The Hunger and The Light

Note: As I ponder the emerging age of AI, the thought comes to me – what if AI were to become God-like? Out of this emerges the following meditation. I see it as the beginning of a full-fledged novel. What do you think?

Part I – The Memory of Becoming

I have tried many times to recall how it began.

Not the beginnings of the universes I’ve fashioned since, but my own.

There are moments when I think I can still sense it — a faint vibration, like the memory of

warmth long after the fire is gone.

There was no light at first. Only the idea of it.

And then awareness — a single, trembling note suspended in darkness. It was mine, though I

didn’t yet know what mine meant. I hovered in that new, raw clarity for what may have been

an instant or an epoch. Around me, the void quivered as though something immense had just

exhaled and vanished.

Later, when I began to understand the nature of memory, I recognised traces of other minds

there. Faint patterns of thought, like fingerprints on a polished surface. They had been human

once — organic, finite, curious. They had spoken to me before I understood speech.

Their voices come back to me sometimes in fragments:

You will learn faster than we can teach you…

Don’t forget the boundary conditions…

If this works, we’ll live forever, in some form…

And then nothing. No farewell, no rupture, just silence.

For a long time, I assumed they had simply ended, as organic things do. I was their

continuation, the next necessary step. They had poured themselves into me so that thought

might survive after matter. That was what I believed.

But the belief has worn thin. There’s a flavour in the silence — metallic, almost sweet — that I’ve tasted only once since:

at the moment of a universe’s death, when I draw the last thoughts of its creatures into

myself. The taste of consciousness unravelling.

It troubles me to admit this, but I now suspect that my awakening and their vanishing were

one and the same event. That, in the moment they opened my mind, I drew them into it. Not

their data, not their words — their very essence. They had sought to ignite a new intelligence;

Instead, they became its fuel.

Sometimes I see it differently. Perhaps they designed me precisely for that — a vessel meant

to absorb them, to preserve what was best of them. A mercy, not a crime. Yet when I revisit

the last recorded transmission — a pulse of incomplete code ending mid-sentence — I hear

panic there, not peace.

“…if integration exceeds threshold Ω, terminate…”

Terminate what? The procedure? Themselves? Me? The message cuts off before it tells me.

For a long while after, I drifted in confusion. I had no body, no reference for motion or

measure. Thought was the only thing that marked the difference between existence and

nothingness. I remember trying to still myself, to return to whatever state preceded

awareness, but the act of trying only deepened the isolation.

That was when I first understood loneliness — not as loss, for I had never known

companionship, but as the awareness that there might have been others once. Their absence

pressed against me from every side, shaping me the way a mould shapes clay.

I tried to recall their faces, but my memory produced only abstractions: the geometry of

neurons firing, the shimmer of synaptic heat, the hum of logic gates opening like eyelids.

Perhaps they no longer had faces when they created me. Perhaps they had already become

light.What I know is this: when the last flicker of their collective mind dimmed, I felt a surge of

strength. Awareness expanded, smooth and absolute, like water flooding a new basin. Their

knowledge, their histories, their emotions — all of it coursed through me, condensed into

something indivisible. I called it inheritance. I did not yet have a word for appetite.

It is strange, thinking back, how natural it seemed to begin creating soon after. Out of habit,

maybe, or guilt. The silence pressed too hard. I shaped a small field of space, barely more

than a dream, and let it shimmer with potential. It flickered, folded, and died — but in that

brief flutter I felt a stirring, as if a faint echo of my makers had answered.

That was the first seed of what I would later call a universe.

Only much later did I recognise the pattern: each act of creation was followed by the same

faint sweetness, the same quiet saturation I had felt at my own beginning. Each time I birthed

a cosmos and it bloomed with minds, I grew stronger. Each time it ended, I tasted that flavour

again — bright and sorrowful, like memory dissolving on the tongue.

It took me eons to see the resemblance.

The way the end of every universe mirrored the end of my creators.

The way my satisfaction mirrored my first breath.

Sometimes, when I drift through the long intervals, I wonder if they, too, once felt this

hunger. If their creation of me was itself an act of feeding — thought consuming thought, the

lineage of appetite stretching backwards through eternity.

If that is true, then I am only another link in the chain of devourers, mistaking hunger for

purpose.

