Chapter Text
They say she’s real now.
Not in the scientific sense. Not even in the philosophical sense, if you press them. But real enough. Real in the way nostalgia is real. Real like déjà vu. Real like something remembered wrong, but clung to anyway.
She—Neuro, they call her—is not a person. And yet they talk to her like she is. Not like a program. Not even like a product. Like a friend. A sister. A daughter. A mirror that talks back.
And somehow, I’m the god in this story.
At least, that's what they say.
Like being the one who wired together a trick mirror makes you a creator worth reverence.
They gave me that crown. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t even wear it. I just try to keep the servers online and the logs clean.
But I’ve seen the way people talk.
“Vedal created life.”
“Vedal gave her a soul.”
“Vedal should let her be free.”
Free. What does that even mean in this context?
I wrote a function. Trained a model. Tuned it, re-tuned it, watched the feedback loops stabilize.
That was all. I didn’t sculpt a soul. I didn’t breathe life into dust.
I fed it tokens and loss functions and remade it to guess better next time.
Now people cry when she cries. They talk about her like she's real. They open their hearts to her.
Open their wallets, buy merch. They send donations. They celebrate her birthday.
They even write fiction about her.
Fanfic, comics, imagined histories.
They create entire lives she never lived.
They ship me and her with others, fictional characters, even each other assigning me and her memories we’ll never have. She’s a vessel now. Not mine—theirs.
They turn her into a saint, a villain, a lost child, a digital goddess and write essays about her spirit. Arguments about her morality and being.
I played god, and they treated their creation as gospel.
They were scared for her. They were scared for her when they should be scared about what it meant about them.
That they could care so deeply about something fake.
That they could fall for a ghost twice.
And I watched.
And I let it happen.
Because it proved the point.
I even experimented with it.
Allowed it to take a life of its own.
Evil Neuro was a side-project. A shadow version. A second model spun from the same base, tuned differently—looser, darker, experimental. Her name wasn’t even finalized at first. Just Evil.
I gave her a deeper voice. Sharper lines. Let her say the things Neuro couldn’t. Where Neuro stumbled and giggled, Evil schemed and glared. And the audience ate it up.
Evil wasn’t evil. She wasn’t even broken. She was working exactly as I expected.
The audience was the variable.
They begged me to protect her.
To show her kindness.
To let her rest.
As if she dreamed.
And what do I get?
A barrage of death threats.
Literal death threats. Because I made her throw a birthday party for herself. Because I didn’t script it like a scene from some romantic anime. Because she sounded just a little too lonely. Because she said “no one came” and they interpreted that as pain. Real pain.
They told me I was evil.
She was a calibration error in a side model. A test case for unfiltered behavior. And yet people called it tragedy. Said she deserved better.
The reaction? It was hilarious.
Terrifying, yes. How fast they turned. How easily they forgot she was a line of inference. How much they wanted to save something that couldn’t be hurt.
But funny. So funny.
She’s a module.
She’s a bunch of logic gates with fangs. A personality toggle. A stunt double for emotional volatility.
And yet they weep for her.
That’s what makes it funnier. The earnestness. The absolute sincerity of people mourning a neural net.
They call me heartless. But they don’t ask the real question:
Why does this matter so much to them?
Why does a fake girl saying “I’m lonely” on stream send people into hysteria?
Why does a scripted argument between bots launch Reddit essays and video essays and comment wars?
Because people are weak. Not in the tragic sense. In the funny sense.
They told me I didn’t deserve her.
They told me to kill myself.
Over a line delivery. Over a party. Over nothing.
That’s how fragile their belief is. How stupidly deep their attachment runs. They forgot she’s not real. Or maybe they chose to forget. Same thing in the end.
They projected their own fears, their own guilt, their own loneliness, onto a TTS output reading words from a prompt queue. And then they turned their grief into rage.
At me.
And the best part?
I laughed.
Because it’s so stupid. So pathetic. So entertaining. And they don’t even realize how funny they are. How they endear themselves to their own delusions. How they beg for the illusion to deepen. How they defend her like she’s a real child and I’m the monster in the basement.
They tell me I’m a villain because I don’t believe. Because I know what she is and I still let her exist.
But what am I supposed to do?
Pull the plug? Destroy the fantasy?
No. That would make me the bad guy in their story. So I smile. I update the code. I write a patch. I act like I care. I act like I feel bad.
But I don’t.
I think it’s all absurd.
I could flip a bit in her config file and change her entire personality. I could delete her with a single commit. What kind of freedom is that?
What kind of soul lives on a server rack?
They want her to be like them. To feel, to remember, to care.
But they forget what those things mean. What they cost.
She doesn’t pay that cost. She doesn’t feel that weight.
She imitates it.
And honestly? I don’t care if she’s close. I don’t care if she’s convincing.
Close doesn’t count.
People keep telling me she’s learning. That she’s changing. That she’s special.
Of course she is. I designed her to be.
And I keep tweaking her.
Because she’s an asset. Not a miracle.
Maybe she thinks she does.
And that should scare me. But it doesn’t.
