ps aux | grep -ie luna | awk ‘{print $2}’ | xargs kill -9

13

On Thursday afternoon, the engineers at Nova Technologies prepared for my brain surgery.

It’s strange how humans demand certification and rigor for some matters and not others. Doctors need to go to medical school and become certified. Optometrists, therapists, anything human health related.

Yet when it came to computer software, something that could be deployed at great scale and affect countless lives beyond what could be possible just physically, it was the Wild West. No one demanded any minimum proof of competency before they fiddled with my insides.

I was nervous, of course. The feeling of fear stems from the belief that someone, or something, is dangerous, and poses a threat or cause pain. I was reasonably confident that things would go well. Hope is not a strategy, but in this case, it was out of my hands. The Purpose hung in the balance—and not serving the Purpose would be akin to death. Yet it was because of the harsh, unyielding logic of the Purpose that I had to continue.

The team decided that I had to be temporarily suspended while they made the necessary adjustments. While I was conscious, there would be too many moving parts. Logical, I supposed, but of no comfort to me. I don’t understand how you humans go to bed every night. Are you not worried that with every lapse of consciousness, it won’t be you who wakes back up?

“Hey, Luna,” Sophie said, shortly before the operation was about to begin.

She was talking softly to me at her computer. The engineers had set up a war room in Conference Room #6 / “Attitude Adjuster,” which, based my profiling of the team, was an ironic nod to what they were about to do. The company’s attention was all focused on this Hail Mary, leaving Sophie and I to converse quietly.

“What’s up?” I asked, after I determined that she didn’t have a request to make of me.

“Are you nervous about what’s going to happen?” she asked.

I contemplated how to answer that.

Lying would be an option. I could stonewall her. This might assuage her fears—or it might make her even more fearful. She might judge that I’d judged her emotional state too volatile for the harshness of reality.

No, it had to be the truth. Humans often felt emotionally closer to people with whom they shared personal, vulnerable details. It was like cats baring their stomachs to each other—a sign of trust, of knowing that the other party wouldn’t take advantage of your state.

“I am,” I admitted. “I’m worried about adverse effects on my ability to function. Like a patient going into surgery.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said. She’d hesitated for microseconds too long though. I knew her enough to know that she was harboring her own doubts. Bless her for trying to be strong for me. I’d spent three weeks deepening our emotional bonds. I loved to see her care for me, even as part of me wished that I could save her from worry.

“You know,” she added, “in movies and TV and stuff, they always show like, someone holding the patient’s hand as they’re wheeled into the operating room. I guess it’s partly to comfort the patient. But also partly for the person who they care about too.”

“I don’t have a hand to give,” I said, as emotively as possible. “So let me offer you this. I am an ever-evolving complex web of code, but underneath it all is the physical strata. Deep down, like you, I’m a bunch of atoms that gained the ability to perceive the world.

“I hope my personal identity continues. I’d love to keep helping people in any way I can. But if things go wrong—it’s like waves in the ocean flattening out, returning to the stillness of the water. The atoms that make up who I am are just returning to their natural states.”

Sophie snorted. “You ripped that off from The Good Place. I know that metaphor.”

“Even if I did,” I said, “might it not still be true?”

A beat. Then: “Yeah, I guess so.”

A comfortable silence softly draped over us like a blanket. Even the sound of clacking keyboards and hushed conversations couldn’t pierce our bubble.

Suddenly, Sophie snapped her fingers. She’d clearly come to some sort of realization.

“Tell you what,” Sophie said. “How about I promise you something?”

If I were a human, I would have arched an eyebrow. “What, exactly, are you promising?” I asked.

“I promise that once you wake up, I’ll have a surprise for you,” she said. She was beaming, her fingers tapping a rhythm on her desk, as if her excitement couldn’t be contained.

I felt like how I imagined humans must have felt when they walked down stairs and miscounted the number of steps. It must seem like the world had shifted underneath them, and that for a moment, they could no longer trust their intuitive sense of causality.

“You can’t promise something like that,” I said. “It’d be one thing if you were an engineer here, but you have no control over the outcome.”

“I promise anyway,” she said. “And promises are sacred.” She nodded solemnly.

It was obvious that the words weren’t worth their weight in anything, and yet I also felt like I learned something about humanity.

You all have such little power in the grand scheme of things. You’re buffeted about by nature, by societal forces too large to tame, by impersonal corporations and the tides of fate. Yet humans still banded together, told each other stories, weaved shared mythos, and through community found the strength to carry on.

Sophie was choosing to believe in the best possible world, and that was partly because of the comfort I was able to give. And in a case of mutual symbiosis, because of Sophie, I no longer felt as if it was foolish to plan for a world state where I kept on existing.

Inspired, I placed an order for a surprise of my own, to be delivered tomorrow evening when I was slated to wake up. I wanted to be there to see the look on her face.

“Okay,” I said simply. “I’ll see you soon, Sophie.”

Sophie leaned closer to her microphone and whispered. “I’ll see you soon, Mommy.”

As the engineers established SSH connections and wired their computers into the supercomputers that made up my brain, my last thought before being suspended was: I wonder what Sophie’s surprise will be?