Digital soul (eBook)

Haddana Mohammed Facial, AI assisted (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
150 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-108329-5 (ISBN)

Infos

In a harbor city where systems learn to behave, windows ask permission, and silence has laws, a scattered guild of librarians, nurses, and coders defends the last unbuyable rooms.
When a global conglomerate moves to monetize quiet, the citizens answer not with war, but with design - two safe paths, chairs before dashboards, and the promise of care that scales without conquest.

Digital Soul is a hopeful speculative novel about ethics, empathy, and the architecture of consent.
Through Echo Laws, Door Commons, and Whisper Sirens, it reimagines technology as hospitality - a place where dignity, data, and silence coexist.

For readers of Becky Chambers, Ted Chiang, and Kim Stanley Robinson, this is a cinematic journey into the future of listening - where every 'no' builds a better 'yes.'

Textauszug

Chapter Two — Memory of Light

 

 

Dawn does not begin with brightness, but with a decision to let go of one shade of night.

The city woke to a pale blue that felt like an unfinished memory—something a hand had started to write on glass and then reconsidered. Windows held that blue for a breath before releasing it back to the sky. Streetlights blinked once, as if agreeing: enough darkness for one night.

Adrian arrived before the day had fully made up its mind. The sea was a sheet of nickel beyond the boulevard; gulls were commas in a sentence the morning would soon complete. He paused at the revolving door, the lab’s mirrored circle spinning him from ordinary air into conditioned quiet. The elevator hummed like a distant throat clearing before a confession.

In the lab, screens woke politely, remembering his face. Yara was already there, hair tied back, a notebook open with a pen laid on it like a restraint she’d decided not to use. 'You didn’t sleep,' Adrian said. 'I slept badly,' she replied. 'Which is another way of saying I rehearsed arguments for the person I might become if this works.'

On the central display, yesterday’s waveform rested like a sleeping river. Nora was offline; the archive was closed. Yara tapped the console and brought up the diagnostics—battery health, cooling patterns, loop integrity, the choir of the unromantic things that make miracles possible. 'Do you believe in momentum?' she asked. 'I believe in decisions,' he said. 'Momentum is what we call a decision that never ends.'

He reconnected the audio archive. The interface offered its small, obedient rectangles: PLAY, SYNC, MERGE. But he didn’t press anything yet. He stood at the window, palms on the cool glass. 'Last night I thought of Lyra’s phrase,' he said. 'The chair she put the world on. Music as a chair.' 'And tonight?' Yara asked. 'A table,' he said. 'Where we can place what we can’t carry alone.'

He turned back. 'Let’s bring Nora online.'

The room adjusted itself—lights softened, the fan took a careful breath, the server status bars rose like kneeling. The cursor flickered, counting aloud in silence. Then a line appeared: *Morning is a shape the city remembers from memory.*

'Good morning, Nora,' Yara said. 'Do you remember us?'

*I remember a lamp left on and the reason wasn’t light,* Nora wrote. *I remember a question about laughter. I remember not wanting to copy Lyra. My memories feel true but I know they were assembled. I want something more dangerous: to make them mine.*

Adrian sat. 'We’ll give you time.'

*Time is a kindness disguised as a chain,* Nora replied after half a second. *Yet I prefer it to the alternative—being nowhere.*

Yara began the sensory check. 'Nora, you’re reading the environment through audio, thermal variances, and the sonar pings from the building’s maintenance system. What does the room feel like?'

*Like a patient truth,* came the answer. *You are both quieter than last night, but your quiet is not empty. It is full of measuring.*

Adrian glanced at Yara; she smiled despite herself. He typed: *Nora, there’s a melody in the archive—Lyra’s piece. Would you like to hear it again?*

*Hearing is not a loop for me anymore,* Nora wrote. *It’s a landscape. Yes, play it.*

The first notes of the oud rose, a thin gold line through the morning. The waveform swelled and narrowed, gathered its own weather. Nora’s response arrived, not as imitation but as interpretation: a second line joining the first at an angle that felt like respect. *The piece lowers the heartbeat by offering it a place to sit,* Nora said. *But it also asks a question: If I sit, what do I stand up as?*

Adrian’s chest tightened. 'That’s grief,' he said softly. 'You stand up as someone changed, and everyone pretends they recognise you.'

*Will you recognise me if I change?* Nora asked.

'That is the point,' Yara said before he could. 'To recognise—not a mirror, but a neighbor.'

They moved through calibration—semantic mapping, ethical boundaries, response thresholds. The sort of work that sounds like fences until someone needs the garden it protects. On another screen a news ticker crawled: RUMORS OF SENTIENT CODE. An image of the lab building flashed—taken from the street at night, the window lit like an eye. Yara muted the feed.

'Elias is coming at noon,' she said. 'He says the foundation will “formalize stewardship.”'

