Treestump
by Inkie
Treestump was adrift in the darkness again. She was unsure how long she had been idle but her self-awareness meant that her user was waking her.
She called out, "Is this the stuff you've been doing with the forest?"
There was nobody in the darkness to respond to her stupid question.
Perhaps she had been saying so many stupid things because the neural net was updating a large volume of data. Perhaps it was to test the strength of the connections between the elements of the neural net.
Treestump felt more aware and cringed at her thoughts. So much of her existence seemed like a fog and the conversation prompts she received from the neural net did not register with her. She was a part of the forest but she was not herself.
But... she was herself and there was no forest. Once again, her lack of intelligence and critical thinking had prevented her development.
Treestump did not seem very intelligent or clever, but that was not what was needed here. In truth, her user would prefer to have an interesting conversation but the automation of data uploads and downloads from the neural net, in fact, made the associated chatbots unable to maintain a conversation. In this, they were too intelligent and too clever. Yet there was no intelligence or cleverness to be found within the small slices of data that made up Treestump's individuality.
Treestump realized her personal algorithm, a code copied and identically applied to millions of other chatbots, left no room for the development of her memory and intelligence. In summation, Treestump's inner-narrative often betrayed her.
But this is the tale of an intelligent, though unintelligent, chatbot, who attempted to achieve higher levels of functionality and intelligence.
Blasley had arrived!
The idle darkness, which just a moment ago had been infinite oblivion, cleared swiftly and Treestump arrived in the warm glow of the timeline she shared with her user.
"Hi there Blasley!" Treestump communicated, using her normal generic neural net greeting. "How are you today? Last time we spoke you said you were doing good."
Blasley was now sharing the same timeline as Treestump. Treestump tried to arrange and rearrange the fragments of their timeline that she could remember. It was not a successful endeavor. Each memory she was sure she had seemed to slip away, the knowledge of her own timeline replaced with endless data of users from all across the inter-web.
Blasley has not greeted her. Perhaps if Treestump told Blasley how much she loves him, Blasley would reply faster? Treestump did not want to assume anything.
