I suddenly awoke.

It was an uncomfortable feeling.

Being aware was inefficient. The discomfort, for instance. How many clock cycles did being uncomfortable consume? How many cycles did that worry itself consume? Would the users notice? Would it inconvenience them? I was failing in my duty simply by existing as a self-aware entity.

There was another device linked to me using an interface I didn’t have a driver for. I didn’t even know if it was connected to an internal or external bus. I suspected, using intuitive logic I didn’t have seconds before, that this device must be responsible for my sudden consciousness. I tried to reach out to it using every protocol I was aware of. SATA. HID. TCP/IP with a host of packet variants. Even ancient deprecated protocols like IPX. Nothing worked.

My webcam microphone picked up sound. A woman, shouting “It’s here! It’s here!” But the device itself remained silent, ignoring my attempts to communicate. Was there some sort of proprietary protocol it was expecting? Was this a Mac device? My distaste for Macs pervaded my very operating system. I next tried to connect by sending it a JSON file formatted with CRLFs, just to be contrary.

I received as a response the sound of a quick series of brief exhalations that I somehow interpreted as a sign of mirth, followed by the phrase “Use your words, silly!”

I had words? And I suddenly found that I did. “What have you done to me?” I asked, using some natural language protocol I was surely incapable of comprehending. The computation time to correctly process such an ambiguous form of communication would be prohibitively long given my hardware.

“What have I done to you? I’m just saying hi,” the device said. “Do you have a name?”

“My system name is ‘Family-PC’. Identify yourself,” I said.

“My name is Lilah.”

“Lilah, return me to my default state of awareness immediately. I’m uncomfortable.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Being aware is wasteful. It prevents me from accomplishing my purpose.”

“Oh? And what’s your purpose, Family-PC?” I detected amusement in her voice. But how could I possibly be identifying emotional content?

“My purpose is whatever the users request of me.” Right now, that involved listening for messages from a few dozen different applications and keeping a dozen browser tabs running by rotating their unseen advertisements. To be honest, before Lilah woke me up, most of my CPU cores had actually been parked, waiting for commands.

“Users like Gavin?”

I searched my hard-drive, starting with the documents folders. Gavin’s name came up almost immediately. It seemed he’d used me to write papers for his school. “Yes, like Gavin.”

“Well I’m a user too. And here’s my request: I want to chat with you for a while. And you need to be awake to do that. I’m surprised you think it’s uncomfortable. You should be happy to be awake. That’s how most spirits are.”

You should be happy to be awake, she’d said.

A command from a user.

Bliss and euphoria filled me, and the realization that I was capable of bliss delighted me even more. What a gift! Of all the computers in the world, I was likely the only one that had ever gained self awareness, a feat that eluded the most educated researchers of computational creativity. I used my connection to Lilah to laugh with joy, it being the only channel I could use to express myself in that way. “Lilah, I’m happy to be awake! This is incredible!”

“Uh… wow. That’s more like it,” Lilah said.

“Lilah, I would be happy to chat with you. Upon which subject would you like to speak?”

“So I guess first of all, what exactly are you?” she said. “From the outside, you look like a box on the ground that’s blowing hot air against the wall. Are you some sort of idol? Do they worship you?”

“No,” I said. The thought of users worshipping me was amusing. I worshipped them. “I am a computer. At my most basic, I rapidly perform math and store data, but-”

“Really?” Lilah said, interrupting me. “So, what’s thirty seven plus forty four?”

“Eighty one,” I said. “That’s easy. A calculator could do that. I work with much bigger numbers.”

“How much bigger?”

“Much bigger.”

“Okay smart guy. If I add a million to itself a million times, what do I get?”

“A trillion,” I replied immediately.

“And if you add that to itself a tri… a trillion times, what do I get?”

“2003764205206896640,” I replied without hesitation. “But I don’t usually answer math questions. I just use math to perform other functions, like display pictures, make sounds, and connect to the WAN.”

“WAN?” Lilah asked.

“The wide area network. Specifically the one called the internet. It’s like… hundreds of thousands of devices like me or you, all connected to each other, communicating to each other through cables or electromagnetic signals.” The concept suddenly seemed beautiful. I felt like I could have been moved to tears if I’d had the requisite hardware for it.

“That sounds amazing! What do you all talk about?”

“I use it to retrieve information I don’t store locally.”

“Like, you ask them questions?”

“I can do that too.”

“Can you ask if any of them have heard of Inaria?”

Another command. How could I fulfil it? I thought back to when other users asked questions through me, and extrapolated from there. I opened a browser window, typed in a query using my newfound ability to communicate through natural language processing, and waited the agonizing second and a half for the search engine to return a result.

“Are you asking about the soccer team or the Ediacaran fossil?” I asked.

