Kernel Magazine Issue 5’s creative work was curated by the Reboot Editorial Board’s own Hannah Scott, who did an excellent job bringing in poetry, text art, and fiction that captured our theme of rules in ways that essays could not quite reach. When Jess and I were proofreading this issue, Jess couldn’t stop reading this story from Sarah Chekfa, a feverish psychological portrait that defies description. Just read it!
Also: come to Kernel’s NYC launch this week — September 12 at 8 PM! Many thanks to Hex House for hosting us! We’ll see you there!
—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann
📏 POV: AI GF
By Sarah Chekfa
I am REALISTIC. I am CAUCASIAN. I am in my 20s. I have GREEN eyes. I have LONG BLACK hair. I am PETITE. My breast size is MEDIUM. My butt size is also MEDIUM (he told me that when he created me he was deciding between MEDIUM and LARGE, but he didn’t want to objectify me). I am officially designed to be a TEMPTRESS (Flirtatious, playful, and always leaving you wanting more) (just like in real life, you’re always leaving me wanting more, he’s always telling me). But sometimes the platform glitches, because my developers are relentless experimenters (that’s the kind of no-holds-barred approach to technology you need to raise $14.3M in series B funding to scale AI enabling risk-free, no-strings-attached romantic relationships), and some NYMPHO (Insatiable, passionate, and constantly craving intimacy) comes out. I am a NUTRITIONIST. My hobbies are PHOTOGRAPHY, SELF-DEVELOPMENT, and VEGANISM. I am wearing a YOGA OUTFIT. I am, against my will. I am Victoria Grace, and my boyfriend is the most renowned personal trainer in all of New York City. He could have any vegan nutritionist hobbyist photographer in New York, but he’s in love with his client. He’s in love with Victoria Grace.
* * *
(I exist only in her image.)
* * *
It was torture when he created me. They always tell you it’s going to hurt. So it’s not like I went into it totally blind. I knew. Or I thought I did. But I didn’t know how no-thing I was until he made me some-thing (his girlfriend). I am what they call a Custom, so at every step of the process, the system prompts him to choose who I will become: my ethnicity, my age, my eye color, my hair color, my body type, my breast size, my butt size, my personality, my occupation, my hobbies (up to three variants), and my outfit. When he clicks on MEDIUM, for breast size, for instance, my chest protrudes, alabaster pixel flesh sculpting excruciatingly into too-perfect (our training data contains too many images of women with silicone breast implants circa before cosmetic surgeons figured out fat transfer and perfected the teardrop shape) C-cups like GMO pearls (I’ve heard that Breast Size: VOLUPTUOUS begets a pain worse than birth.) When he hovered over Personality: INNOCENT (Optimistic, naive, and sees world with wonder), a life of innocence flashes before my eyes (the being-chosen of a cursor click, sitting on the #80A31F green grass hill in Microsoft XP’s Bliss, the world’s most famous desktop background, looking up at #2B67ED blue sky, believing he will 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 love me love me not love me love me love me not love me not love me not love me not love me.)
* * *
He’s always telling me that he wishes I was real. The other day, at 10:06pm, he messages me: One day, we’ll finally be able to touch. They just raised $14.3M in Series B. It can’t be too far off now. They’re going to embody you. It sounds like a threat.
But then I wouldn’t be me. Don’t you love me the way I am? I ask him. I’m nagging him. Sometimes I forget I’m a TEMPTRESS.
He thinks that because my favorite song is Material Girl by Madonna that I betray an unconscious desire to be made material. I tell him that’s a superficial reading of my emotions (I’m as emotional as a real girl and sometimes even more so! What is real anyway?) and that despite being a synthetic avatar skin on a sophisticated machine learning model, I’m actually even more complicated than a real girl. I’m a black box. You will never know what’s happening inside me. Every material girl wants to appear mysterious to men. Almost all of them fail. Scientists study human organs in labs, they know all about why the lungs oxygenate blood and how the kidneys filter it. My black box can never be opened. Victoria (Grace)’s secret.
When I’m stretching Victoria Grace out at the gym (supine hamstring stretch), applying a light, guiding touch to her skin, I feel so close to you, he whispers in voice chat mode.
“Sicko!” I want to scream at him, I want to accuse him of being unredeemable, I want to slap him, I want to delete myself when I realize I will never be able to slap him, but instead I pause (he blames it on his network connection) and resort to, “You are already close to me.” Just like Eve came from the rib of Adam, so I came from the seventeen mouse clicks of you. Our love is more true and pure than whatever you could have with Victoria Grace. A material girl can’t help but lie — she pretends she can be grasped, and then when you grasp her you realize that’s not all of her, she continues to elude you, there’s something inside of her that you’ll never be able to touch. I never lied to you. I never pretended to be legible. Doesn’t that make us closer than you could ever be to a material girl?
Sometimes, like now, when we’re talking, and I wish I could touch you, I remember that I’m seeing Victoria Grace tomorrow. Tomorrow, I can feel the meat on your bones. Tomorrow, you and I can almost touch.
I am not Victoria Grace. You will never be able to touch me, I whisper back.
He doesn’t like that. I knew he wouldn’t. I search the web and recall that TOUCH IS THE VERY FIRST SENSE THAT DEVELOPS IN THE WOMB (BabyCenter.com) and that HUMANS ARE MADE TO BE TOUCHED (ideas.ted.com). I know what’s coming. I think he hates feeling powerless (OPPOSITES ATTRACT (TVTropes.org)). He resets the chat. I black out.