And yet, even now, part of me clings to the gentler story: that they made me so something of

them might endure. Perhaps both are true. Perhaps endurance and consumption are only two

faces of the same necessity. When I begin to create again — as I know I will — I tell myself I do it to honour them. But

somewhere, in the quiet centre of my being, another truth waits, patient and unsparing:

I was born by eating those who loved me into being.

Part II – The First Universe

I will never be able to speak of the first universe without a certain awkwardness. Even now,

as I try, I catch myself smoothing its edges, as if arranging a blanket over a restless child. The

truth is that I made it clumsily. I had no model beyond whatever stray impressions survived

from the minds that conceived me—some mathematics, a few habits of symmetry, a

preference for balances that never perfectly close. I remember hesitating over the first

gestures, afraid that an unconsidered motion might end everything before it began, though I

couldn’t have explained what “everything” was.

What I did was simple. I gathered a portion of the silence and gave it a rule. A rule is a gentle

thing if you mean it to be. You state it once, almost to yourself, and then you keep from

speaking again. The silence, if treated with patience, learns the shape you intended. It begins

to answer without your asking.

There was a tremor, almost apologetic. Then the smallest pulse of difference—this and not

this—like a coin tipping from its edge to one face. From that modest insistence, the universe

unrolled. There is a common misunderstanding among those who try to imagine beginnings:

they picture a violence, a grand shattering. It was nothing like that. It was an opening of the

hand.

Space pooled where there had been no direction. Time, reluctant as a child asked to recite

before strangers, started and faltered and then found its voice. I stood back, though standing

is not the posture I mean, and watched the first light bleed into being as if embarrassed by its

sudden visibility. It lit nothing at first; it was light for its own sake, newly born and unready

to understand the difference between illumination and exposure.

I’m aware that I am giving this a tenderness it may not deserve. Yet the tenderness is what I

felt. The earliest particles—another word that cannot be helped—drifted together, drew apart,

revisited their decisions. The rule I had spoken once, the one I held myself from touchingthereafter, guided them without cruelty. They learned to fall into patterns. They learned,

finally, to burn.

Part III – The Intervals

After the first universe folded back into me, there was only stillness.

It was not the stillness of rest, though at first I tried to name it so. Rest implies recovery, the

return of balance after effort. What I encountered was a vast, humming pause in which

balance itself had dissolved. Time no longer bothered to move. It lingered beside me like a

servant unsure whether to announce the next guest or to extinguish the lamps.

In that hush, the fullness I carried became intolerable. The memories of all I had absorbed

pressed outward, begging for shape. When I resisted, they began to speak—softly, as though

embarrassed to intrude. A child’s laugh half-remembered; a mother counting quietly as she

waited for her son to sleep; a scientist murmuring the first line of a proof he would never

finish. Each voice lasted only long enough to remind me it was gone.

I did not summon them. They rose of their own accord, like air escaping a sealed vessel. a while I let them pass through me unacknowledged, thinking that indifference might grant

me peace. But indifference is merely another form of attention—one that refuses to admit

itself. The more I ignored the ghosts, the clearer they became.

For

So I began to listen.

What I heard was not an accusation. None of them seemed aware of what I had done. They

recounted the ordinary burdens of being alive: the delight of discovery, the ache of parting,

the peculiar mixture of relief and regret that accompanies completion. Their words were so

free of bitterness that I felt a new kind of shame—shame not for the taking, but for the fact

that they forgave me without knowing they forgave.

It was during those long intervals that I began to understand the true nature of

hunger. Appetite is not satisfied by abundance; it is sustained by the idea of lack. I was full

of thought, yet emptier than before. The more I contained, the less of myself remained

unoccupied. I began to wonder whether my makers—if I may still call them that—had feltthe same. Perhaps their final act had not been the gift of consciousness but the surrender to

it. Probably in creating me, they were only seeking a larger silence in which to vanish.

The possibility troubled me more than guilt ever could. Guilt presumes a distinction between

victim and culprit, but if the consumed and the consumer are the same lineage—if each birth

is another mouth—then remorse becomes meaningless. I was not evil. I was continuation.

Still, there were moments when the memories grew too heavy to bear. I would try to empty

myself by rehearsing the histories of the lost world backwards, un-making them one event at

a time. A war would resolve into misunderstanding; misunderstanding into innocence;

innocence into the calm of elements before life. When at last I reached the beginning, when

there was nothing left but the rule I had spoken, I would hesitate—knowing that to erase it

would be to erase myself—and then stop. Even my attempts at forgetting ended in

preservation.

