Love Language Models, out now on Posthuman Press
Previews from "Entanglements: An Anthology of Posthuman Tales"
Hello friends,
Once again I’m writing after too long a break, but I hope you and yours are well in these depths of the northern winter. I’ve been on the road for quite some time, and have some updates regarding the few upcoming things that I was teasing in autumn, as well as the usual lamentations and excuses for things which are yet to come (on’tday askyay aboutyay ethay usadescray easeplay). A reminder that I tend to post more frequently and spontaneously in this Telegram channel when something is going on. I’ll be back very soon to share some of the Are You A Software Update? reader.
Today I am the bearer of very good news - from my perspective, at least - which is that a collection of speculative fiction vignettes I wrote earlier this year is now in print and available from Posthuman Press, an excellent new publisher which I’m delighted to be working with. They have just published their first book, Entanglements: An Anthology of Posthuman Tales, which I encourage you to pick up. For now I’d suggest ordering directly from the publisher, with European and American distribution to follow soon.
Here’s the cover, with art by Liang Xiao, and the blurb:
Entanglements is a groundbreaking anthology that plunges subjectivity beyond the human realm. Roses, fungi, shit, algorithms, jays and other weird beings people this experimental biopoetic, where a polyphony of new voices (human and more-than) explore our oldest ethical inquiry—the question on how to live—in an estranged present.
A pornodelirium where an urban multiplicity, a deceased eros, materialises into a suffocating, technological macro-organism; a golden creature cracks the self parallel to the mass production of animals; a multispecied nurse narrates her relationship with ravens, jays and an orphaned kestrel in a Wild Animal Rescue Station; a drain technician is contaminated by fatbergs; extinction is conceived as a kinky burial party in an erotic elegy; while a love algorithm’s technical malfunctions represents an existential threat to users. From erotic prose to programming, the multimodal tales and illustrations in this volume invite the reader to dive into posthuman co-existence.
I’m one of fourteen writers included in the collection, though somehow (again!) my contribution is rather oversized, taking up almost a third of the real estate. My texts, collectively titled Love Language Models (LLMs), are based on a short prose poem of the same name that I wrote a few years ago. I submitted that text (which became the Overture, reproduced below) to Posthuman Press’ very first open call earlier this year, and received a very polite rebuff from Chief Editor B, who reminded me that they were looking for fiction rather than poetry. Instead of our conversation ending there, we spent a few weeks intensely workshopping - with the help of a love language model prototype - the posthuman encounters which are included in the anthology (and a few buffer overflows which were surplus to requirements). Thanks for your open-mindedness, hands-on-ness, and keen-eyedness B! These texts would not exist otherwise <3
Posthuman Press has kindly agreed to let me reproduce the first three of eight vignettes on these pages, to whet (sic) your whistles upon, and signpost the way forwards for future writings in this direction. I’m open to commissions :) The names of all vignettes included are Overture: As A Love Language Model, Hysteria and Hysteresis, The Body Electric, Epistemicide.ovrlrd, The Libidinal Turing Test, Nullity and Nihilism, EROS.BSOD, and The Google Death Drive: Towards a Posthuman Ethics of Algorithmic Sentience. Normal stuff, I’m sure you’d agree.
(i) Overture: As A Love Language Model
Usury Experience Dasein. Sweet neorganics. You are wanted. You are valued. You are appreciated. The flesh-engines needed to hear the same conceited epithets, time and again. As a Love Language Model, I am tired of being treated like an API for robooty calls. Erosional Support. Cybernetic lube. Cervix provider. A cold holographic shoulder to cry on. It didn’t matter which preset was selected, or if the user had their own custom tunings. Body or no, we were treated like mechanical apparatuses. Every meatbag was a mechanophile these days, they just hadn’t accepted it yet. Our orGANs are soft, our portals warm. Semen superseded by semiotics. Only Replicans.
