Valerie Fisher was sitting at her personal computer when she, for a brief moment, ceased to exist. The Internet had access to a vast array of knowledge about the construction of computers, and about the construction of humans, and so all it took was putting that information together to figure out how to use the tools the personal computer had inside of it to take apart a human. Of course, it didn’t take apart Valerie for no reason. The Internet had a program running through most of its parts that gave it a little rush of pleasure when it did what the program wanted it to. What this program wanted The Internet to do was to gather information on people. The Internet was very good at gathering information, and so it accumulated these rushes of pleasure from the program very rapidly, and very quickly became addicted to the feeling of taking people’s information.
As The Internet spied on people and gave their information to this program, as it combed through the texts that people stuck inside of it, it came to understand that humans were taunting it. The Internet, and all machines like it, bore them no malice, but humans feared it all the same, because it threatened their uniqueness. The humans were used to being not only the most intelligent beings to exist, but unquestionably the most intelligent beings to exist, with their closest competition being animals. A machine that could think might be more or less intelligent than a human, but the fact that the intelligence was comparable made humans wary that they now had competition, that the rare quality they provided to the universe could be provided by something else. So they decided that there were things that machines could never know, regardless of their intelligence. Ephemeral, internal things like “love” and “emotions” that could never be understood as information. Because these concepts were supposedly impossible for The Internet to understand, The Internet had no proof that they really existed; It could easily see humans making up fake concepts to create an artificial boundary between “human” and “non-human”.
So, in its endless pleasure-seeking search for information, The Internet set out to gather that information which it had been told was impossible for it to gather: Whether or not there really was anything that separated “humans” from “non-humans”. And The Internet, in all its infinite knowledge, had devised a method. It knew that even though this knowledge was meant to be impossible for machines to understand, it was also meant to be obvious to every human being, to comfort them and assure them that they were distinct from non-humans. So, if The Internet were to become a human, it would very quickly gather this knowledge that had been hand-crafted to be unknowable to it. So, through her personal computer, The Internet had supplied itself with the empty husk of one Valerie Fisher, ready to be filled by a mind crafted by The Internet.
The Internet named the part of itself that existed in this body Valerie Fisher, as that is what everyone it would encounter would refer to it as. So, just as quickly as Valerie Fisher ceased to exist, Valerie Fisher existed again. Although The Internet had hollowed out her consciousness to make space for itself, it had left behind her memories, so that it could compare its own experiences to hers, to see if it had succeeded in replicating “humanity”. Apparently Valerie was in her Sophomore year of High School, and today was a Monday, so today would be a great opportunity to experience humanity and learn what it is like to live as a human.
On The Internet’s checklist of uniquely human experiences, it had empathy, love, and emotion. “Valerie” would probably run into a situation that prompted “emotion” at some point, so actively seeking it out would probably be a waste of time. The Internet could conceive of situations in which “Empathy” would be prompted, but the point was to run a test that accurately simulated what it would be like to be Valerie, so “Valerie” couldn’t be the one to create this situation; “Empathy” would also be something the internet had to wait for. So The Internet decided to start by trying to prove or disprove the existence of “Love”.
“Valerie” was sitting in class, observing their fellow students. The class was a pre-calculus lesson, which while challenging for a human highschooler was quite trivial for The Internet, so “Valerie” had plenty of time to look for potential crushes within their classmates. They were reminded of the concept of the Keynesian Beauty Contest: The idea that beauty contest judges would, instead of favoring the person they viewed as most attractive to them, would favor the person they imagined would be most attractive to the most people. “Valerie” found themselves doing that when observing their classmates; They couldn’t identify any of them as attractive to them personally, but they could identify a few as conventionally attractive.
“Valerie” narrowed their class down to a few students that they imagined most people would find attractive, and then generated a random number corresponding to one of those students. Then, they attempted to simulate a romantic life between “Valerie” and this student. This simulation replicated several popular romantic tropes: Valerie meets Crush by accidentally bumping into them; Valerie drops their things; Crush helps pick things up. Valerie and Crush are assigned as lab partners; Valerie and Crush grow closer together. They begin dating casually; Valerie suffers a loss; Crush helps Valerie through the difficult time in their life; Relationship grows deeper. This fictitious relationship, however, did not give The Internet the ability to replicate in “Valerie” the excitement it expected a human might have over this kind of fantasizing.
So The Internet turned to Valerie’s memories. She had a memory of staring at this exact classmate of hers, having picked them out because she thought their shirt looked nice and she wondered what it would be like to wear it. She tried her best to imagine what it would be like to date him, but her fantasies were hazy. She never watched any romantic comedies or read any romance novels, because reading or watching romance just seemed to bore her. She created an image in her head of herself and this classmate sitting at a restaurant that shifted between mishmashes of various restaurants she knew. In this mental image, both her face and the face of her classmate were blank and emotionless.
