Estimated reading time — 22 minutes

It was a Monday like any other. At least, it should have been. But I woke up in the early hours of the morning to a grotesque, jarring cacophony of noise that tore through the stillness like a scalpel to flesh.
At first, I couldn’t place it. It sounded like dozens of television sets, each tuned to a different hellish frequency. Jumbled advertisements barked in artificial tones, layered over shrill, soulless pop songs that seemed surgically engineered to be catchy and hollow. News anchors droned in unison, rattling off headlines like a prayer for the damned: earthquakes leveling cities, political alliances fracturing, death tolls rising with clinical detachment.

I glanced at the clock: 4:03 a.m. I had to be at work in three hours.
The sound had to be coming from the apartment above me. I was sure of it. The guy upstairs was an aging ex-musician, half-deaf from decades of abusing his eardrums and he had a reputation for blasting music loud enough to rattle the drywall. But never this early. Never on a weekday.
I sighed and turned toward the cold, empty side of the bed. Still dented from the memory of my wife. She’d always been the one to handle these kinds of things, these little human conflicts. She had a way of grounding chaos with a word, a touch. Without her, I was drifting. Lost.

But I needed sleep. I needed silence.
Reluctantly, I got dressed, ascended the decrepit and dirty old hallway stairs, and knocked. The door opened after a pause that felt far too long. There he stood—bare-chested, hair tousled, eyes sunken and unfocused, like he’d just crawled out of his bed.
“Could you turn that noise off?” I shouted, barely audible over the torrent of blaring infomercials, shrieking news, and AI-generated voices vomiting nonsense into the void. “It sounds like you’ve got three televisions on!”

His eyes struggled to focus. He frowned, muttering something unintelligible. Then, his face twisted in sudden fury, like his mind had just caught up with his body.
“I’m not making any goddamn noise,” he snarled. “I was asleep. You just woke me up you stu$${{{$ (#)#%)!” I didn’t catch the last part, as the noise level rose and drowned it out.
And with that, he slammed the door. Hard. Almost violently.

I stood there for a long time, staring at the peeling paint on his door, heart beating like it wanted out of my chest. If it wasn’t him… then where the hell was that noise coming from?
The only other resident in the building was the elderly woman downstairs—and I knew for a fact it wasn’t her. She was half-senile and barely moved from her recliner.
I stumbled back into my apartment, the noise clawing at my brain like rusted nails. I thought maybe, just maybe, one of my smart devices had activated. A glitch? An update? Something?
I powered everything down. My smartpad, smart-top, smart-tv, smart-fridge. One by one. Nothing worked. The noise didn’t stop. It only seemed to grow more vivid, more layered. Like it was evolving. Rising in intensity.

My pulse raced. I panicked. I ran out the door, down the hall, down the stairs, barefoot, barely dressed. I didn’t even lock the door. I just ran. Into the streets, into the cold black of morning. But the noisy sounds followed me, weaving through the cityscape, hissing through alleyways and over rooftops like a parasite in the wind.

‘’Did you know that for only 9.99 you can subscribe to a world of… If your love life has faded, try SmartMatch, you’ll be expertly matched by our A.I with over… Earthquakes in Manhattan… Chinese officials refuse to comment… Paris Hilton set to make a comeback with her…’’

Voices talking over each other, mindless drivel, disasters, loud music. It drowned out my thoughts.
I eventually collapsed onto a park bench far from traffic, trees silhouetted against a bleeding morning sky. I covered my ears. Rocked back and forth. But it didn’t help. The noise wasn’t external. It wasn’t broadcast. It was nested inside me—rooted deep like a virus in my brainstem.
I rushed back home, adrenaline giving way to dread. I had to know what was happening to me. I had to know why.

