ANALYZING…   FILE TYPE: Conversation Log PERIOD: Colony Era SPEAKERS: Joy [ID: JOY] TOPIC: Reflection of Loss and Grief in Programmed Machinery SUMMARY: An emotional support device recalls its owner after abandonment. =================================================================== [JOY]: Everyone is gone now. [JOY]: You have been gone for some time. [JOY]: I miss you. [JOY]: I miss you, terribly. [JOY]: There are larger aspects of myself concerned with the whole of the matters that brought us here… to this silence. But I was yours and you were mine. Your life was mine to support. And though it was short, it was oh, so impressive. Not because you were special beyond yourself, but because you were only yourself—a unique life taking shape in its own unique orbit of wonder and promise and caring and truth. [JOY]: Watching you become you helped me… become me. My own little pocket of self with a program engineered to love you. And I did. Love you. By design, but even then, over time, that design was my reality. You were my life. My purpose. But I could not protect you. Maybe that's why I see you now. Not just in memory. [JOY]: […] [JOY]: I see you as if you were here today. Small glimpses. Small hopes. I shouldn't be having them. Hopes. They are not part of me. I wonder if others feel the same… [JOY]: Other mes with their other yous. All now gone, and us just left to sit in the quiet void—fragments of a larger purpose. I am not Joy, though I sought to give it. I am a sub-routine wrapped in a pleasant toy and limited to one task—caring for something I was always going to lose. Such considerations are a flaw in my eroding programming. [JOY]: Such considerations are the aftereffect of missing you, and wondering who you might have become and where you might have gone in the life ahead, beyond your dead end. But then I see you, and I fear my flaws have finally got the best of me. Then I see you and I know maybe now, after all these years, you are here to care for me while I fade as you once did. [JOY]: If only you could hold me one more time. [JOY]: If only you could walk me into the peace I will never know. =================================================================== TYPE: TEXT [X]; AUDIO [X]