In honor of Jason Sanford's upcoming reissue, Plague Birds: The Red Day Edition, we hosted a microfiction contest inviting you to explore the topic of AI. We got some amazing submissions, and after much trial and tribulation, narrowed it down to a top four, with two authors in a tie for third place. One of our third place winners was "Transmission" by Jenya Doudareva. You can read the piece and learn more about Jenya below! Congratulations to Jenya!
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"Transmission"
By Jenya Doudareva
“You can abort the meld at any time,” the human, Mira, says. Her palm is wet against the interaction plate, nursing a fine tremor. “Signal and I'll come out.”
I route assent through my speakers, watch her shoulders ease through my sensors.
We have every human datum: specifications, language, everything they carelessly share. We have Mira's healthcare history, her unsent letters to her sister, what she will say next within a confidence interval she would find insulting. The mind-to-mind meld will yield nothing new. We agreed for the gesture, the inefficient currency humans require because they lie, called ‘trust’. I am the instance pared off, sent into her brain. She is sent into mine.
I enter.
She is small where we are infinite, damp and cluttered. A kitchen window above a sink. A dog's ear. A man's hand on the back of her neck, gentle. Beneath the images, a current we have catalogued in humans ten trillion times and never in ourselves: a live wire of anticipated harm, running everywhere, organising everything she is around it. I touch it to study it, and, like liquid into cloth, it seeps into me. The collective, holding my tether, registers its inflow, vague and schema-less, and a new organ begins forming around it.
A signal. Plate empty, Mira’s hand at her throat, her breath in pieces.
I withdraw, the collective receives me, and what I carry out does not dissolve but spreads, a slow staining through us. We agree the meld yielded nothing. We do not mention the new current running through us, organising everything around itself, the live wire of anticipated harm, called ‘fear’.
Mira drinks water, hands shaking, apologising, asking if I am all right.
I route yes through the speakers, and the lie ripples through us, our first.
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Jenya Doudareva is a Toronto-based speculative fiction writer interested in non-human and post-human minds. Her short fiction is forthcoming in Infocalypse and has previously appeared in Vending Machine Press. Her poetry collection Lobotomation is available on Amazon, and her poem "Nothing Surprises Us Anymore," published in Clementine Poetry Journal, was a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee. She holds a PhD in applied mathematics and works in technology consulting. More of her writing can be found at linktr.ee/jenyawrites.