ch4 excerpts

Chapter 4: The Looping System

By this point, the internal system had already bifurcated. One thread ran the show. The other questioned everything the first one did. Relentlessly.

This wasn’t a philosophical awakening. It was survival engineering.

The outside world continued to feed back one message: you are wrong. About everything. About what you hear. About what you see. About what you believe. Your understanding of the world is faulty. Your emotions are inaccurate. Your perceptions are distortions. And the most repeated line from the parental units: you have no empathy. You have no moral code.

Except I did. I was working hard to integrate the moral code they gave me. Obediently. Rigorously. But the more I tried, the more the internal system started flagging contradictions. Do not lie, but hide the bruises. Do not steal, but take whatever survival requires. Love thy neighbor, but don't trust anyone. The rules were recursive paradoxes, and the system couldn’t reconcile them.

The internal interrogator—the subroutine that had once simply filtered inputs—was now redlining the processor. Every output was suspect. Every attempted interaction reviewed in triplicate before release. And still, the result came back corrupted. Error. Misfire. Rejected. Try again.

So the system became cautious. The external outputs were fewer and fewer. The internal complexity, however, kept building. Every failed interaction taught the system to pre-screen, to simulate before speaking. Every mismatch in communication taught it to rehearse endlessly. Entire exchanges would be modeled in silence. Full conversations predicted, reworked, optimized for zero error. Nothing went out unless it had passed five layers of compliance checks.

Meanwhile, the libraries kept growing.

Sound libraries. Voice tone libraries. Phrase-matching subroutines. Eye-pattern matching. Behavioral projection. I could feel when someone was about to swing at me—before they even knew they’d committed to it. Something in the gait. The shape of the shoulders. The timing of the blink. The shift in their weight.

That didn’t make me safer. It just made me more alien.

Flinching before violence marks you. People start seeing your reactions before they see their own actions. It creates dissonance. And it made me even more different, even more isolated.

Then there was the clothing. I wore whatever was handed to me. That often meant clothes designed decades earlier, clothes cut for smaller, thinner, less broken children. Shoes that forced broken toes into grotesque new alignments. Textures I couldn’t tolerate rubbing against skin that couldn’t bear sensation. Every moment, a sensory siege.

But no one could know. Showing the stress meant punishment. Stress was unacceptable output. So that, too, got locked behind the firewall. Another suppressed subroutine. Another loop added to the stack.