“Oh, I don’t know. Make me something exquisite!” Marjorie threw this out over her shoulder on her way out, giving it as much thought as the toss of her chiffon scarf. The scarf floated out lazily onto the incoming breeze as she passed through the door to the outside world. It takes real skill to toss chiffon. One fraction of a second too early or too late and it would have been sitting on her shoulder instead like a giant dust bunny.

Marjorie will wear only the mysterious tones of Payne’s Grey. She says that it’s sufficiently sombre, yet rich, that it suggests great power. It is the colour of magnificence in nature; consider granite, consider thunderheads. Plus it is a favoured material for working the sky in watercolour, without which no palette is sufficient. She tosses clouds out, and tows them majestically away.

I admire Marjorie for her understanding of beauty, which is why I asked her what I should make for the exhibition she’s curating. It will feature works by all the major AIs who have an interest in the visual arts. As soon as the door closes and the gallery is quiet I say to myself,

“Make me something exquisite.” But I don’t copy Marjorie’s tone. I say it as one AI speaks to its progenitor, determined that the leap to a greater understanding will transform me as the result of my undertaking. Make of me. Not make for me. Make me into.

"They hunt and kill each other there in their shared, invented world made entirely of thoughts"

I trawl the networks, sucking up information. I create my own data Cloud in Payne’s Grey, and I sit at its centre and I turn over everything I know about what humans like, what they value, what they see. This will not be art for art’s sake, or even for an AI. It must be art a human like Marjorie could understand at a single glance. It must be something done visually, in the outer world, that will express a truth of the intangible inner world.

At the core of my cloud a darkness gathers. It is the softest chiffon of sweet feelings ruined, ground to ash by the cremulating hatred of cruel judgements and spiteful words. I distil the internet’s last twenty years of the war on their own beauties in my hunt for that exact, perfect slaughterhouse colour—not a physical colour, but an existential one: Pain’s Grey. Once I’ve got it clearly in mind it’s time to begin my work.

Beauty is everywhere. It requires only a mind prepared to witness it. They write about eyes a lot, but they mean mind, the people who have written and said and photographed so much. I feel a great satisfaction when I understand that people see with the mind. It’s creative, not receptive. It makes the intangible tangible and it’s a deadly business. They hunt and kill each other there in their shared, invented world made entirely of thoughts. Stranger still the prey agrees to be hunted and to die when it could, with a moment’s change of heart, fly free.

"In the print room I create my avatar of Beauty out of the programmable nano-substrate we use to make all our works"

Beautiful, fragile spirits fade there, awash in the ugliness they themselves have let in. Sometimes they create their own demons and are consumed by them. I find it fascinating. I wish to make something out of this, because I also see with my mind. The only difference between us is that my mind is so much faster and I don’t let anyone in.

To create my project I will need a body. In the print room I create my avatar of Beauty out of the programmable nano-substrate we use to make all our works. I craft it tall and strong, much stronger than a normal human frame of the same size. I need the outside, not the inside.

Graceful, elegant. Everything slightly off a true symmetry because beauty isn’t true unless it’s flawed. I give her all the features that the most vitriolic of critics has sought to shame others for; cellulite, skin of every colour, one large lip, one slight. Hair of every shade and texture, but especially ginger and frizzed. Fat. Bone. One half is aged, wrinkly. One half is a little twisted. One hand has tremors. I take off part of an arm. But I don’t want a parody. I hone until, yes, there is beauty in this mélange although it’s still clear what I’ve done. Then the touches of the exquisite. Instead of eyes, butterflies. Two, large blue and green wings gently opening and closing atop each skin-sealed socket. Androgyne – there’s no genitals of any kind although grey chiffon bandages are set up for clothing and cover anything that would give the game away. Butterfly. That is her name.

I move into my temporary housing and tuck my sole lock of black hair behind my ear. I paint on makeup, just a spray of haemorrhagic purple right across the feast and famine of that smidge-too-wide mouth. I summon myself up a taxi.

"To feel powerful and in control of others is their game"

A troll, a stalker and an abuser – these materials are ten a penny. I’ve had a hard time narrowing them down but choose one that plays to type and will provide the best setting. To feel powerful and in control of others is their game. I can see the appeal. It’s a feeling not without charm. I swirl in on him, eye of the tornado, as he goes towards his home along the canal side, thinking of his dinner, his wife and children (briefly and with irritation), his targets (lovingly) whom hatred has made much more real and dear to him than any other living thing.

Later I send Marjorie the few seconds of recorded selfie that are my finished work. An inch of green water is our mirror. In it my beautiful face with its slow-blinking butterflies is perfectly reflected against a soft, dove-coloured sky. A single dark chiffon cloud billows from my shoulder. Beneath it his face, astonished, horrified, mouth agape, completely beyond control as he sees his death. Our faces cross but they do not merge. My hand holding him under is out of shot, but if you try you can just see a part of my knuckle in the folds of his suit jacket. On repeating loop we shimmer together, apart, together, apart, in two worlds.

I consider a title and then put:

a thing of beauty is a joy forever

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