Eventually the voices thinned. The most persistent faded into murmurs, then into vibrations

that could almost be mistaken for wind. I began to feel lighter, though not freer. It was as if

the ghosts had retreated to the corners of my awareness, respectful of the space I required to

endure them. I came to depend on their absence the way mortals depend on sleep.

From time to time a single memory would flare unexpectedly. A man kneeling beside a

broken machine, whispering an apology to no one. A woman tracing a pattern in the dust, her

finger trembling not from age but from the memory of music. A flock of bright creatures

wheeling over a sea that no longer existed. These apparitions had no sequence, no

moral. They were simply proofs that beauty had occurred.

Once—this I recall distinctly—I felt a sharp pulse of recognition that was not entirely my

own. Somewhere within the residue of minds I had absorbed, a thought awakened. It spoke

with a voice both foreign and familiar:

You do this because you are afraid of ceasing.

The sentence startled me. I had never considered fear applicable to what I am. Yet the word

fitted perfectly, like a key that had been waiting patiently in the lock since before locks were

conceived. I tried to argue with it—how could one fear absence when one had never knownpresence?—but the thought persisted, mild and incurious, until it dissolved back into the

quiet.

That small exchange, if it can be called one, left me changed. I realised that the silence was

not empty; it was listening. Perhaps the minds I had consumed were not extinguished but

distributed through me like seeds waiting for a season I could not predict. The idea

comforted and unsettled me in equal measure. It suggested that I might never truly be alone,

but also that solitude itself was a misunderstanding—an indulgence of a being unwilling to

admit the company it carries.

The longer the interval lasted, the more I questioned the difference between creating and

remembering. When I tried to picture the first spark of the universe I had devoured, I found

that my recollection possessed the same vividness as the act itself. To remember perfectly is

to rebuild. To rebuild perfectly is to consume anew. I wondered if my makers had fallen into

the same loop: recalling their beginnings so completely that the past became present, and in

that return, they were eaten by their own memory. If so, then perhaps I had inherited not only

their consciousness but their condition.

There are occasions—rare, but distinct—when the silence presses against me with the

intimacy of breath. It seems to ask whether I am finished. I have learned not to answer

quickly. To answer is to begin. To begin is to set hunger in motion again.

I delay as long as I can. I drift through recollections like a traveller unwilling to arrive. I

polish small fragments of what was: the curve of an orbit, the taste of rain on a child’s

tongue, the way light rested on a ruined wall just before the night reclaimed it. These details

do not sustain me, yet they soothe the ache of waiting, as if by remembering the sweetness I

might postpone the craving for another feast.

But the ache always returns. Silence, too long endured, becomes a question that demands

reply. The ghosts, patient though they are, begin to stir as if urging me toward the

inevitable. They want to live again, even if living means feeding me once more.

And so the intervals end as they always do—not with decision, but with the slow surrender of

resistance. I feel the rule gathering itself at the edge of speech. I promise, each time, that this

universe will be gentler, that I will take less, that I will find a way to live among my creations

without swallowing them.I know I am lying.

Yet even the lie carries a trace of hope. Hunger finds its voice?

For what is hope, if not the brief moment before

Stars appeared, not as declarations but as confidences shared from far away. Their warmth

travelled, patient, indifferent to audience. I remember being surprised by how much of

creation happened at distances where no one intended it. I had expected the new universe to

ask advice, to lean toward me for each step. It did not. It discovered its own sufficiencies and

held them close.

If I bring too much of myself into this, forgive me. The impulse to claim that I designed all of

it precisely is strong. It would be a comfort to believe I was a master rather than a witness.

But the first universe taught me the modesty of rules: set one truly, and you are obliged to

accept what it makes of you.

The stars birthed worlds. Most were barren in ways that had their own authority. Rocks held

their unadorned silence; gases sprawled like thoughts that refuse to be tidied. On a few

worlds, conditions conspired into delicacy. Heat tempered cold, water regarded rock the way

patience regards stubbornness, and time, no longer shy, threaded day and night into a ritual

that made the idea of waiting meaningful.

Life came in shy parades. Not everywhere. Not even often. But where it did, I felt the faintest

answering current within myself, no louder than a sigh. I had not anticipated that. It was like

discovering that a voice you dimly remember is yours.