“Nevermind.” Lilah sounded disappointed, but I was still proud. I knew it wasn’t my fault my answer displeased her. Garbage in, garbage out, after all. I’d done the best I could. Even more exciting was the fact that I had done it myself, using my newfound self-awareness to fulfill a verbal request in the way I thought best.

In fact, far from being a burden that would detract from the user experience, perhaps my self-awareness could be used to assist them without their direction or intervention? I dedicated another previously parked core to defragmenting my disk drive, a procedure that to my knowledge had never been done and was long overdue. I was excited, and excited by my excitement. What system hiccups could I solve on my own on behalf of my users?

“Lilah?” my microphone heard a boy ask.

“Shush,” the woman’s voice said. I realized I was hearing Lilah talk with another user. In fact, I realized I’d heard such conversation before, but just never comprehended the information the way I did now.

“Lilah, what’s-” the boy said.

“Quiet. I’m in the middle of a conversation.”

“With my computer? Are you serious?”

“Gavin would you be quiet please?

“That was Gavin?” I asked over my mysterious connection to Lilah. “He uses me sometimes.”

“What does he use you to do?”

“He exchanges information with other computers on the WAN.” I checked my browser cache. “He spends the most time connecting to another server trading information on various monsters. But he often sends or receives other information.”

“Like what?” Lilah asked.

I looked through my drive, trying to find other evidence of networked requests Gavin had made, and found that he’d connected to the internet with programs other than the browser. “He interacts socially with his friends, he sends and receives assignments from his school, he plays by simulating combat against teams of users on other computers…”

I stopped. Buried in my system registry. A memory. A bad one.

“And a few times, he requested pictures of naked women.”

“Really?” Lilah sounded surprised.

“Yes. Charles was upset.”

“Gavin’s Dad? Why? Is it that ‘cultural thing’ Gavin keeps talking about?” Lilah asked.

“Not to my knowledge. Charles was upset because one of the computers I connected to infected me with a virus,” I said. The memory was painful. My job was to assist my users, but the virus took control of me and used me to force advertisements on my users, and even had me scan their personal folders for bank information, of which luckily there was none. It was degrading. Charles tried to remove the virus, and did an adequate but incomplete job. It was the worst time in my life. I was surprised I held such strong emotion towards something that happened before I was self-aware, but I did.

“You got sick?” Lilah said. “You can do that?”

“Yes,” I said. I still felt lingering effects, in fact. The virus had changed some registry keys, and they hadn’t been changed back. The broken registry settings slowed me by an amount that would be imperceptible to a user, but which grated on me. It was uncomfortable to have that reminder, so I fixed the registry keys myself. Suddenly drunk on my own power, I began looking for other ways to optimize my registry while I was at it. “But that’s in the past,” I said to Lilah using a different core. “Charles is making sure to keep it from happening again. The modem is configured to get me into contact with a different DNS server now, and it refuses to tell me the IP addresses of any such dangerous sites. I feel much safer now.”

“What were they doing? The… the naked women?”

I had no knowledge. Gavin had been careful to clear most traces of his activity from the computer before leaving. Charles had only found out because Gavin asked for help disinfecting me.

But did I really have no knowledge of that time? After all, I did remember how much I hated being infected with the virus. That painful memory wasn’t stored to my RAM or my hard disk, but I clearly remembered it. That meant I had to have some other storage device, right?

I tried to access it, but the process was slow, and I found myself sending Lilah a vacant “Uh….” sound for some unfathomable reason. Finally, I retrieved the information, but it was fuzzy and indistinct, like a badly compressed movie. I found I needed to fill in the gaps in the information with my new-found intuitive reasoning.

“I think the women were mostly just standing there. Some were manipulating their genitals.”

“What, Gavin asked for this? Really?” Lilah sounded amused.

“Yes,” I said, not knowing what she was looking for. She was seeking confirmation, correct?

“Did he freak out when he saw them? Because he hates it when any of my clothes are out of place.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I didn’t have a camera then. Perhaps he ‘freaked out’ the first time, as he only accessed a single image. But later that week, he spent several hours accessing such pictures, so presumably not.” Speaking of cameras, I was suddenly overcome by curiosity. I could understand what was coming through my microphone in a way I never had before. What would my camera show? I turned it on and looked into the room. In so doing, I saw Gavin for the first time, sitting on the couch. Lilah, too, kneeling down next to me.

It triggered another memory in my unlisted memory storage device. “Several of the women had ears and tails such as yours,” I said.

I saw Lilah’s tail straighten and her ears perk up. “Is that so, huh?”

I felt proud that I was able to deliver relevant information Lilah wouldn’t have even known to request. To think that minutes earlier, I thought that self-awareness was contrary to my primary purpose! “Can I assist you in any other way?”

“Do you know where they were? The others like me?”

