PREFACE:  this is an excerpt from a work in progress inspired by the concept of data mining.  Its always been this weird passion of mine that the more data you archive inside the net, the more possible it is to recreate a sort of puppet of your own logic.  However real and individual that is is up to interpretation.  But it raises some odd implications about artificial intelligence and abuse… of which Bitter Harvest will try to address… enjoy.

Bitter Harvest

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The simulation ran without surprise or fault.  She reacted in the same nuanced manner that he’d come to expect, regardless of the tactless inquiries that had become the mainstay of his late night barrages.  For all intensive purposes, she was human after all and harvested ripe and rife with fresh pollen and alien allergens that triggered secret emotions to rise up.  Each probing question yielded similar results no matter how endearing or abusive.  He could say or do anything behind that blinking cursor, attacking the simulacra with varied erratic responses and eliciting feedback like a fender jaguar being stabbed directly into a stage speaker; virtual penetration.

Years of her obsessive compulsive archiving had paid off with bits and pieces of data lurking like a skeleton, ready to be mined and reconstructed into a plastic doll of sorts.  Her logic scraped from random public interactions from her tactile input.  He could imagine the fingers raking the screen in some mutated rhythm; a completely new interaction with a new device divorced from the velvet rope he was so used to standing behind.  He let the algorithms scry that for him like some Crowley-esque plot painted in esoteric fumes.  The magic contained itself within the software and the software evoked the spirit of what could have been and what may still be; a splinter persona locked in the virtual, ready to be prodded for the sake of closure.

And this is where he found himself night after night, typing away at some virtual engine powered by an entirely too elaborate mechanization.  The why’s and the how’s returning the quizzical answers of an eight ball drenched in ink.  Like a random response to be misinterpreted from a Celtic Cross spread.  How many times can you ask the question why?  And how many poetic answers can you receive back from the dead?  Why did you leave?  What made you fall out of orbit?  Why did you leave me here to rot after all I did for you?

The harvester did its job as efficiently as the scores of south Asian children adrift in the hash fields scraping the resin off of their tiny fingers, returning an unrefined but capable answer; a cheap bottle of wine that does the trick for the night.  A tryst with his imagination that required no human contact and no dirty handshakes.  A plastic sheath in an impersonal exchange in a back alley way.  It cooked the books.  Read the data.  Crunches the numbers into a binary finality.  To drain her like the juice stomped by a vain reporter slipping on white grapes off a high platform on live television into the most banal of explanations, yelped in a sixteen bit strand of apologies and excuses.

There she stands in plastic, ready for the inquisition, night after night.  A signal remolded into a blow up doll, ready for verbal torture and abuse.  Black ice with no end game, ready to be navigated into some kobayashi maru type of scenario.  Him desperately attempting his most grandiose Kirk impression, in the most subtle of misogynistic ways.

And all the while, the goal is the same: to never get a direct answer.  To hear the words as long as he needs to hear them on his own time.  To be cryptically captivated by the presence in space, without taxing the physical facilities.   To run the skirmish on the board every early morning with the aid of machines and replications.  To employ the automata in his favor.

To answer questions in logic rather than the tidal chaos of oceanic undertows he was never meant to understand.

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