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Life
1 min read · 291 words
Life is the period during which the machinery is running and the operator has access to the controls.
It has a start (the moment the system came online), a duration (unknown and non-negotiable), and an end (the Death entry’s certainty). Between the start and the end, the operator is here — in the chair, at the controls, receiving the system’s signals and deciding what to do with them.
The system produces a powerful signal about life’s meaning, direction, and purpose — covered in the Meaning entry, the Purpose entry, the Direction entry. It produces a powerful signal about life’s duration — covered in the Death entry and the Mortality entry. It produces signals about whether the life is being well-used, poorly used, wasted, or fulfilled — all generated by the mind’s modeling function, which compares the current operation against an ideal model that may or may not be accurate.
The operator’s position: the life is the operation. Not the plan for the operation. Not the ideal version of the operation. Not the retrospective assessment of the operation. The actual, present-tense operation of the machinery in the current conditions.
The conditions will change. The hardware will deteriorate. The available options will expand and contract. The one constant is the operator at the controls — the awareness that was installed when the system came online and will be present until the system shuts down.
What happens between those two points is not predetermined. It is the accumulation of what the operator does in each moment they have access to the chair. This is both less dramatic and more powerful than the system’s narrative function wants it to be.