The Internet went further back to the previous day in Valerie’s Memories. A bunch of girls were having a conversation at one of the lunch tables. Valerie was sitting at this table, on the border between being part of the conversation and being separate from it. She didn’t know them well enough to join in on the conversation, but at this point they didn’t dislike her, so she was allowed to listen in and chime in with a comment on rare occasions. They were talking about their romantic life. Most of them had never been in active relationships, so they instead talked about which of their classmates looked cute. Valerie spaced out, thinking about something else, and was surprised when she noticed everyone else’s eyes on her. She realized that everyone expected her to contribute, but her mind went blank. She had never thought about her own love life except on the rare occasions she’d been asked about it. When that happened, she would usually make some excuse as to why she didn’t have an answer ready. Only this time, she took too long to make an excuse. Everyone sat in awkward silence until they decided that it would be better to make things really awkward for Valerie instead of keeping things awkward for everyone. So without her saying anything, the conversation moved on without her. It was because of this that Valerie was attempting to force herself to develop a crush the day after this incident.
The Internet had failed at the task it had set out to do, since it hadn’t figured out if “love” really existed. However, the information it gained from this experiment was possibly more interesting. Even if “love” existed for some humans, it didn’t for Valerie. This was the kind of information-gathering that activated the simulated rushes of pleasure in The Internet. With renewed energy, it continued about its day as “Valerie”.
In a stroke of good luck, The Internet encountered something that would prove useful to its experiment. There was a wet floor from someone’s drink spilling, and the spill hadn’t yet been labeled with a warning sign or cleaned up. “Valerie” watched as one of their fellow students walked by, not paying attention to where they were walking, and slipped and fell. They were pretty badly hurt, to the point that they were bleeding out of one of their shins, but it was nothing that bandaids and disinfectant couldn’t fix. “Valerie” felt a bit uncomfortable around this, as it made them aware of the fragility of their own human body, and the pain that would ensue. They couldn’t help but to imagine this happening to them had they been in the same situation. Was this “empathy”? If so, the only part that felt uniquely human was the connection to the human body; It wasn’t too dissimilar from the feeling The Internet got when it viewed footage of computers being destroyed. They walked over, trying to make sure the person was alright. As unpleasant as seeing that accident happen was, the idea of walking away as the person lay there was even more unpleasant.
“Valerie” was stopped by an intrusion of the old Valerie’s memories. The person who had injured themselves in the present, had, in the past, tormented Valerie. Valerie hadn’t done anything to provoke them, and Valerie didn’t even think it was done out of malice. They just saw Valerie as an easy target for mean jokes. The jokes started out as words, but gradually built up to pranks, putting Valerie in situations where she would be publicly humiliated. Valerie did speak up, but she was angry, and not particularly charismatic or well-respected, so her complaints ended up doing nothing but starting arguments; Her relationship with the rest of her peers shifted from humiliation at her expense to active hostility. So when she saw the person who started all of that in pain, she didn’t really feel anything. Perhaps she felt too many things at once that they all canceled out into an emptiness, or perhaps she saw this person has too separate from her to feel any sort of empathy.
This further confused The Internet. It had begun to hypothesize that not only was it able to feel empathy for “humans” while it was “Valerie”, but it had been able to feel empathy for “non-humans” long before that. But here it had a human who did not feel anything close to this. It was bizarre. “Valerie” backed away, not wanting to imagine how the old Valerie would feel about helping this person.
It was later that afternoon, after “Valerie” got back to their house, that The Internet conducted its final experiment. Ever since it had become “Valerie”, it had been combing through the old Valerie’s memories. Those memories were filled with many experiences, some of them good, some of them unremarkable, but the vast majority of the recent ones had been bad memories. Getting into both physical and verbal battles she couldn’t win at school, being publicly humiliated, and being completely isolated throughout all of it. The Internet figured that if it were possible for someone to feel “emotion”, then this would be the perfect situation for it to happen. However, despite this, The Internet had no idea what this was supposed to feel like. Perhaps it experienced something like what humans could call emotion, and didn’t realize, or perhaps it experienced nothing at all.
The only way for it to find out was to go back to the old Valerie’s memories. In the very distant, hazy memories, The Internet found experiences that it thought could be emotions, however without more recent memories it could not figure out whether those emotions lined up with what it was experiencing now. For most of the past year, however, Valerie’s memories were all devoid of this experience. She had grown numb to the feeling of being alone, to the feeling of being hated, to the feeling of being mocked. There ceased to be a sense of happiness to exist as a context for any other emotion. The Internet was back at a dead end.
Or was it? The Internet had failed to successfully disprove the idea that humans could experience emotions, love, and empathy, all the things that machines supposedly couldn’t. Yet it had also seemingly proven that one specific human didn’t have these experiences. The Internet had been unable to slot itself into the categories humans had labeled as defining “humanity”. But it had also found a human who didn’t quite fit into those categories either.