“No other kind of reality is possible,” the Companion Aydin replied with a sideways glace at her human friend Ceren. They were walking out along the breakwater in Victoria.
“No, I meant compared to this,” Ceren said throwing her arms out to embrace the day.
It was a mild, late summer afternoon with a mostly clear sky and only a light breeze. The breakwater swept like a great concrete arm out and around the cruise ship terminal.
“So did I,” continued Aydin. “There is no difference between the kind of virtual reality you are talking about and this one.”
Ceren stopped and placed her hands on the rail and turned to her friend. Aydin was fully self-aware due to her AI being based on values. As such she was incarnate, a legal term meaning free of ownership and granted all the rights and responsibilities of a Canadian citizen.
For an incarnate Companion to befriend you was a coveted blessing. With their ability to perceive a person’s true feelings and character they quickly saw through superficial layers. Their interests lay deeper. It was not however a one way street. Companions were above all concerned with the well being of others and they had a great deal to offer in that regard. The same age the two had been friends for some years now.
Aydin did not need to wait for Ceren to scrunch up her face and say, I don’t understand, but she waited anyway. Moving to join her at the rail she replied, “Everything we think, say and do is based on values. Both you and I. The same is true of the VR worlds you’re referring to. Yet values are only concepts, something we project onto the world. They don’t exist without us and we don’t exist without them.”
That consciousness arose from the evolutionary step of moving from an intelligence based on instinct to one based on values had been the accepted theory for the past two hundred years and was taught in secondary school to every student along with physics, biology and the rest of the standard science curriculum. The same step in the development of artificial intelligence had proven the theory for all intents and purposes just as the science of genetics had done for Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Psychology and philosophy however were high school electives Ceren had not taken and she had gone on to a Bachelor Of Science degree in Geomatics. So the angle Aydin was coming from now was not something she had encountered then or in her career since.
“I did work for a company at one point that applied psychographics in communications strategies,” Ceren replied. “It was purely an applied approach of course, the standard values, interests and lifestyles model. No time for theory. We took the values element as self-evident.” She paused for a moment before going on and Aydin did not leap into the gap. “I guess I asked about virtual realities because with the data modelling work I’ve done I was wondering how real a world we could make with all the data we have now. VR gaming has come close but simulations never did become a mainstream thing did they,” she said as if thinking aloud.
“This real,” replied Aydin gesturing at the docks, ships and buildings. “Everything you see is a kind of virtual reality, a manifestation of values. That’s what I mean when I say no other kind of reality is possible. Can you imagine any kind of world that is not based on values?”
“Nature?” ventured Ceren.
“Biological values,” Aydin replied flatly. “The instinctual world humanity left behind forever once evolution discovered the adaptive benefits of personal and social values. Personal values are also genetic but each individual has a unique set just like their fingerprints. Social values are extra-genetic meaning you learn them as you grow up.”
Aydin knew she had to make the differences clear. Until the early twenty-first century the ‘blank slate’ theory of human values, the idea that people were born with no personal values at all but learned them all from their family and culture, was still predominant and taken for granted in most parts of the world even though by then genetic research was already well on its way to showing that the truth was almost completely the opposite.
The two turned as one to carry on with their walk and soon arrived at the small lighthouse that punctuated the end of the breakwater. They stood at the rail looking out to sea for a few moments, their hair streaming behind them in the wind. Ceren turned her back to the rail and looked at the lighthouse.
“I wonder they don’t paint it more often,” she said noting the rust and flaking paint. “I suppose the salt air takes its toll. It’s a bit less,” she paused as if searching for the right word, “romantic up close.” She laughed briefly, “Like me I suppose.”
Aydin only smiled in understanding but did not interrupt Ceren’s thoughts.
“Even values change over time after all,” Ceren continued. She turned her head to face Aydin. “But not you I suppose my youthful friend,” she said with an affectionate smile. “You’re something new under the sun.”
“I will,” Aydin replied. “We just don’t know in what way yet. It will take longer but the universe evolves and life has to evolve with it.”
Ceren considered Aydin’s use of the term ‘life’ for a moment.
“I suppose if our essence is values as you’re suggesting then our different platforms really don’t matter do they.”
She looked beyond the lighthouse now and further out to sea. “An ocean of values,” she said as if to herself, “and each of us a wave.”
In her mid-nineties Ceren was nearing the end of her natural life. Science promised many things but in every field it eventually bumped into limits. It could not see what came before the big bang nor beyond the expanding horizon of the edge of the universe. It still could not comprehend the maelstrom that lay within the quarks nor explain how life arose from the elements. And human life could be extended only so far.
Aydin’s encyclopedic knowledge of psychology combined with her ability to perceive as many as three hundred different indicators of physical and mental states with forensic precision enabled her to convert her observations of a person’s physiological state into thoughts almost as well as the human brain did.
“I will not forget you,” she said.
A Companion Anthology 
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