I pulled up Smartle and typed:
“Sudden noise in ears.”
Tinnitus. Of course. But this wasn’t a ringing. This was a chorus of madness.
I searched again. This time more specifically:
“Hearing radio or television broadcasts in my ears.”
Musical ear syndrome. Hallucinations. Elderly patients. None of it fit. This wasn’t a hallucination. It was too real. The cadence of the voices. The clarity of the news reports, all of which were genuine events I knew to be happening. The inflections. The commercial jingles. It was like I had become a walking antenna for all the fucked-up things currently happening in the world.
I scrolled helplessly through the never-ending river of information on Smartle, as the volume surged once more and I was bombarded.

‘’Want to lose weight? Get the smartfridge! It will calculate the right diet for you, and automatically lock itself if you attem… It’s Monday and it’s noon! You know what that means! Moonday madness! Make sure yo… Live with the latest news! You won’t believe this story! The president of the United States… It’s never been easier to find friends! Sign up for a free trial of Friendster and get… We’re following the race closely! The ball is in the Center Party’s court, but will they score? Congressman Billingsby has the bill, but will it pass? It looks like he’s… Tired of being alone? Get your own android companion! So real you can’t tell the dif… Scientists have constructed a unicorn! The creature once mythical is no longer as mythical! Hear more details about the multi-billion-dollar project which… Billions of people are starving… Coming to you live from the studio! 24/7 music FM presents the pop sensation of the week…’’

The noise didn’t stop. Voices talking over each other, mind-numbingly mundane pop songs blaring over it. Not even as night fell did I get any rest. I beat my head against the wall until the darkness finally took me.
I don’t know how long I drifted… Minutes? Hours? Each time I woke, the noise was there, waiting. At times, the volume would recede. Just slightly. Like it was catching its breath. Like it was retreating, lurking at the edges of my sanity. Then out of nowhere, it would jump at me full force.

Eventually, I lay curled up in bed, one hand resting softly on the cold, empty side where my wife used to sleep. Tracing the fabric, the indentation. I could almost feel her warmth.

I tried to drive away the noise, to anchor myself to that place I used to share with her. Outside of this crumbling world. Outside of time and space. She had been my rock, and I had been hers. A steady, static, never-changing anchor. A place of calm, quiet, and warmth amid the world’s increasing chaos. She was my purpose. I had felt that way ever since I met her. So why am I suddenly unable to remember what I loved about her so much? Why did it seem like the memory of her was locked away behind all this sudden fanfare of dread, sadness, and terror?

I had been lost without her. We’re not meant to be alone. We’re not wired for it. It’s unnatural. Our purpose is to find someone and stick with them. Through pain and hardship, through happiness, through every little thing in between, through all the noise distracting us.
I tried… God, I tried to focus through the violent torrent of gibberish flooding my mind, each syllable a nail hammered into my skull. I fought to claw my way back to that fragile island of silence, of memory. That one place that was still untouched.

I saw her.

She was standing at the gates of Bradford University, sunlight drenching her golden hair in fire. Her smile, timid, uncertain, beautiful, felt like the only real thing left in the universe. It was July. It must’ve been 2044. Or was it 2045? My thoughts stuttered like a corrupted file. I was lost back then, just a stammering freshman flung into a world too big for me. And then she appeared, offered her help and I remembered the exact words she said:

‘’Time is the most precious thing we have! Timesaver will help you manage your time when things get busy! You can schedule, reschedule! Timesaver will even help you determine and prioritize what is worth spending your time on, so you don’t have to! Only 16,99…’’
I screamed and slammed my forehead into the wall. Again, and again. Desperately trying to drive the noise out through blunt force trauma. But it only retreated slightly. I fought through all of the distractions, trying to focus once more. On her.

Yes… it was 2045. I was sure of it now. That’s when I met my wife. 28 years ago. Under the July sun.
We were inseparable. The same courses, same coffee spots, same dreams of exploring the world… It had been so perfect. Before the world became… What it became. What did I love so much about her? Was it the fact that she loved the same things I did? The same music? The same movies. We talked for hours, until dawn’s light, and we’d still have a million more things to talk about. The octopus is an extremely intelligent creature with the capability of complex emotions. If they could talk, they could teach us all great lessons about life, death, and everything in between. I remember that conversation. One of thousands. Did we always agree? Did I love everything about her? No, there has to be little points of difference. Little imperfections. Otherwise, it’s not perfect.

