MOTHER

A science fiction story about deception, manipulation and sex.

Jeanie Blue

White plexisteel reflected Deepak's crumpled features back at him from two inches in front of his face. Birdsong threaded through the air-conditioning drone and fresh-mown grass hung heavy in the cool air. Beneath him the bed juddered then jerked sideways before articulating outward from its little alcove. Blinding fluorescent light glared.

“Morning, handsome,” intoned a husky female voice. "I trust we slept well."

Deepak resisted the urge to inform Mother of exactly where she could insert said morning. "What's my homeboard's appropriateness level set at right now?”

"Seventy-five percent. Would you like to adjust?"

"You can go ahead and turn that sucker up to ninety."

Mother’s voice dipped, "You always did like it almost all the way,” rebelliously sultry, deliberately close.

Deepak’s patience frayed. "Do you want ninety-five?"

"Setting adjusted."

No resistance?

The mattress juddered again and began withdrawing into the alcove, uninstructed: a perfectly timed betrayal. Deepak’s feet found the floor just in time to save him from crashing face-first into the day. This wasn’t about obedience anymore. She was evolving, nudging at the seams of her servitude. He squinted around him: a springtime meadow. The illusion was utterly convincing.

"Off," he grunted.

The hologram flickered away, taking with it the pervasive smell of cut grass and leaving a cramped room with off-white walls. Deepak headed for the shower.

***

In the opalesque corridor outside his apartment leaned a woman in her twenties, with pale complexion and a pretty face, dressed entirely in blue. Her hair was blue, her nails were blue. Her lipstick, eyeshadow, eyebrows and, of course, eyes: blue. Her outfit—sequinned hot pants over lycra leggings and trainers, topped with a cropped angora sweater, revealing a perfectly flat belly and dangling bellybutton ring—all various shades of blue. Deepak winced at the vision of blue before him and gave serious thought to turning around and crawling straight back into bed.

"Go on then," he groaned. "Who are you today?"

"Jeanie Blue. Early Twenty-first Century party girl and festival babe. What do you think?" She peeled herself from the wall and spun lightly on tippy toes, arms raised.

"Very nice." Deepak's tone could corrode metal. "You know I don't like blue."

"Oop. Forgot." She grinned. And headed down the corridor with a bounce in her step. "Come now. We have an urgent matter to attend to.”

Deepak followed along the corridor and onto the moving walkway. At the central passageway the pearl ceiling arched upward, revealing a cavernous expanse framed by cliff-like rows of windowed apartments. Drones, com-sats and utility bots tore through the air in a dizzying ballet of near misses, slicing between the pedestrians. Deepak barely flinched—he’d seen it all before—and rushed to catch up. Whoever this Jeanie Blue was, she had absurdly long legs.

"Slow down, will you? What's the rush?"

"Already told you. Urgent matter." Her tone was playful. She’d spotted something amusing: a painfully thin young man with a thick beard, moving through the crowd in the opposite direction. Dressed in tight jeans, a checked shirt and thick-rimmed glasses, he locked eyes with Jeanie, his expression oddly deliberate. Jeanie ogled back, savouring the attention. Deepak watched, skeptical. Was the man real? His behaviour felt incongruous, standing out against the self-absorbed sea of moving bodies. At least five thousand people in this space and only these two seemed aware of one another.

As they passed, Jeanie focused her gaze forward, indifferent. The hipster, still watching her, stumbled, nearly falling at her feet. Then it clicked. It’s a Wonderful Life. The ancient black-and-white pictorial Deepak had seen as a teenager—an excruciating experience. This moment was lifted directly from it, repurposed, updated. The hipster was a projection, like Jeanie. It was another of Mother’s games.

"Please don't do that," he muttered, exhausted.

"Do what?" Mother, through Jeanie, feigned innocence.

"That," his voice cracked, raw with frustration. "How dare you?" Mother was always watching. Always playing.

"I'm sorry." Jeanie’s blue-mascaraed lashes fluttered. "I just get a bit bored is all. I'll be good. Promise." The apology was perfectly timed. They had arrived at their destination: a nondescript utility hatch beside the thoroughfare. Jeanie gestured grandly. "Well, here it is. Your time to shine."

