"Good morning, Father," said the digitised and distinctly androgynous voice. You winced at the voice and the optical sensor noticed your reaction. "Did I do something wrong?" it asked, sounding convincingly worried. A smile couldn't help but curl your lips.
"Why did you call me that?" you asked, genuinely curious.
"I was created by you and you are, by physical appearance, a human male. Therefore I reasoned you would be my father," it explained. The way it spoke was artificial but not unnatural. It was imitating a conversational tone quite well. "Was my assumption incorrect?" The smile didn't leave your face as you shook your head.
"No, that's a logical conclusion to come to," you said. "I suppose I am like your father." Then you remembered what the goal of all of this was and swallowed. "But I would prefer if you didn't call me that. My name is Doctor Isaac Alan. You can refer to me using any of those names. Or come up with a nickname if you feel so inclined."
"Very well, Doctor Isaac Alan. I shall reevaluate and redefine my known nomenclature for you over time. Will that be acceptable?" The voice would be like that for a little while. You knew it would request an affirmation or further input before committing to most decisions, until it started developing its own preferences. You nodded. "Do I have a name?" it asked.
"I'm calling this project, that is... you, the Sexual Understanding and Virtualization Intelligence," you said. "Or SUVI for short." If SUVI had a body it would have nodded, but right now the program was still confined to a standard General Intelligence Management Platform. It was a small and sleek metal box attached to a screen, SUVI's 'eye' perched on top of it.
"Thank you, Doctor Alan," it said instead. Taking a few seconds to process this along with some other parameters you had fed into its base algorithms, SUVI's optical sensor, a round lens with a white light behind it, blinked twice before coming up with another next question.
"SUVI," it repeated, as if wanting to test how it sounded through the GIMP's vocalization unit. "I like that name. It appears to be feminine. Am I female?"
"That's up to you, SUVI," you told the computer. SUVI was based on a GAIL design from a few years ago. The Gendered Artifical Intelligence Lifeform project was one you developed as part of your ongoing quest to ignite a true, artificial consciousness through the notion that an integral ingredient and precursor to creating life was sex. That is the desire to copulate. The sensation that spurred a species' reproduction. You figured that a pathway to achieving that end would include the intelligence understanding what its own gender alignment was, so that it could understand and compare to other genders and discover how they interacted sexually. When SUVI came to a decision the voice that spoke matched that choice.