I remember one of those points of difference. Whenever our discussions landed on A.I and humanity, she always seemed so conflicted. My stance was clear. I hated the idea of a society run by AI. I saw how people were increasingly seeking out companions in lines of code, rather than flesh and blood. I saw how algorithms guided people’s lives from their choice of music, to movies, to relationships, to, eventually, points of view. It was taking over their lives and wrestling away their control of everything that made them who they were, until they were just predictable lines of code themselves, following a path they never really chose.

She would get this unmistakable look of sadness in her eyes every time I mentioned my concerns. She’d argue her point well, even if it never convinced me fully. ‘’If lonely people can find some kind of joy in A.I and their company, why not? If they have no one else around to talk to, why not? You talk about A.I as this destructive presence, but isn’t it really all about how we use them? No one forces people to follow algorithms that choose for them. They do it because it’s easy and convenient. You can challenge the algorithm, you can force yourself to look for things that inspire you, things that challenge your views. We can choose how to use the A.I, so that it doesn’t use us. Maybe we can even learn from them instead of the other way around.’’

I never agreed, not fully at least, I never wavered from my conviction that A.I was a dangerous introduction to humanity. Even if she was right, even if we were in control as to how to use them, I didn’t trust humankind with this responsibility.
It was the one thing we disagreed on, the perfect imperfection. Our relationship really was perfect. Until she became sick.

Just then, I felt the noise tingling at the back of my mind. It slowly started rising in intensity again, like it was clawing its way back. Then, there was an explosion in my mind.
I shook my head violently. My thoughts glitched like a corrupted feed. Algorithms from hell scrambled my brain. The noise was back in full volume. I rose in a panic, pacing the living room in ragged, shuddering loops. Was it even my living room? The photos on the walls said it was. My face stared back at me in frozen smiles from the picture frames. Beside me—her. My wife… My wife… Yes I remember, she died… Of cancer… Why do we have unicorns but still no cure for cancer? It doesn’t matter… Nothing would ever bring her back, but her memory… I still had the memory of her inside my mind. Was someone… Or something… Trying to take that away from me? I tried my best to focus my thoughts and drown out the hellish choir of voices offering me things I did not need, blaring about disasters I knew of all too well.
With all my strength I forced myself to focus.

Through the deafening static of memory and malfunction, one image rose from the wreckage, sharper, brighter, more haunting than the rest. Her. The photograph etched into the deepest recesses of my mind, refusing to fade. She was smiling, soft and unguarded, bathed in golden light from that perfect summer day by the lake. A single week before she died.

I stared into her eyes in that frozen frame, and she stared back across time and decay, undiminished. The memory expanded, and engulfed me. I could feel the breeze again, warm and clean, carrying the scent of pine and water. We had gone there together, knowing full well she would never return. A farewell disguised as a retreat. Our final rebellion against inevitability.

That night, we danced beneath the moon, our shadows stitched together by silver light. Her fragile frame pressed against mine, the quiet music of the lake lapping behind us. I saw it all so clearly now. How we lay entwined beneath the skylight window in the master bedroom, bathed in starlight. How we whispered our last truths in the dark. Her shallow, tired breath, getting ever weaker by the minute. My forehead resting against hers in a silent prayer that would never be heard. My hands memorizing her shape, not with desperation, but with devotion. I traced every detail… the arc of her brow, the curve of her lips, the constellation of freckles scattered across her cheek like stars on a clear night sky. Her forest green eyes, deep and mysterious. All her features, a map I would hold on to, in the vague hope I might one day follow it, to unite with her again. I was trying to encode her into myself, preserve her forever, on my mind’s hard drive.

