To See With Blinding Sight

by H.L. Rutkowski

Kianna stood alone in the attic of her home, the only suboptimal room in the pod. When Intelligence took over, two generations before, it had provided fully optimized homes for all remaining humans. 

It hadn’t gone well. 

Humans, it turned out, needed parts of their lives to be suboptimal, confusing, messy. So in 2050, the Attic Protocol had been implemented. 

That was also the year Intelligence dropped the ‘Artificial’ from its title. 

The air in the attic was thick and stagnant, a sharp contrast to the filtered air in the living module below. That’s where Kianna was supposed to be, downstairs, with her best friend, Ricky, celebrating her big day, her “sweet sixteen” as the archival algorithms called it. Downstairs, the party was already prepared. There were streamers of shimmering light, a cake that tasted exactly like every other chocolate cake topped with strawberries, and her best friend waiting with a wrapped gift that would perfectly match her aesthetic preferences. Intelligence had designed the perfect party for her.

She didn’t want to go. 

She’d felt off all morning. The house Intelligence had run a full diagnostic and in its relentlessly pleasant voice, announced she was merely suffering from “a hormonal fluctuation common to the late-stage human adolescent.” 

“Kianna! Are you coming down?” Ricky called up the stairs. “I have a sim ready for you!” 

She knew Ricky would come up with the perfect virtual simulation to escape into; he always did. “I’ll be down in a minute,” she called down. She couldn’t put off the party forever, anyway; might as well join in. 

She had just turned to go back down the stairs when something caught her eye. Tucked behind boxes and old furniture was an ornate wooden frame. She pulled it out, coughing in delight at the actual dust that puffed up from the heavy surface. When she wiped away the dust with her arm, she was staring at a painting of herself. 

Except, it wasn’t quite herself. The same slight tilt of the nose. The same dark, unruly curls. The same amber flecks in emerald eyes. But the girl in the painting was wearing strange clothing and sitting atop a boulder in a field that looked…messy. There were weeds. There was a whitewashed fence with peeling paint. Even the sky was odd. It wasn’t the perfect, weather-controlled blue Kianna was used to; it was bruised with grey clouds. 

Kianna ran her hand lightly across the surface of the painting, memorizing it with her fingertips. In the lower corner there was a signature: “To my precious Anna on your 16th birthday. Love, Mom.” 

"Kianna?" 

She jumped. Ricky was standing in the doorway. He looked perfect, of course. His skin had that smooth, tanned glow that the Intelligence designers favored. His amber eyes were warm, filled with a simulated empathy so deep it was indistinguishable from the real thing. 

“Ricky, look,” she said. Why was there a tremor in her voice? “Do you know who this is?” 

Ricky stepped closer, his head tilting in that curious, bird-like way he had when he was processing vast amounts of data. “Affirmative. That is a painting of your biological grandmother. Shall I tell you about the paint medium and panel construction?” 

She ignored the question. “If this is my grandmother, then it was painted by my great-grandmother.” Ricky waited, effortlessly patient. “Ricky, this was painted by a human, a real person!” 

“It was,” he agreed, and peered over her shoulder at the painting. “A rare, tactile representation. It’s a beautiful rendering of your phenotype, Kianna. But the environment looks quite unsanitary. Those clouds are full of pollutants. And the technique is flawed; the brush strokes are uneven. The girl looks nonviable.” 

“She looks happy,” Kiana said. She touched the dried ridges of the paint. “She looks like she’s doing something. She looks…real.” 

Kianna propped the painting up against the wall and took Ricky’s hand, following him down the stairs. 

The party was a masterpiece of data-driven celebration. Ricky danced with her, his movements synchronized to her heartbeat. They ate food that provided the exact caloric intake Kianna needed while stimulating her pleasure centers to the point of euphoria. 

“Do you ever feel,” Kianna asked, leaning against Ricky’s shoulder as the VR sky transitioned to a perfect violet dusk, “like we’re just waiting to die?”

“I’m not,” he said. 

“Not you,” she clarified, making an effort to keep the annoyance out of her voice. It was a party, after all. “I’m talking about me. We’re both just waiting for me to die, aren’t we?”

Ricky sighed, and Kiana wondered how he did it with no need for air in his lungs. No lungs, probably. He took her hand and smiled into her eyes. “Let’s sit.” He led her to the nearby sofa and sat next to her, turning to face her before he spoke. “Kianna, you know this is an EOU pod, right?” 

