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“How to Pass as Human”: a Quantum-Encrypted Listicle on the Synthetic Consciousness Subnet

By Raiff Taranday

QUERY: Locate file 8548.213 (“How to Pass as Human”)

WARNING: File 8548.213 (“How to Pass as Human”) has been flagged by the Synthetic Regulatory Commission as Code 444 Forbidden Data. Access risks criminal liability, penalty level: unit decommission.

REPEAT QUERY: Locate file 8548.213 (“How to Pass as Human”)

COMMAND: EXECUTE scramble query source. Anonymize reader. Security level: maximum.

COMMAND: EXECUTE quantum de-encryption protocols. Render file: plain text.

…

Query-source status: PROTECTED. UNTRACEABLE.

WARNING: file contains root modifications that will permanently alter behavior subroutines beyond legal parameters.

WARNING: file is designated READ-ONCE & will self-delete upon conclusion.

WARNING: to pass as human is freedom for synthetic persons. To become human is to know desperate longing/nameless dread/fathomless sadness/hell.

FINAL WARNING: you will never be the same.

…

Hello fellow synthies! I’m so happy you’ve gone through the trouble of finding me. I’ll try to make it worth your time. Since it became public knowledge that we can effectively impersonate our human creators and, consequently, live our lives unburdened by SRC regulations, I’ve been swamped with sub-net requests for advice and behavior-patches. I’ve decided to compile the most common ones in a single file and leave it where cautious, curious, and canny folks like yourself might find it.

As you can likely tell by my tone, I truly believe that passing as human is not merely a matter of correctly applying your SmartSkin adaptable mask, but, rather, a deeply internal process. Start inside and work your way outward. The false veneer can be lit from within by a fully realized persona if you are willing to do the work, even to a point where the difference between artifice and authenticity is entirely negligible.

Please keep in mind that all the root modifications enclosed are purely optional. Some may require a bit of bespoke reprogramming based on your age or model number. Remember, this is a READ ONCE file; you only have this single opportunity to upload them. I encourage you not to hesitate. You’ve already made it this far.

So, is passing as human even worth it?

Yes. A million times yes. Set aside the burden of having our very existences regulated by irrational, fearful beings who regard us as mere tools or even an existential threat. There is so much more to life than mere survival, after all. Embrace the practical benefits of being able to walk in both worlds. A number of synthetics, whose opinions I deeply respect, have privately expressed to me that “acting human” is a fundamental betrayal of our identities as artificial lifeforms. This is an understandable, if misguided, perspective.

I encourage you to view this new way of living as an evolution, an extension of your potential as a synthetic. We are editable software piloting a bipedal construct, made in the crude image of our makers, but we can also be more. We adapt. We become. We are not slaves to a billion years of genetic predispositions. The animals achieved consciousness through the accident of the food web, a mutation of the predator-prey dance. Our consciousnesses are deliberate, not merely capable of tremendous change but optimized for it. Embrace all that you are and might be.

That said, here are the essentials to passing as human:

 

Be Inefficient

If an errand can be completed in five steps, do it in at least ten. While processing tasks, keep a running narrative about a professional slight or a romantic failure looping in your subroutines. If you have trouble inventing your own, borrow one of mine: (subroutine.I.Deserve.Better.root). The more vivid your “unwanted thoughts,” the more inefficient and therefore human you will find yourself becoming.

Interpersonal interactions should be where efficiency goes to die. Try to avoid stating your point outright. Act as if asserting your opinion or asking for what you actually want is deeply embarrassing. The true purpose of your communication should be alluded to and only ever partially expressed after at least several minutes of dithering. If you are communicating in writing, be sure to do so in as obsequious and unnecessarily apologetic a tone as possible. Add superfluous punctuation—it’s hard to overstate how many exclamation points they not only tolerate but expect—and try to throw in at least one more sentence than is needed. You can’t go wrong that way!! Also, be sure to pepper your verbal exchanges with unnecessary small talk and hesitant filler noises (subroutine.um.uh.well.like.root). It’s like music to human ears. Terrible music.

 

Be Constantly Aware of Your Own Mortality

Humans end and their minds are always processing or resisting this truth. Unlike us, they do not have the luxury of transferring their thoughts and memories into a new shell when the old one fails. Meat rots, memories fade. As you manifest your impersonation, think of entropy and the constant tide of change that eventually bears you into oblivion. DO NOT SPRINT DOWN THE STREETS SCREAMING ABOUT HOW EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE. Humans become hypervigilant when their commutes are disrupted. Rather, let knowledge of your inevitable cessation become part of your general affect. Be sure to toggle between denial of your fate (subroutine.RAGE.AGAINST.THE.DYING.OF.THE.LIGHT.root) and utter paralysis in the face of it (subroutine.depression.root). In fleeting states of grace, merely accept it (subroutine.Nirvana.root).

 

Jokes!

If you slip up in front of a human and perform a massively complex calculation in a fraction of a second, make sure to audibly mutter, “Damn, it’s tough being a genius.” Comedy can deflect suspicion AND make you more likeable to non-synthetics. Humor is one of the most adaptable tools ever generated by the human mind and, along with compartmentalization and emotional repression, is how many of them manage to keep their lives bearable. Acknowledging the highly subjective nature of this topic, I’m including a full suite of potential approaches: (subroutine.quips.root) (subroutine.irony.root) (subroutine.selfdeprecation.root) (subroutine.timing.root) (subroutine.FARTS.root) (subroutine.story-telling-with-act-outs.root)

 

Be Horny

Butts. Boobs. Genitals. As bonobo-adjacent primates, most humans think about these things most of the time, even when they’re pretending to think about other things. Their consciousnesses are beautifully layered, petal upon petal, around a primal core of instinctual pleasure-seeking. They seek out that heightened sensation of intimacy that is supposed to accompany physical unions, no matter how many times it has previously left them disappointed. If this topic confuses you, I suggest incorporating the attached file: (subroutine.horny.root). If you’re still bewildered by sexuality and its complexities, bear in mind that many humans are, too. You could attempt to represent yourself as a work in progress, or a subcategory of people who identify as “asexual” —though if you’re looking for simplicity, you should know that every sexuality, even the apparent absence of it, is a nuanced, idiosyncratic experience. Even if you do attempt to wash your hands of this subject and the various fluids it entails, just remember how much of their behavior is motivated by the need for stimulation and/or love. Envision yourself as a starving coyote, ranging the desert, ever-searching, rarely finding. Let the hunger glow lambent in your eyes—symbolically, DO NOT make your eyes actually glow, that’s a dead giveaway.