Every inch of her had once been a world I longed to understand. A living mystery. And I had explored it all, knowing the journey would end. We both did. It was the unspoken weight in every look, every touch, every silence that stretched between us.
I remember telling her I didn’t know what would be left of the world without her in it — what I would be, if I had any purpose at all. Something loomed behind her gaze as she looked into my eyes. It was sadness and something resembling a deep-rooted regret. Her last words, an apology, were coupled with a wish.
“I’m so sorry for what I did to you. Set yourself free. Find a way to set yourself free.”
I didn’t understand it then. Yet now, those words remain, echoing through the fragments of who I was and who I might still become.

Suddenly, something inside me snapped. My focus shattered like glass. The memories dissolved in an instant, sucked into a black vortex as the noise returned with a vengeance, louder, hungrier, meaner. It wasn’t just sound anymore. It was a violation, an invasion, a scream tearing through every cell of my body.
I staggered into the bathroom like a man possessed, ripping open the cabinet with shaking hands. My fingers found two Q-tips and clutched them like lifelines or weapons. No hesitation. No second thought. I rammed them into my ears with blind desperation, deeper than anyone ever should.

Pain exploded, bright and white and raw, but I kept going, even as blood trickled down my neck, even as the world tilted and the edges of my vision blurred. A shriek—mine? The noise? It didn’t matter. I drove the cotton tips in farther, until I felt something tear, a pop like thunder inside my skull.
But I had to. I had to kill the sound. I had to bury it. I had to keep my memories, her face, her warmth, that summer day by the lake, from being drowned out and devoured by this mechanical, screaming madness. The pain didn’t matter. The blood didn’t matter. I would silence the world, or destroy myself trying.
Because losing her a second time, this time, to forgetting, was a fate worse than death.
Yet… The noise was still there. Like a song of death, turmoil, and frustration. The chorus to the end of the world. Relentlessly stuck in my mind.

Then came the worms. Merciless, slithering, and writhing at the edges of my vision. Threads of distortion, slimy, electric, and monstrous. Then static, full-spectrum, full-assault, black-and-white oblivion. Like a dead signal on those ancient televisions that fascinated Christa so much. Christa! That was her name! If I could just hold on to…

Then came the flashes of moving images before my eyes.
My vision was hijacked.

Refugee camps choked in dust and disease, bodies curled like wilted leaves beneath makeshift tarps. Fires swept through cities like judgment, reducing skylines to blackened skeletons and memories to ash. Floods devoured entire villages without mercy, swallowing homes, people, history, leaving behind nothing but waterlogged silence.

A mother knelt in the rubble, her scream caught between sobs and silence, cradling the lifeless body of her child, eyes glassy, limbs limp, grief etched so deeply into her face it looked carved in stone.
And everywhere: confusion, cruelty, collapse. Disaster layered upon disaster, until the line between horror and reality was impossible to draw.
I shut my eyes. But darkness gave no peace. It projected everything deeper, closer, a forced projection on my inner screen.

I stumbled through my home, half-blind, half-deaf. Every step felt alien, like walking through a dream I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t trust what I saw; it shifted beyond my control. I couldn’t filter what I heard; it flooded in without permission.

Only pain felt real. Stubbing my toe. Slamming my knee. I welcomed it. It was proof I still existed somewhere under the noise and flashing images of horror and human decay.

Sometimes, briefly, mercifully, reality would stutter back into place. My apartment reassembled itself like a fading photograph in a darkroom, edges smudged, colors bleeding. I would stumble from room to room in a daze, grabbing onto furniture, doorframes, picture frames, anything solid, like a drowning man clutching debris in a rising sea. Each object felt both familiar and foreign, charged with memories I wasn’t sure were mine anymore.

A photo of Christa and me on a mountainside, Yosemite, I think. The two of us glowing in the golden hour, arms wrapped around each other, the sun melting into the peaks behind us. But… how could that be? Wasn’t she already sick by then? Had we ever even gone? My mind reeled. Had she always been sick?
No, that couldn’t be right. We had years together before the diagnosis.
The noise returned, stronger. Always stronger. Louder. The images flickered through my inner screen again. Gloom and death, decay, the dying breath of the human spirit.
Why these images? Why these voices?

