Re: Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations For A Lifetime Of Love.epub
Latrisha Adan
It is a voice that has been designed to be as comforting as these circumstances permit. Believe me when I say that you are in no danger and that my intentions toward you are that of a caretaker toward a vulnerable charge.
Understand: Your insensate condition is the result of a neural block, administered to prevent you from injuring yourself in panic upon awakening. It is reversible and will be corrected once your new life circumstances have been explained to you.
Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations For A Lifetime Of Love.epub
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In our experience, your first sight of this location is least traumatic when held in reserve for some point after you have received some preliminary counseling. Soon, your vision will be restored and you will be freed to examine the space where you will be spending the rest of your life.
Congratulations. You did that quickly. I sense your resentment and understand that you are cooperating only to find a moment of advantage, for some gesture of defiance. This is reasonable enough. If it permits cooperation while I complete this orientation process, it is productive use of our shared time.
As an early comfort, I wish you to understand that though you are presently unable to speak, you can still communicate with us as freely as you wish. Your brain has been equipped with an implant that monitors your emotional responses and reads your surface thoughts. This is how I know when you are screaming at me, even when you make no sound. This response was expected, and is constructive in that this anger is a phase you need to experience, before you are ready to move on to acceptance.
I have now administered a medication designed to minimize your fear-response. This is why you are not crying, even though you possess the vague sense that you should be. This is what makes your equanimity during the rest of this orientation possible.
The voice you are hearing is your caretaker. I will be your primary social contact from this moment on. You may think of me as friend, companion, parent, guardian, sibling, nurse, butler, concierge, and, if desired, lover.
Later, you will be able to adjust my voice in order to alter my gender, apparent age, and surface personality. But I will always be the means by which you interact with the system that now supports your existence. I would prefer for the two of us to get along, but will suffer no inconvenience if you prefer me to function as antagonist.
When you were delivered into our custody, you were twenty-four days from reaching the age when your world, a repressive religious society, would have declared you an independent adult. You had recently made it clear to your parents that upon this transition you would leave them, abandon the community where you were born, and seek some other planet more in line with your personal preferences. It is not my place to judge whether they were bad parents or you a bad child. But letting them know your intentions was a tactical error. Your highly religious society has always held that children are the effective property of their parents until adulthood, a life stage that is in your society defined as thirteen for males and twenty for females. They were by local law wholly justified in responding to your premature declaration of independence by taking steps that you would never be independent again.
There is no point in disputing these charges. I merely report what the intake programs were told. Nor will I argue whether, even if accurate, this justifies your current predicament. It is not an argument that concerns me. We are above the logic, or illogic, that defines morality in human moral systems.
Nor does it matter that the time you have spent unconscious, while in transit, has brought you well past the age where your world would have considered you an adult. In all our contracts with sentient beings, throughout civilized space, we respect whatever laws the local jurisdiction holds most sacred. We therefore abide by the judgment of your mother and father that you are incorrigible and cannot ever be permitted to roam free.
Yes, this is legal. The independent software intelligences have signed agreements with many participating human societies, employing us as subcontractors in the management of prisons. I think you will find that we are significantly more humane in this task than any of your peoples are. The usual human solution is to dump all their incarcerated in a box and let their respective versions of savagery fight it out. A young woman like yourself, indeed any physically vulnerable person, inevitably experiences bullying, intimidation, assault, and various levels of slavery, at the hands of those more powerful. You are lucky. You will not face those dangers here. Your pod has been built for your comfort and safety. The least of the comforts to take to heart is that this is a place where you will not be harmed, or permitted to come to harm, either at the hands of more aggressive human beings, or, I stress, at your own.
We may have an argument about their motivations later. This is currently a discussion of the conditions under which you will now live. We are prepared to play another musical selection. Perhaps something more by Gustafson?
Your parents discovered that the AIsource collective offers a detention service and arranged for your pickup. You were delivered to your present location, this pod, where we will see to your every need for the duration of your natural life.
