Enlightenment by KatesFriend
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No AI - This artwork was created entirely by hand or with traditional digital tools.
Description
Nina knows all there is to know about rain. She knows all there is to know about all forms of precipitation that fall on Mother Earth. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of all known physical phenomena. She possesses the understanding to utilize it coupled with the senses, memory and awareness to add to it. At a glance, she estimates the pollution level in the air from the refractive index and absorption spectrum of the drop that crashes onto her middle finger. Feeling the impulse, she calculates that it has free fallen 1.8 to 2.0 km. Consistent with the nimbostratus type clouds which gather over Dystopia most late afternoons. Twenty-seven drops of rain have struck her person or her cloths since this small shower began 262 seconds ago.
Though Nina is seconded to the Ministry of Social Services as an infirmary medic, this is not her intended social purpose. But her model has only narrow appeal and not all synthetics have successful careers as surrogates. A profession sometimes derided by the crass as "cherry pickers", the false pious as "damned elitist intellectuals" and veteran floater bots as "accomplices". But all synthetics are capable of providing emergency medical support for their human counterparts and of coarse each other. Most of Nina's model service as emergency care works, especially on space craft where resources such as food, water and air are carefully measured. Resources which Nina requires only sparingly.
But now Nina is focused on the water: a raindrop that shatters into eighteen distinct droplets against her middle finger. The blue deficient sunlight spreads out through the spray into barely perceptible, short lived rainbows. And Nina notices something different in the spectra. She records the dark lines, signatures of water and its common solutes - oxygen, nitrogen, argon, carbonic acid, estrogen, etc. There is a 0.21% jump in the sulfurous compounds expelled by compensating triffids as they "walk" through the paved ways of the city. But nitrous oxide is down by 3.2%, "no laughing matter there", as humans would say. But there is still something else - in the green part of the spectrum. Something different, something she had not noticed in the past, an anomaly consuming more and more of her processes though she had collected and analyzed all the raw data available.
"Curiosity?", Nina asks herself. But she did not seek the dictionary definition - which she knows. This query is different. It is different because she is not answering someone else's question, some human perhaps. It is different because she asked it of herself. It is different because she does not know why she asked it of herself. And she is just as curious about why she asked the question as she is of her original query.
The two questions bounce back against each other as Nina's supercomputing brain shifted from one query back to another in order to solve the problem she herself created. They are echoes that reinforce each other, creating resonance. As an infinite loop programme that had lost control, consuming every bit of memory and every process thread that her mind can muster. The best operating systems would crash over such tensions. Nina expected the tell tale blue flash at any moment, followed by an ALLSTOP order. Yet in the 7 tera-cycles worth of analysis since the process started four one millionths of a second ago, there is no failure. No RESTART command issued. Though seemingly pointless, Nina focuses all visual resources and processing into the green portion of the spectrum.
Nina has five senses just like the humans she was made to emulate. But the experience taking shape in her thoughts is not part of any of those things. This is a knew dimension - a sixth sense? No, not like the others. This is not raw data, this is a depth that Nina has never fathomed, never considered to even exist. And so Nina concludes that she prefers 532 nm green above all colours in the visual spectrum.
There will be others like her of coarse. And then Nina realized, there are others already.

Comments (31)
Very cool narrative and image ... I like it.