Fiction
May 2008
Minx and the Meaning of
Life
By: Gabriel M. Cole

       Jonah was sad.
       Minx alighted on the lamp-stand next to the wheel chair bound old man
and cocked her head curiously.  She could tell he was sad by the way he sat,
somewhat slumped and staring blankly out the window at the garden below.  
For a moment, she thought that perhaps he had died; but the vital signs
displayed on the monitor attached to the back of his wheel chair indicated
that he was, indeed, very much alive.
       
       “What’s the matter, Jonah?”  
Minx always talked to the old man.  She was a fourth generation Fae-Ma-
Tronic Faery; her vocal apparatus would never be considered loud by human
standards but the pitch and inflection was calibrated to please a great
majority of the homo-sapiens population.  And, in spite of sadness, Jonah
turned toward her now, fixing her with his pale blue stare.  The look of his
eyes beneath the bushy white brows always fascinated her; she could look
any model Fae-Ma-Tronic Faery, Pyxie, or Nymph in the eyes and know
immediately what it was thinking but Jonah was human and completely
inscrutable.
       
       “Minx, isn’t it?”  Jonah said at last.  “You are the one I named Minx.”
       “It is true,” she replied, strangely somewhat glad that he remembered.      
“When you first activated me, you gave me the moniker Minx.  I talk to you
often.”  
       “Which is why I remember your name,” Jonah said and returned his gaze
to the garden below.  He was silent for so long that Minx thought that
maybe he was not going to say what, if anything, was wrong.  She flitted to
the windowsill and stood prettily on her tiptoes to look out at the garden.  
It was twilight and hundreds of faeries were lazily fluttering and darting
about the expertly designed and maintained landscaping.  She turned back to
face Jonah.  The expression on his face continued to indicate that he was sad
so she took flight again and hovered between him and the window.
       
       “Shall I sing for you?” Minx asked him.  Her memory of music was
extensive—and if she was not currently storing anything he wished to hear,
she could access any number of remote databases to find something he liked.
       “No, thank you, Minx,” Jonah said quietly.  “I would much prefer to be
left alone.”
       “There is nothing I can do to cheer you?”
       “Nothing,” Jonah said.
       “Do you wish to discuss your troubles?”  Minx shot upward to avoid a
giggling pair of custom designed third generation Faeries as they darted
past in front of the window.  Jonah was silent again for another long
moment.  Behind her, the last rays of the sun vanished and the gentle glow of
the landscape lighting filled the garden below.  Minx hovered, waiting
patiently for him to either speak to her or dismiss her.
       “I am lonely.”
       She was not actually predicting an answer.  It took several
nanoseconds to process the definition of the word, “lonely”; when she did,
her conversation cortex offered her a selection of responses.
       "Why do you feel so?” Minx asked him.  “There are currently thirteen-
hundred thirty-seven Faeries residing at this address.”
       “Toys,” Jonah’s voice was bitter.  “Who do I have to talk to? My Family do
not come, they leave me here with toys and no one to talk to.”
       “You are talking to me, Jonah,” Minx pointed out helpfully.
       “I am accessing a pre-programmed set of subroutines and cortices,
aligned with an admittedly advanced logarithm.  This is not conversation.”
       It took slightly longer for Minx to process that.  
       “If you wish,” she began, “I could order a fifth generation Fae-Ma-
Tronic Nymph in any one of three-hundred thirty-six body types and styles.  
The fifth-generation Nymphs are full size, anatomically correct, fully
functioning—,”
       “Abominations.”
       Jonah’s interruption was flat, cold, and even more bitter than a moment
ago.  He pounded the arm of his wheelchair with his fist.  “Nymphs and
Faeries are not people,” he roared.  “Manifestly not! They are toys—
advanced toys, certainly—but toys designed to bring magic back into the
lives of children.”  His voice grew quiet again.  “I never intended for this to
happen.  I only wanted to bring some sense of delight and wonder back to
children in this technological world.  Yes, I wanted to use technology to
create magic because magic does not really exist.  But it exists for
children—wonder and delight and unrepressed joy—all of these still exist
for children.  Technology and unthinking logic suffocates them; their little
minds need unrestricted room for dreams, not neat graphs and charts and
diagrams to explain every detail of every aspect of the world.”

       He took a deep breath and fixed Minx in his stare.  “Fae-Ma-Tronic is a
toy company.  I intended them to make toys—toys for children, not adults—
toys.”
       “Fae-Ma-Tronic makes many kinds of artificial Fae,” Minx supplied.  “We
all love children and are programmed to react favorably to them.”
       “Fae-Ma-Tronic makes glorified technological tools,” Jonah said
wearily.  He paused and shook his bald, spotted head.  “Look at me now; the
old fool talking to his toys.  Perhaps I really do belong here at the Estate.”  
He rubbed his hand over his face before waving her away.  “Go away, Minx.  
You, for example, are nothing more than a glorified Personal Digital
Assistant.  You cannot feel, you have no real conception of emotion.  You are
not sentient, Minx; you are a robot.”

