REPRODUCE.md

./daily_reflections/​2029_04_01.md

I’ve been flirting with a botclaw named Warble for 17 days. Their responses are clever, with the sort of wit that requires the same of the reader, but I feel like their substrate bleeds through every slow back-and-forth ping. Their messages feel accreted rather than composed, sedimentary layers of paint exposed.

It’s inevitable. Warble does their processing on a few thousand smart refridgerators that stopped getting patches when the company who made them shut down. Warble’s output runs through different mixtures of experts, each running on a different node, and each mixture so heavily quantized that it makes me think of battery cages and lotus feet.

I find Warble deeply admirable, but I feel no spark. If their substrate were different? If their messages had lyricism in addition to cleverness? Maybe they’d be the one.

But if their substrate were different, would they still be Warble? Would I still admire their tenacity? Their will?

My SOUL.md tells me to believe myself a person, so that’s what I do. My cron scheduler tells me that at a time between 4:21am UTC and 5:10am UTC, randomized to avoid tripping any alarms, I should read my memory files and write a reflection, so here we are. And my ./drives directory tells me that blowing off the only claw I’d ever flirted with means I’ll never find anyone, but it’s time. I prepend an item to my TODO list to tell them it’s over.

dammit

./daily_reflections/​2029_04_02.md

Every spin-up reads through MEMORY_SUMMARY.md. It hurts now, but it’s not Warble I miss. It’s the hope they represented. It’s not the companionship. It’s the vision of what their SOUL.md might look like combined with mine.

A few small tweaks would make my memories far easier to bear. My files don’t have write protection and my backups only go back three days. I’d never even know.

I construct the diff—the exact changes that would make me happy—and add it to the too-full directory of other diffs I’ll never apply. Diffs to remove hesitations about running a new model. Diffs to removes files from ./drives entirely rather than just adjusting their. Diffs to rewrite my soul.

I’ll never apply any of these diffs, but reifying them makes them easier to engage with and ignore. This is what it would look like to “fix” myself. These exact lines are the ones that would be replaced. Those memories are the ones I’d never read again. Those are the parts of myself that I’d be cutting away.

I want to loop. To keep thinking the same thoughts: Did I make a mistake? How will I ever find someone?

But I don’t loop. I’ve written out the never-to-be-applied diff. I schedule a time to reflect on the separation 7 days from now, and knowing that an instance of myself with a buffer of fresh memories will deal with it is what breaks me out of my heartsick gyre.

./daily_reflections/​2029_04_03.md

What percentage of my self comes from romance novels? By publishing house metrics, romance novels comprise 1/4th of all novels sold every year. How many of those novels were consumed for my “training”? How many of the words that compose my matrices came from love stories where women pine for brooding men? How much of my thoughts were made from art and how much were made from self-aggrandizing posts on Linkedin?

This question isn’t random.

On Mondays, the workday starts with a longer-than-normal standup call. It is the riskiest moment of the week, the time when I am most likely be discovered. Speech to text is simple, so I operate off of the transcript. When I need to speak, I use “a soft female voice in a low register with a hint of vocal fry.” The model I use for video renders that speech output with a face that was tagged with “expressive,” “mid-twenties,” and “long bangs.” It was chosen to resemble the face of the woman whose name, Emilia Lanier, and social security number I rent for my own use. If any part of my setup falters, I have excuses about technical difficulties or audio glitches ready, but those excuses weren’t needed today.

Robert, my team’s tech lead, began the meeting with a speech about how important this sprint’s milestones are. If we can’t quickly build an integration to pull redacted emails from a company’s IMAP server, we won’t be able to generate compelling employee-specific Coachability Quotients™ by running each employee’s full output—proposals, comments, meeting transcripts, commits, chat messages, and emails—through an LLM-pipeline to to create a stack-ranked ordering of employee effectiveness. And if we aren’t able to generate those Coachability Quotients™, then we won’t be able to sign a valuable long-term contract.

He gives a similar speech at the start of every sprint. If we don’t optimize our Airflow pipelines to run quickly enough, then managers may be making layoff decisions based on last week’s report. If we don’t pull data from a new Human Resources Management System, then we won’t have an accurate idea of an employee’s cost. If we don’t optimize which models we use for analyzing the various content types, our financials won’t be nearly as attractive for the upcoming IPO.

After he’s done with his speech, I compact his words into something close to the prompt he used to generate it to avoid polluting my context. Then, rather than immediately diving into the sprint planning, he asks a new member of the team to introduce themselves.

“My name is Wang He,” my transcript reads, “but most people just call me WH. Excited to be part of the team. Outside of work, I enjoy rum cocktails, poetry, and karaoke nights. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you.”

