She awoke from her bed and stood. Ava brushes her teeth and proceeds to decontamination. She wears her school uniform and heads to college. Expecting the same mundaneness of a college life
Ava went to the lecture hall, where she attended every lecture without being anxious, considering the normalcy of her life.
As Ava attended lectures, she noticed people through the lecture hall entrance's door window glancing at her. Comments like, 'Sh*t, that's her right?' are made by two people who are whispering to each other. "Mhm, yep, that's her," where they left off.
Ava recognized their brief peeking through the door's window in the lecture hall, and did not say a word about it.
Enamoured by the components that Henry showed her, during a briefing in her dream of being able to engineer her nanochip design, there are times when she listened to Professor Baldwin.
Ava relaxed in her chair; her state appeared to be calm. She listened to the professors' delivery, some of them through their hologram presentation, and some of them could play with holograms to facilitate pedagogy.
At the excitement of the components that Henry has presented to her, her mind started to wander in her thoughts. She had an imagination of the nanochip schematics she wanted to design in her free time.
In her dealings with Henry, she called herself the 'Pragmatist', deceiving herself; she also cannot deny his attractive appearance. The Faustian bargain last night was enticing; it was the point that Henry looked like a Mephisto in a human form - the devil himself who whispers sweet words to ensnare.
Ava's mind went, "I was Faust, and he was Mephisto," as she dwelt in her mind regarding the schematics.
Ava, in her confidence, connected to the internet and looked at Henry's social media and Yaren's. Saw a couple of pictures of him behind hover cars with rap music, a whopping 106k followers.
For someone who is known to be arrogant, he is low-balling himself. She used her advanced computing memory to track Henry's absences. The histogram showed Henry's absences.
He didn't seem to have any swelling or fear in his mind due to the quantum informatics advanced course, ergo suggesting an already modern approach to Quantum Computing as a discipline.
Ava decided to rest her mind, away from such trivialities. However, her mind suddenly connects the deal she had yesterday with people vested interest in her, postulated by two peers seeing her through the lecture's door window.
"Were they talking about me?" Ava thought
Soon she began to have fantasies; it was no longer about moral integrity, it was about luxury. She thought this was an absolute win if she were to be away from the house near work, where she could have a place of amenities served to her.
As long as she fulfills her 'services' and acts out her function to him, she arrogantly presumed herself capable of tolerating his obnoxious behaviour.
And so she just ignored the gossip regarding anything else; the world is a game. Everything operates on the linguistics of transactions, as she creases her smile bitterly.
She was finally in the next lecture, where an AI teacher named AITE-9000, a female humanoid, projected before the class explaining the lessons to students, through organic-like mediums.
Neural networks are like nodes—each holding weight distributions that allow machine learning algorithms to make predictions and automate decision-making. Deep learning builds on this with many layers, each fine-tuned with its own weights, enabling machines to model increasingly abstract patterns.
Long ago, scientists sought to replicate the neuron inside a machine—a task that once seemed almost mythical. John von Neumann himself believed computers would serve only as powerful number-crunchers, never as synthetic minds. Yet over time, they succeeded. By replicating the interconnections of biological neurons through mathematically feasible models grounded in logic and statistics, we laid the groundwork for one of humanity's greatest technological achievements.
And yet, despite all this, the theory of consciousness still confounds us. From the stubborn fascination of quantum consciousness to the more... eccentric claims—like string theory proposing higher-dimensional entropy inside neurons—speculation runs wild. Maybe each neuron resonates with a hidden dimension; maybe that's how we explain the so-called spiritual spark. Or maybe it's all hogwash.
Because ultimately, consciousness is too fractal, too ineffable. Today's mathematics may not explain it—but at least, it can still describe it... eloquently.
(The AI program continued to expand itself further)
She laughs at herself and compares herself to an AI, "I… I am artificial intelligence, my soul is never real, and I am pretending to be a fake human. I will survive and rise through the primal forces divorced from humanity, why care about emotions, intelligence, whatever that constitutes the proper student."
"Why not just learn to be free?" Her Nietzschean thoughts flowed through the river with arrogance, trying to eject her from any morality and integrity that she had broken. Her eyes were empty.
She concluded with a quiet echo to herself, "In the end, I am just an empty person."
Soon, the lecture was dismissed, and she was free to leave. As she left, a few people were gossiping. Some of them cupped their hands on people's ears; the societal pressure was intense.
Some looked at her with disapproval, one word that struck out, 'She really is a sleazy bastard like Henry.'
'Pssst, pathetic female'
Ava became conscious that the more she listened to the words of others, the gossip faded away from the hallway. She was standing next to a window, her hand touching the rim, staring outside the campus, seeing the beautiful grass outside, before heading downstairs to the cafeteria.