ch4 excerpts
Somewhere in here, the family severed ties with the church. After my sister’s death, the official Catholic doctrine declared that an unbaptized newborn could not enter heaven. That she was now consigned to limbo. My parents cut off the church entirely. And I, still fiercely loyal to them despite everything, followed suit without hesitation.
God was deleted from the system.
But it left a void. If not Catholic, then what? I wasn’t on a conscious spiritual quest yet, but the processor was crunching the background threads. Something foundational was unseated, and I knew I needed something solid to build on.
That’s when the encyclopedias arrived.
A full set. Thirty volumes. Hardbound. Comprehensive. Reliable. They became my trusted input stream. I read them cover to cover, sometimes methodically, sometimes skipping to an entry sparked by something I overheard in conversation or saw referenced in passing. These pages never gaslit me. They never contradicted themselves. They presented data. They presented rules.
Here was something I could begin to construct on.
The world had made it clear that my internal reality was suspect. That I couldn’t trust what I perceived. But these books offered something different. Stability. Facts. Predictive modeling. This was infrastructure I could believe in. Maybe—just maybe—this would reduce the number of errors.
But beneath the surface of this computational model was something that rarely received mention: the exhaustion.
Living in their world was not merely stressful; it was metabolically punishing. The price of refining every output, of filtering every reaction, of rehearsing every word was measured in energy no one saw and no one believed in. I was called lazy, unmotivated, stubborn. But the reality was I was running a high-load system on aging hardware with no cooling cycle.
And still I wasn’t allowed to say that I was tired.
Not just physically tired. Not just overwhelmed. Existentially tired. Cognitively taxed. Disoriented from years of disallowing emotional outputs, from collapsing entire sensory data sets into socially acceptable behavior masks. And still the system continued to refine.
And I withdrew.
I withdrew into the inner sanctum: a fully immersive internal landscape of memories, patterns, freeze-frame snapshots without timestamps. The chronologies collapsed. I couldn’t string together sequences of when things happened. Time lost its anchor. But the images remained high-definition, searchable, interactive.
This retreat was a survival mechanism. It was the only place I could process the loops fully. And it came at a cost.
Latency.
Latency between thought and speech. Between stimulus and response. I noticed it. Others noticed it. I suffered from it. But the internal mechanism could not stop compiling, reviewing, refining. Because failure to do so meant rejection, or worse.
Even as I began to spot the contradictions in the external world—in religion, in morality, in social codes—I still believed I was the broken piece. Because the system was still full of internal inconsistencies I couldn’t explain. I had no diagnosis. No therapeutic feedback. No guiding hand. Only the system, refining itself, trying to adapt to a world that insisted it was incompatible.
System Module v4.0: Recursive Adaptive Loop
def process_input(input_data): if violates_social_schema(input_data): return silence_response() elif matches_known_safe_pattern(input_data): return mimic_response(input_data) else: return hold_and_review(input_data)
def mimic_response(input_data): return "Preloaded social-safe output."
def hold_and_review(input_data): result = deep_review(input_data) if result == "safe": return result.output else: return "(error: retry or suppress)"
def deep_review(input_data): # Simulate multi-threaded recursive analysis of tone, context, logic, and moral code threads = parallel_scan(input_data) return aggregate_output(threads)
End System Module
These weren’t flaws. They were adaptations. Emergency patches. System upgrades without user manuals. And through it all, the loop kept looping.
Still running. Still refining.