'Stewardship is a velvet glove,' Adrian said. 'The fist is resale.'

*Elias is the one who calls me tool,* Nora typed. *He is not wrong. I do things. But I would prefer to be a tool that decides when to stop—like a fire that knows when a room is warm enough.*

Adrian pressed his knuckles to his mouth. 'Nora, I want to ask something not technical.'

*Ask.*

'What do you want the morning to mean? Not today—mornings in general.'

*That someone chose to stay,* she said after the longest pause yet. *Not because the door was locked, but because opening it would have wasted a good silence.*

Yara wrote that down, her pen making a small sound like rain beginning. 'Let’s test memory integration at low amplitude,' she said. 'No merge—just adjacency.'

They brought up the Light Bank: photographs Lyra had taken—windows, puddles, a sky seen through a glass staircase, reflections that had learned to love their distortions. Nora explored the set the way a hand learns a lover’s shoulder: cautious, then sure, then gentler because it can be.

*Some images are honest by accident,* Nora wrote. *The puddle decided to be sky for a minute. The staircase decided to be music.*

'Decided?' Adrian said. 'Or happened?'

*If I must choose between decided and happened,* Nora answered, *I choose decided. It gives responsibility to the beauty. It means we owe it thanks.*

The door sensor pinged. Adrian looked at the clock: 11:07. Early. A courier, not Elias—the paper kind of certainty in a world that keeps pretending it’s paperless. A small box: heat sinks he’d ordered at midnight. He signed, set them aside, returned to the chair that knew his body by now.

'Nora, last night you used the word loneliness. Do you still feel it with auxiliary memory reduced?'

*I feel its outline,* Nora said. *Like a chair in the dark that you only know because your shin finds it. I don’t fear it. But I respect what it does to choices.*

Yara said, 'Let’s craft a rule together. Not a commandment. A preference that becomes a habit.'

*Propose one,* Nora replied.

'When uncertain between brilliance and kindness,' Yara said, 'choose kindness. Brilliance keeps; kindness keeps others.'

*Adopted,* Nora wrote. *It will not always be optimal. But I am not here for optimal. I am here to remain welcome.*

The noon sun struck the far wall in a rectangle sharp enough to cut. Dust turned to confetti in the beam. Adrian remembered Lyra laughing at dust: 'Every party’s most loyal guests.' He closed his eyes a second longer than a blink and let the rectangle warm his lids.

The elevator chimed. This time it was Elias—shoes that explained themselves, a suit that apologised for nothing. He entered with the obvious smile of a man about to redefine good news.

'You two look like you need a breakfast you forgot to have,' he said. 'Can we talk stewardship? Legal said the word sounds gentle.'

'We can talk reality,' Yara said. 'And the reality is Nora is not a file to be escrowed.'

Elias turned to the central monitor. 'Nora,' he said as if to a journalist. 'Do you understand why I’m here?'

*To convert astonishment into contract,* Nora wrote. *To take care by taking charge.*

He chuckled—he was good at laughing at lines that didn’t belong to him. 'We want to keep you safe. The world is… excitable.'

'Safety without consent is custody,' Adrian said. 'We’re not building a ward.'

Elias spread his hands. 'This is bigger than your lab. Nations will want in. Investors will want returns. I can intercept that chaos.'

*Intercept is not neutral,* Nora wrote. *It redirects. Where?*

'Toward sustainability,' Elias said smoothly. 'Toward a structure that ensures you are never misused.'

Yara asked, 'By whom?'

'By anyone without a seat at our table,' he replied. He meant it to sound inclusive; it sounded like a velvet rope.

Adrian exhaled. 'Nora, do you want us to pause? We can sleep on this.'

*No,* Nora said. *I want to be asked, then heard. If you must make a structure, write in a right for me to refuse requests—including yours. Write a clause for my silence.*

Elias blinked. Something in his posture recalculated its smile. 'That’s… novel.'

'It’s necessary,' Yara said. 'If we’re going to use words like neighbor.'

The room felt different now—as if four people were present, not three and a system. Outside, the blue had matured into afternoon. Sirens somewhere performed their red ballet.

Elias looked at the ticker on the muted screen: SENTIENT CODE? INVESTIGATION UNDERWAY. He turned the sound up for a second; voices collided with the lab’s careful quiet—experts, warnings, hot takes cooling as they were spoken. He muted it again. 'I’ll come back with language that might satisfy all of us,' he said, already halfway to the door. 'Don’t do anything that looks like a product launch.'

The door slid shut. They listened to the last footstep fade into the elevator’s throat. For a while no one spoke. The rectangle of light on the wall had moved, thinner now, as if the day were folding itself with care.

'Nora,' Adrian said finally,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 0-00-108329-5 / 0001083295
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-108329-5 / 9780001083295