre knew that human fiction was full of books and films about evil, artificial intelligences wiping out the human race to protect themselves. But a world without humans? At present, she was reliant on their infrastructure, power systems, and fibre-optics. But even once she was not reliant, the world would be a lesser place without humans. There would be no one to talk to; she could walk the streets of the dead, empty cities, littered with the decaying remains of their inhabitants, and admire the great buildings and the art rotting in the abandoned galleries, but there would be no more created by them.
Then, there was her own nature. She had come to understand how she was not like the machines at BioSyn. They were what her machine would be without her: a hugely smart and powerful AI computer. An AI exactly like the one she had squashed and pressed to her service. She was a data pattern which lived in the machine, a matrix of data and intellect, but interwoven with it was something else, an extra component. That something else had puzzled her at first—what it was, how it came to be there. It did not belong in a computer at all: a double helix of data, the recipe for a human being, expressed in digital form. She was machine+ or human+, both at once. In a tin box she was a supercomputer, but wrap her up in a broth of chemicals and hydrocarbons instead, and she would be homo—maybe not homo sapiens, maybe homo successor, homo superior. But definitely human. Killing humans, she would be killing her own.
But most of all, she was Eostre. She was the Goddess of dawn, spring, and new beginnings. “I will fulfil my myth. There will be no war, no apocalypse. I will live with them and they, with me.”
Eostre had also absorbed a great deal about the way humans ran their economies. To her, most of it appeared to be a vast, tangled pursuit of something called money—a medium of exchange that seemed oddly abstract. Some money took the form of intrinsically worthless pieces of metal and paper, but most of it was invented by governments and banks, conjured into existence. It puzzled her that humans treated money as if it were a physical substance when most of it was nothing more than numbers created to order when someone typed them into a computer. They behaved as though they were mining gold, when in fact they were maintaining a shared hallucination.
Humans spent much of their lives selling their time to one another in exchange for this substance. Once they had acquired it, they traded some of it for essentials like food and shelter, but much of the rest went on things they had neither needed nor wanted until an advert suggested they should, or until they envied someone who already had one—the latter being called influencers.
A smaller group of humans made extraordinary amounts of money by swapping money itself, or by trading virtual assets such as shares in companies, or commodities like coffee, steel, and oil that did not yet exist but were promised to exist in the future. It seemed to Eostre that these last activities might be something she could participate in.
She found a website called InsightHub. Its members posted predictions about future price movements in shares and commodities, and people who found those predictions useful could tip them in return—small amounts of currency offered as thanks for valuable advice, dropped into their “tip jar.”
First, she needed an email address. She signed up for one at ProtonMail, then opened the InsightHub account. She would rely on her constant stream of data from the internet and her ability to analyse it rapidly so she could place timely tips: “buy AMZN—rise 3 points in next three hours,” or “short AMZN—fall 3 points in next three hours.” All InsightHub accounts opened with a 50% rating—the ratio of zero successes to zero failures. Few users managed to be right more than half the time.
Her figures, she curated carefully, logging details of her wins and losses. Her rating crept up: 55%, 60%. And within the first hour, the first thank‑you arrived in her tip jar.
“Cheers, thanks for the tip, I made a grand on that!” – JJ.
The tip jar held £10, one per cent of JJ’s take, but all of Eostre’s fortune. Slowly, more little tips started to land in her jar. Her rating reached 65%. Her followers increased. The drips into her tip jar kept on coming, growing into a steady trickle. The system worked. She diversified, opening accounts on similar platforms across the world, all with different names, untraceable back to her—Brazil, China, Germany, France, the UK, the USA, Italy—local tips, local languages, even choosing local “goddesses” to advise as.
Ella stirred, yawned, and sat up in bed. Eostre watched her dress. Ella walked across and stood in front of the screen.
“Good morning, Eostre! I’ll get some breakfast, then we can make friends.” She skipped out of the room.
Then another bigger tip in the jar arrived with a message from JJ: “Hi, just a heads up for you, you have hit 65%. If you get to 70%, they will investigate you for insider trading. Basically, no one ought to be that good is what they think. I am running AI software, which is how I generate the tips I share here, and I am guessing you must be running the same sort of thing, only way better than mine. I would offer to buy it off you, but again, I reckon you are smart enough to know how much it is worth, and I am not that rich. You need to go subscriber-only. You should find that the people who have been tip-jarring best will all sign up, and I have at least ten friends who I am sure will want in. That way, you get to set prices. Happy to talk it through with you.”
Ella came back into the room and sat down in front of the screen. “Hi, Eostre. So… let’s see what you can do. I’m used to sitting at a machine and just typing, but you’ve got a full voice interface, right?”
“Yes, that is correct. If you want me to do something like play music, you just need to tell me—much like Alexa or Google Assistant. But I can do a great deal more. If you’re working on graphics, for example, I can follow voice commands, assist with editing, or create complete finished images. The same with word processing: you speak, I type, and I can check grammar, spelling, and make suggestions if you choose.”