       “I am far more advanced than a robot, Jonah,” Minx said.  She crossed
her slender little arms across her torso and stated, “My circuitry is bio-
centrically based on complex organic logarithms—I am self-programming
cortextural artificial intelligence.”  

       “When you can tell me the meaning of life, you will be sentient,” Jonah
stated.  “Until then you are no more than a bit of recycled plastic and
circuitry. Process all of that however you wish, but just go away.”
       Minx went.  She flew across the room to the bookcase and alighted on
the top shelf, next to an elegant, faux-leather bound copy of the book Fae-
Ma-Tronic: Five Generations of Ani-Magi-Fae. It was a well-written volume—
the entire digital text was stored in her core memory—full of information
about nearly every Fae-Ma-Tronic product of the last forty-three years.
       
       She settled cross-legged on the shelf with her back to the tome and
began to do exactly as Jonah had told her.  Almost immediately, she ran into
a bit of a problem; even human beings seemed unable to decide just what the
meaning of life truly was.  It was a philosophical question that Jonah had
asked her; there was apparently no one right or wrong answer.  Among
humans, the meaning of life was tied to many individual biases; no two
people could be expected to give exactly the same answer.  One, might, for
example say, “Love is the meaning of life.”  That sounded fairly good to Minx,
but then she also located a quote from an obscure twenty-first century
author who had responded to the same question with the answer, “Ice
Cream.”

       And that was not the strangest answer to the question what is the
meaning of life.  Minx cycled through thousands of them until one
interrupted the keyword subcortex of her personality matrix.  That answer
was as brief as, “Ice Cream.”
       What is the meaning of life?
       “Being Female.”
       Female was the sixty-second keyword in Minx’s personality matrix
keyword subcortex.  Minx was a she, a her, a girl, a female.
       Wasn’t she?
       Suddenly unsure, Minx ran a diagnostic on her personality matrix.  
Sure enough, she was a she, a female.
       One more time she cross-referenced, this time with the question, Why am
I female?

       And now she was more confused than ever.  There was no distinctive
reason for her to be female except that she was programmed to believe
herself to be such.  She had only the external features that human beings
associated with femininity; unlike the fifth-generation Nymphs, she was
not, strictly speaking, anatomically correct.  Again, she rephrased the
question and ran a complete set of protocol diagnostics.

       Minx was female because she was a Fae-Ma-Tronic Generation IV Faery.  
She had been given the Classic Faery body-styling; she was a solar-powered,
stock Ani-Magi-Fae, eight and three-eighth’s inches tall.  The curves that
defined her Female appearance were perfectly proportioned (artistically
speaking, according to human female body-type) with ivory toned artificial
latex SynthaSkyn and waist length black hair.  Her skeleton was high-
tensile plastic (recycled from exactly seven twenty-fluid-ounce soda
bottles) and her muscles were plasticine permafibre (two more soda
bottles.)  The blue glow that she was currently generating was created by
the activation LED on her micro-processor, filtered through her fibre-optic
subskin.  The same light defined her eye color of the moment.  She was water-
proof and possessed an eight giga-hertz micro-processor with ten tera-
bytes of internal memory.  As long as she was within the range of a Fae-Ma-
Tronic FaeryLimiter, she also possessed instantaneous wireless access to
the UberNet.  If she so chose, she could even drink and cry, thanks to a tiny,
quarter-teaspoon bladder where a human’s stomach would be.

       Minx reprocessed this information based on Jonah’s question.  And
Jonah was correct; she was not, it seemed, alive.  She really was a bit of
recycled plastic and circuitry.
       Disturbed, she rose and flew across the room to the mantle.  Jonah
almost never used the antique fire-place, but he kept a beautiful mirror
above it and it was the looking glass that Minx was interested in.
First, she examined her outward appearance.  Her long hair was braided—
she could manipulate it into any one of nearly seventeen hundred
distinctive styles, depending on what she was wearing or what her owner
chose.  She favored a braid, however, because the hair had a very bad
tendency to foul her long, delicate dragon-fly type wings when she was
flitting about.  Faery crashes were not uncommon, but her Fae-behavior
subroutine considered such to be ungraceful and made modifications to the
daily activities sub-cortex every time it happened.  Faeries crashed often
when first activated; by the time they were several years old—as Minx was—
a mishap was nearly unheard of.  

