Komorebi

"Emi closed her eyes. She wasn't in the bone-white room any more. She was seven, hiding from the summer heat under the sprawling arms of a camphor tree in her grandmother's garden. The light dappled her skin with shifting warmth, painted shimmering coins on the mossy ground. And she was 27, Yuka's head on her lap under that very same tree."

""AI can't learn that," she had told the Conservator once. "The smell. The feeling." The Conservator, a young man with kind but distant eyes, had patted her hand. "It's the words we need to save, Emi-san. The grammar. The structure." He called her Emi-san. He didn't know the quiet triumph of that, of seeing her name on official documents after so long. Another word the machines would never archive the feeling of: a name that finally fitted."

The room is bone-white and sterile, with synthetic tatami and a ceiling microphone. Emi whispers "Komorebi" and a calm synthesized voice acknowledges the noun and requests a sentence. Memory transports Emi between childhood under a camphor tree and being twenty-seven with Yuka's head on her lap, enriched by sunlight, tilled earth, pickled plums, and Yuka's citrus shampoo. Emi insists that AI cannot learn smell or feeling. The Conservator insists on saving words, grammar, and structure and calls her Emi-san. Emi's body betrays her with a persistent cough and strained lungs as the microphone pulses blue.

Read at Nature