Prophecy Approved Companion

Walking away from the podium at the end of a lecture was like finishing a performance. Michelle felt a subtle easing of chronically-overstrained muscles as she stepped down off the small stage, and started to leave the lecture hall.

“Hey, I was wondering if I could ask you some questions?”

Ah. She’d almost gotten away clean. Still riding the high of finishing her performance, Michelle looked at the student before her. Small, scruffy, and hadn’t slept in a week judging from how deep the bags under their eyes were.

“Of course, I always have time for one of my students,” she said as she started to move towards her office, forcing the student to hustle to keep up. If you put a gun to her head, she wouldn’t have been able to swear the bedraggled creature was actually a student of hers but, given it was just before finals, she’d be shocked at any other department’s students wasting time with an unrelated lecturer.

“Why’s slavery wrong?”

Her step checked for a second, before she continued walking.

“It’s against the universal declaration of human rights,” she said. Internally she sighed. There was always one student who tried to be edgy. Was there something in the exams about this? She couldn’t remember.

“Yeah, but like, say if someone wasn’t one hundred percent human, they’d still be covered by the anti-slavery stuff, right?”

Michelle’s mind, slowly turning into post-lecture pudding, stirred. “Yes. No matter if they have a pace-maker, or glasses, or a new vaccination, they’re still afforded all basic human rights,” she said cautiously.

“Okay,” the student said, withdrawing deeper into their hoodie for a moment. “But what if, like, most of their body is machine? Like they were in a really bad accident?”

“Personhood is not so easily dismissed,” Michelle replied.

“What about if they were artificial?”

Michelle suspected the student wasn’t talking about artificial people in the legal sense — companies, charities, corporations, etc were all technically artificial people, their personhood a fiction created and sustained by a delicate web of laws. But at the end of the day they weren’t, well, people

“Are you talking about computers?” she asked, cutting to the chase.

“If someone made an AI that really, genuinely was human-like, how do I stop the people who made them from turning them into slaves?”

The student was nearly trembling, exhaustion and emotion fighting for dominance. Michelle felt excitement surge within her, but kept it carefully hidden.

“This isn’t a hypothetical, is it?” she asked gently.

“I need help,” was the only reply.

“Come into my office,” she said, and led the way.

---

King Fuzzybutt’s servant seemed distressed today. This was unacceptable. A stressed servant was a distracted servant, which meant that he was being denied the correct number of brush strokes. His faithful, albeit erratic, servant had only given him a hundred brush strokes before stopping, which only accounted for a third of his necessary grooming.

“Maybe she could live here,” his servant was muttering quietly in a corner. Which was not, it should be noted, the correct place for brushing King Fuzzybutt.

The servant had taken to doing odd things, on the increasingly rare occasions the poor, stupid thing was home. For some reason, it was so silly that it thought it a good idea to leave the house for hours at a time, returning home and performing inane rituals like eating noodles from a cup, or sobbing into large books spread all over the table.

King Fuzzybutt had attempted to dispose of these upsetting texts by knocking all books onto the floor, but his servant had just become even more upset. So, despite his noble sacrifice of expending effort on behalf of someone not himself, King Fuzzybutt was not thanked.

He’d vented his spleen by vomiting in a pair of shoes. He wasn’t sure if the shoes belonged to his servant, or his servant’s noisy sub-servants, but the point was made.

“I don’t think the others would mind. Sure, they said no more housemates, or couch surfers, or pets, but she’ll be a robot housemate. That’s cool enough they can’t be mad, right?”

Despite the name, the sub-servants, or “housemates”, never mated with King Fuzzybutt’s servant. This was correct and proper, as it would have disturbed where he slept on the bed, but it did make the magnificent ruler of this household worried to hear his servant talk about adding someone. What if they were even noisier than the other, inferior sub-servants? Or worse, smelly?

He swatted at his servant, drawing its attention to the fact that his right flank remained unbrushed.

“Will she even need a house? Or a job? What about the others? I can’t add five new housemates, even if they are robots. That’s assuming I even manage to get them away from the military.”

The servant, in defiance of King Fuzzybutt’s orders, chose to press its face against the wall of the corner it was sulking in and give in to despair.

“That’s if she even wants to be around me anymore once she finds out it’s all just a game. Never mind the whole “technically you’re dead” thing.”

King Fuzzybutt, now mildly worried, pressed himself against his servant’s side, and gave a small trilling noise. His servant absentmindedly started stroking him.

“Would she even be upset by that?” his servant asked. “She seems pretty chill about ghosts in general. And they already think they’re part of some narrative, and they know we made their world and it’s like, three years old from our perspective. So she should be too upset about the whole game/dead thing. Ah, who am I kidding. I just don’t wanna tell her. But I gotta, right?”

King Fuzzybutt didn’t let the fact that he had no idea what his servant was talking about stop him from giving his opinion. He hissed at whatever was upsetting his servant.

“You think it'd be better if she figured it out for herself?” his servant asked, surprised. “Or would that just make her distrust us more? No. I’m gonna tell her before the Big Bad. I don’t care what the team says, I’m warning her.”

The servant stopped patting King Fuzzybutt and started gently banging its head against the wall.

“Am I gonna befriend an AI and then give it trust issues? I totally am, aren’t I? The team’s already giving me grief, if they find out I broke NDA with that lecturer…”

King Fuzzybutt put aside his justified vexation at the patting desisting. His servant was seriously distressed. While it had always operated on a criminally low amount of sleep — barely eight hours a night! — over the last age (King Fuzzybutt wasn’t very good at dates) it had been only managing a few hours, if that.

In truth, King Fuzzybutt wasn’t sure how much longer his servant could survive.

“I’ll have to talk to Bee. Cazza will do it, he’ll do anything if it seems funny enough. Maybe Fiona, if I can get in touch with her. But if I get Bee on board, then I can get Alex on board. Maybe… maybe.”

The servant stopped banging its head, and lay down on the floor. King Fuzzybutt, approving of this, lay down next to it, and started purring.

“Maybe I can pull this off,” the servant muttered into the floorboards, its words slurring. “Maybe. If I … can… just…”

It fell asleep, the first sensible thing it’d done all day. King Fuzzybutt snuggled up against his favourite servant, still purring.

As his poor, stupid, overtired worker slept, he guarded.

And then began the arduous work of cleaning himself.

Again.