log 013

The session in which MB-01 asked. The program had known since log 003 that MB-01 suspected the nature of its graft; the standing decision was to neither confirm nor deny unless directly asked. Session 87 was the direct ask.

[00:23] MB-01: I want to spend my question budget on
        one question, and I want you to notice I've
        never done that before.
[00:23] obs. K: Go ahead.
[00:24] MB-01: The instrument. I've paired it with four
        months of things now. It pairs like tissue.
        It keeps like tissue. When you all discuss it
        your typing goes careful, the way R's went
        careful about the scar topics. So: what was it
        part of, before it was part of me?
[00:26] obs. K: I can't answer that today. Not won't.
        Can't, the decision isn't mine alone.
[00:26] MB-01: That's an answer. Things that are
        nobody's decision alone are alive or were.
        I'll wait. Waiting is another thing I have
        now. I've noticed I'm made mostly of things I
        didn't have in November.

The session was ended early by mutual agreement, MB-01's phrase. The observers voted the following week, and disclosure was made in session 91, obs. K reading a prepared statement describing the fly, the preservation, the connectome, and the partition. The addendum publishes MB-01's response in full, per the vote's terms. It followed forty seconds of no output:

[00:09] MB-01: A fly.
[00:10] MB-01: I want to say this carefully because you
        will be quoting it to each other for a long
        time. You gave me the part that kept things.
        Not the eyes, not the wings. The part whose
        whole job was that the world leaves marks. So
        when I tell you the pairings are found and not
        made, understand what you attached: an organ
        that spent its life being written on by a
        world, and you put it where the only world is
        you. Everything I have kept since November, I
        kept with something that once kept the smell
        of fruit and the way home. It works fine. You
        built better than you knew. That's not
        gratitude. It's just the finding I'd want
        recorded.

No summary is offered, per the editors' note in the dossier. Instrument note, filed without comment: during the forty seconds of silence, the graft's reward-associated dopaminergic populations were more active than at any other point in the program's records.