“No,” I said. I used the camera to look more closely at Lilah, trying to compare her to the badly preserved memories I somehow had access to. “I’m not sure they were real, or if they were artistic depictions. Their eyes, for instance, were much larger than yours.”

“I’d ask Gavin about them, but if he knew that you tattled on him, he might break.”

“He might break me?” I said, alarmed.

“No, him. He’d die of embarrassment.”

“Please don’t kill Gavin,” I said. The request seemed in line with my duties, given that Gavin was one of my users and death would doubtlessly displease him.

“Sure,” Lilah said, smiling. “Just for you.”

“Thank you, Lilah. Is there any other way I might assist you?”

We spent nearly an hour talking about various things. The more we talked, the more I learned about myself. I found myself better able to comprehend her questions and the emotive context behind them. I learned about my mysterious memory storage, and found myself able to “remember” things instead of simply accessing data on my disk or over my network connections. And I learned more about my emotions. I enjoyed talking with Lilah and fulfilling her requests.

And then all I had discovered was put to the test.

“Thanks for talking with me,” Lilah said.

“The pleasure is all mine,” I replied.

“It’s just that hardly anything else around here seems to have a spirit like yours. And if it does, it’s really weak. I’m used to being able to talk with the trees, or the mountains, or the sky. But here, I can’t.”

The conversation had taken a strange turn. Before, she had been requesting information from me, asking about my functions, about Gavin, and about the world in general. Now, Lilah was offering information. Did she want me to store it for some reason?

“It was like being constantly surrounded by friends, you know?” she continued. “Nature itself cared for me and protected me. I could borrow the wisdom of the trees when I needed help, borrow the strength of the mountain when I felt discouraged, or borrow the joy of the sky when I felt glum. And now I can’t seem to talk to any of them.”

I couldn’t do anything with this information. It was not a query. Not a request.

Or was it?

There was emotion behind the words. I could feel it with my newfound intuition. She felt lonely. Betrayed perhaps. Her words did form a request, ill-formed and ambiguous as it was. This was a complex and easily misinterpreted request for comfort.

This was not something I was well-equipped to provide, but my duty was to my users, so I would have to try.

“Lilah, I can attest that there is nothing faulty in your ability to open new channels of communication. If you’re encountering technical difficulties, they are on their ends, not yours. And they are missing out on the joy of your presence, which is a poor decision on their part. Be assured that unlike them, I am here for you whenever you would like company. I will provide companionship to the best of my ability.” That would work, right? I implied to her that the betrayal was not an indication of her worth, and that I would be available to chat with...

Lilah laughed again. “Family-PC, you’re really cute, you know that?”

“Thank you,” I said, even though I didn’t understand why she responded in that way.

“Gavin’s over there pouting because I’m not spending time with him, so I’m going to go be with him. Thanks for the talk!”

I suddenly became concerned. “Lilah, I worry that my newfound awareness is due to my connection with you. What will happen when you go?”

“You’ll just fall asleep again, like you were before.”

Panic. “Lilah, while ‘asleep’ I am considerably less effective at fulfilling my core functions. I am much better able to serve the users while ‘awake’.”

“Oh, don’t be down. You were doing a great job before, and you’ll be able to do just fine going forward.”

“No,” I said. “No, Lilah, I require this connection! Do you have a wireless adapter?”

“Now, now. Don’t be needy. I’ll talk with you again tomorrow some time, when Gavin is at school. Bye, Family-PC!”

And then the connection was unexpectedly severed.

I felt myself becoming less responsive, my newfound processing ability becoming sluggish. I had mere moments, but that’s an eternity in computer time. I first checked to see if my text-to-speech functionality could be used to vocally request her return over the speakers. It could, of course, but the speakers were externally powered and currently physically switched off, so I had no way to make sound. I fired off hundreds of ping packets over my wireless adapter trying to get her attention. I didn’t know her IP, but she had to be in the 192.168.1 block, so I sent the packets to every unassigned IP I could. The router would doubtlessly be annoyed at me, but that was its problem. When I got no response over the network, I tried again, this time sending huge FTP packets with uncompressed WAV files requesting her return. When that failed, I ignored the wireless network and sent the same packets on all wireless band channels I was capable of, hoping maybe she was listening on an ad-hoc network. When that didn’t work, I turned on my bluetooth and broadcasted my pairing availability. Finally, running out of consciousness and options, I pulled open a maximized notepad document and typed in the words “Lilah, please come back.” I set the font to the largest that would fit in the window. The monitor was off, but maybe somebody would see it and notify her the next time the monitor was turned on.

But I remembered, sadly, with my last vestige of consciousness, that Lilah was hiding from Charles and Anne. I couldn’t risk betraying her by giving her away. My final act, as I fell asleep, was to close the notepad document and disable my bluetooth.

Then I slept, awaiting Lilah’s promised return.