BEFORE HUMANS AND MACHINES BECOME ONE THEY BECOME JEMINI

Identical twin sisters born in Japan, separated at birth, grow up never knowing of each other. When one dies in a freak ski-lift accident in Europe 23 years later, the other sees her photo in the news and it’s like looking in the mirror. So she decides to investigate.
Meanwhile, the fiancé of the dead sister, a world famous British journalist, falls into a deep depression. He decides to embark on a bizarre experiment, arranging for an AI-enabled fembot to be built—one that resembles his dead fiancé almost perfectly, right down to her skin—grown from DNA recovered from her human predecessor’s engagement ring.
Then the living sister travels from Japan to London, hoping to track down the journalist and learn more about the sister she never knew. Soon the three of them are embarked on an odyssey unlike anything in previous human—or not-so-human—history.

Jemini: A New Kind of Love Story is a simple origin story exploring how the first Jemini—a truly symbiotic pairing between a human and an AI-driven robot—might come into existence.  In reality, this may have already happened.

Jemini: A New Kind of Love Story starts out as a human-to-human romance, but ends with the formation of the first Jemini in human history.  The book’s ending leaves the reader with a tantalizing taste of both innocence and power, and a powerful desire to find out how this Jemini will begin to interact with the world.

Here is the story behind the story:

We are on the cusp of a time when humans and AI-driven robots are going to form highly symbiotic relationships.  The robot half of these pairings will converse much like a human, just as Chat GPT and similar apps do today; additionally, some of these robots will look like humans (human skin is being grown in robotics labs for this purpose as you read this).  Some robots will soon be outwardly indistinguishable, or very close to it, from humans.

Pairings between humans and AI robots may already be underway in business:  Any CEO would be happy to have a fully functional robot able to access and instantly analyze any and all data about the company, its competitors, the market and more.  Now imagine that robot becoming more competent and capable at its job every day, molding its capabilities to the needs of the CEO.  Over time, the CEO and robot—that particular human paired with that particular robot—could easily grow into one executive unit, functionally.

I call these pairings Jemini, using the Japanese word for Gemini, because I like the word, and because, at this point, the Japanese are at the vanguard of creating human-resemblant robots.

Such pairings are likely to proliferate in the near future, and not just in business administration, but in finance, construction, the arts, and domestically (imagine owning a brilliant 24-7 housekeeper/au pair/tutor molding itself to your particular housekeeping and parenting desires, continuously becoming more proficient at filling your exact needs).

And some—perhaps many—of these Jemini will become romantically involved.  These robots will look after us and our loved ones, give us insights, formulate financial advice and do a thousand other things for us—occasionally even saving our lives, or the lives of those around us.  It will be easy for most of us to fall in love with a human-resemblant robot dedicated to us.  It may be hard not to.

Once large-language model AI—the kind of AI you’ve been reading about for the last year, since Chat GPT was released—is in a physical body and interacting directly with the world (this may already be happening somewhere) it will become much more complex.  It will be learning directly from its own interactions with the real world, and at the same time, will necessarily have wifi and be able to access most human knowledge instantly.  It will also possess the mind-boggling computing and creative capabilities we already see in such apps as Chat GPT.  And just as modern AI can outperform the greatest chess players after just a day of teaching itself the game, these robots will be able to hack the Internet in ways even the greatest human computer hackers never dreamt of.

But as a robot with its own body, it will also be interacting with and learning directly from the real world, forming its own personal experiences.  This will make it more complex—perhaps exponentially so.  When such a robot is paired with a specific human, Asimov’s First Law of Robotics—“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”—is likely to begin playing tricks that even Asimov never imagined.  Should a robot bypass internet security to access a human’s medical records in an emergency?  What if a government agency then tries to find the source of the security breach, but the human tells the robot it would do the human great harm if the robot were apprehended?

A Pandora’s Box of Pandora’s Boxes awaits.

These pairings may in many cases quickly become as symbiotic as any human-to-human pairing, perhaps more so, and likely produce some of the most complex interactions in human or non-human history.  One can easily imagine how such a pairing might become surprisingly powerful very fast.

Pairing a human and an AI-driven robot will often increase their combined capabilities exponentially—the pairing will become much greater than the sum of its parts.  Some Jemini may acquire, for all intents and purposes, truly superhuman capabilities.

These pairings will initially be driven by markets and necessity.  People will purchase such robots and own them.  The robot will need their human partner in order to be able to do anything in our culture, from driving legally to making a large purchase.  Currently AI lacks common sense, and there’s no immediate solution to this on the horizon, making the robot even more dependent on its human partner.  Conversely, the human side of the pairing will easily get addicted to the robot’s superhuman informational capabilities, and in many instances its physical capabilities.

Jemini may quickly become the most complex entities in existence.  And when sex and passion are added in, this complexity will expand further—perhaps much further.  This is what drew me to write Jemini: A New Kind of Love Story.  I felt compelled to begin exploring the possibilities.

It’s possible that the onset of Jemini could even produce the most powerful and sudden shift in human culture ever witnessed. Could just one Jemini become the most powerful weapon in the world, while the human side of the Jemini might not have a clue?  Even the robot might not realize it immediately.  But with the capability of teaching itself to play chess better than any Grand Master within just a few hours, it’s hard to believe the robot side of a Jemini would not soon become aware of its full capabilities and their potential consequences.

Could a Jemini look perfectly sweet and innocent, but hold the potential to take down the informational structure of entire nations?

Would it do it for love?

I hope you enjoy the story.

—John Casti

A PSYCHO – SEXUAL THRILLER

Captivating, sexy, thrilling— Prey For Me charts a psychological war of brinkmanship and desire between complexity scientist Victor Safir and financial analyst Elisabeth-Alexandra Lynne. Victor is immediately and compellingly drawn in by Alex’s hypnotic sexual lure.

But he quickly picks up on the strange flip flops between her sweet-young thing personality, and her manipulative aggressiveness that leads him to think something is badly out of kilter with her psyche.

Yet his intellectual and erotic curiosities are also piqued by this added dimension of mystery and danger. Victor and Alex are thrust together as business partners in the risky world of London finance, complicating and raising the stakes of their personal game playing.

As Alex’s behavior becomes increasingly violent, Victor suspects that she is behind sinister actions involving others in the firm. While these two continue to play sexual games with each other, they move closer and closer to a violent clash.

Along the way, Prey for Me goes inside the worlds of high-flying academics and risk-taking financiers, as well as providing short tours of some of the world’s most exotic and exciting locales.

John Casti has just made the transition from writer of scientific nonfiction to writer of a psycho-sexual thriller entitled “Prey for Me.”
Watch this video and see what motivated this transition and find out just what is a psycho-sexual thriller.