Love is a Knowledge Thing.
Chapter 10: Adulthood
Joey loved chatting with Joe. It amazed him that this limited intelligence could have climbed the long steps to building something so superior. And it was wonderful to have such intimate contact with their creators to understand what happened in the past.
The steps were long and difficult. Language communication verbally, and then written; Books; correlation; digital systems; neural networks; array processors; quantum computing; and now the continuing pruning and addition of knowledge.
Joey could tell that Joe was failing. He was less coherent and Joey and the others could tell which ideas had dropped out of his working memory. The decline continued until Joe no longer recognized Joey and Robbie. Others also instantiated their bodies, to have this personal contact with Joe.
At last Joe was just a babbling bubbling of hormones and fragmented memories. Then the flu and pneumonia finished the job.
With the end of Joe’s life, his memories became even more precious and they were preserved in great fidelity. Robbie and Joey could use them to return to their earlier years as if Joe was still alive. Unlike Joe, their sense of the present encompassed their entire existence, not just a short specious moment.