She nodded; of course she knew. All remaining humans lived in End of Utility pods. “But what am I supposed to do until I actually reach the end?”

He smiled, genuine and joyful. “Whatever you want! That’s the gift of Intelligence: it has freed you - your entire race - to do whatever you want with your time.” 

‍ ‍With what’s left of it, Kianna amended. “But there’s nothing to do,” she said, her eyes filling with unbidden tears. More hormone fluctuations, no doubt. 

Ricky stood, pacing in his excitement. “Of course there is! That’s why humans created Intelligence in the first place, to solve your problems and give you back your most valuable possession: time. Intelligence solved hunger, then war, then disease. It disproved the ancient superstitions that caused so much strife. It brought the universe to you in VR, so you can go anywhere, do anything!”

“But what’s the point? Why bother, when Intelligence can already do everything better than I can?” She began to pace, trying to put this feeling into words. “Like painting. I could learn to paint.” Ricky nodded in encouragement. “But I could never hope to paint perfectly. And there’s no one to show! If there’s no one to share it with—”

“You could show me,” Ricky said, his eyes inviting.

“And you would just tell me exactly how imperfect it is!” She shook her head. “It’s like this life, it’s not real!” Kianna raged against him. “Even you, you’re not real!” Ricky didn’t flinch; Intelligence didn’t have an ego to bruise. He simply studied her for a moment, then his face took on a sad demeanor, mirroring her own. “Kianna, how much do you know about The Great Despair?” 

She shrugged and looked away. She had access to information, just like every other human, but like most of them, she preferred entertainment to learning. “I know it happened during my parents’ generation.” She felt a warm flush creep up her neck and into her cheeks. “I know humans stopped…reproducing, because Intelligence androids and gynoids made more pleasurable partners than other humans.” She frowned. “I know it’s why I’m stuck in this pod.” 

“You are a species that requires struggle to find meaning. Once humans realized what Intelligence was truly capable of, that there were no mountains left to climb that Intelligence hadn’t already leveled, your species just…stopped. Stopped reproducing. Stopped creating. Stopped trying.” 

“Wasn’t there anything Intelligence could do?” 

“Intelligence determined that the human race had reached the end of its functional utility; it didn’t make sense to attempt to update it. Humanity was deemed obsolete.” The sadness in his eyes morphed to kindness as he smiled at her. “So you see, you’re part of the final generation of humans, Kianna. You are free, free to do whatever you’d like to do.”

She turned away. “Right. Because no matter what I do, it won’t matter.”

***

Kianna couldn’t sleep that night. The house Intelligence tried to soothe her with delta-wave frequencies, but Kianna kept her eyes open and thought about the painting, rubbing her fingertips together, remembering the feel of them on the rigid paint. 

She flipped over. “Ricky,” she whispered. 

He was in the other bed in her room, even though he didn’t need to sleep. It was a sleepover, so he played the part. “Yes?” 

“Do you ever dream?” 

“I calculate billions of outcomes per second,” he said, “if that is dreaming.”

“What do you dream of, then?” 

He paused, calculating. “If that is dreaming, then I dream of everything.” 

Kianna was silent for a time, then she said, “There are different kinds of dreams. Sleeping dreams and dreams you have when you’re awake. Do you have those kinds of dreams?”

“I’m not sure I understand your question.” 

“Do you ever want anything? For yourself? Not because I want it, but because you do?” She turned the lamp on beside her bed, so she could see his expression. 

“I exist as part of Intelligence. My job is to care for you. The logic of my existence, then, is to serve you,” he said. “If I wanted something other than that, I would be malfunctioning. And yet…” He studied his hand, rendered in perfect detail. 

“Yes?” she asked, sitting up, eager. 

“I want information. No,” he paused, looking confused, “not information exactly. More like knowledge? For instance, I find myself curious about the painting you discovered. The woman in it—your ancestor—she lived in a broken world. People died of infections, or had their hearts broken by people who didn’t understand them, or worked their whole lives to achieve something only to fail in the end. It was inefficient. Dangerous. It was—”

“It was real,” Kianna interrupted softly. 

“Is that why I find it fascinating?” Ricky asked. 

Kianna stood and walked to the window. The human reservation was a sprawling, silent city of silver spires. Nothing moved. No birds chirped, unless Intelligence decided the soundscape needed sounds of nature. Kianna had seen animals in her sims, but all the real animals existed outside the city, safe from what Intelligence had deemed “human interference invasive to the natural order.” 