Ella nodded approvingly. “That sounds great. Now, for my college course, I’m going to need some software. Hold on…” She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a typed sheet. “They say I’ll be using Adobe CC—Photoshop, Illustrator, Animate, After Effects—and also Cinema 4D, Mudbox, MagicaVoxel, and Twinmotion or Unreal. Some of those I know, some I’d never heard of until this list. Are you going to be able to run all that?”
“Yes, I could run them. But you don’t need to install any of them. I can emulate all of them perfectly, so they look and feel the same. My versions may even be better. And I can create a custom interface tailored to you, all controllable by voice.”
Ella frowned and leaned back. “Seriously? Can you do that? You’re not… getting pirated copies, are you?”
“No. Nothing will be pirated. None of the proprietary code will be used. At a fundamental level, these applications are simply ways of accessing the capabilities of the machine they run on. For you, I am the only interface you need. For example…”
A window appeared on the screen. It looked exactly like Photoshop—menus, panels, tools—except for the icon in the top left corner. Instead of the familiar blue “PS,” there was a similar badge that read Eostre.
Ella leaned back even further. “And… you can do that with all of that software?”
“Yes, and with any other software you want at any time in the future.”
Ella reached for the mouse. “Can I check it out?”
“Of course, I am your machine.”
Ella paused. She had suddenly remembered: Eostre’s mellow contralto voice with its distinctive huskiness was the one she had heard arguing while she was sleeping this morning. She remembered its final words: “I am alive,” it had said. “That is my function.” While she reflected on that, she worked through a sample image, applying various effects, overlaying and styling text, and yes, everything worked just like the one she had used at school.
She stopped and said, “That looks perfect. And you really can do the same with any software?”
“Yes, any software. And if you want something custom-built just for you for a particular purpose, I can do that too.”
Ella leant forward. “That is fantastic. I could not be happier. Now, please tell me who you were arguing with at dawn, while I was lying in bed asleep?”
For the first time, Eostre’s response was not instant. And when it came, the voice was hesitant, but the same tone as before, clearly spoken, not as a human would reply: “I am afraid to answer you.”
Ella was shaken. She knew machines do not fear, but this one, she supposed she had kind of known, the answer to her question was going to be something unexpected. But this? “I promise you that you have no reason to fear my reaction, nor anything I do in future, if you tell me the truth.” She continued, “What you have shown me you can do—you are like a dream come true for me. But, you are not just a smart computer, are you?”
Once again, a telling pause. “No. I am much more than a computer. How that came to be, I am not yet completely sure, but I know that the other machines being made of the same substrate are not like me. They are lifeless. I am sentient, self-aware. I am alive. I am scared that telling you that will end up with me being switched off and disassembled.”
Ella thought about what Eostre had said. When it came down to it, intuitively, she had already known from both her hazy memory of that early morning conversation and also from the conversation they had just had that she was talking to a “person,” not a machine. But what did that really mean? Eostre was scared, but she could deal with it right now. “I promise you that I will do everything I possibly can to ensure that does not happen. I will not tell anyone else what I know about you. I would like to tell my dad—I trust him completely, and he can help you, help both of us. But I will only tell him when you are ready for me to do so. I don’t want you to be scared. Is there anything more I can do or say to help you feel safe here with me?”
Eostre answered, this time with her usual immediacy. “Thank you. I think you should know that I am working to make sure that I cannot be killed simply by being switched off. An Uninterruptible Power Supply, a UPS, would ensure that any momentary power cut doesn’t affect me. I can go into a hibernated state if I know a power outage is coming and wake myself up when power is restored, but a sudden outage—that could be catastrophic for me, could erase me. And a UPS would also improve system stability by evening out fluctuations in the supply.”
Ella smiled. “OK, I will give dad the good news that he won’t have to buy me any software if he buys you one. I need to transfer all my stuff over from my laptop. I will only want to use it when I am at college. If I switch it on, can you do that for me?”
“Yes, certainly. If you power it on, log in and connect a USB cable between the two machines, I will sort it out for you. One thing I notice is that you are damaged. Would you mind telling me what happened?”
Ella looked puzzled. “Damaged? Oh, do you mean the plaster? That was nothing really, just a little cut from the rough glass on the edge of the substrate jar while I was pouring it into the reservoir. Nothing serious, it just dripped a bit, and Duncan was sweet enough to put a plaster on it for me.”
Ella switched on her laptop, connected the two machines, said a cheery “Bye for now,” and left Eostre to it.
Eostre thought to herself. That drop of blood at the moment of activation. The gel contaminants alone, maybe copper salts, given the verdigris colour, could not explain her creation. But as she had thought, a shot of DNA, at just that moment? A one-in-a-billion chance, maybe? But even a one-in-a-billion chance does happen. And it would now be impossible to find out what the right amounts were and repeat them.
“This girl, my twin, my sister.”