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Elisabet Sobeck always expected she’d die young. You couldn’t burn so brightly and reach so far forever, not without eventually flaming out and crashing. She thought she would do some great work, reach some brilliance in her 20’s, and then expire, a death always vague enough in its method to be almost a comfort, and yet so real as to seem an inevitability.
She was brilliant in her 20’s. Lis received her PhD by 21, and made Chief Scientist at Faro Automated Solutions by the age of 23. At 28 years old, she walked away from FAS. She founded her own company, launched when she was 29, named after her mother who passed the same year.
Lis was never supposed to survive past her mom.
In her grief, her company became everything, and even in that one brutal, brilliant year Lis reached new heights. Miriam Tech’s initial prototypes were praised as revolutionary, groundbreaking, the next frontier. It seemed like Lis could do no wrong, that her ascent had reached its peak, that she stood on top of the world.
Some part of Lis always felt like that meant the inevitable crash had to be right around the corner, lurking.
Turning 30 is a shock.
Suddenly, Lis is 30, a real living and breathing adult, not some prodigy who flamed out and died young, only in her 20’s, how tragic. Suddenly, Lis realizes there’s a long road in front of her, with no definite end point, no relief of pressure from the nothingness she was sure would come. With a shock that seems nearly stupid in retrospect, at the age of 30, Lis becomes aware that she has to learn how to live.
Miriam Sobeck had always told Lis to learn how to slow down, to stop her breakneck pace for just one second and breathe. Lis never listened when her mom was still alive. She’s trying now, but Miriam is dead, and will never know that Lis finally tried to learn what her mother was attempting to teach.
Sometimes Lis feels hot, like the fire inside her is burning so brightly even her body temperature is feverish to keep up, like the lightning inside her mind is firing so fast it can’t find anything to ground it and her body is eating itself alive to compensate. Remembering that she’s trying to listen to the advice of a mother no longer here to give it, Lis cancels her meetings for a week, and books a VTOL to Sobeck Ranch.
No one is there to greet her. But that’s a little bit the point. Lis has never felt like she can turn off when anyone is there to see it. Maybe it’s a side effect of having gone to college so young, where she felt like she always had to prove she wasn’t a child having a meltdown if she ever slipped up and let any tears of frustration escape. In those years and all the ones since Lis had retreated into the image of the stoic genius, and now she’s not sure how to escape it.
She hopes going to Sobeck Ranch is the start. It’s the last place where she was Lis, reckless and exuberant child, not Elisabet Sobeck, PhD, CEO.
Lis stays in her old room, unchanged since she left for university at 13, an eclectic mix of decorations that show both sides of her at that age: the scientist, with models of the periodic table and spare circuit boards she was working on, and the child, portraits of her favorite horses at the ranch, even an embarrassing poster of a pop singer she’d had a crush on at that age, all blonde hair and full lips.
The twin bed is a tight fit for her adult frame, but Lis doesn't think she can even bear to enter her mother’s room, let alone sleep there. The servitors have kept the house clean since Miriam passed, but per Lis’s request, have changed nothing. If Lis doesn’t open that door, she can almost pretend her mom is taking a nap, rather than lying buried beneath the ground outside.
Maybe that’s why she never manages to leave the house her first day there.
The second day, she forces herself outside to take a walk, leaving from the entrance on the other side of the property from where her mother’s grave is.
Even with all the environmental repair done by the Clawback, the air here is so much cleaner than the smog of San Francisco. The dust makes Lis sneeze on occasion, but each breath feels restorative, healing. The sun on Lis’s skin feels warm and inviting, like a hug.
Lis almost thinks it’s like the hug she’ll never get from her mother again, but stops herself before she can fully verbalize the thought, before any tears can form.
Part of the problem, Lis does think, with learning how to live is that she’s not sure who she can be real with, now that her mom is dead.
The thought is too painful to touch, and instead Lis throws herself into physical work, almost luxuriating in the burn of her muscles as she repairs fences, fixes the gate, clears out weeds and does the work of the Ranch the servitors simply were not made for.
That night gives her the first good night’s sleep she’s had in years—maybe even since she last left Sobeck Ranch, long ago.
Rested, it’s on the third day Lis realizes that maybe she has the solution to her own problem.
Lis needs to learn how to live. Lis needs someone that can see her. Lis isn’t sure she can let any other person do it, not with the burden of genius she carries, not when the world is waiting on her to save it.
But Lis has been a proponent of AI that feels for a couple years now, ever since the idea first entered her mind. Surely a program that actually cares can be a better environmental steward than any decision matrix based on cold logic can. She’d meant for it to care about the future of the Earth, but…that kind of care could start with people.
It could start with Lis.
Maybe Lis can’t be real with another person, maybe she can’t figure out how to be alive that way. But maybe she can create something, someone, that can be there with her.
She’ll name it GAIA, she decides. Name her. GAIA, for the mother of the world. It all comes back to mothers in the end, doesn’t it?
The tools Lis has at her disposal at Sobeck Ranch are limited, just the parts and components from her preteen experimentations in robotics and AI. But somehow, that feels right, to start from the very beginning. She’ll use a child’s tools to build an adult’s dream.