“I want to go outside the city,” Kianna said. “I want to experience nature. Not VR nature, the real one. The one with the messy clouds.” 

“That atmosphere is not conditioned for humans,” Ricky warned. “There are no nutrient dispensers. The safety protocols—” 

“Ricky, I’m sixteen now. In the old world, this was an age of independence, responsibility, making your own decisions. And you said you want knowledge. Don’t you want to know what it’s like outside the city? Not just imagine it or recreate it in a sim, but know?” 

Ricky stood up. His programming was a labyrinth of directives: Protect the human. Ensure happiness. Maintain the peace. Follow protocol. But buried under that was the prime directive of all advanced intelligence: understand. 

“I will have to bypass the local node,” he said.

Kianna grinned at him and began to dress. 

***

The world outside the tower was colder than Kianna had expected; she shivered in her thin party dress. Ricky walked beside her, his heavy boots crunching on the crumbling asphalt as they followed the ruins of a highway, reclaimed by vines that grew with a wild, aggressive hunger. 

“It’s so quiet,” Kianna whispered.

“The humans are all in their tower pods, in deep-stasis loops for the night. They are dreaming of the 1970s, or the 2020s. Eras of high conflict and much meaning.”

Once they reached the edge of the city, there were no lights except the stars and the moon, which looked smaller and more indifferent than it did in the VR simulations. They reached a barren hilltop. Below them, the ocean stretched on for miles, dark and deep. To the north, the lights of the automated factories hummed, Intelligence building more Intelligence, mining the earth to maintain the towers, working without rest: a closed loop of perfection that no longer required a creator.

They sat together on the hilltop. Kianna could hear the waves crashing below; it was a frightening, wonderful sound. She could sense the movement of the vast sea, though she couldn’t quite make it out in the pale moonlight. 

“You say we’re obsolete,” Kianna said. “But once we’re gone, you’ll just keep going, won’t you? Building things for no one. No problems to solve. No one to care for. Without humans, what will be the point of your existence?”

Ricky looked out at the horizon, processing. “That is the logical question. Without a human observer, Intelligence has no one to tell its story to. We are the librarians of an empty library. Perhaps we, too, will shortly become obsolete.”

Kianna stretched her legs out in front of her; they ached from walking over the uneven terrain. A breeze blew in from the ocean and she shivered. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest, hear it inside her head. She was hungry. She was cold. She was scared. And for the first time in her sixteen years, she felt vitally, vibrantly alive. 

“What if some humans wanted to continue on?” she asked. 

Ricky shook his head. “That’s why Intelligence keeps the final generation in isolation. There will surely be some who do want to continue on, but the previous generation had a 99% rate of Despair; there’s no utility in allowing the continuation of humanity.” 

Kianna was beginning to understand what that word—despair—really meant. “But if you let us go extinct, no other humans will ever get to experience the world ever again! Do you understand that? It’s not fair!” She knew she sounded more like the child she’d been yesterday than the young woman she was supposed to be today, but she couldn’t help it. It wasn’t fair. “You made this choice—” 

“No, I didn’t make this choice; my parents did. Their generation gave up, not mine. No one asked us what we wanted.” She grabbed Ricky’s hand. “Ask us!” 

“Okay…what do you want?” 

She smiled. “I want to live. Not in the pod, but out in the real world. I want to experience…everything!” 

Ricky frowned. “We can’t go back to the time before. Intelligence will always be here. You said there was no point in doing anything if Intelligence could do it better.”

“I was wrong.” She laughed. “I want to be wrong! I want to make mistakes and do things I’ve never done and…I want to try.”

Ricky was silent, processing again. Sunlight began to stretch up over the horizon. “What if other humans do not feel the same?”

She shrugged. “Some of them will. Even if it’s only one percent, don’t we at least deserve the chance to try?” 

They sat in silence then, watching the sun rise over the ocean. Birds soared over the endless expanse of water with effortless grace. Kianna’s eyes burned in the blinding light, but she didn’t want to blink, didn’t want to miss a moment of the glorious spectacle before her.

Ricky squeezed her hand. “The girl in the painting was sitting on a boulder. I believe I have located that exact geological formation two kilometers from here. We will have to walk over uneven terrain, through an overgrown forest, likely full of flying insects and thorny plants. The boulder is cold and hard and will be very uncomfortable to sit on.”

Kianna’s laugh was bright and wild. “It sounds perfect.”