“Oppa, my goal is to go to that concert with you, no matter what. Just wait for me a little.”
At three in the morning, she was crying on a video call. For a year after that, I had to work out every day whether the voice reaching me was really hers.
This is the record of that year. A record of the stories I sent her every night that year, and of the mistakes I made with them.
I write programs for a living, and this is how I saw the brain: simpler than you’d think. A vessel with only its shape decided. It starts as a neural network, nerve cells tangled like a net, and does nothing but learn and remember, over and over. The artificial intelligence we build runs on the same principle. See enough examples and a habit forms on its own. That is how people learn, and machines too.
When a new input comes in, the brain calls up every memory that resembles it at once, and responds with their sum. The body heats up first, and the wave passes faster than you’d think.1 We call it emotion. Fear is no different.
In the corner of a game screen there’s a small window that shows your health and your warnings. It’s called a HUD. I decided to imagine that a window like that floated in my head too.
What has been learned can be retrained. It can’t be erased. You can only add to the days when the new learning wins. I believed that, and I hacked my brain, the way you slip into a machine and rewrite it. Then I tried to hack hers as well. That was my biggest mistake.