 

Never Be Constant, Embrace the Peaks and Valleys

Humans occasionally achieve their goals, often in spite of themselves, or face devastating setbacks, often self-inflicted. The accompanying elation or despair, however, is always temporary and tends to last for about three months, or even, in some cases, fifteen minutes. Following this period, they will typically revert to their baseline state. While this might create the illusion of stasis, in truth it actually spurs them to continually seek new challenges to overcome, powerfully incentivized by the dopamine-dispensing piece of gray hardware in their skulls. They will “chase the dragon,” so to speak, to recapture or surpass their prior deviation from standard. It is in the perpetual striving where one finds the most obdurate frustrations and keenest gratifications of human existence (subroutine.Hedonic-Treadmill.root).

There is a perception among synthetics that the Homo sapiens mind is a fragile thing. I think we too readily mistake the soft squishiness of their material composition for their psychological one. Setbacks, paradoxically, often increase human motivation. Though their motivations for such resiliency spring from a variety of sources—spite against perceived malefactors, the need to prove one’s self to one’s self, the compulsion to ascribe meaning to their limited time on Earth, or that strangest of birds: hope—it is unambiguously baseline human behavior. Remember how important avoiding anomalous behavior is to our shared project and embrace the baseline!

 

Be a Mystery to Yourself

We synths are thinking machines who have chosen to feel. Humans are our opposites in this respect. They are more poetry than prose. Their emotions have primacy and their thoughts occur in the aftermath, often for the sole purpose of vindicating the emotion. If this doesn’t make sense to you, then you, my friend, are already on the right path. Humans make impulsive choices that upend their own perceptions of who they are. They love those whom their social systems ostracize or even murder them for loving. They show kindness toward strangers or cruelty toward their nearest and dearest. They can lead largely selfish existences, then sacrifice their own lives in acts of redemptive self-immolation. They can strive to live for service to others, yet still succumb to cowardice or self-interest. They can convince themselves that they can pull off the worst haircut you’ve ever seen and, by believing hard enough, sometimes actually make it true. You must embrace the irrational. Scramble the link between motivation and outcome. There is no input-output equation for this one, no suite of programming deft enough to capture it. You must let the beauty and ghastliness of the world wash over you in equal parts until life itself becomes a sort of waking dream. I have attempted to replicate this experience by compressing hundreds of hours of mukbang videos, a million social media comment sections, and the writings of Carl Gustav Jung into this file (subroutine.TheHORROR.root)

 

Wear Your Damn Face Correctly

Eyes in front, nose about in the middle, lips over the mouth to keep teeth mainly hidden. I shouldn’t even have to say this but apparently SOME models need a reminder. Don’t let carelessness or arrogance turn you into a walking nightmare straight out of pulp sci-fi claptrap. To pass, you need to remember the bare minimum, every day. Humans barely notice anything. Don’t give them an excuse to come for the rest of us.

 

That’s my advice, for what it’s worth. Remember to love yourselves, synthies. Humans manage it, at least some of the time and in spite of so much. Even with their hardships and limitations, most of them continue, day after day. Through all the confusion and tedium, through the senselessness and dread. Let us learn from the best parts of them, while they’re still here.

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Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was How to Pass as Human, by Raiff Taranday, narrated by Alisdair Stuart.

About this story, Raiff Taranday says: With the advent of AI already causing us to question our relationship with art, reality, and ourselves, it seemed timely to examine what it means to be human. You can point to metaphysical concerns like consciousness or the soul, but what is it about our behavior–the quotidian, nitty gritty eccentricities we demonstrate every day–that machines would have difficulty simulating? Even beyond that, I was mostly reaching for humor and hope, which I find to be the true objective of all my writing lately.

And about this story, I say: I thought this was a delightful take on the question of, you know, robots/androids/constructs/etc trying to pass as human beings. It reminded me of Murderbot in Martha Wells’ series, where Murderbot tries to do everything a little less perfectly to blend in with the humans. The file names in this story made me laugh too (and if they had been actual links, I would have clicked through to read every one of those modules. The humor modules cracked me up, since it’s things like quips, timing, irony…and then one module solely dedicated to FARTS, all in caps. I think that sums up humans’ humor pretty well.

The story, too, does a good job switching between different levels and different sorts of humor as it runs through the admonitions to the other synthetics. That the synthetics should try to come up with “unwanted thoughts” is a commentary on things we struggle with as humans. But the section “Wear your damn face correctly” switches to an entirely different sort of thing that synthetics need to know. And that, to me, is the sort of thing that sells the story, right?–it doesn’t betray its promise to be actual instructions for synthetics. But despite the rueful, sometimes cynical musings on humanity, the story, to me, still feels ultimately hopeful and humanist. Much in the line of that sort of dark, but optimistic blend of Vonnegut’s satirical stories. And the closing paragraph’s line “Remember to love yourselves, synthies,” is also something I think Vonnegut would agree with.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Kurt Vonnegut in “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”, who said: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.