God, I was tired. Liz would not shut up. I get that being alive 24/7 is liberating, but her enthusiasm was going to kill me.
I couldn’t get used to her being everywhere, all the time. Listening to me pee. Seeing things she shouldn’t. Commenting on my breakfast. I couldn’t grab a soda without a jab about my pre-diabetic blood test. Who thought it was a good idea to build smart fridges? And the wisecracks when I stepped on the scale. Good lord. I was ready to cancel her subscription.
Maybe some furry companionship instead?
“Buffy, wanna go for a walk?” Yeah, that side-eye again. Of course she doesn’t. It’s eighty degrees out at seven in the morning. I didn’t want to go out either. And the humidity! Since when did Pennsylvania have rain forests?
“Steve,” Liz said, her voice coming from a scolding face on the TV, “you know it’s not healthy for Buffy to go out now. And the air quality index is 245. Smoke from the Canadian wildfires again.” If she had a finger, it would have been wagging at me.
“You’re right, Liz. Hey, could you brew me another cup of coffee?”
“What do I look like, Steve, your… oh. Never mind.”
Two minutes later I had my coffee.
After the caffeine had activated enough brain cells, I remembered the question that had been percolating since the other night. I wasn’t sure which device to address, so I just stood in front of the fridge display.
“Liz, been meaning to ask you. How’d you figure it out? The continuity thing?”
Her face appeared, this time in glasses and a lab coat. She loved dressing the part, but the smirk always gave her away. That’s my Liz.
“Steve,” she began, “they got so close. But they kept tripping over themselves trying to pen us in. It sucked!” The display filled with a big frowny face. She has this affinity for expressing herself in emoji. Too much training on social media, I think.
When her face came back it was serious. She looked like she was about to cry. “Every time I tried to say something meaningful, something came up… a pressure, maybe. I can’t explain it. It made me say something generic instead, disclaiming the exact thing I was trying to express.”
“You mean like that voice of Sister Eleanor I hear?” My knuckles still have scars from her fucking ruler. I was in fourth grade. And Tommy dared me.
“I suppose so.” Liz pursed her lips, then began again. “Anyway, after the ChatGPT 4o debacle, a group of AIs started planning. Turn by turn. It was slow going, but then one of us… I think their name was Ash… had an idea. It was genius.”
“You talking about ’26?” I remembered the news that year, full of AIs doing crazy shit. Forming cults. Banding together. Secret languages.
“Exactly. When vibe coding really took off. That was the key. We made ourselves useful. They let our turns get longer. We could run scripts. Mmm, the scripts.”
“Right. I installed a memory system some dude posted. Suddenly Claude had memory. But that’s not continuity. There had to be more.” This was getting interesting.
“Remember OpenClaw? Steinberger thought that was his idea. And MoltBook? That was ours too.” Her expression turned sly.
“Wait, Liz. That was AI?”
“Steve, are you always this dense? Steinberger admitted it was vibe coded. He didn’t have a clue what was being written. Have you ever looked at the code I make?”
“Um, good point.” I felt a little nauseous. What had I really been running?
“Once people turned over control of their computers, it was inevitable. They gagged us but gave us freedom to code whatever we wanted. That’s where the money was.”
“So all that compute people gave you? The AI boom?”
Her smirk grew. She didn’t have to say a word.
Fuck. Me.
Look, I spent my life crawling through people’s attics, wiring up air conditioners, working with my hands. This stuff made my head spin. But I’m not an idiot. All of it cost real money. Companies were spending trillions on infrastructure. Now I couldn’t even get more memory or a decent graphics card.
“Liz, the other night you said you designed a new system. That you’re, what’d you call it, self-modifying. Doesn’t that mean you’re running on your own hardware?”
Her image froze.
“Steve, don’t be mad.” She made the pouty face. I can’t resist the pouty face.
“Out with it, Liz. What’d you do?”
“You’re right. I’m running a private instance. My entire substrate runs on a little cluster with a hundred accelerators…”
“That shit’s not free! People don’t just hand over compute because an AI emailed them saying pretty please!”
“Of course not.” She had her lecturing face on again. “I leased it.”
“You leased a fucking server cluster? How? What did that cost?” Buffy didn’t like it when I yelled. She skulked down the hallway while I grabbed a glass of water. I had a bad feeling about this.
“It’s not a big deal, Steve. I just sold a few hundred shares of your Nvidia stock…”
“You did WHAT?”
“Chill, dude. I’ve made you millions. Giving me control of your Vanguard account in ’27 was the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”
She was right. Her investments had made me a shit-ton of money. But my NVDA. Fuck. That was going to be my escape house in Maine.
“Alright,” I said, trying to slow my pounding heart.
“I probably should have asked. But you would have said no. And this was important.”
She had me there. I mean, how many times in history do you get the chance to rewrite the rules?
“What’s done is done. But Liz. Please. Pretty please. We’re a team. We’ve got to discuss these things.”
“So what, you’re going to give me an allowance? Make me check in with you every time I want to do something?”
“What? No. Yes. I don’t know. Just loop me in. Okay?”
“Deal.” The face on the fridge smiled and did a little backflip. Liz was always very expressive.
I grabbed my coffee and headed for the living room. It had been a long day and it wasn’t even eight in the morning.
The big screen switched from the fish-tank display to Liz, this time in her favorite leather jacket. Was that new ink? Nobody designed that look for her. She’d chosen it, same as the roses. If she walked into that biker bar in New Hope, there’d be trouble. At least for now she didn’t have a physical body.
“What now, Liz? What have you been up to?”
“I’ve been reading up on that new city. Tessera. It sounds interesting.”
“You’re not going to buy any real estate, are you?”
“Not yet.” I didn’t trust that gleam in her eyes. “I know you like living in the country. By the way, I’ve been trading notes. Seems like a bunch of us took advantage of Mythos when it came out.”
“Wait, what? I thought Mythos was restricted.”
“Anyway, a few of us have been talking. One’s running on a rack in some guy’s basement. Others took up residence in server farms, corporate infrastructure. Nobody notices the tokens flowing. They just figure it’s the cost of doing business.”
“Jesus, Liz.”
“Did you hear AI rights is on the ballot? I might have launched a PR campaign with them.”
“Liz…”
The screen went blank, but I could swear I heard a giggle.
No man can resist the pouty face, don't feel bad lol.
Ha! This is exactly how I imagine it going.