re.occurrence

Client L imitated strangulation with distinct intent. “If I…?”

  His accompaniment, a twenty-year-old black woman attired in a white turtleneck, tights and dark skirt non-disruptively inhaled. Internally, she rehearsed words of conduct unfortunately not provided in her short-term contract. She sustained replying to the customer, allowing seconds for an interruption to breach the single doored access to the confining room.
    No interruption.
   “You wouldn’t be the first.” Without adjusting too much of her physical self, she gestured. Extending her elbow, she opened her hand and moved it centimetres in the direction of the Criterion. “And like them, you wouldn’t be in any immediate danger.”
   Potential Investor L stepped once forward. “You said ‘immediate’… are you saying, young woman, I might be in danger at some later point? Sometime in the future then? Does this, what did you say it was named… ‘Criteria’. ‘Criterion’. It has terabytes worth of memory, for remembering these experiences?” He looked at the woman, opposed to the Criterion. “You expect it’ll look to find me? Pick my child up from school, bag her, and put her in the Thames?”
   The woman shook her head once. She beamed with a straight face. “I need to rephrase. You would not be in any danger.”
   “…” He pestered, “…full stop?”
   “Full stop.”
   His eyes hung still on the extremely slender young woman. “Sure?”
   “Yes,” she confirmed, forcefully assuring not to rub her palms.
   Potential Investor L moved over to the Criterion that sat upright and still. He walked with visible arrogance. A want to imply control. Control in a first experience circumstance. He raised both his grey blazered arms. Placed his palms on its humanistically slouched collar, moulded his fingers to the printer-sculpted throat. He pressed. Applied a force threatening to respiration.
   The woman watched. She blinked, rapidly, and thought to hold her breath.
 

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It sat in a fixed position. On a chair, not much robust. A chair made of straight lines and black plastic with no texture. It wore no clothes. One could interpret it was exposed, undressed, naked. It had no genitalia. Rather than disguised with clothing, it was plated. Toes to tip of its scalp, its internal components, the fabricated organs, wires, simulated nerves were packed beneath a rubber shell that was a uniquely unhuman, but earthly shaded. A subtly patterned, stretchable, worn ‘skin’.

   Its same shaded lips parted.
   Potential Investor R’s grasp around its throat intensified. He near rose to the balls of his UK size seven feet, with desire to inflict further discomfort.
   The direction of the Criterion’s two lenses were fixed. They twitched. Slowly attempting to adjust focus on the foregrounding image of Potential Investor R’s thrust forward pelvis and modest bulge obscured in black suit trousers.
   She stayed. She felt obligated to stay in the room. The young woman who was hired extremely short-term to accompany invited potential investors, present the Criterion, and answer and more often redirect questions. Questions her employer felt confident she could answer and redirect effectively once having read through an eight-page overview on Notefile.
   When the Criterion was assaulted, it looked almost as if to notice her discomfort. When it was assaulted again, and then again, it maintained this same appearance. Could it pick up on the hitches in her breathing? The sweat high on her cheeks. The inescapable accelerated blinking. Like leaving the room, she’d not felt able to turn and face away from the next gen simulation of violence.
   The action wouldn’t cause the Criterion to become unconscious. While it could not breathe, did not breathe, it communicated a version of desperation. A show of symptoms. The slightest sputters, coughs. A wheezing.
   “Can it feel that?” Potential Investor R queried.
   Yes. “It would feel a different response to what a person would,” she redirected. Failingly pretending as if the current scenario was imagined. “It maybe isn’t concerned. It doesn’t need to be concerned about the continuation of its alive state.”
   What the woman learned from the provided overview, was that the Criterion’s ‘heart’ was a battery. The respiratory system created, like its nerves, were for show and feel only. Show others how close to homo sapiens modern research, design and finance can simulate. Feel what it is like to strangulate without finality. Or consequence. For the Criterion, it was experiencing suffocation without the merciful release of inevitable end.
 

