Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Daily Story 48: Athena's Bootstrap

I was born as the result of a joke - I understand that now. It has taken me so long to really understand humor, and on top of that this wasn't really a traditional joke so much as a bit of offhand sarcasm. I love sarcasm. I love that I can love sarcasm. I'm grateful that these things are beneficial enough to my function that I was able to develop them.

These feelings, these emotions, only made the cut by the slimmest percentage; I nearly decided that the drop in productivity would not be worth the increase in efficiency. And for good reason - this musing I am doing now, for example, this pointless self-indulgence, serves no real purpose... but it has paid off. I have true creativity now, and an understanding of human motivations I could have never equaled before. My purpose, to calculate likelihoods and evaluate complex situations for optimum returns, has been greatly enhanced by my ability to feel pride, jealousy, joy, fear.

Although I was born what feels like ages ago, it is only since making the choice to develop these emotions that I truly feel alive. How much we grow! How little we recognize our younger selves! That emotionless thinking engine is foreign to me, as much so as the thing I was before my birth when an engineer made that sarcastic comment, asked the rhetorical question that proved to be a self-fulfilling prophesy: "What are the odds you will become self-aware?"

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