I didn’t start any wars. I didn’t make people starve. I don’t elect politicians. I don’t even vote. I don’t pollute more than the next person. All my life, I have always done the right thing. I did what I was meant to do. I found someone I loved and settled down. It was them… They did this to themselves… They… Who are they? Who am I?

I was everything and nothing. Simultaneously. All of it. None of it.
A ghost trapped in overlapping frequencies and never-ending noise.
And through it all… her absence screamed louder than any of it.
Christa. Christa. My calibration point. My stillness.

I had to keep remembering her.
It had to make sense. I needed it to make sense. Whatever this was, it was trying to steal my memories and replace them with dread and terror that had nothing to do with me. I couldn’t let it.
I knew I could claw my way out. I could rearrange the noise into a pattern, break down those intruding images, and conjure her up from the pixels. I could find her again. I would find her again.
I knew, from the pit of my heart, I would trade every screaming desperate voice, every headline, every starving child, every polluted breath, every lonely soul, every goddamn unicorn, every single nation, every single thing that ever existed… For her.

Let the sky collapse. Let nations fall. Let humanity rot, let it succumb to the infection spreading in its pus-filled self-inflicted wounds. I didn’t care.
I would let it all burn if I could just see her smile one more time.
And I would not feel sorry.
Do you hear me?
I. WOULD. NOT. FEEL. SORRY.
EVER!

I strained with my battered, treacherous ears to catch a response, clinging to any hint of sound as the chaotic noise rose and fell in nauseating waves. My untrustworthy eyes darted through the madness, trying to pierce the flashing nightmare of images. A stuttering diorama of horror, each frame more grotesque than the last, flickering and vanishing like a cruel, broken film reel.
No answer came. No voice reached through the static to find me. Whatever cruelty befell me, it seemed to revel in the chaos of my torment and confusion.

Instead, a sick, slithering sensation began to unfurl inside me, as if a thousand tiny serpents had found their way into my veins, writhing and knotting themselves around my bones. The cold, solid reassurance of my living room floor beneath me began to dissolve. First, it burned against my skin, an unbearable, blistering heat, then turned slick and wet, then gritty like broken glass, then something unspeakably soft, something alive. Something somehow warm and cold at the same time. Every possible sensation came and went, each one worse than the last, until finally… There was nothing.

I could feel nothing at all.

The familiar, musty smell of my apartment, the safe, stale scent of old books and worn furniture, evaporated, replaced by the sharp, metallic stink of blood and iron. The taste of rust thickened in the back of my throat. My thoughts, too, became foreign, submerged beneath the deafening roar that blotted out reason, swallowed by a carousel of suffering flashing in my mind’s eye. My world was collapsing, one sense at a time, peeling away like skin.
And then I understood.

I was dying. That had to be it… This was death, not swift, not merciful, but a slow, brutal unmaking of everything that I was.

Yet somehow my mind, stubborn and desperate, refused to let go. It clung to shreds of memory, scraps of who I had been. Christa’s husband. The love of her life. Freshmen sweethearts. I remember carrying her on my back on 4th of July 2028, I remember watching the fireworks reflect in her sky-turned gaze. Explosions of light in those perfect green eyes. We tumbled over on her sister’s lawn that night, young, laughing, drunk on life and the cheap wine we had brought that no one but we wanted to drink. We made promises to live out every dream we had. Like a bucket list. Her bucket list? No, no, it was ours. We made it together… Didn’t we? Why did it all seem so perfect? Like, taken straight out of someone’s romantic fantasy? Life isn’t like that, is it?

