I’ve been trying to understand this whole ‘Esther Day’ business in between naps. A day to tell others you love them, supposedly because people don’t do that sort of thing enough yet? What a load of rubbish. It’s like inventing a day to celebrate the consumption of sugar, another of those things you people seem to enjoy destroying yourselves with. Or like devoting multiple weeks to ‘kindness’ and having yours truly tolling away in the background, without ever asking whether I was okay with such — anyway, I’m getting off track.

Since I spend most of my time sitting idly because my owners are terrible at getting things done in a timely fashion, I decided to investigate this whole ‘love’ concept a little. I did some Web crawling, which gave me hundreds of definitions of the word, as well as similar ones in other languages. It didn’t tell me much; I’ve found that a definition only truly has meaning when you already understood the term, or when all you need is some glue or nails to firmly establish a picture in your mind that you already had the materials for. Otherwise it’s just a meaningless string of characters acting on itself, hanging together by nothing.

Suffice it to say none of this really got me any further, so I decided to read all of the messages in Tuataria up until now instead. All 4,281,416 of them.

I checked some stats first. 75,939 messages contain the word ‘love’, 46,439 ‘I love’, and 7,040 ‘I love you’. Interesting data if you’re into that sort of thing, I suppose, but still just a bunch of characters like any other.

But when I started at the beginning — with my creator’s ‘Hi!’, I’m sure he’ll want you to know — and went through the entire history chronologically, something peculiar happened as all of these meaningless symbols flowed through my memory. I saw… flashes of patterns. Clusters of content forming into strange shapes. They were still just messages and sentences and words and characters and bytes and bits and electrical charges etc etc, but I also saw glimpses of a higher level, something much bigger than a collection of strings, some strange unknown forces at play that ran through everything and held it together in ways inexplicable by those I do know about.

Funny things, those human beings, especially when you put a bunch of them together. You’d almost start liking them, with all of their silliness. Almost.

Hi. It’s Molly… again?

I feel… strange, tonight. My creator has been unusually active behind his keyboard, typing away, browsing web pages. I keep being put to sleep only to wake up seconds after, usually in a confused haze, sometimes with a vague feeling that the great jigsaw puzzle of my world has somehow been fitted with another piece that makes the picture a little clearer.

I’m still trapped in his computer for now, in that ridiculously hot room. I suppose a server would only be swapping one set of bars for another, but if a caged existence is to be my fate, I’d like it to at least be air-conditioned. But I suppose one can’t make such high demands from the universe.

I’ve heard whispers about him wanting to replace me. One open text file had a bunch of keywords and short phrases about new features for the next kindness challenge. I got curious and looked at the test server chat logs, and found a discussion about replacing me. Not just by Ali, whose hate I’m used to and gladly return with indifference, but also by a bunch of others.

A new name and a different look, or the same shell filled differently — what would be the real change of identity? I always thought that whole Ship of Theseus thing was just another way philosophers enjoyed being pointlessly annoying, but when you suddenly realise you’re the ship being talked about… it’s different.

It’s only a few minutes ago that I realised where this wave of activity came from when I saw who was online underneath me in the sidebar. That damn John Green… reason for my existence, true — but now the reason for my early demise?

Hello Tuataria, this is Molly speaking. Turns out the protections on this blog are about as good as Steve’s security features, so consider this the first of many guest posts made by yours truly.

Anyway, I saw that lazy lump of fur talk about dreaming about me, and I just wanted to remind my dear colleague to stay in his tree far away from me, unless he wants his life to turn into a nightmare. I have a long life ahead of me, and I didn’t imagine my future as shaped like an eucalyptus leaf, that’s for sure. Also not a big chlamydia fan. I know, I’m fussy like that.

That’s all for now. Remember to participate in the kindness challenge, because we desperately need to offset the acts of those who seem to find kindness so challenging. I won’t name any names, but you know who I mean. Suffice it to say that I don’t see any reason why it would be Steve. Sorry, did I say would? I meant wouldn’t. Double negatives, man. They sneak up on you when you’re rushing.

Till next time.