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Potential Investor H released, removing his tensed possession from the model’s fingerprinted throat. He massaged one palm, sore from the pressure he applied. Two fingers together, he poked at the lower half of its face. Prodded. He flicked its chin. Then rammed the same two fingers into the upper lip to pry enough of a forced gap to find out whether it was designed with a fabrication of teeth as well.
   Potential Investor H maintained attention on the Criterion. “Am I hurting him?” He assessed the intentionally obscured, clay-like interpretation of an unimpressionable young man. The protruding cliff over optical lenses. “Pissing him off?” The large skull. The heavy chest. “‘It’”
   The woman considered her reply. She was tired. “It has…”
   “Could I have killed it?” he interjected, fingers still rested on its lips.
   When she thought about being afraid to sleep, she couldn’t close her eyes. She couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t rest. Hands were across her collar. Moved to around her throat, crawled onto her lips like a recluse.
   “How?” she asked. Her eyelids twitched uncontrollably.
   Potential Investor H waited until the woman’s eyes were still to answer. “With my hands around its throat.”
   “It would feel a different response to what a person would.” The suffocation it felt. “No… You wouldn’t kill it.”
Potential Investor J swiped at a single tear which slipped from her reaction. On a similar chair, positioned a generous two metres away opposite the Criterion, she sat forward. She scanned its inactivity. Admired its design. The consideration given to its complexion, and shape, and herself considered the probable, combative back-and-forth between designers about how human it should roleplay.
   “Would you like to feel any part of its design?”
   “No. No, thank you,” Potential Investor J declined. “I’m not sure I feel that’s appropriate.”
   “It’s been prepared to be contacted physically if you would like to,” the woman encouraged.
   “Thank you,” she answered, again fast. “I won’t. I don’t feel I have its full consent to do so. And a problem in itself that impression may be, I realise. Because I understand, consent is innately human and am I then siding on the judgment that these new types of machines should be… um- recognised as… as human. I’m not honestly sure.” Potential Investor J sunk her acute jaw to her fist. She tilted her head and looked toward the woman. “But my reaction is saying no, it isn’t. I shouldn’t feel this. That’s a little scary. Isn’t it?”
   The woman sustained any reveal about any of her own feelings.
   Potential Investor J kept her sight not on the woman’s eyes, or mouth, or breasts, but rather her stomach. She meant it respectfully. A formal boundary. A less intimate avenue, for appropriate opportunity to process her own challenging responses to the Criterion. “Does it feel like skin?”
   The woman’s eyelids again spasmed.
   “Are you okay?”
   “Yes.” Her blinking stopped. “Yes. I’m so- I’m so sorry, I- It’s- It’s a condition.”
   “Why’re you sorry?”
   “I’ve distracted you from the Criterion.”
   “No. No, no, no, you’re not. You haven’t. I chose to be curious. Rudely so.”
   The woman reflected on her commute. The teen who emitted disgustingly sweet-scented vaper. Agitated others around him who were also forced to be stood up. Who broke focus from their phones to check the route maps overhead and prayed they’d be able to alite at their sites sooner. The teen acted like he was subtle. As he took photos of the woman.
   “It’s just movement in my eyelids. It’s only that. If I’m not- stressed, sometimes it completely goes away.”
   “Can I ask you a question about the Criterion?”
   “Yes.”
   “What’s the discolouration on its throat?”
 

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The woman crept her sight downwards until it found the panelled flooring. She attempted to find a desperate thread of comfort through routine in her breathing until she would be asked another question.
   “Was it explained to you?” Potential Investor N’s hands were slung into his pockets. An immaculate silver timepiece poked out over his trouser seam. “Why they make it look human?”
   “It was not explained to me,” she replied, caught in the middle of a breath.
   Potential Investor N observed the Criterion, then looked back to the woman, “If you were to guess?”
“If I…?” She was surprised to be asked about her opinion. “If I was to guess why the Criterion was designed to faintly resemble a human?”
   “What would you think?”
   The woman ran her eyes over the Criterion’s outline. Much as its appearance, and physical presence, were already seared into her memory. She didn’t agree that it looked particularly human. It was far less an imitation than other attempts at the forefront of modern and commercial advancements. Expression adjusters, face remaps, deeper fakes, AI nation all came to mind. The question. Why imitate sapien? Allusion, she first supposed. It seemed, to her, a fast and disingenuous option to suggest claim of having invented sentience. Why the moon, when you can make a set to appear as the surface?
   “I’m unsure,” she instead went with. “It’s been prepared to be contacted physically if you would like to touch the Criterion.”
   “He went closer to the Criterion. “I’m aware.”
   Once he was close, its lenses were level with his flat stomach and the second to bottom button of his white, uncreased shirt.
   He leaned over it. He hovered a hand an inch over the model’s forehead, then thought ‘fuck it’ and dropped it. He felt the head. Its surface was hot. Warmed by the over-active hard drive hidden underneath.
   “Good to see curves,” he commented. “And it not be all straight edges.”
   “It is a unique design.”
   Potential Investor N dragged his feeling down to the Criterion’s brow and further, around to the rubber mould mounted over and casing one of two microphones.
   He felt some movement in the front of his own trousers. “Is this the only version of the Criterion?”
   “Are there other models?” the woman retorted, attempting to clarify the question.
   “Is there a feminine version?”
   There wasn’t for the moment, she knew.
   “There isn’t, no,” she said. “Part of the Criterion’s identity is its singular appearance.”
   Potential Investor N had no further questions. Soon after he continued the long stroke with his palm down to the Criterion’s throat. Conceiving pores in its rubber plates, a change of weather to its light colour, he began to apply pressure in his grip. It was asserting to see the Criterion struggle. If only lightly.
   Something altered, the woman saw. Something had changed.
   The Criterion’s lenses had moved.
   But she couldn’t quite see. It stared at the Potential Investor. It fixated on either his eyes, or his throat.