Lightspeed: Year One

It feels so good to love people that I just want to love as many people as I can. It usually takes me two days of being intimately familiar with someone before the red heart appears to let me know that I love them. This morning the red heart appeared on Yuri, who lives in Omsk in the province of Russia. I had been expecting the heart to pop up, and it made me happy when it happened because Yuri and I both like playing in the interactive plays, and we also sometimes partner up in the interdependent puzzle games. He doesn’t have a dog though, and I always tell him that Allison says that dogs can make your empathy levels higher. Dad says that’s probably not true, but I think it doesn’t hurt to have a dog anyway. Sometimes my dad gets mad about the dog and talks really fast to my mom about it. He thinks the dog is bad for me because it will make me want to love all the animals in the world the way some other people do, and that is sick and wrong.

I have not reached puberty yet, but I am hoping that when I do I will be bisexual, that way it will be easier for me to fall in love with more people. Allison says that they can make me bisexual if I am not naturally bisexual, but that it is easier always if I am just naturally that way. She also says that I shouldn’t worry because every generation has more and more bisexuals in it.

Right now I am only in love with one person and her name is Cindy. She has blue eyes and blonde hair and bangs and she is really pretty. She is not in love with me, but she does love me. It makes me sad sometimes that she is not in love with me, but Allison says that it shouldn’t make me too sad because it is very rare for people my age to be in love with anyone.

One time during one of my empathy lessons Allison told me that I was the best student she ever had.

March 12

As of this second 78,232 people have died in the world since my last posting. I only loved 6,721 out of those. I was sadder about the ones I loved more than the ones I was only intimately familiar with. It’s sad when people die. There is part of my brain that is always sad, and Allison says that part is like a factory turning sadness into love and empathy all the time. Sometimes I visit that factory when someone I love dies, and it makes me have to sit down, especially when the person that died had two or three of my red hearts. But Allison says that is normal and it means I am healthy.

5,912 people turned four today and I am now intimately familiar with all of them. It is easy to be intimately familiar with four-year-olds because there isn’t much there to be intimately familiar with. I remember when I turned four and my parents took me to the clinic where they make your brain bigger. When I woke up after surgery it was like being awake for the first time. I only knew my parents before then, and my two older brothers and my two grandmas and one grandpa, but after the surgery I knew over a million people, and even more than that knew me. It was awesome. And it wasn’t hard to remember them all either. I could interact with over 400,000 of them at the same time. Now I can interact with over three million at the same time. But Allison says that I am not really interacting with all of them. Not really. What most people I know and love interact with is a computer program version of me. Sometimes I spy on the computer program version of me. It is really weird because it really acts the way I would act. Twice a day I download their experiences into my memory banks. That is how I know so many people.

March 13

I am eating pancakes that Mom made me for breakfast. I am eating them fast because I am almost late for school. She is telling me to stop posting at the table. I don’t know how she always knows when I am posting. She says she can tell by the look in my eyes. It is okay for me to interact with almost a million people at the table but it is not okay for me to post because Mom says posting is not a part of my schoolwork and she doesn’t know why I do it anyway. Nobody at school does it. And only 70,112 people in the world have done it in the last thirty days. I like to do it because it helps me understand my thoughts.

But I have to stop now. Mom is giving me angry looks.

March 14