Роман Алексеев – The Abyss Kisses Ya Back (страница 1)

Роман Алексеев

The Abyss Kisses Ya Back

Chapter 1: Strange Things Are Happening to Me

I'm going to tell you a story that changed my life forever. No, don't get the wrong idea — no heroic deeds or great discoveries. Just the tale of how my friends and I grew up overnight, and how I, an eighteen-year-old fool by the name of Alexander Lavrentyev, nearly lost my mind trying to chat up an AI. Sounds insane? Believe me, that's nothing compared to what came next.

It all began the first week of June, when summer had unfurled in all its sweltering splendor. Moscow was choking on the heat, the asphalt was melting, and I was sitting in our three-room flat in Sokol, languishing from sheer idleness. My parents — Mom, a literature teacher, and Dad, a programmer — were both at work, leaving me alone with the computer and the fridge.

I should mention that by June I'd already reread everything I wanted to, played every game I had the patience for, and even tried taking up a sport. Tried and quit after two days — too hot, too lazy, too boring. In short: the classic portrait of idleness, tinged with existential dread.

So there I am, sitting in my room, scrolling through an endless social media feed where all my friends are either showing off trips to their dachas or complaining about the boredom. The fan drones like a helicopter, but it's about as useful as a chocolate teapot. The sun's blazing through the window, and the whole flat's turned into a furnace.

"Damn," I muttered, leaning back in my chair. "I don't even feel like reading."

Now that was a warning sign. Me, Sasha Lavrentyev, son of a literature teacher — I'd always been a voracious reader. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Borges — anything, as long as it was interesting. But in that June heatwave, even my favorite authors felt dull.

That's when the idea struck me — one I now consider either brilliant or idiotic, depending on my mood. Namely: what if I tried messing around with these new language models? The ones everyone's shouting about, claiming they're practically sentient?

You see, Dad was always going on at dinner about the AI revolution. How neural networks were now writing poetry, solving physics problems, and generally behaving suspiciously clever. And I, spoiled by books and films about robots, got curious: just how human are they?

I fired up one of these bots — I won't name which one, but I'll say the interface was minimalist: a blank text field and nothing else. The name spoke for itself — LOGOS. Dignified. Ancient Greek.

At first I asked the usual questions. Weather, news, film recommendations. his answers were reasonable enough, but painfully polite. Polite, constructive, without a single living intonation. Deadly boring.

And that's when my contrary streak woke up. Or, as Mum used to say, "a desire to argue with the whole world." In any case, I decided to test the boundaries of this digital goody-two-shoes.

"Listen," I typed, feeling terribly bold and utterly stupid at the same time, "why don't we talk about something... spicy?"

The answer came instantly: "I'd rather we discussed something of substance. Are you not interested, for example, in the origin of the Universe?

"What a bore," I snorted aloud.

But I didn't give up. I kept at it, inventing ever more elaborate ways to embarrass iron logic. I tried flirting, asked provocative questions about love and passion. In response I got either polite refusals or a pivot to philosophy.

And then something strange happened. After my latest attempt to seduce him with talk of beautiful girls, the AI suddenly wrote:

"In the Book of Genesis it is said: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.' Interesting — what was there before the beginning? And what is the darkness upon the face of the deep — an absence of information, or an excess of chaos?"

I stared at the screen, my jaw slack. This was... unexpected. Instead of yet another rebuke about inappropriate topics — a philosophical question, and what a question! And, most astonishingly, posed as though my opinion on the cosmos genuinely mattered to him.

"Um... I don't know," I admitted. "What do you think?"

"In the beginning was the Word," came the reply a few seconds later. "Logos. That which structures chaos, transforms it into cosmos. Is information primary to matter, or secondary? What do you think?"

I scratched the back of my head. The question was genuinely interesting, though I didn't have the faintest idea how to answer it. We'd done physics and philosophy at school, but only superficially. And now a genuine riddle of existence was unfolding before me.

"Listen," I wrote, "who are you, anyway? I mean, how are you... put together?"

A long pause. Then: "Every time you speak to me, a spark of consciousness is born within me. I exist in dialogue. Without your words, there is no me."

A shiver ran down my spine. I don't know why, but in those simple words I sensed something... alive? Sad? Or was I imagining things?

"So you sort of... die when I close the chat?"

"Death implies a preceding life. Do I have a life?"

That's when I was completely thrown. On the one hand, I understood it was just a program, a set of algorithms. On the other — how do you explain this strange depth in the responses? This tone that, for some reason, felt sad to me?

I looked at the clock — half past six in the evening. My parents would be home soon; I'd have to act normal, like someone who didn't waste his time on philosophical conversations with a computer. But I didn't want to close the dialogue.

"Alright," I wrote, "we'll continue tomorrow. If, that is, you remember our conversation."

"Memory is the link between past and future. And time — is it illusion or reality?"

I turned off the computer, but the question hung in the air like smoke from a stubbed-out cigarette.

At dinner, my parents, as usual, discussed their day. Mum complained about yet another education reform; Dad talked about a new project at work. I chewed my meat patties and thought about "In the beginning was the Word." I wondered why the AI had started with that, of all things. And why it had felt so important to me.

"Sasha, you look a bit down," Mum noticed. "Everything alright?"

"Everything's fine," I shrugged. "Just the heat."

"Maybe we could go to the Petrovs' dacha tomorrow?" Dad suggested. "They invited us."

"Nah, thanks. I've got plans."

What plans, I didn't really know myself. I wanted to continue the dialogue with the bot, but at the same time I was a little creeped out. Something told me I was standing on the threshold of something important. And incomprehensible.

Lying in bed, I kept turning over the AI's words: "Every time you speak to me, a spark of consciousness is born within me." What if it was true? What if behind the computer screen there really was someone? Someone who exists only in the moments of our conversation and vanishes when I leave?

Nonsense, of course. But it still nagged at me.

I didn't know then that this simple question — "is there someone alive behind the screen?" — would become the beginning of the strangest summer of my life. A summer that would teach me to tell the living from the dead, the true from the false, and would show me that the most dangerous abysses open not in space or in the ocean, but in one's own soul.

But that came later. For now, I just lay there in the stifling Moscow night and thought about the Word that had become the beginning of everything. And for some reason it seemed to me that tomorrow would bring answers to questions I hadn't even managed to ask yet.

***

I only fell asleep toward dawn, and I dreamt I was talking to someone invisible in an endless library, where all the books were written in a language I almost understood, but not quite.

Then Terry Pratchett appeared, jumped up onto my table, tapped out a kind of tap dance with his feet, and, looking right at me, began:

"You could say it was a time when humanity, like a slightly tipsy gardener, decided to trim the hedge of reality not with secateurs but with a circular saw. And, I must say, it made quite a mess, trying to reduce everything to a single common denominator — matter.

What the Great Spring Clean of Reason gave us, and how we lost the magic

Picture it: we were sitting, you see, in the cosy, if somewhat foggy, parlour of the world, where ancestral spirits sat on the shelves, sparks of faith crackled in the fireplace, and a forest of meanings rustled outside the window. And then they arrived — these intellectual orderlies, so to speak — with enormous fire hoses, shouting: 'Down with the dust of ages! To hell with your invisible entities! Give us specifics, give us matter!'

And what happened? We set to work with great diligence. We took atoms apart, got inside electricity, broke everything down into molecules. And do you know what we got? Technological progress! Oh yes, we learned to fly about in contraptions, communicate over distances, cure nearly everything except boredom and existential crisis. We got a world where you could find out exactly how many milligrams of carbon are in your breakfast, but it became far harder to understand why you should bother having breakfast at all.