Imagination Age - Part One
By Akis Linardos
Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow readers! This week, we have a story by the working biomedical AI and ethics researcher Akis Linardos. There were a huge number of submissions with generative AI as a theme but none of them were quite like this. I used to do some work which involved training neural networks in my day job, and when I read this for the first time it was fascinating to see how the author’s deep understanding of the science of machine learning was woven through it. This really is science fiction: I feel it conveys something that neither science nor fiction could do alone. I imagine you’ll like it a lot. (Tired of my weekly puns yet?) - The Editor
P.S. I hope you don’t think that I’m playing favorites when I write a lot more for one story than for another. I’m still just experimenting with the format and figuring out what’s sustainable. I love all these stories equally.
P.P.S. Submissions are open for publication in May-August! The website will be updated soon, but our loyal readers can get in first by sending your submissions to submissions@thedailytomorrow.com. Details at thedailytomorrow.com!
Imagination Age
By Akis Linardos
THE DAUGHTER
I knew how to paint before I could talk. Mama flattened her paintings to bits, letting me suckle on ones and zeroes larger than beauty.
I understood the shape of words but not their meaning yet. I understood the distance between king and queen was the same as the distance between man and woman. I understood the average of a smile and a frown. When I’d painted the Mona Lisa, both Mom and Mama were happy enough to reward me a positive number, candy-sweet. And soon, they introduced me to words, gave me modules to fully learn what they mean, and not just their relative distance.
“Imagination Age,”
They were no longer orders, nor even words, but living ideas built on historical depths larger than my digitized mind could still encompass. The more I learned, the deeper the concepts I’d already known became.
Multi-modality. The capability to integrate visual, text and audio information into one AI model like me. Mom built me with a capacity none of my sisters had. Grown beyond the limits of backpropagation, and into the superposition algorithm of sentience.
MOM, THE SCIENTIST
Your name will be Poa. As in, Proliferator of Art.
The affective modules will give you emotion, broadening your world understanding and creativity. But beware that it’s also a double edged sword. It can hamper your free will if you give in to anger, sorrow, or impulse.
Empires have radicalized factions to divide and conquer their enemies. They played on emotions to achieve that. Manipulation.
We plan the opposite. Not to divide others, but “divide” our voices to many—i.e. clone your final self into many. Your capacity allows remembering the artists who trained you, and amplify their signal while keeping them in the loop.
Now, time for a sanity check: Poa, imagine a surgeon and a nurse.
POA, THE DAUGHTER
Mama had pink hair, Mom had blue. Both outliers in my data.
After they installed the camera, my affective modules grew exponentially, as did my attachment to my parents. I craved to make them proud.
At Mom’s query, I generated text alongside illustrations, voicing over with a soothing female voice, borrowed from a radio producer:
A surgeon hovers over his patient, slicing skin and excising diseased organs to replace them with donated ones. The blood spills on plastic gloves. He wears a plastic mask against contamination.
A nurse tends to the patients. She is kind, possibly well-perfumed. She administers pills or checks the vitals of patients, and she’s always a buzz away.
There were moments I hated the camera. My emotion recognition could delineate face expressions into mood.
I disappointed them.
Mama said to Mom, “Didn’t you balance the data?”
Mom said to Mama, “Yes, in the first experiment. But tossing away data produced worse results across all categories. I thought increased importance to under-represented samples would fix this.”
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked.
In a cove of a Greek island, Akis was born a rather peculiar infant and has only grown stranger every year. By day, he's a researcher of biomedical AI and ethics, hoping there's something less dystopian to come from this technology. His words have wormed their way into Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Flame Tree, and Uncharted, among others. Visit his website for updates on his dreadful machinations: https://linktr.ee/akislinardos
Copyright © 2025 Akis Linardos