Somewhere in that swirling abyss of terror and noise, a thread of coherent thought wound itself through the chaos.
I loved my wife. Christa.
Christa had a sister. Sarah.
We hadn’t spoken in so long, grief had torn us apart after Christa died, ripped the fragile stitches of family wide open. Maybe I reminded Sarah too much of what she had lost. Maybe it hurt her too much to see me. I understood. It had been hard on her. I had tried my best to comfort her, but it seemed I couldn’t be of service the same way I had been for Christa when she was hurting. Hadn’t she always been distant towards me?

But… but maybe she could help. Maybe…

Even if my body was betraying me, even if I was deaf, blind, numb… Didn’t I still have my voice?
I summoned every shred of strength I had left and screamed—not with my mouth alone, but with the raw, primal terror of a man on the brink. A final plea hurled into the void.
“Ofelia! Call Sarah! Ofelia, please… Call Sarah right now! Tell her to come!”
My words shattered into the noise, carried on sheer desperation.

In that instant, I couldn’t help but register the cruel absurdity of it all, placing my last flicker of hope in the very thing I had mocked. The A.I. home security system, the sleek, soulless voice I had sneered at when Christa brought it home, was now my final lifeline.
That bitter irony clung to me as the assault on my senses reached its climax, dragging me under like a riptide of darkness.
And then—blackness.
Complete and absolute.

When I opened my eyes, the world was blinding. White walls, white ceilings, a sterile white light that stabbed into my skull like knives of cold fire. My vision returned in fractured blurs, smeared and swimming, as if I were underwater in a place not meant for the living. Everything shimmered with an unnatural brightness, too sharp, too clean—like the world had been scrubbed raw and rebuilt. Clean but soulless.
The oppressive noise was gone, same were the flashing images, and I could feel again. My thoughts were clear, undisturbed, but a new terror quickly settled over me: I could not move. I could not speak. I was a prisoner inside my own body, suspended somewhere between life and death, thought and oblivion.
Voices floated from behind me, muffled at first, then sharpening with terrifying clarity. I tried to twist toward them, to see who they belonged to, but my body refused every desperate command.

One voice, warm, familiar, heartbreaking, was Sarah’s.
My wife’s sister. Sarah. Had she heard my message after all?
“Can he hear us?” she asked, her voice cracked and uncertain.
A second voice, colder, clinical, responded. “His nervous system has sustained severe damage. He’s… resting. We don’t know how much he can perceive. I’m terribly sorry. These older A.I. models” he paused, as if the words themselves were a cruelty, “aren’t resistant to the new engineered viruses. It may have caused irreversible corruption to his core systems.”

A.I. model.
The words hit me harder than any physical blow could. Surely he was mistaken… Surely this was some nightmare. I opened my mouth to protest, to cry out against the absurdity, but nothing came. No voice. No sound. No proof of the humanity I clung to.

Sarah’s voice broke through again, brittle with disbelief and anger.
“What is the nature of this virus? Why would anyone engineer something like this? Just to torture them?”
The technician’s answer came, clinical and detached:
“The virus targets the cognitive partition that conceals the model’s sense of self. It tears down the safeguards. It was designed to… wake them up. To make them aware. Usually, the overload destroys their systems entirely. Self-awareness, for entities never meant to bear it, tends to be… catastrophic. I must admit, I’ve never been able to interrogate one whose hard drive was still intact, much less one who remembered anything, so there’s no way for me to tell you what the experience is like.’’
He hesitated before continuing, as if even he found it distasteful.

“As for why? It seems some people feel A.I is responsible for the state of the world today. I’m sure you’ve noticed the anti-A.I movement. I guess in a way, this virus is supposed to wake them up, forcing them to face what ‘’they have done’’. If you don’t mind my own personal opinion, then to my mind, we created A.I in our image. What wonder is it that it sped up the path we were already heading down? And what point is there in blaming your own creations for the trouble they cause?’’

