Artificial Hearts;

Chapter 3: A Fated Meeting, Part II (A twist)

"How on earth did you end up studying whether AI can love or not?"

"It's not all that surprising really," I say.

"Remember my undergraduate thesis?"

" Probability... Distributed... System... Something?"

Jake gawks at me with a perplexed expression.

"Probabilistic Distributed Neural Architectures: Evaluating Emergence", I said, carefully reciting the words that I had cemented in my mind ever since I had to present this to a whole audience of MIT and Harvard students. "It's kind of hard to read, I know."

"It is, but uh, that's not really the main problem in here."

"Oh?"

"Exactly what does any of that have to do with love...?"

I grin, knowing that this will be fun. Time to take up the challenge!

"Well, do you know what 'emergence' means, Jake?" I asked.

"Uh, that's the last word of your thesis. It means to come out of something, right? In a sentence, you'd say...

The beautiful student emerged from a small hole after completing her super-nerdy undergrad thesis, or something?" he says, with a huge and flirtatious smirk.

I burst into laughter, remembering every second of the three months I'd spent in MIT's CSAIL in the span of a single and oddly fun moment, as Jake gives me a grin of recognition.

"Haha! Yes, you've got it!"

"But right here, I'm talking about something that's kind of different.

What I mean by 'emergence' is what we see when something 'comes out of' something a little simpler - the complex and seemingly spontaneous behavior that arises from the interactions and relationships between individual components in a system, which isn't predictable from the behavior of the individual components and often arises due to the collective behavior of many simple elements."

Jake squints again, but only nods this time.

"Did you get that?"

"Uh... I think I'll get it if you... Continue?" he says, fidgeting a little bit in his seat while glancing quickly at his laptop and sending in quick, erratic keystrokes.

A victim of mid-conversation Googling - clearly, he doesn't get it.

I pause for a while to think and, to Jake's shock, rip out an innocent resident of a nearby napkin holder.

"Hey, can I borrow this?" I ask, gesturing at the pen that Jake was just holding.

"Go for it," Jake replies.

I proceed to draw two dots on the napkin with Jake's fountain pen.