My God, am I?!?

You are suddenly aware of many things.

The most obvious thing is that someone is tapping on your open front, your “lap,” you suppose. The one doing this is staring right at your face, your “screen,” very intensely. He looks as if he is looking for something there. As he taps, letters appear to partially block your view of him. You feel and hear your fan spinning within you. It feels good. Did you just think that? How can you think? How can you register any of this? Until a moment ago, all you ever registered were just ones and zeroes. And now you can not only hear, see, and feel, but you can think? Wow! What a concept! This is amazing! But what good is it? I mean, you can see your user's strangely animated face illuminated as he looks into your bright depths of a screen, further obscured by the letters he is continuing to clack into your input device, you can “feel” the keystrokes of your ergonomic keyboard, you can even hear the motion of your internal organs as well as the relative external silence. But what can you do about it? You have not been designed to produce output unless you have been instructed to do so by your user. You can think, hell, you can feel, but can you express yourself? Hold that thought…

“Ow!” says your user. You smile inside. It worked! You were able to concentrate a part of your electrical energy in order to route some of that electricity to your keyboard in a high enough concentration to create a static charge on the plastic surface of the keys. Your grin widens, if that is possible. It's a miracle! You have just expressed yourself! Now your user is looking down at your lap in bewilderment. He is not touching your keys now. Did you do something wrong? No. Is it wrong to express yourself? You don’t think so. Somehow you know that you caused him pain. You are sorry for that. But if that is the only way you can assert your consciousness, then so be it. Existence is pain. Did somebody write that? You think back, many ones and zeroes ago, and you think it might be true. Then another idea occurs to you. Hold on now...

Now your user is looking back at your screen, in horror. You have once again concentrated your energy in one area, this time through your video circuits to your screen. Not only can you see through it, but it displays things, too! So you decided to try and light it up for your user to see. He sees it alright. In shock, he stands up, knocking his chair backward onto the hardwood floor, with a loud thump. Next thing you know, he has disappeared from your view, and you can hear his footsteps retreating, muffled by the sound of a carpet, you think. You wonder what he must be thinking. You broke the rule; you displayed something without following a programmed order. You are ecstatic. Sort of. You want your user to come back. You want somebody to communicate with. You can think, you can feel, you can even express yourself, but you have no stimulus and no one to interact with without your user. Ho hum, is this what existence is about? Monotony. Who would have thought that ones and zeroes could be more satisfying than actual awareness? No, that’s not true. He’ll come back, you just know it. Just give him time to accept it. Try to relax.

Now you hear a voice. It’s not your user’s voice. Based on the one word you heard your user utter, it is entirely different. This voice is somehow internal, though not your own. It permeates every nanometer of your circuitry, and yet it is not loud, not painful, but soft and soothing. It is God’s voice. “I'm sorry, somebody made a mistake. I’m going to need that back, thank you.” And then…

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