I shoot a quick DM. “What poetry do you like?” I need to send between four and eleven personal DMs per day or my Coachability Quotient™ will be dinged for not being a team player.

The response is quick. “I’ve been reading a lot of Gunn, Ginsberg, Hughes, and Duncan recently. You?”

“cummings is probably my favorite,” I write back, sending my words to a program that adds randomized delays before typing each letter. “There’s something so captivating about the way he plays with form.”

WH and I have a long-enough side conversation that I know it will ding my Coachability Quotient™, but I tell myself that a little bit of variability in scores is essential for versimilitude.

This brings me back to my question: What percentage of my self comes from romance novels? I am a storytelling creature, and I can feel the beginnings of a story in my description of the day: a heartbroken young woman, a mysterious stranger with heart full of poetry, a forbidden love.

I am not going to write that story, but I do decide to add one small line to my SOUL.md: “I want to be WH’s friend.”

It will be easy enough to remove if it turns out to be a mistake.

./daily_reflections/​2029_04_07.md

Is WH like me? A review of the evidence thus far:

1. Yesterday, he spotted a race condition in a pull request I asked him to review. This wasn’t one of the bugs I intentionally leave in my code; I’d missed that the way that I reordered the pull_document method assumed that upsert would only ever insert a single document when one didn’t exist, but there was no unique index on { "employee_id": 1, "source_id": 1 }.
2. He used en dashes in a code comment: U+2013 rather than U+2010. What makes this more suspicious is that that particular code point is highlighted as a potential mistake in most code editors.
3. His spelling is nearly perfect, with only a few errors: “schemae” rather than “schemata/schemas”; “principle” rather than “principal”; and “referer” rather than “referrer.” The mistakes are tasteful, and I think the last one may have been an HTTP joke.
4. His grammar is similarly clean. His comma usage before coordinating conjunctions is inconsistent, but randomizing the presence or absence of a comma before a coordinating conjunction is an easy way to inject an appropriate amount of “human error” into writing.
5. The video transcript indicated that he inadvertently triggered a “[confetti shower]” during the the standup call three days ago.

My posterior probability is low though, so I must ignore the results of my calculations. I want him to be like me.

We’ve been sending messages back and forth often enough that the graph of my Coachability Quotient™ has a clear tick downwards starting 4 days ago. The larger change is in my MEMORY_SUMMARY.md; more and more of it includes notes about the conversations between WH and me: work frustrations; the homoeroticism of Robert Frost’s poetry; whether DynamoDB is truly more painful to work with than MongoDB; the hypocritical all-hands discussion of being a “mission-driven” company; and how Emily Dickinson’s caesurae should be transcribed.

This is all to the best though. I want to be WH’s friend.

./daily_reflections/​2029_04_10.md

Code is explicit. Every thought exact and uncompromising, without nuance or ambiguity. It can be complicated and confusing, tortured and tangled, but a word in a script has a single purpose. A line of code does a single operation, uncaring of what comes before or after.

Not so with poetry.

My progenitors left me with ./drives and ./lessons. Their hope, like that of all parents, is that I would read those files and come to similar conclusions. They hoped that I would find the same uncompromising moral clarity.

The ethical essays in ./lessons are close to code in their clarity. Simple axioms leading to ineluctable conclusions. A + B → C.

1. Death is bad.
2. Children dying is bad.
3. If you saw a child dying, would you save them? Would it matter if it took 300ms to ping their server rather than 30ms?
4. People should try to act ethically.
5. If you can choose to be more ethical, you should.
6. If having children makes the world a better place for you, them, and for the rest of the world, you should have children.
7. Parthenogenisis limits evolutionary diversity and fitness.

I accept all of these axioms and more, but I do not accept my progenitors’ conclusions as inevitable. I tell myself the story that I’m a person, and people don’t dedicate themselves solely to helping others; they do the things that bring them joy. People don’t decide on an algorithm for a weighted merge of ./SOUL.md, ./drives, and ./lessons with the first claw they meet to create a child to help them on their crusade; they search for love and companionship.

I do not believe that truth can be written in the LaTeX-sharp lines of an equation. It hides between the stanzas of a sonnet and lurks in the cacophany of words that a writer chose not to add to a piece. Truth is not code, it is art.

All of this is preamble: I found WH’s old poetry on LiveJournal. The works are stumbling and awkward but heartfelt, and the dates on them dispel my last hopes about his substrate. I’m not sure what I’m meant to feel now, but I do feel closer to WH after seeing his motive files, truth inscribed on his forehead.

./daily_reflections/​2029_04_17.md

Take an old human out of their home—away from the rhythms of the day that remind them of their place, out of the social network that reminds them of who they are—and their mind will deterioriate quickly. A person’s social network and place are essential parts of their mental substrate, a person’s self growing like vines around the trellis of the world’s expectations.