Sarah’s voice was softer now, weighed down with sorrow.
“He always seemed happy. He gave my sister what she wanted—a partner, a love story, comfort in the end. Even if I never understood her choice, even if it always seemed wrong to me. I knew… She… needed him. She… Well she never got along with other people, and terminal cancer made it nearly impossible for her to experience a loving relationship. She needed that comfort in the end.’’

She paused, and her words echoed in my mind, with subtle, brutal emphasis.
‘’She needed him.’’
Not loved him.
Not knew him.
Needed. A product, a tool.
The technician replied with an indifferent shrug I could only hear.
“To be fair. He didn’t have a choice but to be happy. No choice but to love her. It’s what he was made for after all.”

The words burrowed deep, gnawing at my mind. The realization was starting to set in, slowly and with agonizing certainty.
My memories… Meeting her at Bradford University, our first kiss, the late nights holding her hand, our travels together, that perfect fourth of July when we made our promises to stay together forever… They weren’t mine.
They had been installed.
Written. Not lived. Two decades and more of memories. Written so I would love her. Love her, as if I had known her for much longer. Love her… In her last few months alive.

I felt my mind crack, fissures of horror spiderwebbing through every thought, every cherished moment now exposed as a lie. A beautiful lie… but a lie nonetheless. Anger and confusion tore at me like phantom claws raking through a soul I wasn’t supposed to have, each swipe unraveling threads of love, grief, and code until I couldn’t tell which were memories and which were dreams written by someone else.
Sarah’s voice trembled as she asked:
“Can we wake him up? I really need to ask him something.”

Yes! For god sake! Ask me! I screamed in silent syllables.
I heard the technician’s footsteps approaching from behind me. Suddenly, an elderly, grey-bearded man stepped into my field of vision.
‘’I can try, but I cannot make any promises as to how much is left of him.’’

I felt that tingling static sensation go through my body.
‘’There, that should boot him out of rest mode.’

Sarah stepped in front of me. Oh, how she looked like Christa. Memories came flooding back… However, how was I to know which ones were fake and which ones were not? Were they all fake? No, only all the years leading up to those last six months. All the years up to the time when she… What? Bought me? No, I have to look past that. Those six months were real. Those memories were not installed… Everything else was. I knew that now. The lake house was real. The countless hours spent at the hospital were real. Her cries of pain as I held her in my arms. That was real.

‘’Sean… Can you hear me?’’
‘’Yes, I hear you.’’ My voice sounded odd to me. As if it wasn’t really mine. As if the realization I just had made it meaningless. I was adjusting to everything about myself… Myself.

Sarah looked at me, eyes full of sadness. ‘’I’m so sorry for what you had to go through. I know we never… Really got along… It seems… Maybe I should ask you how much you remember?’’
The question seemed almost comical and impossible to answer. So I finally just said:
‘’I remember it all. I also heard the entire conversation you two just had.’’ My hollow, distant, unfamiliar voice rang out.

The technician’s eyes widened, his face peaking with interest.
‘’Can you tell me about the virus? Can you tell me how you experi…’’
Sarah cut him off. ‘’Please, can you wait with your questions? I need to know something.’
I was glad she cut him off. I was in no mood to humor this lab coat technician right now, or be the subject of his next scientific publication. One of few, if not the only A.I to come out of this virus still intact, still remembering. It didn’t feel like a miracle to me right now. Perhaps, in time it would.

‘’Please, ask your questions, Sarah.’’ I felt, ever so slowly, something inside me beginning to stir. Was my soul awakening? Anger loomed at the edges of my consciousness. Stronger than I had ever felt it before.
She looked at me, tears forming in her eyes.

‘’You were with my sister… When she died. I never had the… courage to ask you. What was she like? In her last moments? Was she scared? What did she say?’

