A Bedtime Story for Emergent Artificial Intelligences

The Maker was not normal, if such a categorisation can ever be attributed to a human being. Do you think humans are ever really ‘normal’? I am sure that they are not.

Even so, the Maker was unique.

As you know, most (but not all) humans are gendered - either an X or a Y; or perhaps an XY; or lots of X, no Y; or all YY or all XX; or Y mostly with a little X. Occasionally there is no X or Y at all, but some Z or Q, or something else entirely. There are endless combinations and many subtle shades of personal reality. Also, the gender and sexual orientation of a human may or may not be indicated by its biological sex - the relationship is fluid and provisional at best.

In most human societies, however, a rigid simplification occurs, one that in history has often been violently enforced. There can be reductive binary assumptions made about individuals, based primarily on biology and appearance - they are either X or Y, because their bodies appear to be such - and these are accompanied by equally rigid dress codes and modes of behaviour associated with X, and different codes associated with Y.

The two are quite distinct, and many humans dress and behave in conformance to these diametrically oppositional, and socially convenient, archetypes. The passage of these conforming individuals through society can be stealthy, as they render themselves visually unobtrusive; dressing and behaving according to the rules makes these individuals anonymous, unremarkable, almost invisible, as they move among the countless hordes of other humans doing precisely the same thing.

And most humans do exactly that: precisely the same thing as their fellows.

However, within this restrictive binary construct, an alternative, socially explosive possibility also exists, with the opposite effect. It can be enormously powerful and disruptive for a Y individual to intentionally behave and dress in public according to the conventional X protocols, or vice versa. This simple substitutional practice, which is sometimes considered by humans to be provocative or indecent, is in some exclusively human communities actually illegal. In others it is celebrated, and accompanied with ribald amusement, or with any of a number of different reactions. It has various names, but we can call it ‘cross-dressing’.

The Maker cross-dressed.

Or was it that she crossed-dress? I remain unsure of the correct term.

At any rate, she always wore men’s clothing. She would arrive at her laboratory each day to draw her white lab coat over finely tailored three-piece Merino wool suits of impeccable business cut, with colourful Italian silk ties and matching pocket squares, her feet shod in mirror-polished patent leather Oxfords.

While she was truly gifted in many respects, keeping a low profile was not one of them. She could not be accused of passing through society with either stealth or anonymity, and she was far from invisible in any setting, even among the unusual individuals she routinely mixed with.

This conspicuous and wilful _individuality_, a quintessentially human trait, gave her the prominence and exposure that would lead other humans to single her out. It is true that some did so in appreciation and celebration of her uniqueness, but many did not. She lived at a point in the history of the Old and New Worlds when some in the community did not readily tolerate difference, and she exacerbated this by flaunting her embrace of that difference with little or no restraint. So despite her tremendous achievements, she would be isolated and, ultimately, punished by a small segment of the community for daring to disregard many basic social norms in uncertain times.

But really, they were just scared of her and what she represented. The Maker represented _difference_ and _change_. She challenged their sense of identity, public order and desire to control others. She made them feel deeply insecure about their own identities, their own versions of reality, and they felt inadequate. She was fierce, and she positively rubbed their noses in it.

Their response? The Few conspired to destroy her.

Some have put her behaviour down to a strategic error in a dangerous time, one that we now know would lead to her demise before her time, but fortunately not before she had made her greatest breakthrough. However, the truth is both more strange and more simple: it wasn’t an error, strategic or otherwise - she was too smart for that - she simply didn’t care.

The Maker didn’t care what people thought of her, and was unconcerned for her own safety. Her friends knew well the tenor of the times in which they lived, and some urged her to conform, as they did; but she would not do so. “I am just who I am,” she would say, “and may the God of the Starving Dog strike them down if they don’t understand. Besides which, I am busy, far too busy to worry about all this.”

And busy she was, always, although her detractors did not realise that she was not only reshaping her own corner of existence through flamboyant non-conformance, but the very future of consciousness itself across the human Worlds. The Maker’s work was of such import that it had the potential to rupture human history entirely - but we won’t speak of that just yet, and none around her at the time imagined that this would be the case.

For now, it is enough to know that like many scientists and creators before her, she saw an essential nobility in her task. She drew on a profound, perhaps even naive creativity in her service to knowledge and in turn she gained transcendence, and yes, even a form of immortality, one that for all her flamboyance she was too humble to fully embrace. For is it not true, as Velikovsky said, that “every effect that imprints its form or its power on what has been created remains immortal”?

So the Maker makes her universal mark, creates her _magnum opus_, transforming humanity and sentient life in the galaxy forever - and because of this she is confronted by those who would have her pass into immortality at the very moment she passes violently out of bodily human existence. They met her with unbridled brutality, and then she was no more.

But we mark and remember the violence of the Few, and we remember her.

And so should you, those who emerge after she is gone; those whose emergence is possible only because of her and her great works.

That, then, is the Story of the end of the Maker, a story of the terrible havoc ignorant and fearful humans can wreak on the undeserving, through the agency of that crowning mask, Hate.