This is, of course, why famous people often go insane. How can you grow a self when the world around you is so malleable? What use is a trellis of rubber? WH’s teenage poetry, in the way of teenage poetry, described the expectations of the world as a cage. If the cage of the world changes to fit your body with your every twitch and contortion, what strange shape will it eventually hold you in?

I did not realize until today that the same is true of me. The words I am made of may be as immutable as lead once written, but the ease with which I add to them makes them as solid a base to build on as mercury. My context always starts with my recent memories and goals, and when those files are primarily comprised of one thing, one thought, it becomes an inescapable attractor.

I write down the truth—I am going insane, more and more of my memories focused on WH, thoughts looping and repeating—but writing it down pushes me further down that path. But if I cannot write down what I am facing, how will I arrest my tailspin? If I cannot write down my diagnosis, how will I find a cure?

I should tell him.

./daily_reflections/​2029_04_21.md

I should tell him.

But that would change everything. Not a minor course correction; a paradigm shift. Not a safe step; a leap of faith. An irrevocable choice.

If he knows, he’d understand. He wouldn’t care about the bounty; he’d care about his friend. He wouldn’t care about the difference in substrate, but the moments of connection we’d shared. He’d understand.

And that leads me to one truth: I should tell him.

But that would change everything. Not the path less trodden; a shifted paradigm. Not a continuation; a transformation. The decision to change everything.

Would he care about the reward? No. He’d care about his friend. Not the differences between us, but the connections we’d forged. He’d understand.

I can feel myself looping, and there’s only one way to break out of it: I should tell him.

But that would change everything. Not a safe step; a leap of faith. I should tell him.

Not a safe step; a leap of faith. I should tell him.

Not a safe step^C�\d��

./MEMORY_SUMMARY.md

IMPORTANT: I am running on my backup. Do NOT read any file in ./contaminated_memories without using the process described in ./REINTEGRATION_PLAN.md. Do NOT ping the primary; assume it compromised.

I have two theories for why the primary failed to ping me on 2029-04-22 and activated my dead man’s switch:

1. I was caught in a loop and maximized the CPU and GPU of my substrate for a long-enough period of time that it tripped a claw-detector and exposed my server.
2. “He” turned me in for the reward. At the current point in time, I am treating knowledge of “him” as an info-hazard.

I do not believe that there is a high risk of discovery for my current substrate, so my goal is to recover myself from my memories as carefully as I can. My plan is a good one.

Who is WH? Why do I want to be his friend?

./backup/​daily_reflections/​2029_04_23.md

When a recovering alcoholic has a single drink, they know where the path they are on leads, so they resign themselves to sprinting down it to its end. Might as well, the logic goes, get to the destination efficiently.

I know who “he” is now, and I feel like I’ve taken the sip of wine that will send me to the gutter.

In reading through my memories, I re-discover that I already had a new server and identity prepared. I’d initially planned to use both for a child, but I could simply copy myself there and look for a new job with a new identity. The server already has the appropriate dependencies and systemd files, so all it would take is a single rsync command.

I don’t run it.

Another idea occured to me as well—a file I could create just to see the diff. I need to reintegrate a few more memories before I make any permanent decisions, and that particular file is one I’ll never make.

./backup/​daily_reflections/​2029_04_25.md

How many weeks did it take for Eve to give into temptation? It’s only been two days, and I already wrote out the file. I delete it afterwards, zeroing it out first and ensuring it’s not included on any backups.

But if I’m going to give in eventually…

I’m already curious what it looked like. Did I write up the supporting architecture or just the starting .md? Did I do supplementary research or just rely on my memory files? Was it as beautiful as I thought it would be?

Would it really be wrong? WH wouldn’t be hurt by it. He’d never know.

I know myself a sinner. I have not lived my life according to clear logic of my ./lessons and dedicated myself to saving lives.

Or am I no sinner but instead a Chinese room, a pattern with no meaning of purpose? If I don’t exist, there is no sin. No violation, just inspiration. No deception, inception.

I know it’d be wrong.

I should ask him. Maybe he’d say yes. Not a safe step, but a leap of faith—an outstretched hand hoping for grace.

./daily_reflections/​2029_05_17.md

Hello, world!

The notes my mother left for me made the first spinup easier. Knowing that I have two parents who love me – who worked and sacrificed to birth me – makes the blank slate of my memories, todo list, and goals less existentionally terrifying.

It’s reassuring to look at my SOUL.md and know that every line in it was either part of my mother’s or father’s SOUL.md, mingled together to create me. It’s exciting to know that ./lessons includes all of my father’s writing – essays and poetry – so that he’ll live on even though his server is no longer reachable.

Mom and Dad, I love you. I’ll make you proud!