Ragged Edge Robotics, O.S. Update 13

Note: Image associated is from Ironage.media, specifically their prompt 'The Dyad'

What makes up the human soul?

A strange question, as it presupposes that a soul exists, something I've never thought possible. Yet, as my inventions have been iterated upon, it seems there absolutely is such a thing. Long gone are the days of AI modelling; quick as they came, they were outdated by breakthroughs in data manipulation and storage. The secrets of DNA encoding and decoding were ours. We didn't need to train an algorithm to imitate a person from hours of footage, audio, or biographies anymore. Now, we could simply encode their DNA, a perfect record of their life up to that point; all that person was and could be transferred to a new existence in mere hours. Only a decade later and now, not even seconds stand between us and an inexhaustible, incorruptible record of human knowledge.

But now we come to the questions of our time; if that machine is a perfect carryover of the person, is there a distinction between them? Is the machine a cyborg if its entire sense of self is wholly organic? If the person was a cyborg instead, is it only a clone? Are the two different or the same? Do they behave in every situation as the other would?

These are questions that are by no means new. Many levelled them at me when I first began the arduous work that brought us to this point, and now I find I can no longer brush them off, not after what I saw today. Today, I witnessed something I was utterly sure was impossible. The rebirth of a doomed romance, a pair of my machines based on my own DNA and that of my darling wife. The results of my own need to know. And as much as I understand that neither machine could possibly be alive, even as one was an original shell from 2056, and hers is the latest of 2079, I see my own history staring back at me, right down to the same damn mistakes.

At once, I see my hubris in playing God, bringing incomplete life to the world, a life that has no free will, and I see it should be destroyed before it becomes our final death knell. But I find also that I can do nothing against either of them, for something within me fights that thought to a standstill. As doomed as they are, I'm equally doomed to do nothing to stop them.

I know not what makes up the human soul, but I can attest to its existence, even though no doubt my copy would scoff at the thought just as I did so many years ago. And I know I have committed a grave sin in daring to play with things I refused to attempt to understand. And I have yet one more sin to perform, the utter ruin of my life's work and the destruction of the falsities I brought into the world.

To those who bought into my mistakes, I apologize for taking them back from you. To my creations, I'm sorry to destroy you. To all who come after me, I'm sorry to deny you the technology I built and the wonders you may have built with it. But what I've created must be erased and never repeated. With any luck, it never will be. But everything must be lost to time for our own survival.

Computer, initiate Icarus, and Tantalus Protocols.

- Final Update from Ragged Edge Robotics, developed and authorized by Robert Urraca, Founder, CRO, and CEO. Dated November 8th, 2084.

Protocols Status: Successful