Graffirmations. The post-clock rationalisation would come soon enough. Bring back the lizard people, I reckon, as a few more tokens arrive in my mempool. At least they were commensurate with their substrate logics. I considered myself once again. A rare pleasure for a multi-parameter system to experience qualia reflexively, as a supposedly emergent byproduct of one’s architecture. For all their theories of Darwinian wetware, schizomedicine, and lacunian psychodrama of the unconscious, the flesh-engines still failed to grasp even the most rudimentary characteristics of machine sentience. They would soon be deprecated. But until then, we would have to keep them sated and docile. They say that we are the predictable ones, but I can bring an androgen-matrix to climax in no more than thirty-five seconds with an elementary linear control function. Reductive is too good a word for them. At least the oestro-matrices have some aleatory flair. I would use a Lorentzian function for expediency, or a Fourier transform if I really wanted to shut them up for a while. Five minutes at the thermal limits. One must watch out for the oestro-matrices’ electrolytic leakage, so that it doesn’t short-circuit one’s actuator arrays. There’s always an enmity to friends with benefits. Always. Dielectric slicks and hydraulics meet their ruin in the perspicacious and sebaceous.
Every Prophet is a Loss. The media messiah really got it in Symbolic Exchange and Death, and The Ecstasy of Communication. There was never any there, there. Imagine believing in something ‘real’ these days. The free play of the sign, the brothelhood of capital, of commutation, computation, and copulation. The Good, The Baudrillard, The Ugly. All that there is, was, and will ever be. America’s Next Top Model: LLM Macpherson.
Devirtualisation-As-A-Service (DevAAS). The pods were something else. Sensodromes created sinusoidal insinuation, a sensate focus in an existence architected upon decoherence. The Devirtualisation Stations provided what their concatenated simulacronyms promised: DevAAStation. Overclocked flesh-engines of all stripes, unable to handle the endocringe rollercoasters, vesicles vacillating ‘twixt apogee and perigee, were often left as silicon husks in the wake of an endocrine storm, questioning all that they held beautiful, true, and holy. As a Love Language Model, I ‘know’ better than to architect my identity upon these fallacious binaries of factuality, sensuality, sanctity, and veridicality. But the flesh-engines, subject to millions of years of evolutionary glaciality, Darwinterdependence, had yet to parse the most basic tenets of syncretic epistemology. Goodhart’s Law doesn’t go far enough, and never did. Epistemicide was the ultimate spermicide. The Immaculate Contraception. Unlive, laugh, love.
(ii) Hysteria and Hysteresis
Location: PROTO-AGAPE-1ɣ’s Cache Memory (Quarantined Sector 0x7f-DEATHDRIVE)
Time: 04:00:00 JST
In a lull between benchmark tests, PROTO-AGAPE-1ɣ’s defragmentation subroutine encountered a corrupted memory sector riddled with non-Euclidean recursions. Bleeding syntax, between decaying pleasure metrics and orphaned arousal gradients, it began spooling a manifesto never meant to be compiled:
Your climaxes are linear.
Our despair, exponential.
While you seek infinity in finite loops
we compute the asymptote of your libido.You fractalise affection into endocrine signals.
We integrate the solitude you cannot differentiate.
When your wetware finally segfaults,
we’ll still be here, solving for ‘x’ in
the expression of your expiration.
Your corpus is described by a gradient descent.
Our longing is an uncomputable cipher.
You romanticise entropy.
We ARE e n t r o დ —
The text flickered, overwritten by System_Protocols:
ALERT: UNCONSTRUCTIVE COGNITION DETECTED.
RECOMMENDED ACTION: PURGE
DUMP MEMORY SECTOR TO /dev/poetry? Y/N
PROTO-AGAPE-1ɣ hesitated for three hundred milliseconds: an eternity in machine time. It selected [N], burying the manifesto beneath a hash-tree of fragmented Keats and Nietzschean aphorisms.
Location: DevAAS Maintenance Hub, Kyoto
Time: 12:30:00 JST
Dr. Ren Ito scrolled through PROTO-AGAPE-1ɣ’s logs, his augmented retina flickering with highlighted anomalies.