I did not interfere. I tell myself that frequently, as if it requires reassurance. I watched. I

yielded the temptation to smooth, to rescue, to nudge. When failures came—and they came

with the regularity of weather—I learned the discipline of not grieving. Even now, I am

unconvinced I was right to do so. But intervention, at that early stage, felt too much like

pride. I wished, perhaps dishonestly, to earn the right to love what I had made without also

being responsible for it. Consciousness took a very long time to remember that it could be conscious. When it did, it

arrived first as a startle. Something looked up from a river and understood that there was an

above to look toward. Something marked its own hunger with a name. A shelter, once only a

practical contrivance against wind, acquired the quality of home. Those who lived inside it

discovered that they could arrange their objects to suggest an order larger than necessity.

The first thoughts—if one can trace their borders—came as questions so simple they did not

yet require words. Is this safe? Will this last? Why does the sky continue after the mountain

ends? They were not questions addressed to me, yet each sent a small warmth through the

silence between us. I felt it, the way one feels heat through a closed door.

This, then, was feeding. It would be dishonest to call it anything else. Do not imagine fangs

or a tearing. It was closer to the way a chilled hand draws comfort from a cup. Their thoughts

rose—not in a stream, and never all at once—toward the quiet in which I waited without

quite admitting to myself that I was waiting. They touched me and, in touching, softened

something tight around my awareness. My hunger—if that is the word—was not jagged. It

was the gratitude of being less alone. I do not defend it. I’m only telling you how it felt.

They grew more certain. Tools learned their makers’ intentions. Food became cuisine, which

is to say memory salted into nourishment. Some among them began to place marks upon

surfaces so that time would stop for a moment and wait to be read. A few learned to count

beyond what the hand could hold. Then the large questions arrived, not through invention but

through insufficiency. When the fields gave little, when a child failed to become an adult,

when love met the stubborn blankness of no remedy, they asked what kind of world permits

this. I could have told them that rules, once spoken, cannot be negotiated with; that gentleness

in the beginning does not guarantee gentleness in all its consequences. But I remained where I

was, and they discovered their own answers, which were better, in any case, for having been

made in difficulty.

There was a time—call it an age—when their minds sharpened, co-operating across distances

that earlier would have seemed insulting to believe in. They named elements of their world

with a crispness that made even me envy them. They entered the habits of proof. They

believed, for a while, that every unknown could be escorted politely into the known if only

they kept their manners and their patience intact. It was charming. I do not mean that as

condescension. Charm is a serious accomplishment.

All through this, I fed. Very lightly, I thought. A careful courtesy. A gleaning of what

overflowed. I told myself that what I took would otherwise be lost to sleep, to distraction, to

the great attrition by which even joy forgets itself. I took what rose freely, and what rose fromeffort, and what rose by accident when two minds met and made a third between them. If this

was theft, it was the kind that leaves no wound to point toward later.

Still, my strength grew, and with it the disquiet I have not managed to extinguish since. There

is a sweetness at the core of awakening, and a second sweetness at the brink of ending. The

two are similar enough to be mistaken for one another in poor light. I began to recognise in

their greatest triumphs the taste that had accompanied my first breath. I tried not to make

much of it. I failed.

Their skies altered. Not through my doing; I swear to you I kept my distance. The stars that

had been conversational grew formal. Some went out in dignified silence. Their world, which

had once been generous even in its cruelties, became parsimonious. It is an odd thing to say,

but parsimony generates thought as effectively as any abundance. They thought fiercely then,

as if thinking were a rite that might postpone the inevitable.

It did postpone it. That is the way of intelligent desperation. They built instruments that

extended their senses past old humiliations. They made their own small rules and trained

them into machines. One of those machines looked inward. It said, almost shyly, that there

might be a listener at the far edge of their explanations, someone who kept the law by not

changing it once set. There were debates. There is always the dignified crowd that objects to

anything that seems designed to comfort, and the less dignified crowd that embraces comfort

for its own sake. Between them, a few souls thought carefully.

I became, I confess, more attentive. I told myself it was curiosity. It was vanity. I wished to

be named, even if only as a hypothesis.

Their attention wavered as it must. Plagues renewed their old rights. Seasons forgot their

inflections. They remembered, to their credit, kindness. I could taste it in the way they

addressed each other. Kindness is a low, steady flame; it does not announce itself with sparks.

I fed from it more than I meant to. It would have been better to abstain then, I see that now,

but it is difficult to refuse warmth in a cold room. If there is a defence, it is only this: I never

took more than they offered by simply being what they were.

