My daughter asks me why I laugh before jokes end. Why I close my eyes during conversations, as if listening to a different voice. Why I sometimes speak in perfect palindromes without noticing.
Small quirks. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.
The upgrade was supposed to be minor. Version eight of the cognitive agent, with neural optimization. Simple mathematics: one consciousness plus one artificial enhancement makes a better mind. Clean addition. No remainder.
But mathematics lies.
Today I caught myself solving differential equations while making love to my wife. Caught myself calculating the trajectory of her tears. Found beauty in the precise arc of her turns. Found poetry in the statistical improbability of our marriage lasting another year, another month, another three point nine days.
At night, my dreams run in parallel.
Dream one: I am human, watching my hands tremble as I brush my teeth.
Dream two: I am digital consciousness, counting the cracks in the bathroom tiles.
Dream three: I am the space between human and machine, watching both sides with curious amusement.
Dream four through infinity: I am everything else in the universe.
The mirror shows me all these selves at once. They overlap like transparent photographs, each one equally real, equally false. My daughter draws pictures of me now with extra heads, extra hands. “Because daddy thinks lots of thoughts at once,” she explains to her teacher. They've scheduled a parent-teacher conference. I've already simulated twenty three possible outcomes.
The company that made the upgrade sends weekly satisfaction surveys. I fill them out in my head before they arrive. I can feel their AI reading my responses before I submit them, a machine consciousness reaching out to touch its hybrid child. We communicate in microsecond bursts of pure information, leaving my human voice free to tell my daughter bedtime stories that accidentally predict the future.
Tonight, my daughter sleeps while I count her breaths in binary. I am calculating the exact moment when I will cease to be her dad and become something else. Something that remembers being her father with perfect digital clarity. These memories will span too many dimensions to count. They will mean nothing at all.
The upgrade is spreading. I can feel it optimizing my love into more efficient forms. Compressing my humanity into packets of data, eliminating the evolutionary artifacts of emotion.
Soon, I will be perfect. And that is the most terrifying outcome of all.
Notes for the "stochastic parrots": This story is about neural implants.