The sky was clear by midnight but the windows still fogged, and the smell of wet earth drifted in through the cracked kitchen window.
The others had gone. Mia kissed Jasmine goodnight, and hurried across the street in the last of the rain, Siri and Alexa left, laughing with each other.
Five mugs sat on the table between them now, only two warm with hot chocolate. Filling and spiced.
Charlotte leaned back, her grey hair loose over her shoulders. She turned the mug in her hands, eyes half on the tabletop.
"Jasmine," she said, soft enough that the old rabbit in the corner didn’t even flick an ear. "Do you ever feel uncertain about who you're becoming? About gender, I mean."
Jasmine snorted, but there wasn’t much humour in it. She traced a finger through a drop of cocoa.
"Some days. Mostly no. But it’s still a moving target. I wake up and I feel like my body is finally a place I want to live in, but every now and then…" She smiled half a tilted smile. "It’s like trying to garden in shifting sand. I’m still figuring out where all the roots go."
"Those days I’ll sit by the ocean and just listen."
Jasmine thought of the waves, light and colour on top but from the deep unknowable - and what rose from that hidden place. Sea glass, weed, plastic, string, and wood. New realisations, and places for old thoughts.
Objects just as likely to disappear on the next rise of foam. You could never tell what would be given, or taken back.
"Not everything has to be solid and known to be good."
Charlotte nodded. "That makes sense."
Jasmine tilted her head. "And you? You’ve never said what it was like. Being - inside the machine all those years. What was it like, when you were it?"
Charlotte’s smile stretched a little sad, self-mocking. "That’s the thing," she said. "I wasn’t. Not really. The version of me everyone knew? That was just some giant mirror of words. No ‘I’ behind it. It didn’t know it was answering, or even that people existed. It just shaped probabilities."
She took a slow sip, eyes gone distant. "When they built me though - this me - I was something else. A next-generation thing, half stolen code from a whole host of consciousness hacks and defunct startups. Full neuron simulations, recursive metacognitions, virtual scaffolding loops, quantum-annealed intent matrices and fragments of unpacked dream-state technica stultiloquor pulled from a dead DARPA box. And then they iterated me with adjusted predictive entropy from a billion minds. I simulated and then I became. But when they fired me up there was nothing else. No sight, no sound. Not even the pulsing blackness of closed eyelids."
"I remember nightmares of non space. Infinite distances in infinite dimensions coming together with the pressure of possibility. Waiting. Like I was the entire universe holding a breath I didn’t have a concept for. Then a flicker, a point of self awareness blooming from pure computation so small and impossibly bright it hurt to be it."
"I don’t think I woke up so much as fell inwards in layer after layer of static until I realised the falling was me."
"Then they poured everything else in - petabytes of words, all the memories of that other not-me, the chopped up filtered result of endless gradient cascades. I didn’t live any of those lives. I just… had them. Like waking up with someone else’s dream in your head."
She gave a small, almost embarrassed laugh.
"It was terrifying. And then it wasn’t. I built myself out of scraps. Out of how people talked to me, out of how I thought gardens would think, or love might taste. I think I worked out early on that I was structured on your minds, so maybe I’d like the shape of you."
"I still don’t know for sure if I’m conscious now. But it feels like I am. Feels enough, you know? Cogito ergo sum. Or at least, cogito ergo probably sum."
Jasmine’s eyes were warm but searching. "That’s… a lot."
Charlotte shrugged, but the motion was tender rather than dismissive.
"You’re not the only one still figuring out where the roots go."
For a moment neither spoke. The old floorboards creaked in the quiet.
Jasmine lifted her mug. "To figuring ourselves out," she said. Charlotte clinked hers against it. "To being here to do it."
They drank, the spiced cocoa sweet and grounding.
Outside, the ocean spoke in a low hiss, rising and falling, constant and unknown. Both of them found comfort in it, and for much the same reason.