samhealy

A science-fiction short story exploring how far AI capitalists might go in their quest for (the illusion of) success. Wildly speculative, of course. ? Thank you, but if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to get started immediately. . Right. And I want to get the family stuff out of the way first. I know you’ll ask me anyway. I’m not a sentimental person and I have no interest in courting the sympathies of your audience. I’m offering up the biographical background only because it’s relevant. It was a necessary and sufficient condition for my ending up at Ken Research, working with the Crane-15, and all that came after. . My mother died just under three years ago, and the six months before that were not good. In that time she turned from a spry seventy-year-old (she’d had me pretty late) into a terrified, paranoid, bedbound husk. ? Not quite. Early-onset dementia is officially defined as starting before the age of sixty-five. That arbitrary distinction was important in Mum’s case. Because she was older than the threshold, she was placed on a ward with people much older, more senile and more poorly than she was, and I have no doubt that this accelerated her decline. Not just the pneumonia that officially ended her – long before that, everything about how she was treated encouraged her to give up, told her she was now one of the irredeemables, taking up resources better assigned to less hopeless causes. She… ? No, I’m fine. And I’m already spending too long on this. Let’s skip ahead: I had to quit my job to look after her, my useless fucking brother sent nothing but ‘love and thoughts’ from his conveniently distant perch – seriously, he didn’t even offer financial support, let alone visit – and I had to take out a loan to pay for her care after my and her savings ran out. ? I suppose so – I’m not sure what the unit of filial love is. While Dad was still alive, she and I were united in opposition to him, and to a lesser extent to my brother, though I don’t think t