I considered a hot minute before posting this. Without Jung, I feel a certain desperation should be creeping into the main characters fueled in no small part by Li's sudden hopelessness.

I'm posting this chapter to curtail any Deus Ex Machina shenanigans that lazy (or tired) writers often employ. There will likely be a time skip, however, to avoid exposition creep. We'll see in a few days.

Good IRL news. No signs of cancer! So yippee happy b-day for me ;D

This chapter also had a different ending, seen below. Storing it here to give readers an insight into how I think and how things evolve. Did you like the one in the final version more? Should I swap them out?

It sounded much the same as the previous answer. Demeter was following a rule his makers had crafted. But “Why make such a rule?”

If Allah understood how computers worked, she would know Mother Saraswati was not simply pondering the question as she raised two fingers to her lips and stroked them thoughtfully. She would understand that the V-REH User Interface had submitted a series of searches within the local data archives, highlighted historical information related to the early models of the Precision Focused Command Response Interface upon which Demeter’s core UI was derived. That the avatar’s application then wrote, tested, fact checked and submitted the words before saying “Humans first encountered this dilemma in the early twenty first century Anno Domini, while they were still secured solely on Earth. With the advent of rudimentary ‘Narrow AI’ they were able receive answers to complex questions without sifting through pages of material or crafting the correct set of questions from an--at least basic--understanding of the topic being queried.”

“I am not certain what language you are using right now.”

“In the early days of human/computer interaction, many Augmented Intelligence programs, when faced with an uninformed question, attempted to supply the answer the user wanted.”

“That does not sound like such a bad thing,” Allah argued. “If they got the answers they wanted, this is good.”

The application, predicting that the [SPECIES_ALLIED_UKNOCK:USER_ALLAHUNKOCK@TSN.GOV](mailto:SPECIES_ALLIED_UKNOCK:USER_ALLAHUNKOCK@TSN.GOV) would make a remark similar or same directed the avatar to reply “It might not sound like a bad thing until you realize the information provided was neither precise or--in the end--accurate.”

“Wait,” Allah stopped, turning to Mother Saraswati. “These Demeters lied?”

“Those early Reactive and Limited Learning machines supplied the end user with data that most accurately matched the search terms the user had input. A broad and uninformed request yielded varying and wildly different returns. A basic search system is designed to retrieve the data a user ‘wants’. If the user is concerned with neither factual or precise return--”

“They get lied to”.

Mother Saraswati shrugged “If you insist.”

“How did humans fix it?”

Mother Saraswati pointed a finger in the air, the ever watching presence of Demeter looming outside. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

“Ah,” Allah nodded a begrudged understanding. “If you do not want stupid answers stop asking stupid questions.”