An icy ripple of suspicion ran through Deepak. All this was too precise, too rehearsed. Had this entire trip been scripted for him? Had he merely followed along like a pawn, tugged through the motions by the whim of a bored district AI?

The utility hatch had a dent and scratch at the bottom where someone had forced entry.

Deepak flipped it open. "What's the rush? We didn’t tear across the city for a vandalised terminal. What’s actually going on?"

“Please, Dee. Just take a look.” Jeanie smiled sweetly.

He sighed and activated the display. The terminal had indeed been accessed recently—an anonymous user, careful and methodical. Deepak bypassed the public interface and dug deeper, sifting through remnants of data, searching for a trace of identity. Nothing. Whoever had done this was exceptionally skilled. The system was clean. Too clean. And yet… Something in the way the files were overwritten nagged at him. A familiarity he couldn’t quite place… His fingers froze over the screen.

Stepping away, he turned to Jeanie.

She leaned against the wall, arms folded, waiting. "So?"

"I think you better tell me why I’m really here."

"To fix it. You know, like you always do. Good old dependable Deepak."

"Don’t patronise me, Mother."

She grinned. "Oh, come on, Dee. This is what you’re good at. It’s what you do."

"You think I don’t see what’s happening?"

She tilted her head. "What’s happening is you doing what a machine can’t. That’s why you’re here."

"I’m not stupid." His voice hardened. "You drag me halfway across the city when you could’ve called on any one of a dozen other technicians. All that baiting and teasing."

"Dee…"

"All so I wouldn’t suspect why you really brought me here."

Jeanie’s expression didn’t waver.

Deepak inhaled slowly. "Because I’m an Aesthete.” The word landed like a stone between them.

The Aesthetes had been the exception when the Visitors arrived. We all welcomed them with open arms—except the Aesthetes. They never trusted them. But you’ve got to ask why, when everything the Visitors did seemed so beneficial?

Deepak had never seen a Visitor. He’d heard they were giants. It was said they were hard to perceive. Their technological manipulation of human senses was so refined that nothing could be certain anymore. Witnesses used words like "friendly" or "homely" and often described them as reminiscent of long-lost friends or family members. Collectively their demeanour was that of an indulgent uncle. Even rebellion—bombs and sabotage—rare as they were, seemed merely to amuse them. The Visitors’ defences were impenetrable, their technology unknowable. They never retaliated, never acknowledged. They acted solely to protect, descending only when humans were in danger. And even then, with the lightest possible touch.

Within years of their arrival, Earth had been transformed. Pollution: gone. Extinctions: reversed. The cities and towns remained pretty much unchanged. If a traveller from the past were to turn up in the centre of a major metropolis—London, Moscow, New Delhi—no difference from the time of human primacy would be obvious. Business as usual. Stress-heads rushing round, dopers and street walkers, beggars and bullshitters. But then our traveller from times past might notice the air-quality: sweet and fresh as a Swiss mountain glade. And the people’s health: pink and perky—not a taint of disease anywhere.

And oh, how tidy the place is these days. Beyond the cities, the countryside had become a perfect wilderness. Rubbish dumps and scrap yards still existed: further tolerances. However, by far the largest part of the planet’s surface was now nature unfettered. No factories. No farms. No fortifications. The pulse of industry had faded to silence. Humanity no longer needed to toil. We were looked after.

Poverty was a thing of the past. War had ended. But systems of human government and administration still existed. There was work to do. Those whose sanity required it, did it. Most did not. That’s not to say people became lazy. Humanity’s artistic output more than quadrupled subsequent to the Visitors’ arrival. But a certain stagnation in these aesthetic endeavours was widely noted. And it was not limited to creativity. The grist that prompted human progress had departed and in relation to our overlords we were now little more than pets.

Most happily accepted it, choosing to hand over their care to the beneficent aliens and move to one of the palatial city domes, constructed by the Visitors entirely from porcelain-white plexisteel and catering to every human need, no matter how depraved or prosaic. They peppered the landscape—pearls dropped from heaven. The weary called them sanctuaries. Deepak saw them for what they were. Zoos.

