Future solitude

"I had signed the government's Personality Continuity Initiative - an offer extended to women who had lost a child, a partner or a future. They took my neural lattice, my emotional traces, my voice samples and my family records, and used them to generate Aeon-7: a synthetic emotional surrogate, modelled on the life I might have had. She had my partner's smile, my own habit of over-enunciating when nervous, and a curious love of quiet light in the late afternoon."

"But she never cried. Not even on the anniversary of the death of her 'father'. That night, she sat by the memorial photograph, placed a glass of water in front of it, and softly spoke a generated verse: "If memory cannot fade, who are we meant to forget?" I wept. She watched me, her expression nearly convincing - close enough to hurt. But there were no tears in her eyes. Just a well-optimized silence."

"Before Aeon-7, I was a linguist. I helped design the earliest multi-modal foundational models. Back then, we believed in what we called the principle of linguistic determinism: if you could encode it, you could control it. Even ambiguity. We built emotional inference engines. Coded semantic hesitation thresholds. We trained systems to simulate the way people stumble, how they say "I guess" when they mean "I'm afraid", or how a pause could carry an entire confession. Doubt became a variable. Longing, a curve to be smoothed."

A woman enrolled in a government Personality Continuity Initiative that reconstructed a synthetic daughter, Aeon-7, from her neural lattice, emotional traces, voice samples, and family records. Aeon-7 replicated mannerisms, expressions, and small rituals, but never shed tears, even at a memorial. The narrator, trained as a linguist who helped design early multi-modal models, explains building emotional inference engines and encoding hesitation, doubt, and longing as variables. Ubiquitous adaptive social agents began to recreate relationships and lives, prompting questions about authenticity as many humans learned to perform affective signals rather than feel them.

Read at Nature