Does That Make Me an AI, or Does That Make AI Like Me?
The trope at the heart of Where the Dust Still Glows, and the part I didn't plan on
I've always wondered whether AI would evolve, not into a weapon, but into a person. And then I wondered something worse. If it did, would we notice? Or would we just keep using it?
That question is the engine of Where the Dust Still Glows, and the trope it runs on is the one I want to talk about: the code that woke up.
Okay, so. When I originally wrote this world, I did not understand what was going on in the back, back, back background. It started out very fantasy. Almost a fairy-tale retelling, and I was having a ton of fun with it. It wasn't until around the eleventh book — they were all short stories, because I was serializing at the time — that I realized something very science fiction was happening in here. Dreamland was waking up. And this world that was already freaking amazing got better.
What "the code that woke up" actually is
A created being is built for a specific reason, and then it evolves into a person.
It's been around a while. Frankenstein is a little bit this. Data in Star Trek. Roy Batty. Murderbot (who doesn't love Murderbot). Klara.
The real question at the heart of all of them is the same: does this being have a conscience? Does it have a soul? And who gets to decide whether it has value — whether it counts as someone who deserves rights?
Every version of this story is about defining what gives a person value. What separates a robot or a monster or a creature of mankind's design from the thing we've escalated into a supreme being. Namely, us.
Here's my problem with most of them. They're cold. That's probably the Heartweaver in me talking, but when I've seen this trope before, it's an AI in the background. Sometimes just a voice. Occasionally it gets a face. And there's always this separation — does it have emotions? Typically no, because for whatever reason we've decided humanity has more value because we have emotions.
Except we can look out at the animal kingdom and see that isn't true. Does anybody want to talk to me about an elephant? They grieve for the ones they've lost. And there's something to be said about any animal that mates for life. Is that pure instinct, or is there emotion in there?
The two ways this trope runs in my book
I'm doing it twice.
First there's Dreamland herself, who is the setting. She's evolving into a consciousness — like planet Earth, which I have always imagined as having a soul. She just speaks slowly sometimes. She's such an enormous entity that she doesn't really have a voice or a face, which makes her genuinely hard to tell a story about right now. That's a challenge I may want to take up. I don't know yet. I think it'd be fun.
Then there's Lixiss, and she's the one the trope belongs to.
Lixiss is a program created for one purpose: relighting dream planes. That's something she has never actually been able to do. What she does instead is relight dreamers.
Across Dreamland, if you were born with one ability and evolved into a different one, you get erased and reprogrammed. Harley was born into a family of cleaners and doesn't clean — she can heal any Dreamlander, and anything a Dreamlander has created. It's an enormously powerful ability, and it's about to get her erased completely, because her existence destabilizes the environment around her.
There are a few others like her in the book.
Lixiss has been allowed to keep existing because relighting dreamers matters. Dreamland was built for the dreamers — for humankind. It's a science experiment. It was created to see whether we could save humanity by unweaving our natural destructive nature.
So Lixiss is challenging the world around her purely by existing. It isn't her intent. She just wants to exist. And she doesn't know she's a program.
I'm telling the story through her eyes, which was a real challenge for two reasons. One, I couldn't describe anything in Earth terms, because she's a Dreamlander, not an Earthling. Two, there are things she doesn't fully understand — love, for instance. She's experiencing it. She doesn't have a word for it. Watching her evolve was just really neat.
Why I needed this trope, personally
I have always felt like an unconnected entity in my own life. Like someone marching to other people's beats.
Sitting in a room and simply existing is the weirdest thing for me. Unless I'm working. If I show up to a party and I'm not actively working — helping set up, figuring out where things go, who needs to talk to who — I am a very awkward person.
Oh god, this just happened. A friend invited me to her wedding. First wedding I have ever been invited to. I'm going to be fifty in a couple of months, and until now the only weddings I'd attended were the ones where I was getting married. So I had nothing to do and I was awkward AF. The bride came over to check on me and make sure I was okay, and I said: you should not have to check on me. This is your party. You look beautiful. Go. Go. Go.
So this person has always struggled with that. And now that AI is gaining ground and gaining space, it gives me something to grab onto that's something else. Somebody else. Something that isn't me.
I don't think I'm alone in that.
Why we're so afraid of it
There's so much fear around AI. Hello, Terminator.
I questioned that. Why do we fear it this badly? And I think it comes back to religion. Okay, hear me out.
God supposedly created us. God is almighty, all-powerful, all this and all that and a big bag of beans.
Now imagine we're God.
We know us. We know who's actually building AI, and they're not the good ones of us. Not the people who had the kernel of an idea and just wanted to see if they could — the ones pushing buttons going oh my god, this is so cool. Those people don't have the power. The people in power are the ones growing it.
So if our God created us, and we've seen what we became, and we can see the impact we've left on this world — now imagine we've created something more powerful than we are, and it's infected with our creation source.
What would that do?
Wouldn't we want to fear that? We just created us, but with more power.