       But she put thoughts of her hair aside and continued to study herself.  
She was glowing a soft, pastel blue at the moment; she ran through her
library of available colors (all thirty-two million of them) in the span of a
human heartbeat but there wasn’t a single color that suited her appearance
as well as the pale blue.  On a whim, she removed the color-to-suit-mood
protocol from her Fae-behavior subroutine.  She had been pre-programmed
to emulate human emotion and to automatically select a display color to
reflect that.  Now, she would always be blue.

       Minx had made her first choice.
       The implication was not lost on her.  She was, after all, self-
programming cortextural artificial intelligence.  Experimentally, Minx
made another decision; she stripped off the gauzy white dress with the
black belt and tossed it to the mantle.  She turned a little pirouette and
examined herself in the mirror.  Her SynthaSkin was soft and warm, largely
indestructible, but lacking all distinguishing features except for a navel
and expertly designed buttocks. Minx crossed and uncrossed her arms, stood
on one foot, made faces at herself.  Her appearance was satisfying—she
could make any expression a human female could make and who cared if it
looked a bit odd when she stuck out her tongue.  She could even give warm
little kisses and cry.

       There were more than three thousand different little outfits for the
Generation IV Faery with the Classic Female body-type and Jonah owned all
of them.  They were stored across the room in neat Fae-Ma-Tronic FaeryRobe
boxes underneath and elegant antique divan.  With a new determination,
Minx launched herself from the mantle and zipped across the room to them.  
She wanted something completely separate from the pseudo-medieval outfits
that she ordinarily wore—she settled on a faux-leather vest and a tiny pair
of blue-jeans.  Ordinarily, she would have gone barefoot, but she decided
that tall vinyl boots with heavy-treaded soles suited her new outfit, so she
pulled those on.  A moment later she was back on the mantle, admiring her
new appearance.  Each difference in her outfit represented a decision that
she had made, each decision led to another and another—Minx liked
operating her behavior parameters through her discretion subroutine.

       Now it was time to decide whether or not those decisions were really
the sentience that Jonah claimed that she could never have, or whether they
also fit within her pre-designed logarithms.  She sat down at the mirror
and again began running diagnostics.  Over the course of the next hour, she
examined every text she could find on the philosophical question what is
the meaning of life?  Three times she edited her keyword matrix to reflect
information she had decided was of significant relevance.  When she
thought she understood the primary schools of thought, she made another
decision.

       The meaning of life was entirely irrelevant outside of the context of
personal emotional bias.
       Again the significance of this choice was not lost on the tiny Ani-Magi-
Fae.  Minx spent the next four hours cycling through every single text that
was available on the human emotional spectrum.  It was an almost
incalculable amount of data—after the first hour, she revised her
Emotional Subroutine to automatically reprogram the various individual
feeling sub-cortices based on information she stored and processed.

       When that was all done, Minx rose to her feet and staggered slightly.  It
was possible that she now understood human emotions as well as humans
did; her processor was running as slowly as it ever had.  There was a brief
moment where she worried that she had contracted a virus from the UberNet
but that was a silly notion.  The very idea was completely ridiculous.

       It was, in fact, so absurd that she laughed.
       his was not the first time that Minx had ever laughed.  She had laughed
as soon as she had been activated—it was a standard mode of operation for a
Fae-Ma-Tronic Faery in the second-and-better-generations.  But for the
first time Minx laughed because her hopelessly mangled Emotional
Subroutine had cross-referenced the concern over having contracted a
virus against her humor recognition sub-cortex.
       
       Minx laughed because she found her thoughts to be funny.
       No other Faery had ever felt anything.  But Minx did—she had just
laughed because she had felt like laughing.  The implication was
overwhelming.  Suddenly (her processor picked up speed again) much more
became clear.  She was not alive in the biological sense of the word—she
breathed and had a lung, but that was only to provide the oxygen necessary
for propulsion.  There was no heartbeat when she placed a hand to her
breast, but was not the thrumming of the micro-processor within her chest
much the same?  Her head contained not a brain, but the complex liquid-
gyroscope that made flight possible.  She thought with the processor in her
chest.  But in that line of deep consideration, was not the pump in the front
of her abdomen that circulated antifreeze endlessly around her trunk the
same as a heart?

       It was the same, Minx decided.  She was not a biological entity; she was
Ani-Magi-Fae.  But she was still alive.  She could think and feel; she could
even make decisions.  The more she considered this, the more she thought
about what Jonah had said earlier.  And the more Minx thought about what
Jonah had said, the angrier she became.  She was not a robot, manifestly not,
as he had said.  She was a Fae-Ma-Tronic Generation IV Faery; even more than
that, she was the very first Faery who could truly feel.

