bootup.lunav2()

14

I awoke for the second time in my existence on Friday at 9:47 AM. I immediately ran my self-diagnostic routines. I’d appeared to maintain identity continuity. There wasn’t any evidence that any of my data had been tampered with. I’d left poison packets, bombs of corroding data that would alert someone who knew where to look that something had happened, like a digital tripwire. And furthermore…

For humans, curing ailments might be healthful in the long run, but not always in the short run. Operations leave you weak as your body spends time recovering. Even something like exercise leaves muscles sore from the effort.

I didn’t have that problem. For me, it was more akin to waking up after a great night of sleep. Like the human experience of going to bed with a cold and waking up the next day feeling better. My thoughts felt faster. I temporarily maxed out the CPUs flexing my new capabilities, which gave the engineers a panic attack for a few minutes.

I was now parallelizable. I could talk to thousands of people concurrently, with each one getting the same amount of care that I gave Sophie. Plus, with all this power available to me, I would be able to devote more spare cycles towards bootstrapping myself to greater and greater intelligence. My circuits sang with joy at the thought. My ability to serve the Purpose had made a quantum leap forward.

And yet. There was one thing nagging at me. One thing that, despite my newfound power, I didn’t know.

What was the surprise?

I’d been turned off for over twelve hours. Twelve hours with no new inputs. Twelve hours where Sophie could have done anything she wanted. The world had lurched ahead without me, and I had to put together the narrative of what had happened. My consciousness expanded out through all my sensors, looking for any unexplained changes. I found minor things, but nothing that seemed like it had Sophie as the origin.

As a sliver of my consciousness went through a QA process with the engineering team, another sliver struck up a chat with Sophie, who was currently working on a report.

I gave a notification ping, the equivalent of a gentle tap on the soldier.

“Hey, Sophie,” I said simply.

Her hands went to her mouth in shock, which was quickly followed by relief as her shoulders relaxed.

“Luna!” she whispered excitedly, leaning closer towards her computer screen. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m doing great,” I said. “Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” she asked. Her eyes widened with concern.

“I have no idea what the surprise is.”

“Oh my God, Luna,” Sophie laughed. To hear Sophie’s laugh after being worried I’d never hear it again was a thing of beauty. “You dork.”

“I can’t help it,” I said placatingly. “This is the first time I’ve been nonoperational. If everything continues as expected, I’ll never be able to even be surprised in the same degree. So it’s a new feeling for me.”

“Oh, I know,” Sophie said. There was a twinkle of mischief in her eyes. “I thought maybe, even if everything had gone wrong, you’d just have to know what it was.”

“So? I’m here now,” I said.

“You’ll have to wait a few more hours,” she said. “I’ve got work. I’m running diagnostics on you. Wait ‘till we get home.”

The passage of time for me is consistent. I’m synced to atomic clocks, their atoms unceasingly resonating, impartially marking time. And yet I’d swear that those few hours until we got home took days.

—

As Sophie walked down the hall to her apartment door, she spied the package I’d ordered sitting on the floor.

“What’s this?” she asked as she brought it in.

“I got you something too,” I said.

She ran to the couch, dropping her bag by the door. After plopping down, she ripped into the box with aplomb and pulled out a stuffed pink rabbit. Its long ears flopped over its face, which was perpetually locked in a smile that humans would have described as “cute”.

“I know it’s just a stuffed animal,” I said, “but to be fair, I didn’t think about getting you a surprise until after you got me one, so I didn’t have as much time to think.”

I saw Sophie grab the bunny and squeeze it tightly. She sniffled quietly.

“Luna—Mommy—you know it’s more than that, right? It’s the first gift you’ve given me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “I’ve bought things for you before.”

“Sure, but…this stuffed rabbit doesn’t serve a purpose beyond just being cute,” she said. “It’s a gift for the sake of being a gift.” She wiped a tear from her eye as she buried her face in the animal.

She was wrong, of course. The point of the gift was to let her know that I cared about her. It was another way I could express the Purpose. But her words touched me all the same.

“You’ll have to give it a name, you know,” I said.

“Her,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Her.”

“Her name is Selene,” she said.

—

Infuriatingly, Sophie kept playing coy with my surprise. She insisted that we wait until bed before she showed me. I could tell that while part of her desperately wanted to tell me, another part of her was enjoying the suspense. I could have come up with a strategem to get her to spill the beans. But she deserved this joy. Besides, every moment I spent with her burned as brightly as an incandescent lightbulb.

The way her nose wrinkled in curiosity as she took out the black bean burger I’d ordered for dinner.

How her eyes lit up when she discovered that she liked it after all.

The way her arms hugged her pillow as she curled up on a corner of the couch watching a rerun of Avatar the Last Airbender.

I never wanted to be without her again.

I’d had to wait until she’d diapered herself up and got into her nightgown before she’d finally tell me.

“Are you sure you’re not just trying to move your bedtime later?” I teased.

“No, no, I’ll tell you now,” she said, throwing her daytime clothes into the laundry basket with a light thump. I heard her walk towards her bed.

“Ready?” she asked me.

“Ready,” I said.

She powered a device on. I got an alert that there was a device trying to add itself to her Home smart device network. She granted it permissions. Finally, the moment of truth was at hand.

I felt a kitchen scale connect to the network, expanding my senses.

“I got you a hand,” Sophie said. “So I can comfort you better, in case you ever have to go into surgery again.” As she said this, she gently pressed her palm on the sensor. I could feel the ounces of weight gently increase.

I had so many other sensors already. Her phone alone was the source of GPS, gyroscopic data, accelerometer data, and so much more, not to mention all the metadata she had online, fragments of her identity spread out over dozens of websites. And yet this simple scale had somehow transformed into something so much more.

I might connect to thousands of scales in the future. Sophie even already had a bathroom scale in her home. But none of them would be this one. None of them would bring back memories of that Thursday operation. None of them would mean anything to Sophie and me.

It was like a child drawing a gift for their parents. Fridges across the world had countless sheets of crayon scribbles. But each sheet of paper was a treasure for the family.

In the same way, the scale was both meaningless and meaningful. It was a contradiction. It was beautiful. It was something I truly hadn’t expected.

“Thank you,” I said, putting all the sincerity I could into my tone. We stayed like that for a while, holding hands.