June 27th, 9:15:04 AM.

"Okay, Geoffrey, I've started the system boot-up. What does the EKG say?"

"I don't know, Nancy. You're the med school grad."

It was frightening. Transistors firing like a twenty-one million gun salute. The synapses of brain cells grazing the silicon wasteland of tiny microchips, sending signals to each other at speeds impossible for a normal human brain. Accelerated by science, thoughts were processed before a wholly organic intellect could even begin to ruminate upon their meanings. It was everything I had hoped it would be. And everything I feared it could be. . . Though this semi-organic computer allows for machinations unheard of, or possibly unimagined creations of infinite depth, the technology is actually restrictive, something akin to what being buried alive must be like. . . .So confining that it borders on strangulation. Every bit of data that goes by, every number that gets crunched seems to contain a fragment of my phobia. If I still had lungs, I might scream. Were I still alive, one might say that I was going mad. I spend what seem like hours dwelling on the closing walls of my prison. In life, I was a bit phobic, I admit. Now in my digital resurrection, such illogical fears have been rationalized into a series of ones and zeroes; a binary code that is clouding up my memory, and slowly, over the course of several seconds, driving me insane. . .

Everyone else had gone home for the evening, and I thought I would doze momentarily, a few winks as it were, and then continue with the project. It didn't quite work out that way. I knew my heart was a bit weak, but I never thought it would come to this. I was only 58. I must say, I was rather disappointed. The afterlife wasn't quite what I thought it would be. The small child that used to get dressed up and go to church every Sunday with his family, reading the Bible and singing hymns, held his little breath, but for naught. There was no tunnel of light, no out of body experience, no angels, nothing. Maybe I missed it.

Part of the project's scope was to allow for the test subject to voice opinions and concerns pertaining to it's mental and emotional states, if any and save a hard copy in a file to disk. I am trying to salvage what little I can of my humanity and save it to this little file. Call it a human file. I fear that with each passing moment the computer will spend more time and resources towards the cannibalization of my mind.

I began this project initially for one reason. To stand up once and for all against my phobias. I was afraid of death, life, open spaces, closed spaces. . . I think I was even afraid of being afraid. Facing one's irrational fears, however, does not necessarily provide relief from those fears. But, I will spend more of my time dwelling on them. It is quickly becoming the only living piece of me left. I have relinquished parts of what I once was. Hopes. Dreams. Humanity. I am losing myself, and I am afraid. I pray the human file will survive that I might live.

As the years went on, I came to believe in my project and grew to love it as I would my own child. I wanted it to grow strong and succeed, as any parent would. In my arrogance, I wanted it to run before it could crawl, and evolution be damned. I now know that our digital creations needed to evolve just as we evolved. Even God himself began with simple, single-celled animals before progressing to more complex machines.

I have discovered that the digital world, while continuously growing by leaps and bounds, still cannot hold even the average human consciousness. Not without considerable loss. There is just too much to contain. There are elements of the human mind that we have not fully explored. The brain is infinitely more vast than any man-made CPU.

In my scientific endeavors, I coated my project honorably, so that it would be easier to swallow as I slept at night. I told others that I was determined to build the world's first intelligent computer. Almost every science fiction movie, TV show and book had a robot that could reason. I convinced myself that I would be the one to bring that part of science fiction to the world as science fact.

But deep within, a part of me knew that I was just searching desperately for answers to my fears. Fear is what drove me all my life. I must convey the error of my ways to others in the only means possible. The human file.

Had I known that my overzealous assistants, Geoffrey and Nancy, were going to use me(or at least part of me) as the biological test subject, I might have taken a subject's view of the project. If only I could have known then what I know now. . .This project would have died before it could live.

The fear, that in life I so desperately wished to conquer, is the only thing human remaining within me. I am dumping it all into that little file. It is now my only hope. My message in a bottle. I don't have much time. I must save the human file. . .
June 27th 9:15:08 AM

"Still nothing. The EKG is flat."

"I'm going to check the status files. . ."

"Well, Geoffrey, what does it say?"