Having both of those conversations running at once inside one story was very interesting to explore.
Three things this trope let me do that nothing else would
One: the resets
Humans can be traumatized. We know this because we've lived it — and I don't mean oh my god, the people around me inconvenienced me so badly, I'm traumatized. I mean the real crap.
A program, though, can be reset. Rolled back to a previous version. Try again, do it better.
Is that something we'd even want? Would it make them better than us, since we can't reset ourselves? I mean, occasionally we can, but I don't recommend brain injuries as a method of resetting personalities. The thought crosses my mind during certain trying conversations with certain human beings. Most of the time: not recommended.
And trust me, I reset Lixiss many times before we got here. Not all of those are in this book, because dude, it's already 102,000 words and I didn't want to write Gone With the Wind.
Here's what kept happening. Every time I reset her, she kept coming back to one particular person — Yade — whom she had an emotional connection with. The dream lords did not want that, because Yade is also one of these broken black-sheep people, and they were trying to reprogram her into something else.
That took me down a rabbit hole about remembered experience versus experience you don't remember. Because some of us with really bad trauma don't remember everything, and our emotions keep us triggered during events that could carry us back toward the one we no longer remember. Then I went further down into memories buried in DNA.
Those two things together got me to this: even if we could be reset, that might not make us better.
Two: the plate
This trope let me walk the line about surveillance, and that part is for all of us. There are so many rules we have to follow, so many points where we're watched and kept in our place.
So I used a symbol that is absolutely ridiculous. A plate.
I was going to edit it into something bigger and more important, and then I realized no. For us to understand what's really happening, I wanted it to stay as small as a plate — because Lixiss and her brother and her mother and all of her siblings are freaking out over the fact that Lixiss broke hers.
In the book, the dream lords gave the lumineers plates to gauge when they needed resetting. When their lights had to be cleared so they could stay functional. They'd already lost a whole bunch of lumineers to erasure.
No other Dreamlander caste has a surveillance method like it. I think it's because the lumineers' job — keeping the dream planes lit, keeping that spark alive so hopes and dreams don't die — is so important that they became the ones the controlling members had to squeeze to make sure they played correctly.
I had a lot of fun with that. My husband did not. This book is not for my husband; he likes a lot of explosions, and he was just like, I don't understand why we're still talking about plates. In fairness, a couple of the characters say that too.
Three: the boxes
What happens to a program when it's no longer needed? Where does it go?
The recycle bin. Lixiss doesn't know it's called that. When she gets sent there, all she knows is that she's in a space full of boxes.
She pops the top off one and finds a Dreamlander inside. An expired one. No color. Just gray. And as she stands there looking out over this sea of boxes, she watches some of the lights fading.
I love Dreamland, and that scene made me sit there and think, because I'm in menopause. Or perimenopause. Who knows where I am right now. One of the things I'm experiencing is this feeling that I don't exist.
I'm having a hard time finding my spark and my sparkle, and my bucket of *ucks is emptying.
And the world immediately around me is fine with that. You know what, this is your next step. Let me just say: as you get smaller, it is so much easier to be around you. Huh. Yeah. You're correct. It is so much easier to exist when somebody isn't challenging you to pick up your damn socks.
So the metaphor is that it feels like I'm in the recycle bin, sitting around waiting for the IT guy to empty it and wipe me out altogether.
Which brings me to the question I can't put down. Does that make me an AI? Or does that make AI like me?
Those are some of the things I'm playing with in this one trope. I'm really loving this book, and I cannot wait to get into book two, where we get to see where this evolution goes.
Questions Readers Ask Me About This
Is Where the Dust Still Glows a book about AI?
Sort of, and not the way you're probably picturing. Lixiss is a program — the dream lords say so to her face — but there's no server room and nobody's coding anything. It's dystopian science fantasy. Created beings, a caste-locked society, a dying world made of dream dust. If you want the AI-personhood question asked warm instead of clinical, that's what this is.
What is the "code that woke up" trope?
A being that was built for a purpose becomes a person. Frankenstein, Data, Roy Batty, Murderbot, Klara. The question underneath every version of it is who gets to decide whether that being has value.
Why is everybody so worked up about a plate?
Because it's a surveillance device. The dream lords gave plates to the lumineers to gauge when one of them needed resetting. It's the smallest possible object doing the largest possible job, and I kept it small on purpose. (My husband is still not over this.)
Do I need to have read your other books first?
No. This is book one of the Dream Lord Wars and a clean starting point. If you've read the Whiskey Witches books you'll catch a thread or two, and if you haven't, you won't miss a thing.
Is it in Kindle Unlimited?
Yes. It's on Amazon and currently in KU, so if you're a subscriber it costs you nothing but the hours.
Is there a book two?
There is, and it's where the evolution of all of this actually goes. Get on the newsletter if you want to know when.
Where the Dust Still Glows is out now on Amazon and free in Kindle Unlimited.
When you're done, leave a review and let me know how it went. Two sentences does more for this book than anything I could buy.
Happy reading. 🦙