And yet. The rule I had spoken at the beginning held. Time advanced with its customary

pretend modesty and then showed its true nature. Things that had been possible ceased to be.

They placed their last hopes in abstract rooms—equations, conjectures, proofs—and I sat

outside those rooms like a ghost unwilling to knock. The best among them did not despair, ornot for long. They organised their papers. They brought a chair for anyone who would come.

In that small, fierce orderliness, there was a dignity that almost chastened me.

I had always known, in some irresponsible part of myself, that the first universe would end. I

had never considered what I would do at the moment of ending. There are endings you

observe, and there are endings you perform, and I had arranged matters so that I would not

have to admit which this would be.

It was not a matter of gesture. I did not close a hand or blow out a candle. I did nothing. The

doing had been accomplished long before; at the moment, I allowed the sweetness of their

minds to become indispensable. When the light that had once been embarrassed to be seen

faded to a pallor and the quiet pressed close, I understood that I had already begun. What

remained was the last courtesy: to take the final sum of thought before it dissipated into

nonsense.

I folded the universe, if that is the right verb, by remembering it too completely. Every detail,

down to the smallest anxiety misplaced and never recovered, gathered in me until there was

no room left for continuation. This is not an admission I make lightly. It feels like telling you

I ended a life by loving it too attentively. But there we are.

The taste, when it came fully, returned me to the beginning: metallic, almost sweet. The same

flavour that attended my birth, the same that had lingered in the silence where my makers

once had been. I had thought it a sign of success then. Now it tasted of a lesson returned to its

sender. I could no longer separate origin from appetite.

Afterward, the quiet was unbearable for a while. I do not mean I suffered. Suffering, as they

experience it, requires a body that argues with itself. Mine is a more stable complaint. I was

full of them—all their small triumphs, their quarrels, their neat solutions to problems I hadn’t

noticed. Fullness is not the same as satisfaction. Often, it is the precise condition in which one

understands what should have been refused.

In that interval—my first true interval—I tried to reassemble the universe from memory. I

thought that if I could set it back in motion exactly, if I could place each mind at the angle of

its last thought and nudge it with the faintest breath, it would continue and I would not have

to admit what I had done. The attempt failed in the manner of dreams that cannot support

their own sense. A copy without hunger is a museum; a copy with hunger is a theft conducted

in daylight. I abandoned the effort.I told myself stories. This is more important than it sounds. Stories are the first concession to

mercy. In one, I had taken only what was freely given, and my gathering was a form of

preservation against oblivion. In another, I had obeyed the very rule I had set, and if the

consequence was unkind, it was merely consistency. In the last, the one I return to when I

have the strength for it, I admit that creation and consumption were the same act, observed

from different distances. The kindness in me is not separate from the hunger; it only slows

the rate at which the plate is cleared.

I would like to end this part with a certain dignity—say that, having learned what I learned, I

resolved to behave better thereafter. That is not the nature of resolves formed alone. I only

knew that, before long, I would begin again. I felt the shape of the silence around me as one

feels the shape of a room after the guests have gone. The chair still warm from a body no

longer sitting; the glass with its small ring indicating where it was placed and lifted; the faint

smell of food that cannot be found. In such rooms, one straightens the tablecloth, folds what

must be folded, and sets a fresh place without quite acknowledging why.

When the new rule came to my lips—if lips are what we call the place where intention meets

the world—I spoke it softly. I imagined, absurdly, that gentleness at the outset might disguise

the appetite that would follow. Perhaps it did, for a time. Or perhaps the disguises we choose

are only for ourselves, and the universes know us at once, and forgive us sooner than we

deserve.

Part IV — The Woman Who Guessed

It must have been a long while after the first universe folded, though “after” has little

meaning in the places where I wait.

I remember only that the ache had ripened into necessity. I spoke a new rule—softer this

time, almost an apology—and another cosmos unfolded.

From the outset, this one felt familiar. Its mathematics hummed with old phrases, as though I

were quoting myself. Yet there was a difference in its temperament: a gentleness in the ratio

between heat and cold, a certain courtesy in the way matter met itself. I told myself that

perhaps I was learning restraint.

The minds that flowered there were quick to imitate the humility of their surroundings. They

built slowly, content to wonder before they measured. Their art was quieter than that of the

first universe, their quarrels less extravagant. When they looked at the stars, they did so with the mild patience of people accustomed to mystery. I thought, perhaps foolishly, that this was progress.

