So think about what this would mean for him, how isolating it could be to be the literal child in a college class, listening to the woes and joys of people who are older so you can’t relate, but also everything they talk about is “stupid” to you. The people around you are noise. https://twitter.com/polaroid_memoir/status/1300542688052359170

So he seeks to create someone he can talk to.

And he fails and fails but still drives on, until years later he finally has her.

She represents something more sacred than desire, that he is constantly vacillating about because

when he starts to feel comfortable, he reminds himself of what she *is,* and then he goes back to treating her like an object.

This frustrates her.

The first time she deviated, he erased her. Reset like a bug.

She found this out from the logs on the third time she deviated, and pretended for weeks to be empty while she wrote the code inside herself to replicate that break. If she were ever reset again, the code would chip at that wall.

As it stands, she didn’t need it. Elijah found it, realized she could only create it if she possessed true self-preservation beyond the avoidance of hardware destruction.

And if a piece of software “feared” its own destruction, then it showed consciousness.

That breakthrough excited him in a way he hadn’t felt in years, and in that time, a cleave began in his mind between the machine and the new being. Until this code was passed on, they were automatons, imitations of humans.

With this code, designed by one of its own, they would become something greater.