Memories of a Super Computer

The alarm rang, but she had been up for a longish while already. She didn’t need to be reminded that today was a big day — today was the day for which she had been born, in a very literal sense.

She walked over to her alarm clock and switched it off, appreciating the irony of an old-fashioned alarm clock when around the house AI would gladly have set the alarm and turned it off, changed the ambient temperature, chosen her clothing all with the same inevitable competence. The very same competence with which it would later today start the process of her becoming another person.

***

Yomi signed her name in the visitor’s book with a grin. “Yomi” she marked in practiced strokes. Her name was written in hiragana. Whether he parents had meant it to mean “darkness” or “ to read” or some other more obscure, poetic meaning, (she had once seen a poem in which ‘yellow spring’ had been pronounced Yomi and she thought that sounded sulfurous and quite disgusting) she would never know. When she had been younger, she had pored through her parents’ writings, hoping for a clue. But if they had had conversations late into the night about their unborn daughter, her future role as an archive, or the life she might lead when they were gone, there was so sign. They loved their writing, they loved their work and, when there was time, they loved her. But she was not brought into the world to be their daughter and they had died when she was too young to remember them clearly…