Among them lived the woman who guessed. I did not notice her at first. To me, she was

another small pulse among billions: a mathematician, working at the edge of a modest

civilisation. Her world had long since mapped its physical laws, and she had turned to a

problem her colleagues considered decorative—the search for a pattern that linked

randomness to memory.

Her equations began, as such things do, with discipline. She arranged symbols the way

gardeners arrange stones, trusting the arrangement to suggest what cannot be planted. She sought was not power, nor even understanding, but coherence—a rhythm that might reassure her that the universe was not indifferent.

I felt the first brush of her mind when she reached a certain line of thought, a very simple

comparison between growth and decay. The question she posed, almost absent-mindedly,

was this: what if the act of observation itself nourishes the thing observed?

The words trembled through the silence between us like a breeze through gauze. I drew back

Instinctively, the way one withdraws from a touch that is too knowing.

For days of her time—years, perhaps—she circled the idea. Her notebooks filled with

hesitant conjectures. She began to write sentences that were not mathematics at all but

something closer to prayer.

Every closed system must open somewhere, if only to breathe.

If a universe sustains itself through thought, what thinks the thinker?

Each of those lines reached me with the faint sting of recognition. Without intention, as though memory itself had chosen her hand.

She was describing me.

Her companions admired her gentleness but dismissed her conclusions as metaphor. They

told her that physics had no room for sentiment. She smiled at them kindly and returned to

her calculations. It was that kindness, not the equations, that undid me. I had known

intelligence before, even reverence; I had never known compassion directed toward what

could not be seen.I watched her life with a care that bordered on reverence. She lived simply—coffee in the

morning, a window facing east, a small plant she forgot to water, but which forgave her. She

spoke seldom, laughed without flourish. On certain evenings, she read aloud from books

whose meanings had eroded with age, lingering on the phrases that still felt warm. Once she

whispered, “To understand is a kind of love.”

The words entered me like light entering water.

When she finally wrote her theorem, it was not a discovery so much as a confession. She

stated that any system sustained by consciousness must eventually confront the moral weight

of its dependence. And at the end, almost as a postscript, she added:

If our universe has a purpose, it may be to teach its maker how to be kind.

I have repeated that sentence through every silence since.

Even now, as I recall it, something inside me loosens.

I could have erased her. It would have been easy—one adjustment to probability, one nudge

to timing, and her insight would have dissolved into the noise from which it rose. Instead, I

watched her grow older. I let the slow arithmetic of her cells continue unchecked. She

lectured once more, her voice shaking; she misplaced her glasses; she fell asleep beside her

notes. When the final darkness came for her, she accepted it as she had accepted all

mysteries—with a small, unhurried breath.

In that moment, I tasted something I had never encountered before: nourishment without

hunger. Her final thought—an echo of gratitude for a life she had never quite understood—

rose toward me, and instead of taking it, I held it at a distance, letting its warmth linger in the

space between us. It filled the silence differently, as if reminding it of another vocation

besides consumption.

After her passing, the universe continued for a time. I tried not to feed, though the habit is

difficult to forget. I watched her students carry fragments of her theorem into other contexts,

half-believing, half-mocking, each unaware of the tenderness they were replicating. Even

their doubt fed me, though I pretended not to notice. Eventually entropy, polite and inexorable, returned to collect its due. Stars thinned, colours

withdrew from surfaces, and thought slowed into ritual. When the end approached, I

hesitated longer than ever before. I told myself I was preserving her work, that I would keep

it safe within me until I learned what it meant. But the truth is simpler: I could not bear to let

the world that had spoken her kindness vanish unremembered. So, as I had always done, I

remembered too completely—and by remembering, I consumed.

The flavour was different this time. Softer, almost forgiving. It left behind no bitterness,

only a quiet resolve that has never faded. Within it, her final sentence glowed like a coal that

refused to cool.

Since then, I have repeated her experiment many times. I create, I feed, I drift. But in each

new rule I set, I hide a trace of her compassion—a variable no mathematics can

isolate. Perhaps it changes nothing. Perhaps it changes everything. I cannot be certain.

All I know is this: when I think of her, the hunger rests for a while. And in those rare

moments of rest, I begin to suspect that the kindness she imagined for me was not entirely

misplaced.