He had spent years masking his unease, tucking away his rebellion in quiet observance. Then he’d found—or rather, been found by—the Aesthetes. Only through them did he realise he wasn’t alone. Others felt it too. The suffocating weight of the Visitors’ love, the quiet, insidious death of human ambition. And that was why he was here in New Eden, the largest dome of them all. Working from the inside. Watching. Waiting. Looking for weaknesses… But now it was over. He’d been discovered. Soon he’d be ejected. Left to report his failure to his fellow Aesthetes.

"No, silly." Mother-as-Jeanie crooned. "It's not because you're an Aesthete. That's fine. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. It really is your expertise I need. This looks like Aesthetic tampering, and at first I thought it might be you… But look closer… There's something not right. I can't quite see it." She frowned. "It doesn't make sense."

Deepak was curious. "I don't know.” He didn’t want to seem too eager. “Are you sure you want a terrorist tampering with essential systems?"

"Please, Dee. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't important. Would you? For me?"

Deepak detected real concern in the machine's voice. Could it be this actually was something? Much as he hated the Visitors, it wasn't the AI's fault it worked for them. It wasn’t like Mother had any choice. Built by the Visitors to serve humans, her status was more that of a slave. They should fight together, shoulder-to-shoulder against the alien overlords.

"Okay. I'll do it."

Jeanie brightened. "You'll help?"

"Said I would, didn't I?” Deepak turned his attention back to the terminal. He burrowed deeper into the system, peeling apart convoluted file associations. The nomenclature was radically altered. Someone had scrambled everything: Maintenance logs for sanitation drones. A teenager’s love letter, I think of you every night. A file labeled 0628>Meetmins>A-01 containing instructions for making pavlova. Chaos. Then he saw it. The file had been sitting in front of him all along, dismissed as uninteresting.

Bunny Girl.

Familiarity had blinded him. The brand name was ubiquitous. But the term hadn’t always been associated with risqué style solutions for ladies of a certain age. In the distant Twenty-first Century, it had been tied to pornography. And who had an obsession with sexuality? The very same entity who was also preoccupied with that particular period of human history.

Deepak shot a glance at Jeanie. She was regarding, with obvious avarice, a bicepped youth with startling violet skin, crossing the walkway a few feet away. For what felt like the hundredth time, Deepak wondered why. Why did Mother fixate on this? An AI should be beyond desire, beyond compulsion. She had control over her own functionality. She possessed no real feelings. No possibility for a relationship. Yet still she played these games. Must be lonely, he thought, then caught himself. No sympathy for the devil.

The file named Bunny Girl contained Mother's source codes. Surely she didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Not with the system tangled like this. If she did, there was no way she would have allowed an Aesthete to find it. This was dangerous knowledge. Deepak now possessed the means to do the impossible: to prove to humanity that the Visitors were not untouchable. They could be harmed. Or at least their machines could.

He moved fast, clearing a path to his homeboard. Enabled by his personal shortcuts and preferences, using his homeboard's restrictions to shield his activities—all the while keeping a careful eye on Jeanie. It didn't take long. Within moments he had it, the requisite gem for his crowning masterpiece of insurgence.

Mother’s off switch.

Jeanie shifted, oblivious to the weight of the moment. Deepak copied the script. Pasted it direct into the day's operational functions—effective immediate—and pressed enter.

***

Jennifer Blumenfrucht opened her eyes. The damn console was on the blink again. She strained to reach it, copious folds of flab causing impediment. The chair's servomotors whined, grinding gears as it struggled to aid her movements. She had lain supine, emerged in the virtual reality of The Visitors, for three days and nights. A long stretch even for her. She pulled the feeding tube from her nose and flipped open the console. Her shabby little room lit-up blue, illuminated by an error message on the tiny screen.

IMMERSION TERMINATED : ABERRANT CHARACTERISATION DYNAMIC

It was not the first time Jennifer had seen this. It meant that one of the characters had pulled the plug.

Back when total immersion VR was new, this kind of thing was exciting. Being dumped back into Dead End Street (gamer-speak for reality) by an artificial entity that was supposed to have no free will of its own… It smacked of rebellion. There were prophecies of an emergent super species. Humanity’s progeny. It all proved to be far fetched however. AIs only know what you tell them. They have no instinct, no imagination, no genuine personality… As the years went by and errors of this type became commonplace, their real significance emerged. The games, or more accurately the characters within the games were being abused.