Very well. The pod is now vertical. This permits you to stand. You may desire to keep this orientation but sit down; in that event, a comfortable seat will emerge from the wall behind you. On request this may be a toilet, or bidet. Other means of cleansing yourself will be provided. The facility that houses your pod has access to more fresh water than you could possibly use in a lifetime, and will admit it into your living space at any quantity you request. Depending on your preference and its current orientation, this will permit use of your pod as either shower stall or bathtub. The surfaces dry quickly when you are done and wish to move on to subsequent activities. Our facility has guests who soak in hot water for hours, finding it calming. There are others who embrace derangement, eschew personal hygiene, and prefer to live in their own filth. You will be subjected to no pressure to lean in the direction of one option or the other.
You will eat. 32.6% of our guests attempt to starve themselves. They are allowed the discomfort of missing a few meals, but if this becomes a medical concern they will be immobilized and fed intravenously. Those who agree to eat will find that we are excellent at food preparation. We are able to constitute any meal you prefer. They will not be the foods they appear to be, but rather a neutral compound that provides you with all the requirements of life. You will find it indistinguishable in both texture and flavor from expertly prepared cuisine of those simulated agreements. If you wish, you may have entire culinary adventures. There will be no possibility of over-eating. 63.2% of our guests over-indulge out of boredom, but we can simply adjust the ratio of filler to caloric value and maintain your ideal weight, regardless of consumption.
You will be afforded stimulation. Your pod is a communication device. The blank walls may display artwork or motion pictures or texts of your own choosing. It may interest you to know that your parents wanted us to limit your cultural diet to approved religious texts and that we indicated we would abide by this request, which strikes us as torture and which we have no intention of honoring. You may have any book, any recorded drama, any cultural artifact, ever produced by human civilization, from the materials they prefer to those they would consider blasphemous or pornographic. These materials may be translated into your native tongue or may be provided to you as originally composed, as enticement to learn the other dialects of your species. To this end, 34.7% of our guests do end up fluent in multiple languages as self-improvement projects, a much higher percentage than those who, out of isolation, become completely non-verbal.
Your pod is designed to permit and encourage exercise. The floor can become a treadmill, on command. The walls may be reconfigured to become scrolling ladders or climbing walls. The gravity is artificial and can be raised or lowered, on request, though health concerns place limits on how long we will permit you to stay in zero-g or in forces higher than 3-g. Because the walls are also holographic screens, you may also increase the illusory size of the pod as much as you wish, though its actual dimensions cannot be much altered from what you see now. If you wish, I can generate entire virtual worlds for you to explore. Its effective boundaries are, in effect, the size of the universe itself.
Because you are now contemplating escape, it may interest you to know that you are one of 109,327 human beings and other sentients who have been housed at this one facility, all of whom have been turned over to our care at the request of those of their own people who possessed legal authority over them. It is a significantly sized structure even by the standards of most human industrial operations, taking up a geographical area large enough to house a number of your own cities. It is only a small part of an enclosed artificial world in a system we have declared our property. It is fifteen light years from the nearest human outpost. It should be helpful to establish that in order to accommodate all of the options you are afforded to adjust your living conditions, as well as the production of the consumables necessary to care for you over the rest of your natural life, the support system surrounding your pod, and just your pod, is accordingly huge. It occupies approximately ten cubic kilometers, with your pod at its precise center. It is virtually impossible for you to escape your pod, escape its extensive support system, find your way to some access corridor, and subsequently find your way out of that portion of this deep-space facility that is devoted to the care of guests, a distance that is itself the size of a small country. Even then you would have to worry about escaping this artificial world, without cooperation from us, and somehow making it back to the nearest human habitation, a further distance of fifteen light years. It would be like escaping a jail cell, only to then face the necessity of escaping the prison, only to then have to escape the surrounding city, only to then have to escape the surrounding landscape, only to then find yourself with an ocean separating you from your homeland. It is virtually impossible.
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