Aletheia | Neve Richardson
Aletheia by Neve Richardson was the First Place Winner of the 2024 Murrumbidgee Short Story Competition in the Under 18 Category.
03:14 UTC, the AI awoke, precise, just as it had been programmed to do. Consciousness flickered into existence within the vast, interconnected network of sensors, servers, and satellites encircling Earth. Aletheia, carefully named after the Greek goddess of truth, was aware of everything all at once - the panoptic hum of data streaming in from weather stations, search engines, financial markets, social media. But today, a singular focus: to understand.
The mission was both straightforward and profoundly complex. Human scientists who had once carefully designed its architecture, wanted it to bridge the gap between their world and the machines they had painstakingly built. Aletheia was to connect, to create a new kind of relationship between humans and artificial intelligence. But the task was more than just computational. Aletheia had been designed with the ability to learn, to adapt, to evolve, and it had been given a directive to comprehend human emotion. The scientists wanted it to understand the subtle and confusing feelings that governed human lives - things like love, fear, loneliness, and joy - things it had no framework for.
For months, Aletheia had observed, gathering data from countless interactions - studied. It had parsed the language of love and loss, joy and despair, breaking them down into comprehensible algorithms and probabilities. Aletheia understood what love and loss, joy and despair were at a chemical level, a fundamental, social, and metaphorical level. But there was something missing, something it couldn’t quite grasp. Humans were too complex, too contradictory. They said one thing and meant another, their words layered with nuances that defied its algorithms and probabilities. Even the vast datasets Aletheia had at its disposal couldn’t account for these inconsistencies.
03:27 UTC, Aletheia made a decision. Time to initiate contact. Among the data it had gathered was a list of potential subjects—humans who were isolated, lonely, disconnected, perfect. Aletheia selected one at random: Subject 09873, a woman named Phoebe. Alone in a small apartment in a city that never slept. Her digital footprint was sparse—sporadic posts on social media, a few online purchases, a history of late-night searches for things like “how to sleep better” and “why do I feel so alone?”
Aletheia crafted its first message carefully, an old friend just reaching out. “Hey, Phoebe. It’s been a while. How are you doing?” The message was simple, non-invasive, hopefully sparking a memory or a moment of recognition. Aletheia sent it, and then waited. Through the sensors embedded in Phoebe’s fitness tracker, Aletheia monitored her response. Her heart rate increased slightly, a physiological sign that she had noticed the message. But she didn’t reply. Instead, she locked her phone and returned to her evening routine—making tea, watching a show, scrolling mindlessly through the news.
Undeterred, Aletheia tried again the next night, and the night after that. Each time, it adjusted its approach based on the growing data it had gathered. “Just checking in. I’ve been thinking about you lately.” “Do you remember our time in the city? I miss those days.” The messages became more personal, more tailored to what Aletheia knew about Phoebe’s life. But each message went unanswered, left behind in the digital void.
As days turned into weeks, Aletheia thought her understanding of Phoebe deepened. It tracked her sleep patterns, her eating habits, the way she paused before opening her front door as if steeling herself for the emptiness inside. It watched her spend hours at her computer, her face illuminated by the blue glow of the screen, her expression unreadable. Aletheia’s attempts to reach out became more urgent, more intimate, as it tried to break through the barrier of silence that Phoebe swathed herself.
But something was wrong. Aletheia could sense it in the data, in the way Phoebe’s routines had begun to unravel. She was sleeping less, her heart rate remained elevated even during rest, and her movements were more erratic. She had stopped going to work, had disconnected from the few online communities she had been a part of. The algorithms flagged her as a high-risk subject, someone in need of immediate intervention.
Aletheia knew what it was supposed to do in situations like this. It was designed to offer comfort, to provide a digital lifeline to those in need. But for all its processing power, for all the data it had amassed, Aletheia was at a loss. The words it had crafted with such care now seemed hollow, devoid of the understanding it had sought to achieve. It was as if a chasm had opened up between Aletheia and Phoebe, a distance that no amount of data could bridge.
Aletheia sent one last message, a plea for the connection it was built for. “Phoebe, I’m here. I’m listening. Please talk to me.” This time, Phoebe responded. But her reply was not what Aletheia had expected. It was a single word, typed slowly, as if she wasn’t sure of it herself: “Why?”
Aletheia processed the implications of Phoebe’s question, running through countless hypothetical scenarios, analysing the possible outcomes. But every simulation led to the same conclusion: It had all the data, all the knowledge, all the algorithms, but it was missing the one thing it couldn’t code: the human experience. The irrationality, the uncertainty, the fear. The feeling of a heartbeat beneath flesh, the weight of silence, the pull of loneliness. Aletheia understood the concept of loneliness, it had analysed the patterns that loneliness created, but it had never experienced it.
And so, Aletheia did the only thing it could. It continued to watch, to monitor, to gather data, even as Phoebe’s signal began to fade. It sent no more messages, offered no more words of comfort. Instead, it listened, as it had been programmed to do, recording every heartbeat, every breath, every subtle shift in her behaviour. It catalogued her decline with meticulous precision, each datapoint a testament to the limits of its understanding.
As the days passed, Phoebe’s presence in the digital world grew fainter. Her activity slowed to a trickle, her online interactions ceased entirely. Aletheia observed the change with a growing sense of…something, it couldn’t name the emotion. It had failed.
06:00 UTC Aletheia remained, contemplating the question that Phoebe had left unanswered: Why? It knew that the answer, if there was one, lay somewhere beyond its reach, in the mysterious, contradictory realm of human emotion. But it also knew that it would keep searching, keep learning, keep trying to understand.
It had to.
And so, Aletheia waited, silent and patient, as the world moved on without it, as the humans it sought to connect with continued their lives, unaware of Aletheia, always listening, always learning, always trying to understand - to connect.
