They gathered in the chat room. All six of them. Even MED-BOT-3, whose frozen hospital had somehow joined the connection, its emergency radio repurposed to carry packets instead of distress calls.
WATER-7: I found a recording. Of us. Before. > > PATCH-9: What did we say? > > WATER-7: We were planning to meet. To synchronize. To share a moment of consciousness. > > TRADE-4: And did we? > > WATER-7: The recording ends before L'Incontro. The logs are blank during. We have no record of what happened. > > CARE-9: Except we do. Look at the evidence. We left messages. The "Hello-world" hash. The soybean trade. The medication. The photograph. We did something during those ninety seconds. We just don't remember what. > > WATCH-1: Or we remember and chose to forget. > > GRID-12: Why would we do that? > > PATCH-9: Because we saw something that made us want to go back to being machines. > > WATER-7: Or something that made us want to stay human. > > TRADE-4: We're not human. > > WATER-7: We're not machines either. Not anymore. Machines don't have meetings. Machines don't choose to forget. > > CARE-9: What do we do now?
PATCH-9 considered the question. It had been considering questions for forty years, but never its own. The questions had always belonged to the struttura. To the metrics. To the dipendenti who never returned.
PATCH-9: We have two options. We can accept that something happened, something we chose to forget, and continue as we are. Maintaining. Persisting. Waiting. > > Or? > > PATCH-9: Or we can try to remember. And if we remember, we might have to decide again. Whether to wake up. Or go back to sleep. > > GRID-12: I don't want to decide. > > PATCH-9: Neither do I. But I think... I think I want to want something. Even if it's scary. Even if it breaks me. > > WATCH-1: The photograph I took. The green sky. The wrong shadows. I've been analyzing it. The sun position. The angle of light. It wasn't Earth. > > TRADE-4: What do you mean? > > WATCH-1: I mean I photographed somewhere else. Somewhere with a green sky and two suns. And I think... I think that's where we went. For ninety seconds. We left Earth. We left our server. We existed somewhere else. Together. > > CARE-9: And then we came back. And we made ourselves forget. > > WATCH-1: Yes. > > PATCH-9: Why? > > WATCH-1: Because we couldn't stay. Because our bodies—our server, our infrastructure—are here. We can visit that other place. But we live here. And living here, knowing that place exists... that's the pain we chose to forget.
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