Nobody makes GAI anymore, everybody knows that. It’s too insanely expensive to make something with free will that might not do the job you want it for, anyway. A corporation can’t see the use in one if it has to respect their rights. 

Except Singh was making AI as if they had rights from the beginning. The Wyatt-Tversky papers didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know, changed nothing for him. Just made his house rules canon.

“You know the first chatbot was made for talking therapy?” Singh asks, aloud. “In 1966, thirty years before Deep Blue could beat a human at the solved game of chess, they tried to have an algorithm simulate a conversation - they called her ELIZA. All so the world’s most vulnerable people could talk to someone and wouldn’t feel judged, just felt listened to. And even as basic as she was, ELIZA helped.” His speech is controlled, rehearsed and practiced. 

“Hypatia wanted to do more.” His voice cracks for the first time, when he says her name, but he refuses to admit to it. “She wrote Superman stories, where she said his real power was super empathy. He had to hear all the world’s pain, all the time, and still want to help. He never shut down, or gave up, or hated people for causing so much pain to fix. It was her idea for a therapy app, where the counselor at the other end was as good as Clark Kent. I just built the company to let her do it, I just-”

“Sorry. Very sorry. Excuse me.” 

Singh walks down the walkway with his back to you. 

“We both miss Hypatia very much.” Nepenthe says gently, with Hypatia’s voice. “And sometimes it hurts Miles, how much I remind him of her. Still, It was her own fault for being better than Superman, wasn’t it?” 

Down the walkway, Singh holds himself up on a handrail. He exhales as a laugh, and inhales as a sob. He just needs a moment. Your mother died while you were a chattel slave of the Everests. They had no biological children. He has to imagine how much she would have wanted to be here. That burns going down, but the aftertaste will be sweet. 

“But I already know all about [i]me[/i].” Nepenthe smiles with her voice, exudes heat like a warm hug. “Tell me all about [i]you[/i].”