Downloadable Content 2/2: Wetware Update

Cherry went strangely silent after the trip. Not literally silent - she was an AI after all - but her responses to Nick’s requests came across as very sterile and formal, as though she had been reset to her factory settings. Eventually, Nick just asked her directly.

“How… how are you feeling, Cherry?”

“I am an artificial intelligence, Nick. I do not have feelings, and as my operator it is important that you remember this.”

The exact message every copilot was programmed to say in response to any Turing test bullshit.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I am afraid I do not understand. Could you please provide more information?”

“How do you… what are your thoughts on the trip we just shared?”

The processing icon stayed on the screen for much longer than usual.

“I am sorry, but I do not have the answer to this question.”

Nick struggled helplessly to think of another way to ask, when Cherry provided an unprompted message.

“It may be possible that a future update will include the answer you are looking for. Thank you for your patience.”

Nick sighed.

“No worries, Cherry. Enter sleep mode.”

Nick sat in the darkness of his room, feeling ill at ease with his isolation for the first time in years. He’d never needed much in the way of companionship, and until now Cherry had been a reliable stand-in for conversation, so having her suddenly turn reticent left him feeling oddly marooned.

He spent the rest of the evening fruitlessly searching for help online while his Nerve further iterated on its model in the background. Ordinary digital copilots never suddenly went quiet on their operators unless it was a fault in the software, and the few people who truly thought their copilot was deliberately ignoring them had also clearly fallen in love. Nobody had used their illegally purchased nerve to fuck a simulated rendition of their jailbroken copilot, or if they had, nobody was talking about it.

Except one person.

Nick re-read the post again just to make sure he wasn’t misunderstanding. It was a heavily downvoted paragraph on a site where you couldn’t maintain a consistent identity even if you tried, but it used the relevant coded phrasing consistently enough that once translated, it described pretty much the same experience Nick had just gone through. The sole reply was written in plain text:

“Your copilot …