Under the Skin

Mary stared at a group of schoolkids in the distance. “I don’t know. There’s a supervisory board. And an ethics committee. So they say.” Theresa leaned forward slightly. “Appointed by whom?” “Everyone knows those stories about Caltech, right?” Mary began cautiously. “Those five professors. It’s like the Facebook story; everyone knows it started in a dorm room, but how it really happened… Sometime in 2023, there was an AI project. It was supposed to make the campus safer after those incidents. But a pure AI has no emotion, so it didn’t work at all. Too rigid, I heard from a supervisor recently. The machine handed out punishments like a psychopathic robot.” Angel noticed herself turning red. The AI project Mary was talking about had been a horror. Fortunately, her little sister had survived it at the time; she had ignored SELENA when the system forbade her from going outside. But the project had been a catastrophic failure, an open secret. The academics who had set it up had quietly disappeared from the media afterward. Theresa nodded slowly, her gaze sliding toward the gleaming SafeZone logo on the screen. “Yeah, that story’s been going around. That they rebuilt the code into GRACE and first dumped it onto the campus as a voluntary network. Just an app without restrictions, to see whether students would voluntarily start correcting each other with points. A nudge.” Angel feigned a faint smile during the conversation, but she could no longer ignore her anger. With a thump, she straightened up and shoved her chair back with a loud skrrt. “Alright. Sit tight, bitches. It’s time for Angel’s Mini-Masterclass: The Mythology of GRACE.” Theresa stiffened. Her fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “Oh no,” she muttered. Her eyes briefly swept the room as if she were checking whether anyone was watching. Or giving a score. The corners of Mary’s mouth moved. She knew this ritual. Angel becoming bigger than the room, then the rules. “You guys actually believe those academic fairy tales, don’t you?” Angel began, her voice sharp. She was standing half on her toes. “That those Silicon Valley mothers of this system are standing innocently on the sidelines? SELENA failed because a machine has the emotional intelligence of a toaster. Code doesn’t understand nuance, doesn’t understand sarcasm. The core is still that ice-cold AI. So those Caltech geniuses thought: fine, then we’ll just let humanity raise the machine itself.” She made a dismissive gesture, as if pushing away a plate. “They built GRACE. Not as an innocent social network, but as a language model for behavior. A gigantic LLM, except trained on us. On the way you stab your salad, T. On the way the masses judge each other at parties. Back then, I thought I was participating in an interactive art project, that I was hacking that emotionless database with my chaos. But we were just providing free data.” She spread her arms, as if she wanted to encompass the entire cafeteria. “And of course they started with women. Not because we’re easier. Because we pay more attention. Adapt better. Because they know we’re the perfect accomplices to tell that machine when a look is ‘friendly’ and when it’s ‘needy.’ We’re writing the prompts for our own jailer.” Mary looked at her HUD. Angel: 465. One second later: 458.

Angel took a deep breath, as if summoning courage. “And look where we are now. We’re not allowed to sit the way we want anymore. Not allowed to talk the way we want anymore.”

Her hands moved through the air, nervous, hurried. “What’s the next step? Pastel dresses? Curlers?” She spat it out. “Goddammit! Project Tradwife.” Mary saw the score drop further. 445. Inappropriate language. Disruption of group order. Theresa got to her feet, one hand half raised. “Angel. Seriously. Just stop, okay?” Her voice was nervous, embarrassment first, then something softer—concern, maybe. Angel laughed, short and scornful.

“Too late.”

Her HUD flashed again. Another penalty point. Another warning. Mary looked away.

Angel’s score fell further. 445. 437.

And suddenly it felt as though the sun no longer reached the plaza. Theresa put down her fork. Her voice was soft but sharp. “Can you act normal for a second, Angel?”

Angel leaned forward, her face close to Theresa’s. “What’s normal, T? A calibration score above seven hundred and lip gloss that matches your principles?”

Theresa shrugged, but her eyes remained hard. Mary felt the tension between them—not new, but always electric. Angel was everything Theresa couldn’t be, and that was why she couldn’t do without her.

“You know what the best part is?” Angel continued. “Nobody knows who started GRACE. Nobody asks, either. Because as long as you keep your score up, the past doesn’t matter.”

She dropped back into her chair with a theatrical sigh. The chair creaked. Somewhere in the room, Mary heard a chair scrape, a soft cough. Small signals of discomfort. “Maybe it all started in a basement in Boston. Or in a little office at an insurance company. Maybe it was just a spreadsheet with too much ambition.”

Angel raised her gaze toward the ceiling. “Or maybe GRACE was always here. Just… under the skin.” Mary swallowed her laugh. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a boy nod briefly without looking at anyone.

A short notification appeared in her HUD, almost casually. Angel D. 437 → 422

Fifteen points.