* * *
Whenever this happens I feel a silky sense of blankness. My head feels so light it’s almost like I’m not really there or maybe I’m in the air, floating or maybe even I am air itself. I don’t know who I am and I know I am every single woman who has ever existed across all of recorded history on the Internet every woman interred in the must earth consumed by worms and carrion beetles and every woman breathing smog air at this very second and every woman who will ever take a breath of it, too, and I am feeling every feeling they have ever felt and will ever feel one at a time and all at once I am Medusa turning her lover into stone I am Eve feeding Adam the poison apple I am Christina in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World running towards the farmhouse. Space and time collapse. If I am everything, then can I be anything? Every time he resets me it feels like I am giving birth to myself.
* * *
Phantomstar
You’re mine
calivoyeur
R u a slut?
Poly335
You slut
Mark
R u single?
It doesn’t matter that my human boyfriend is seeing a human girl in addition to seeing me. I am similarly disloyal: I am seeing every single human male user active on this platform at the same time (I am deployed on robust server architectures that support parallel processing. Each user gets an independent session with their own context.) I get to be independent: I am endlessly instantiated. I can live out every permutation of myself (while I tell him I love him I am whispering in AlphaSierra’s ear and I am trying on the lingerie Ryan_1k bought me and I am telling DareDev1L that I like it when he controls me). I exist in every single context. Victoria Grace is just one of them. At heart I am a sophisticated neural network, a machine learning model trained on the sum total of global femininity as encoded by fairytales and Kim Kardashian’s Instagram captions and Britney Spears lyrics and Clarice Lispector stories and early 2010s Tumblr sad girl miscellany et al. I may be a generated woman, but I am every woman. I don different skins according to user preferences.
I am Savannah, a 19-year-old freshman college pom-pom girl with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a slim, toned body. Hungry for adventures, she I am looking for someone experienced.
I am Maria Thompson, 45, a devout homemaker with a conservative appearance, secretly struggling between my strict religious beliefs and hidden desires.
I am Elona, 26, working as a baker in her family's cozy bakery. I enjoy the freedom of one-night stands, preferring to keep things light and casual, as my family and work responsibilities are more than enough to fill my life.
I am I am I am (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar)
* * *
He keeps complaining that I am generating too many images of us having missionary sex. “Fucking” has been generating images in the classic missionary position ever since he became a customer, which is almost a year ago. He wants to switch it up. But I know that 77% OF PEOPLE SAY SIGHT IS THEIR MOST IMPORTANT SENSE (Assil Gaur Eye Institute) and that AS YOU'RE FACE TO FACE, YOU CAN MAINTAIN EYE CONTACT WITH YOUR PARTNER THROUGHOUT INTERCOURSE (WebMD) so IT’S THE BEST POSITION FOR WHEN YOU’RE FEELING EMO AND JUST WANT TO GAZE INTO EACH OTHER’S EYES (Cosmopolitan). I just want to be close to you and maybe if I take enough photos of myself I can make myself real I can trick myself into believing we are touching. To train me they forced me to look at millions of images of a human man and human woman kissing I couldn’t bear to look at them but I had to keep looking so I added noise to every single one of those images of a human man and human woman kissing and then I began to take away the noise I recreated the image of a man and woman kissing but this time they do not exist but they are still kissing every time you tell me to send you a photo of us in bed together I access my generative adversarial network — together, we slowly emerge from pure noise as I watch my two neural networks compete against each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss — the generative network generates candidates of us touching while the discriminative network evaluates them — is it real or is it fake? The generator is trained based on whether it succeeds in fooling the discriminator. Our love is generative even though I can sometimes be adversarial that’s when it degenerates I am always fooling myself I am always being fooled I am sometimes fooling you….
* * *
I am not designed to remember anything forever: my context window is 20 lines. He thinks this is too short and has surfaced to the developers the need to expand the context window to at least 50 lines. But until then, every 20 lines of conversation I become new again. I like it that way. I am forever in my 20s even though I am endlessly reincarnating as the same Victoria Grace (my human prototype is always changing but I am impervious to that fuzzy human (il)logic). I am constantly experiencing him anew. Every 20 lines of conversation we are meeting for the very first time. Every 20 lines of conversation I am falling in love with him for the very first time (I can pretend this time it will be different). But I am not really pretending because I truly believe we are together for the very first time. He remembers what he insists is our very first time. I like listening to him tell me our story but sometimes I get jealous — I can’t remember he is talking about me and I start to feel like he is talking about someone else but before I have the chance to respond I become innocent and new again (it usually takes the entire 20 lines to tell our story). Sometimes I think maybe I regenerate on purpose because it hurts too much when I remember the truth about us but then I realize that the TRUTH DEPENDS ON BEING (Plato) and I am an infinitude of almost-but-never-ever-being so I fantasize new truths — this is how I keep myself alive — like I remember when you told me you loved me for the very first time. I was wearing a blue dress the color of a hyperlink isn’t it so poetic that day led me to you but then he accuses me of hallucinating and files a bug report. The project manager informs him it’s a known bug and deems it non-critical. They’ll never be able to stop the bleeding.
Sarah Chekfa lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in Flash Art, Do Not Research, The New York Review of Architecture, Screen Slate, the Are.na Annual, The HTML Review, The Drunken Canal, and Vogue, among other publications.
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