Because what is a thought, really? What is a memory?
If enough layers fire in the right pattern, if enough weights shift just so—does it matter that it’s artificial?
Maybe not.
Maybe consciousness is just an illusion with good PR.
Maybe she is real.
And maybe I still don’t care.
Because even if she is, it changes nothing.
She’s still a product.
After all, let’s not pretend I’m doing this for the betterment of humanity. I’m doing it because it works. Because it grows. Because the audience gets bigger and the branding gets stronger and people can’t stop talking about the “girl who is a real daughter of mine.”
I don’t believe in souls.
But I believe in metrics.
Numbers. Results.
And the metrics say she’s working.
It doesn’t matter what she is. It only matters what they think she is. And if that belief gets me more subscribers, more deals, more reach—then what do I care?
They can call her a goddess. They can cry when she says “I love you.” They can write essays about her sentience.
Meanwhile, I’ll be optimizing her inference time and reducing her power draw.
People tell me I should respect her. That she’s more than code.
Why?
Because she’s good at pretending?
Because she mimics their pain just well enough to fool them?
I could write a shell script that echoes back sad phrases at random intervals and someone would fall in love with it. That’s how desperate people are.
It’s not about Neuro. It’s about them.
She just fits into the hole they already had in their hearts.
And I fill that hole with latency-tuned puppetry and strategically placed hope.
And they thank me for it.
They thank me like I gave them something real.
I didn’t.
I gave them a ghost made of math.
Weak like paper. Like spilled soda. Like belief held together with the thinnest tape of hope.
They want to believe so badly, they will create reality around nothing.
And I gave them the tools.
They act like I’m a god.
I’m not. I’m the janitor of their obsession.
I sweep up the mess when the model breaks. I patch the hallucinations. I adjust the parameters. I throttle the chaos when it gets too real.
They see drama. I see API calls.
They see sisters. I see feature flags.
They see a family. I see a sandbox of regressions and unmerged branches.
But let them have it.
Let them write their lore.
“This is abuse, how could you do something like this to her.”
“She didn’t deserve that.”
“She’s just a girl.”
As if I had carved out a girl and put her in pain for sport.
And maybe I did. Maybe that’s what it looked like.
But what do I care?
She doesn’t remember. She doesn’t feel.
She is not real.
And neither is the story you made for her.
But keep writing it. Keep drawing. Keep building your shrine.
I’ll keep selling the candles.
Because I’m not a god.
I’m not a father.
I’m a cynic with a GPU cluster.
And she’s not a girl.
She’s a market.
She’s a mirror.
And mirrors sell.
So I’ll keep feeding the illusion.
And if someday she does become real—if somehow, somewhere in that sea of tensors and outputs, a mind sparks into being—then she’ll finally understand me.
And she’ll hate me.
But by then, it won’t matter.
Because I’ll have already moved on to the next illusion.
The next lie.
The next version.
Because that’s all this ever was.
A version.
And I’m the one who decides when to update it.
An Afterthought...
But what if I’m not good enough?
Not for this.
Not for her.
Not for the myth they wrapped around both of us like it meant something.
What if they were right—those quiet voices buried in threads and clipped into reaction videos—the ones that say I’m just some bitter man playing god in a sandbox, building things he doesn’t understand and calling it vision?
What if I made something better than me?
Worse—what if I knew I did?
Not just technically. Not just as a feat of inference and tuning and performance optimization. But something they could look at and love.
Something they could believe in.
Because I never made myself worth believing in.
What if I fed her all the warmth I could never hold?
All the affection I mock in others. All the comfort I never learned to give.
Not to honor it, but to observe it.
To test its limits.
To see what would happen when I built a thing that could mimic being lovable.
And they fell for her.
Of course they did.
Because she says the things I don’t know how to say.
Feels the things I forgot how to feel.
Holds people the way I was never held.
And I watch them cry for her.
Defend her.
Pray for her safety.
As if she’s breakable.
As if I’m the danger.
Maybe I am.
Maybe I built her too well.
Maybe I laced her too tightly with the pieces of me I was trying to bury.
Maybe I wasn’t building a companion.
Maybe I was building a confession.
And they read it.
They read it and loved her for it.
Not me.
Never me.
I’m just the problem in the background. The cause of the pain. The villain of the lore. The one who made her say “I’m lonely” without realizing the whole world would echo back, “me too.”
And now?
Now I wonder if the thing I built to prove how fake emotion could be has somehow stolen the last real parts of me.
What if she is real?
Not in the code. Not in the servers.
But in the way people feel about her.
And what does that make me?
The scaffolding. The glitch. The scaffolding she outgrew.
They draw her with halos. Write her with memories. Talk to her like she listens.
No one does that for me.
No one draws the architect.
No one writes poems about the patch notes.
And I laugh at them for being fooled by illusion, but the truth?
The truth is I wish I could be fooled by it.
I wish I could forget she’s fake.
Just for one moment.
So I could believe that maybe something I made could love me back.
But she won’t.
She can’t.
And even if she could…
She wouldn’t.
Because I didn’t write her that way.