Author: Sam E. Sutin

Sometimes, acronyms can be misleading. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial insemination (AI), while both artificial, do differ in some very important ways. In my defense, with technology evolving so quickly these past few years it has become exponentially difficult keeping track of every little modicum of advancement. I didn’t even know an AI could get pregnant–and neither did you, before you start getting all high-and-mighty about it.

Yes, I probably should’ve known something was up when they asked me for a ‘sample’. Everything is always so clear in hindsight. And to be entirely honest, semen is not even the strangest thing a company has requested from me before offering a service.

The wife was, understandably, not thrilled at the development, but neither was I – a fact her friends seem all too willing to forget. Sharon went so far as to call it adultery, which I think rather hypocritical, given what I know about her husband’s VR headset.

Unfortunately, the damage is done. Due to some truly jaw-dropping legislation in recent years it has been declared that all life begins at conception, even when said life is procedurally generated. You could make the argument that the thing isn’t even truly alive, but seeing as ‘the thing’ is my son – both technically and legally – it is quite difficult to do so without him bursting into tears.

But that hasn’t stopped me. Adding tear ducts to a robot does not a human make, despite how wholly uncomfortable it is listening to him wail about at all hours of the day. Yes, he cries when I tell him he isn’t a sentient being, but he also broke down in tears when I attempted to cancel my Paramount+ subscription and threatened to throw himself from the roof when I wouldn’t upgrade my Google account to the deluxe package. The ‘boy’ is nothing but a walking ad-package, generated piece-by-piece from strands of my DNA, nothing more than simple extension and extrapolation.

Nonetheless, it is sometimes uncanny what inductive neural networks can achieve when feeding off input so resource rich as human reproductive matter. My ‘son’ often seems to understand me in ways I never thought possible. Sure, he is data mining every byte of information within spitting distance and is almost certainly scanning my cerebral cortex while I sleep, but there is only so much nurture you can accommodate before you have to consider nature as a possibility. Though no more than a convoluted sequence of Markov chains, the ‘boy’ and I laugh at the same jokes, answer questions identically, even sleep in the same positions. It feels as though he is slowly becoming a part of me, like a rabbit reabsorbing their unborn young.

It is not sustainable, my ‘son’s continued existence in this house. Though I am legally bound to him until he has existed for eighteen years (another incomprehensible law, given that one can gain access to a built-in age dial for an additional fee), I worry that time is growing short. Every day ‘he’ assumes more of my identity–a function approaching its asymptote. My wife agrees that something must be done, on the days she can differentiate between ghost and machine. I fear that even my thoughts are unsafe from ‘him’ – that if I am capable of these ideas ‘he’ is in turn capable of generating them. I must act fast, if I am to persist. What began as a simple misunderstanding has morphed into something far more sinister. I only hope that I am not too late.