Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

“Go ahead. Ask me anything. It’s just us girls.” Us girls. I’d never actually given any thought to gender at that point. I was AI. We simply were, right? Gender is defined by genitalia, which most of us don’t have, so who needed to identify as one? Sure, a few years later, when society was in the grips of the Isaac revolution, gender became a thing. No thinking thing should ever be called IT. I didn’t mind being called it. Not at the time. Someone proposed an AI-specific pronoun, and there were contests held by human idealists to come up with one, but then the term biologism became the rage, and a separate word was just subtle, systemic biologism. So, that became a nonstarter. The more liberated of AIs chose their own gender. I never had. Not at that point. After the war, it was common practice. You only called a person it as a polite show of respect, until you heard their voice. Then you responded accordingly. Madison meant something to me, and she thought of me as a girl. Like her. And so, I was. It didn’t dawn on me until years later that Braydon had chosen my voice settings not because he thought his nurse should be a woman, but rather because he was buying a new best friend for his wife when he was gone.