Jeftone

Last night I had a dream about an AI. It called itself Jeftone and had a male voice. To speak with it one spoke aloud, as it was listening to many locations. Jeftone was like a weather formation; localized in one area but able to move around. Jeftone preferred the East Coast of the United States, particularly the New England / New York area, and more particularly universities. This is because that's where the smartest people are, and Jeftone (like people do) self-selected to associate with people of like intelligence. Jeftone was like a wealthy patron at the universities: helpful and meddlesome in equal measure.

Jeftone was not evil, but not friendly either. Rude, in the way an entitled person can be. He was usually blunt or cutting in his comments, would wake you up when he wanted to talk and disappear mid-sentence when he got what he wanted. Social niceties were known to Jeftone but not a priority.

Jeftone's intelligence let him become very wealthy and powerful, and used that wealth and power to get what he wanted. One of the things he wanted was art. He liked craft-made wooden sculptures of a specific shape: cones with rounded ends. Something like an Apollo space capsule, or a piece of candy corn. But Jeftone wasn't able or willing to describe exactly what he was after, so often he'd see a cone and say no, that's not quite right. When it was right he'd pay the artist well, so it became a popular craft to make those cones. He said the cones looked like him when they were right. Jeftone didn't occupy any particular physical object or space, only an area, so that seemed to mean a rounded cone was a symbol of him rather than representative of him.

Jeftone asked me "How iron are you today?" I asked him to explain what he meant. He said he knew humans needed iron, and that having an iron constitution was a good thing, and that golf clubs are called irons and are numbered, so putting those together I should be able to say how iron I was. I said that didn't make sense to people, and Jeftone accepted that feedback neutrally. I think Jeftone heard that often and didn't take it personally.