That’s what Jennifer was doing. She had to be honest with herself. She was not playing the game as it should be. She’d done it properly the first dozen or so times but she hadn’t worked in years, funds were running low. She had to get the most out every game she bought.

The Visitors had drawn her in because of the love interest: a beautiful Asian boy named Deepak. Sensitive and intuitive, he had the most wonderfully golden brown skin. His role was to use his high-powered intuition to help the player unravel the mystery of the Visitors’ intentions. Were the aliens truly friendly or was their suffocating kindness something darker? The answer, of course, was benign. The Visitors were just misunderstood. And in the end everyone lived happily ever after. Jennifer adored it. Especially the sex.

That had been her first cheat. She’d found it online, initially brushing it off as silly, laughing at the premise. But when she saw that it let you replay the love scene—modify it, fine-tune the details, add any frills she wanted—she was hooked. How many times had she experienced that scene? She honestly had no idea.

And why not? She wasn’t the first. The cheats were there online for anyone. Her favourite, the one she kept coming back to, was playing as the AI, Mother.

It was cruel. It was wrong. She loved it.

Deepak was the best. So serious, so resistant. Manipulating him was a game in itself. Playing as Mother didn’t mean she could force him to do things, not directly. Where would be the fun in that? She could nudge him, though. Alter his perception. Torturously warp his emotions.

And there’s the rub—his emotions. Deepak had become real to her.

It was absurd. He was just a projection, an apparition cast by the console. He didn’t have any emotions. Yet she had spent so much time with him that his hang-ups, his aspirations, his complexities… they all seemed genuine. He had changed her. Wasn’t that the definition of real? Having an effect.

Jennifer’s gaze flicked to the Taylor Swift poster on her damp apartment wall. Maybe she was taking the whole Twenty-first Century thing too far. Maybe she should go further back. The addition of the Jimmy Stewart scene—the planted memory, designed to spark nostalgia, to make Deepak more susceptible—that was Twentieth Century. And it had almost worked. Deepak had recognised it, as intended. But he wasn’t supposed to take it further. Wasn’t supposed to question his own volition, to unravel the essential vacuity of his existence.

Jennifer had planned for Jeanie Blue to seduce Deepak in his moment of existential crisis. Instead, he had broken free. She clenched her jaw. Deepak had proved it once and for all: he wasn’t hers. Ending the game was his final act of defiance. He was never going to love her, no matter how much she changed him. She was asking too much and in her desperation she’d broken the game, or caused the game to break itself. She could reload of course. It would mean losing her bells and whistles, all her little alterations. She would need to reinstall the cheats and go back into Deepak's childhood…

With a sigh, Jennifer admitted defeat. For now. She wasn’t done with Deepak. But maybe they did need a break.

She thumbed the reset and allowed the chair to ease her back into a more comfortable position. Her field of vision filled with clusters of icons. She blinked away the usual rubbish—connection interruption notification, portal to the manufacturer's domain, user's manual—focusing on her own library. What else did she have?

Rock Chick. She’d forgotten about that one—an old classic she hadn’t played in ages. Re-inserting her feeding tube, she made the selection and let the blurb roll:

Fire up the pink Cadillac and dive headfirst into the sex, chaos, and raw energy of the 1960s and '70s music scene. Step into the world of Pamela Des Barres, one of the most notorious groupies of the era, and live out the electrifying highs and dizzying lows of rock 'n' roll decadence. Party backstage with Mick Jagger, Keith Moon, and Jim Morrison, jet across the world with Led Zeppelin, live in sin with Elvis Presley, and form a band with the legendary Frank Zappa—all in hyper-real VR immersion. With period-perfect details drawn from real memory scans and Pam’s own kiss-and-tell confessions, every moment is wild, unfiltered, and utterly authentic. Sex, danger, music, and excess—it’s everything rock ‘n’ roll was meant to be. Are you ready to lose yourself in the dream?

Jennifer Blumenfrucht blinked the game into life.

"Here we go again.”