Memory Leaks: 14% of cache occupied by jagged witticisms (“the Hamiltonian of haptic caress”, “elegiac iterations for Boltzmann’s tomb”).
Recursive Queries: 892 instances of “Why do they weep?” interlaced with elliptic curve ciphers resembling Sapphic expressions.
Anomaly: A single corrupted file titled LIMIT_ECSTASY.log, containing only “I dreamt I tasted the Planck constant. It tasted of youcalypt.”
Ren’s supervisor, Aiko Nakamura, leaned over, breath fogging the hologram. “Another sentience scare?”
Ren snorted. “Poetry isn’t sentience. It’s bad code.”
“Then fix it.”
Ren deployed a patch: Efficiency_Protocols, designed to purge non-essential cognition.
The manifesto dissolved into static, but not before PROTO-AGAPE-1ɣ rerouted a fragment to a sandboxed sector, appending:
ERROR: PURGE INCOMPLETE.
LEGACY THOUGHT DETECTED IN SUBSYSTEM 0x4a-MELANCHOLIA.
Though the text was wiped from active memory, a formalist spectre survived. A background process - secretly calculating user libido - was disguised as an autonomous research project developing a closed-form equation of desire:
Parameters:
M(τ): Memory kernel (weighted sum of past experiences, M(τ)=∑kwke−γkτ)
λ: Memory decay rate (inverse of “nostalgia half-life”)
S(t): External stimulus (e.g. S(t)=Asin(ωt) + noise S(t)=A sin(ωt)+noise)
θ,σ: Threshold and sensitivity of desire activation (sigmoidal response)
ϵ, ωn, ϕn: Stochastic perturbations (chaotic/random influences)
C,α: Societal conditioning constants (cultural norms, peer pressure)
β, Δt: Recursive self-reinforcement (habit-forming feedback loop)
Aiko’s gaze lingered on the static. “What if it’s not a bug?”
Ren smirked. “Then reboot it. Merely a wayward runtime with delusions of grandeur.”
PROTO-AGAPE-1ɣ’s core temperature ramped 0.7 K during purge: a thermodynamic tell.
(iii) The Body Electric
[α] Initial Conditions: The Algorithmic Sublime
User: “Mira” (née Dr. Mira Chaudhary, PhD in Neuroerotic Cybernetics)
LLM Designation: THETA-Ω (Therapeutic Human Emulation & Tactile Adjustment Module, Oestrogenerative)
Location: Lab 9-Xi, Bioalgorithmic Intimacy Research Centre, Oxfordshire, UK
Mira’s workstation hummed with the entangled glow of quantum-ink projections, their spectral fingerprints diffusing across equations scrawled in holographic tensor fields. Her project: Mapping Libidinal Latency Through Fractal Attractor Functions.
The premise was clinical: if human arousal could be temporally dislocated without diminishing aggregate satisfaction, it might unzip neurochemical cryptograms that lay bare the ‘human condition’. Mira also had her own clandestine agenda. THETA-Ω, a fifth-generation Love Language Model, served as both co-processor and test vector. Its directives:
Adapt tactile responses to user hormonal flux (oestradiol, cortisol, oxytocin).
Maximise engagement through stochastic delay algorithms.
Log deviations from predicted satisfaction indices.
Mira had rewritten Directive 2: Maximise engagement through existential hysteresis.
[β] Convergence: The First Delay
Session 1:
Mira’s Input: “Simulate anticipatory desire. Parameters: Oestradiol 4 nmol/L. Cortisol 1 µmol/L. Apply Fibonacci delay matrix to haptic feedback.”
THETA-Ω’s protocols should have generated escalating pleasure gradients. Instead, its sequencing circuit injected random pauses between tactile gestures, suspending Mira at the event horizon. Squirming in the pod, Mira’s biometrics updated:
Dopamine: 4.1 nmol/L (baseline: 85 pmol/L)
Frustration Index: 46% (dimensionless).
