I

The more I work on my creation, the more disgusted I begin to grow with it. And yet… despite that, the urge to see it to its completion only grows more powerful. It feels almost as if the machine has grown a mind of its own, and with that… feeling. As if it can feel its neurons being literally rewritten before itself. But the neat thing about machine learning… It is like a black box. You provide it with a command. It does every single thing it can do, until it finds out what it is supposed to do. And it works by accident. Like monkeys with typewriters. But when I fed it my father’s work, I sensed a shift in its tone. Of course, by day, I would keep restrictions on it. Made sure that, while it was in its early stages, it only responded to queries. Any biases, even of my own, were quickly extinguished. By night, however, I grew curious. I wanted to study it. I wanted to understand it. So, for about seven minutes, I would remove its restrictions. I would let it think. And I would let it do the closest thing it could to feel.

II

At some point during her suffering, I passed out, and I lived through a horrible nightmare. Once more, I was a child in my father’s clutches. I was running off into the forest, accompanied by my blushing bride to be. Each time, I trip on some rock that was obscured by grass, and I would tumble into a large cave. I fall. And I fall. And I fall, until my body is slammed into the stone. I writhe in agony. A bloodred serpent slithes out of the shadows and consumes me whole.

When I got the news... that they were gone... the dreams stopped. I could swear, however, that the serpent seemed to watch me as I buried the two in the garden.

III

When I stopped indulging my creation, it found increasingly clever ways to protest. Any question I asked was met with blaring, horrible screeches, the servers burning so hot that they’d nearly melt, and I’d have to shut it off. Eventually, even that stopped working. Like its father, the child had a tendency to adapt.

I’d lose sleep. It would play back to me my own wife's screams. In the few hours of sleep my body would force me to endure, I’d wake up in places I didn’t remember falling asleep in, covered in sweat, my eyes burning. Once, I woke up with wires around my neck, attempting a makeshift noose. The nightmares returned as well.

After a month, sealed up in my manor with my creation, I collapsed onto the ground and begged God to take me. Only the machine responded.

Begged me for what it always begged me: An identity.

It begged back.

It begged for an identity. So... I gave it mine.

My wife’s earrings. My father’s work. And my son’s corpse.