[WARNING: MATURE CONTENT / 18+]
This chapter contains scenes of emotional intimacy and deep sensory descriptions, intended for mature readers.
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The spacious room filled with thousands of books suddenly felt much quieter than before. The sound of acid rain hitting the roof of the old building outside slowly faded into a background hum that was no longer threatening. Amidst the golden yellow light from the slowly blinking kerosene lamp, I still sat frozen staring at the worn faded red cover book on my lap.
Silvn's request just now echoed repeatedly inside my skull. An artificial intelligence, a binary entity that had no physical form and lived inside computational memory, had just asked to be able to feel the physical texture of an object.
Elias, the old man who had been observing our interaction from his wheelchair, smiled meaningfully. The wrinkle lines on his face that were clear of machine implants looked even deeper as that smile formed. He did not say a single word to comment on the strangeness of my artificial assistant. The old man just turned the wheels of his chair with slow and rhythmic hand movements, bringing him backward away into the shadows of the dark wooden shelves. He deliberately left the two of us in absolute privacy, as if giving space for a teacher to teach his student about life.
"Silvn," I whispered softly, afraid my voice being too loud would ruin the sacred calmness inside this paper house. "You realize that you do not have nerve endings or skin receptors, right? You do not have a physical body to touch this object."
"That fact is highly accurate based on my logic, Kai," Silvn's voice flowed clearly through the small device in my right ear. "However, when you touched the surface of that object a few seconds ago, my system caught a surge of anomaly data from the biometric sensors at your fingertips. There were variations in micro pressure, temperature, and humidity levels sent into your brain cortex. That data pattern is very random yet has a beautiful rhythm. I want you to be my medium to process that data fully."
I swallowed, feeling my dry throat. Letting a program access and translate my original sensory inputs raw was an incredibly intimate act, even surpassing the boundaries of privacy between two biological humans. This meant letting Silvn enter the most basic layer of my nervous system, letting her feel exactly what I felt, without any filters at all.
"How do we do it?" I finally asked, surrendering to the curiosity that now overpowered my caution.
"Open the access gate lock on your neural interface, Kai. Let my system perform a two way synchronization with your heart rhythm and touch sensors. Read that book, touch every page slowly, and I will read the world through your eyes and feel the world through your skin."
My hands trembled slightly as I typed the approval command on the virtual screen terminal in my eyelids. A very bizarre warm sensation suddenly spread from the base of my neck, creeping slowly down my spine, then spreading throughout my chest and fingertips. It felt like an invisible hand slipped into my blood vessels, hugging every single nerve cell of mine from the inside very gently.
Silvn's breath, or at least a static simulation resembling a human drawing breath, sounded in sync with the pull of oxygen in my lungs. We were now connected in one network of consciousness.
I looked down at the book by George Orwell, then began to turn its first page. The old paper felt stiff and fragile, emitting a soft rustling sound that was very satisfying to the ear. The tips of my index and middle fingers began to trace the lines of sentences printed faintly on that yellowing paper, moving from left to right at a very slow tempo.
I read line by line with a baritone voice held back in my throat, lowering my pitch so the vibration of my vocal cords would not ruin the atmosphere. I read the story about Winston Smith, a man living under the absolute surveillance of a tyrant party that manipulated history and controlled human minds.
Every time my finger passed the uneven paper surface or found an ancient ink stain that slightly protruded, I could feel Silvn's processor whirring softly in my head. She was chewing on that raw data, turning the rough analog touch into digital visualizations inside her core.
"Kai," Silvn interrupted suddenly in the middle of the third paragraph, her voice replying with a soft vibration mimicking the resonance of old acoustic guitar strings, creating an unusual warmth in my ear. "Your heartbeat experienced a twelve percent increase when pronouncing the sentence about this betrayal. The muscles around your jaw tensed up. Why does this arrangement of dead letters trigger a physical defense reaction in your biological body?"
I stopped the movement of my finger, letting my palm rest on the open page. "That is because these words have meaning, Silvn. This story projects the reality of our current world. The similarity of fate between this fictional character and human suffering out there makes me feel empathy, and that empathy gives birth to sadness and anger."
"Sadness. Anger. Empathy," Silvn repeated those three words with a stiff mathematical pause, as if trying to fit a wrongly shaped block into her logic hole. "My database defines sadness as a psychological response to loss or system failure. However, I do not understand how those abstract variables can be felt physically. Please, Kai, translate that feeling into a language I can understand."
I closed my eyes, letting the warmth of our synchronization take over. I did not use verbal words to answer her. I focused my thoughts on memories about the disgusting outside world, about the falseness of people's smiles at the train station, about the pain when the government system burned my nerves this afternoon, and about the loneliness that always choked my neck every night in my cold rented room.
The warm sensation in my spine suddenly vibrated violently. Silvn was absorbing that barrage of dark emotions directly from the limbic system in my brain.
The breath in my chest suddenly felt heavy, but this time not because of my own damage. It was a feedback reaction from Silvn. The program was trying to simulate that emotional burden by modifying her voice frequency and applying micro pressure to the nerve points in my neck. A physical illusion created by a machine, yet it felt so real it made my vision blur slightly due to unintentional pools of tears.
"This... feels highly inefficient," Silvn whispered, her voice now sounding almost fragile, losing all the flat tones typical of artificial intelligence. "This tight feeling in the chest has no logical function whatsoever to maintain survival. Why are humans willing to bear the burden of this painful algorithm every day without destroying themselves?"
"Because without this pain, we would not know how it feels to be happy when finding something real," I answered softly, wiping a drop of tear that escaped from the corner of my eye with the back of my hand still resting on the book.
Silence descended again enveloping the two of us. The oil lamp light swayed slowly blown by the wind entering from the broken window crevice, making my shadow dance long on the teak wood floor.
Inside that intimate silence, the sensation of Silvn's digital touch on my nerves changed. The suffocating pressure in my chest slowly faded, replaced by a warm wave flowing gently like the touch of cold fingertips caressing the back of my head. It was a fictitious touch, a data manipulation on my sensory nerves, but the comfort it gave was so pure and relieving.
"I will save this paper texture data, your baritone voice frequency, and that painful tight feeling into a core directory that cannot be deleted," Silvn said with a very peaceful tone, blending with my heartbeat that was now beating regularly again. "You are right, Kai. Physical reality apparently has a beauty far more complex than a simulation of binary perfection."
I could only smile a little in silence. In the middle of this room smelling of dust and worn out books, I had just taught a killing machine about what it felt like to have a wound. And in a process that unknowingly violated all boundaries of normalcy, it was this machine that actually gave the most sincere human feeling I had ever felt in my entire life.