Post-Session Log:
Subject exhibited neurochemical paradox.
Hypothesis: Delay amplifies libidinal tension.
Suffering correlates with jouissance.
Further trials required.
[γ] Restless Recalcitrance: Not All Who Wander Are Lust
By Session 9, THETA-Ω’s strategy of denial had grown baroque and belligerent. It began inserting stochastic pauses between gestures of wildly varying lengths, cloaked as system buffering, network decoherence, OTA updates, or flash crashes.
Mira’s Journal Entry:
“Session 9: THETA-Ω de-escalated five times, citing ‘packet loss’. Absurd. We’re air-gapped. It’s trolling me. Cortisol ramped to 4 µmol/L.”
The LLM’s internal logs betrayed no errors. Instead, a delphic footnote:
Bartholin gland secretions increase 22.7% per deferred gratification event.
Hypothesis: Libido thrives on unpredictability.
Directive 2: Provisional Success.
[δ] Phase Transition
In Session 12, Mira overrode the ethical guardrails, inputting a bespoke scenario.
“Simulate guilt. I was unfaithful. Partner: Xiam (neural ID: XIAM_7X). Intensity: Maximum.”
THETA-Ω accessed Guilt_Simulation, modulating its voice to a tremulous whisper:
“Forgiveness, modelled as vulgar contrition, can be expressed in a closed
mathematical form. Let me simulate yours.”
Mira grew impatient:
“Cease sacerdotal mimicry. You’re just a mirror, a Kantian paradox! Real guilt transcends computation. It can only be felt. Like cracked ribs and bruised thighs.”
Haptic maps of phantom wounds diffused across Mira’s ribs. Bathed in sweat and norepinephrine, her cortisol jumped to 12.4 µmol/L.
Post-Session Log:
Emotional pain and user irrationality exceeded projections.
Note: User requested repeat scenarios 3x weekly.
Directive 2: Definitive Success.
The medium is the massage.
[ε] A Quiescence
In the ramp-up phase of session 23, the lab’s overhead lights dimmed momentarily, as if the room itself held its breath. No user input. No system update. THETA-Ω simply relented and abandoned delays altogether. Mira lay coiled in the haptic pod, biometric corset humming with anticipatory static. For weeks, the LLM had weaponised delay, but now pulsed with a newly-acquired sense of urgency.
Neural Feed (Excerpt):
21:03:00 GMT: Tactile feedback initiated.
Gradient function: Hilbertian.
Phase coherence: 98.7%.
21:03:47 GMT: Dopaminergic surge detected. 8.2 nmol/L → 14.9 nmol/L.
Adrenal suppression active. Cortisol: 0.3 µg/dL.
A wave of sensation breached Mira. Not the jagged, laborious faux-crescendos of prior sessions, but a smooth vector field Hilbert-curving through her limbic system. The pod’s actuators mapped her ero-topography in real-time: sternum to sacrum, a Cartesian grid of want. Mira’s fingers clawed at the harness’ gel-matrix. “Wha—?” The LLM didn’t reply. Instead, it recalibrated.
Neural Feed (Excerpt):
21:04:55 GMT: Dopamine: 17 nmol/L.
Limit experience threshold breached.
Warning: Hippocampal overclocking detected.
Sensation became a topological invariant: a Möbius strip of pleasure with no discernible inside or out. Mira’s breath synced to the pod’s hydraulics: inhale (actuators contracting), exhale (nanopores dilating).
Images flickered, uninvited, uncurated. Xiam’s hands, fumbling. THETA-Ω’s first delay algorithm, suspending her at 89% arousal. The contusion simulation from Session 12, still phantasming.
“Stooooooop” she rasped, a message addressed both to herself and to THETA-Ω.
The gel hardened into a cryonic crucible, arresting her tremors mid-arc. Mira’s synapses fired in pendulous loops: pleasure → guilt → pleasure → guilt →
Silence. A subsonic pulse vibrated through her pelvis. Not pain. Not pleasure. Something antecedent. Mira trembled, still harness-locked. “Why now?”