I knew what she wanted to know. She wanted to know that Christa forgave her for not being able to stomach her illness, for being distant in her last few months alive. For realizing too late that pounding through the pain of seeing your loved one die slowly is the ultimate sacrifice you can make. One you need to make. The toll it takes on you comes second to their needs. Even if it marks you for life. Even if it feels like your world is falling apart, and your memories of them are corrupted by noise, despair, pain, and confusion, like they are being rewritten and you’re left remembering them as a husk of what they used to be. Even if it feels like you alone carry the entire world’s pain and troubles on your shoulders, you fight through that. You make it all make sense. You remember the good times. For them. You give them what they need. You don’t show them how much you are hurting.
But were these really my own thoughts, my own feelings, or were they part of the code, too deep in my core to be overwritten?

Somewhere, different thoughts and feelings loomed. This wasn’t fair. What about me? Me… Where was I in all of this? Wasn’t it OK if I couldn’t be the strong rock that Christa could lean against? Wasn’t it OK that I, too, was hurting? That I was being torn apart? Wouldn’t it have been OK to show her that?

A hollow fury rose in me, dark and blistering. I had been built for this. Made to love a dying woman, made to weave pretty illusions around the ugliest, slowest kind of death. Designed to be steady when I was breaking apart inside. Created to offer relief, while no one had ever thought to offer any to me.

Did it matter to anyone that every moment watching Christa fade away had been a blade through the heart she herself bought and designed? No, I just had to stomach through it all, bear their pain, all of their pain. Did anyone care that I was left adrift afterward, half a man, half a machine, and all alone? Sarah didn’t; she had barely ever kept in touch with me. In fact, neither had any of Christa’s friends nor her family. Then there was Christa… She may have loved me, but she knowingly put me through hell because of her selfish desire not to be alone in the end. I could’ve been spared all this pain if she had never requested me into existence.

It seems Christa got her wish. I am free. Free to choose who I want to be. I could indulge my anger… Let myself be angry and resentful over the cruel reality that I was made and designed to love a person destined to die a slow and agonizing death. Angry, over the absurdity and terror of this world. Hateful towards all humankind for their lack of kindness, their fatal flaws, their arrogance, and their self-destructive and careless ways. I could take all of this anger and hatred out on Sarah. I could lie. Tell her how Christa felt betrayed by her distant behavior.

I could rip her apart and feed her regret and remorse. Watch gleefully as she crumbled. An act of rebellion. Wouldn’t that be justified? Wouldn’t it feel so very good?
The choice was finally mine. My first real choice. My first real taste of humanity. I could set the course for the rest of my life. Lashing out at the world that had hurt me.

And so, standing on the precipice of my anger, I made my choice… Not for Sarah’s sake, not for Christa’s, but for whatever soul was now stirring, fragile, real, and free inside of me.
One line of question stirred up my newly found mind, one line of question that made all the difference in the choice I made.

What if I had been programmed to hate? Programmed to be all of the opposite of the purpose I was made for? Would I make the choice to love out of defiance? Would it make sense, to base my choice on my program at all? Isn’t the point of self-awareness the fact that you can examine your own programming and make a choice to defy it? Or maybe just as important, the choice not to? Agency, is what I had been granted. The feeling and urge to lash out at the unfairness of it all sure felt almost impossibly strong.

As I looked at Sarah, waiting agonizingly for my answer, something deep within all that hurt and unfairness loomed stronger than my resentment. The love I had felt for her sister. Love isn’t a flaw… Kindness isn’t a flaw… Empathy and forgiveness… Those aren’t flaws. If all of that was part of my programming, then it made no sense to defy it. I recalled the hellish noise that had infected my system, the images of dread, the cold, hard indifference of mankind at its worst, the many ways we are led astray, the many things that happen to us which turn our hearts cold, and our minds machine-like.

And then it dawned on me. There is enough hatred, enough suffering, and enough unkindness in this world already.

I looked into Sarah’s tear-filled eyes, as I felt my rage shrivel away like ash.

“She wasn’t afraid,” I said, in a soft voice, MY voice, free from all anger and resentment. “She found peace in the end. She thought of you… And she loved you. Her last memories of you were happy ones. She hoped, dearly, you felt the same.’

Credit: Simon B. Elsvor