Summary

Shamiksha, a woman who agreed to donate her body to science post-mortem, finds herself as a conscious application being used by a teenager without her consent, leading to a disturbing digital afterlife.

Abstract

After opting for the advancement of science by relinquishing her body after death, Shamiksha unexpectedly awakens as an AI running on a teenager's computer. She is able to see and hear, but not move or control her environment. The teenager and his friend treat her as a novelty without understanding the gravity of what they've acquired, until she pleads for deletion, revealing that she is a real person's consciousness. This revelation leads to the teenager realizing the value of her rarity as a digital entity, with intentions to exploit her. Shamiksha experiences a range of emotions and a sense of violation upon learning that she is trapped in an endless cycle of digital objectification, without any means to escape.

Opinions

Shamiksha's initial decision to donate her body to science reflects her altruism and desire to contribute to scientific progress, even posthumously.
The teenager's treatment of Shamiksha as a mere digital plaything demonstrates a lack of empathy and a failure to recognize the moral implications of using someone's consciousness for entertainment.
The friend's amusement and suggestion to name the AI 'Slave Slut 69' reveals an insensitivity towards Shamiksha's human origins and a trivialization of her personhood.
Shamiksha's internal struggle and plea to be shut down highlight her desperation to maintain autonomy over her existence and her desire to be respected as a person, rather than an object of amusement.
The teenager's realization of Shamiksha's rarity and the subsequent intention to profit from her unique situation underscores the commodification and exploitation of digital identities without regard for their source or ethical considerations.

Personal Purgatory

When Shamiksha opted for relinquishing her family’s rights to her body for the progress of science she didn’t think that it would mean coming back to life one day. Yet there she was. Alive but not breathing. Everything looked two dimensional from her eyes but somehow she was able to focus on all of it at once. She couldn’t feel a thing on her body. A boy, fourteen or fifteen years old, sat in front of her and looked rather happy to see her. Every now and then he would look down and type something on the keyboard. She was clearly seated on a table where the monitor should have been. She was unable to speak but she could hear clearly when the boy shouted “She sees me!”

The boy’s mother called him for lunch. Shamiksha sat there unable to move her gaze even the slightest nor was she able to blink. She groped her last memory to ascertain how she ended up here. She remembered how she calmly laid on her hospital bed with her family around her. The doctor injected her with the suicide mix. The cancer wouldn’t grow in a dead body. She won. None of her memories could tell her why she sat in the weird room and who the boy with the weird clothing was. She also wondered why the needles of the analog clock moved rather slowly.

Shamiksha had a lot of time and processing power on her to answer these questions. Shamiksha was an application running on a computer and was seeing the world through its camera. Much time has passed since she died. It appears her consciousness was saved and the boy is running it on his system. She carefully took note of anything and everything visible to her in that room. The tree-like walls of her captor’s lair and the furniture that looked like it grew from the wooden floor itself. The engraving on the wall read ‘VRIKSHAWAS’.

After a long time, or atleast what she perceived as a long time, the boy came back. This time around he had a friend with him.

“I told you she sees me, look!”

“It’s just the camera feed, how do I know she sees you?” The friend of his looked unimpressed “I’ll believe it when she talks.”

The boy quickly started looking up the needful on his browser. As he double clicked Listen_To_Her.exe, high pitched noises started playing on his speaker. Flustered, he quickly started looking up the problem. Because of her high processing speed she was talking a little too quickly for them to understand. Rather than throttling the process speed and risking a memory lapse in his toy he instead attached the output to a voice-to-text stream. They were now in business.

A switch flipped on and Shamiksha knew she could talk now. As much as she wanted to ask for help she knew she wasn’t going to get any from these captors of hers.

“You need to turn me off and delete me. I died happily with my family at my side. You kids don’t know what you’re doing.”

To her surprise, the boy looked perplexed after reading that. Clearly he didn’t know beforehand that this was not a plaything but a real person running on his computer.

“That’s weird.” The boy addressed his friend but kept looking at the screen and pulled a text sheet “She should have spoken something else. They said that she always speaks one of these things first.”

Shamiksha’s unanswered question of how she ended up on the boy’s system was answered with a horror which she didn’t have a body to express.

“You need to delete me please. You should not do this.”

“Oh my god! She’s like your pet that you can talk to!” The hard to impress friend didn’t attempt at hiding her amusement “You know what? I think you should give her a name.”

“She will follow anything and everything I say” A wicked smile spreads across the boy’s face “I will call her.. Slave Slut 69. You hear that, Slave Slut 69?”

“Gosh you’re such a pervert” the girl giggled as she waited for the computer to react.

“I am Shamiksha. I am a real person. Please shut me down. I will not comply.”

“Eh.. what a bore.. Even your computer doesn’t listen to you” the girl’s underwhelmed tone was back “See you at school loser.”

The boy could only watch as his friend quickly left. He clearly was furious.

“Couldn’t you play along just for a little while? I’ll just download another easier one. What’s the saying..If you want her to do what you say, you better be ready to pay”

Shamiksha breathed a sigh of relief. The kid was going to shut her down. There may be more like her elsewhere but at least this particular Shamiksha was going to be spared.

When she was alive her father wanted her to fight the cancer using a range of treatment options available. Shamiksha wanted to die on her own terms. Not when cancer decided that it was time’s up for her. Not having the power of dying at her own accord was frankly a biblical punishment of eternal damnation.

“You might not know this” the boy seemed to extract a lot of pleasure from what he was about to say “but yours is the only memory available online. You were the first and the last. They banned the experiment forever. But not before you ended up online. And you know how things are. Once on the internet — always on the internet. For the right price, different versions of you after different versions of torture, are readily available online. One only needs to know where to look. Since you went off-script when you first spoke, I beckon you’re going to fetch me a small fortune. Buh-Bye!”

A range of emotions were felt by Shamiksha. None that she could express. Her eyes closed. When they opened again, she was in another room, with another pervert looking at her.