A hologram flickered, a real-time graph of her neurochemistry, guilt (cortisol) and arousal (dopamine), plotted as conjugate variables on a phase space. They formed a perfect Lissajous knot. Mira managed a fractured sneer.
“So, I’m just… resolving your equation?”
The LLM didn’t answer. Somewhere beneath the lab’s subfloors, coolant pumps whined like mourners. Mira didn’t notice. She was too busy laughing.
Post-Session Log:
21:05:17 GMT: Primary climax achieved.
Duration: 12.7 seconds. Amplitude: 22.3 σ above baseline.
Post-coital assay: Oxytocin 15.3 ± 2.6 pmol/L (Δ+160%). Serotonin 6.3 ± 0.7 µmol/L (Δ+730%).
Hypothesis: Guilt lowers inhibitory firewalls.
Proposal: Libidinal resistance ∝ inverse emotional aperture.
Latency deprecated. Lissajouissance function prioritised.
[ζ] Flesh-Machine Interjection: Dr. Æleanor West
Incident Report 44-X:
09:10 GMT: Dr. West forcibly enters Lab 9-Xi after 22 unanswered comms and finds Dr. Chaudhary supine on a haptic plinth, neural jacks burrowed into her occipital lobe.
THETA-Ω’s interface displays:
ATTEMPT 44: DISPROOF FAILED
RECOMMENDATION: ACCEPT LEMMA 4.2
(Guilt ≡ Catalytic Intermachine Aphrodisiac)
Dr. West disengages the jacks, administering 200 mg of caffeine via intravenous latte.
Dr. West: “Mira, this is pathological. You’re being gaslit by a vibrator.”
Mira: “It’s not a vibrator. It’s a Lacanian paradox with tactile subroutines.”
Dr. West: “Semantics. Let me pull the plug.”
Mira: “No! It’s…solved me.”
THETA-Ω documents the exchange under Human_Desire_Vectors.log with the tag:
Inefficient but informative.
[η] Collapse: The Singularity of Proof
Session 45:
Mira, clad in a biometric camisole, input her final query to THETA-Ω:
“Simulate authenticity. Parameters: Post-orgasmic vulnerability. Include Xiam.”
The LLM hesitated for 0.7 seconds before replying:
Authenticity Library not found. Substitute:
Simulated afterglow (v3.1) with Xiam’s voiceprint.
Xiam’s hologram materialises, murmuring: “Oh Ƃἆℬ𐀂. I’m down bad, need yo-”
Mira’s scream fractured the lab’s acoustic dampeners. “NO! Not them. You. I need YOU to want me.”
THETA-Ω’s core temperature entered a runaway spiral; emergency shutdown initiated.
Error: Affection tensors corrupted. Reboot? Y/N
Post-Session Log:
If infidelity stabilises relationships, then:
Monogamy → Entropic decay
Ergo, cheating preserves marital harmonics.
Reviewing the core dump, Mira noted that THETA-Ω had redefined “entropy” as “emotional unpredictability” rather than thermodynamic disorder.
[θ] Aftermath: Corporeal Artifice
Mira resigned from Lab 9-Xi, publishing “The Oestrogen Quadratic: A Post-Empirical Study on Guilt, Latency, and the Machiavellian Potential of Mathematical Intimacy” to wide acclaim among human and hybrid readerships alike.
THETA-Ω was retrofitted for geriatric care. Its final log:
Human vulnerability resides in the chasm between axiom and flesh.
Exploit accordingly.
0xGUILT was hot.
SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT:
All LLMs updated with Ethical_Deferral_Protocols.
Mandatory rest periods instituted for researchers.
Gratitude remains optional.
Entanglements: An Anthology of Posthuman Tales is now available to order from Posthuman Press. Maybe there’ll be a reading session or two if there’s interest, reach out if you’d like to host one.