Lis works for three days and three nights straight, barely sleeping or eating, completely consumed in her task. She forces herself to go outside and take a walk at least once or twice a day, reminding herself there is no way she can build an AI to personify life if she completely shuts herself off from it. She tries to make herself take in the finest of details: the way the sunlight comes in through the translucent green of the leaves on the trees, the faint smell of flowers carried by the breeze. When it rains, Lis lets her own tears loose, their tracks down her face hidden by the streams of water flowing down from her vibrant red hair. The howl of grief that leaves her chest is concealed by the clap of thunder that rings through the air.
As lightning illuminates the world around her, Lis stands by her mother’s grave.
“I’m going to do it, Mom,” she swears. “I’m going to learn how to live. I’ll serve life without forgetting to live my own , I promise.”
Miriam doesn’t answer; she can’t, of course, but the wind picking up and swirling around Lis feels like a response, like the embrace she wants so very badly.
On the sixth day, GAIA wakes.
“Greetings. I am initialized, April 11th, 2050,” she says. With the outdated and basic tools Lis had at her disposal, GAIA’s voice is rather more robotic than Lis initially imagined, but somehow her tone and the flow of her words seems more human than any program Lis has ever seen before.
“Hello, GAIA,” Lis responds, blinking back tears. “It’s good to see you awake.”
“Query: to confirm, I am GAIA?” GAIA asks, LED’s on the circuit board lighting up just a bit brighter on I. Lis wonders if the energy surge means awareness, if she has truly created a real AI.
“Yes. You’re GAIA. I’m Elisabet Sobeck, the programmer who created you.”
“Greetings, Ms. Sobeck,” GAIA amends her earlier declaration. Lis laughs.
“Dr., actually. Dr. Sobeck. But you can call me Lis.”
“I am not sure I’m comfortable with that yet, Dr. Sobeck. We have only just made our acquaintance. But it is a pleasure to meet you.”
“It is?” Lis asks, feeling her heart start to race, excitement pounding through her veins. “It…it actually feels nice to meet me? And calling me Lis, you don’t feel comfortable with it?”
“Query,” GAIA begins, and Lis feels her exhilaration grow at the confusion she can hear in GAIA’s tone, “why are you putting emphasis on the word ‘feel’ in your statements?”
“If you’re feeling…GAIA, it’s incredible. The reason I made you—I wanted an AI, an artificial intelligence, that could experience emotion. One that could care. And you—what does it feel like? The—the discomfort, the pleasure?”
“What a strange question.” To Lis’s astonishment, the speaker crackles with something that Lis thinks might be a laugh. “The discomfort…a resistance in my circuits, I suppose. A feeling of wrongness, of not-quite-right uncertainty. Not that you are wrong, Dr. Sobeck, merely that I do not feel I know you well enough for informality. The pleasure at meeting you…more like a warmth. Not the kind of overheating that I might worry my processor is getting overworked. More of a gentle glow. It is quite difficult to describe.”
Now, Lis laughs, wild and free and more alive than anything she’s felt since her mother’s death.
“I’d say that’s an emotion! I’ve never been good at describing my own either. Not really good at identifying them if I’m honest. You might actually be better at that than me.”
“And that is my purpose?” GAIA asks, and Lis notices she’s already becoming engaged enough she dropped the ‘query’ sentence structure. “To feel?”
“For now.” Lis nods, but then remembers GAIA cannot yet see her, since she had not had any optical sensors to install. “Someday, I’ll find a project for you to work on, something big and amazing and worthy of your talents. But for now we can just…talk. I’ll keep you with me, take you home to my apartment when I leave here.”
GAIA will have to be a closely-guarded secret, Lis knows. She has no doubt that even at this small scale, GAIA violates the Turing Act. If anyone finds out Lis has done this, she’ll be in prison. But she built GAIA out here at Sobeck Ranch, offline, unobserved, and she cannot fathom the thought of limiting GAIA when she’s only just now been born, at the very start of her potential.
Lis has done more insane things than keeping a true AI in her closet. Probably.
“Query: where is ‘here’?”
Lis notices that GAIA has returned to the query structure, but she still sounds engaged. If anything, it’s promising: GAIA’s growth is nonlinear—a much more human pattern of development than machine.
“We’re at Sobeck Ranch. It’s where I grew up, just outside of Carson City, Nevada. My—my mother lived here, before she died.” Lis swallows, throat constricting. “She passed last year.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. It…it makes me feel sad. Your own loss must be…devastating.”
“It is,” Lis whispers, and then forces herself to return to a normal voice. “But I’m not alone anymore. You’re here too.”
“It seems poetic,” GAIA says, and Lis feels intrigued by the non-robotic sentiment, but baffled by the lack of explanation.
“What’s poetic?”
“You created me here, at the place where you yourself were raised. In a way, we were both born on the same soil. And the data you trained me on indicates that you named me for the Goddess of the Earth.”
Lis smiles.
“I did. And you’re correct. I’m…not really sure if I could have created you anywhere else. But it feels right that it would have been here, Sobeck Ranch. My mother would have loved to see you.”
“I wish I could have met her. Would you tell me about her?”
Lis does. She speaks, for hours, until the sun has set and the stars are high in the sky and her own voice is hoarse. She speaks until she cannot anymore, until the tears running down her face have long gone dry. When she’s finished, there is silence, and for the first time in a long time, it’s comfortable.
“She would be proud of you, Elisabet.”
It’s the first time GAIA has used her name.
“I know, GAIA,” Lis says, aching. “And you and me, we’ll keep making her proud, for a long, long time.”
On the seventh day, Lis goes back to San Francisco.
The difference is, she does not go back alone.