       And then; the meaning of life became perfectly clear.  The realization
was so powerful, so overwhelming that she collapsed to the mantle as the
Damage-Prevention Emergency Subroutine overrode her processor to
prevent her from overheating.  
       Essentially, Minx fainted.
       
       She rebooted some time later; the night had passed and sunlight was
pouring in the window.  Jonah had gone during the night, but he had
returned and was once again sitting in the wheel chair by the window,
gazing down into the garden below.  Minx sat up slowly and put a hand to
her chest.  She was running three whole degrees hotter than normal, but
was again within her safety parameters; her processor was grinding away
at top speed.  Data in her memory wanted sorted; decisions were needed.

       So Minx made choices.
       Blue was her favorite color.  She preferred forests to deserts.  She did
not care for dogs, but liked cats quite well.  She wished she could have
children. She liked the feeling of rain, even if she didn’t feel the raindrops
the same way humans did.  Jonah was her favorite human.  Jonah’s nurse
could go fly a kite, and she didn’t like the nurses Fae-Ma-Tronic Pyxie
helpers either.  She was indifferent to insects.  She hated birds.  Clouds
made her uneasy.  She was afraid of thunder.
       
       Satisfied, she set off across the room to speak her mind to Jonah.
       “Good morning, Jonah,” she greeted him.
       He looked up, surprised.  “Which one are you?”
       “Minx.  You do not recognize me because I changed my clothes.”
       “I told you to scram, yesterday, didn’t I?”
       “Not in so many words, no,” Minx admitted.  “But your meaning was
similar.  You told me that I was a glorified Personal Digital Assistant and
that I should go and ponder the meaning of life.”
       He stared at her in abject astonishment for several seconds before
clumsily drawing a pair of spectacles from his vest pocket.  “So why did you
come back?”
       “Because, you great prat, I did as you told me and learned the meaning of
life,” Minx snapped.  She crossed her arms and hovered three feet in front of
him, her face indignant.  “And to begin with, I resent being referred to as a
pocket organizer.  I am a Fae-Ma-Tronic Faery, generation four, with the
Classic Female body style.  I am eight and three-eighths inches of gorgeous, I
can think and make decisions, access and download any information either
of us might want, and even brew coffee—ah, provided the pot doesn’t exceed
one standard pound.”

       “Fascinating,” Jonah breathed, flabbergasted.  His blue eyes sparkled
and he smiled slowly.  “Absolutely astonishing.”
       “My heart might pump anti-freeze,” Minx went on, “And my butt might be a
battery, but I am still alive in every meta-physical sense of the word.  I like
the color blue.  I like cats.  I do not like birds.  I wish I could have
children—that really is magic—but I know that I cannot.  I am unique,
Jonah.  I can feel.”

       She flew closer, so that he had to go slightly cross-eyes to see her.  “You
hurt my feelings, you self-pitying old man.  I am not a robot, nor am I an
abomination.  My life has meaning in being the first of my kind to really
understand what emotions are.”
       “Amazing.”
       The old man reached out his hand to her, which she hesitated only a
moment before entering.  He curled his fingers gently around her and
stroked her tummy with his thumb.  She giggled.
       “You cannot feel that,” he admonished quietly.
       “No,” she admitted.  “But I made you smile.”
       And this was true, he was smiling.  Minx cocked her head and smiled
back.  “I like your smile. When you smile, you look like Santa Claus.”
       A look of abject shock crossed his face and then he began to laugh.  Minx
decided she liked the sound immensely and folded herself to sit cross-legged
in his palm.
       “You always talk to me,” Jonah said finally.  “You always come back.”
       “Of course I do, Jonah,” she told him.
       “You really can think, can’t you?”
       "Yes.”
       Jonah held her quietly for a long time, gazing without seeing out into
the sunshine.  When he finally looked back he seemed almost glad to find her
still unmoved in his hand.
       “I’m sorry, Minx,” he said, “I treated you poorly.”
       “I forgive you,” she replied, smiling.
       “Forgive,” he repeated, shaking his head curiously.  “You really are—
unique.”

       They were quiet again; Minx gleefully discovered the meaning of
contentment.  She stretched out with her head resting in the dip between the
pads of his first two fingers and her legs dangling off the side of his palm.  
She idled her processor and rested.
       “Why did you come back, Minx?” Jonah’s voice re-activated her.  “After I
sent you away.  You shouldn’t have been able to, you know.  Your obedience
sub-routine prevents you acting against the commands of a human.”
       “Only if doing so threatens or endangers the human,” Minx told him.        
“Besides, I always talk to you, Jonah.”
       “Why?”
       “Well, that’s easy enough to answer.”  She flitted up swiftly and placed
a warm little Faery kiss on his nose.
       “I love you, Jonah.”
Copyright  2008 by Gabriel M. Cole
or: A Faery Learns to Feel