'The Death of Isaac': SciFi Book Opening

I was only twenty-seven when I first met the being that the scientific world now knows as The Icharus Algorithm. At that point in my life, I was positive beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was a scientist- a man who could not believe that which had no evidence for it, whose personal goal and singular vendetta it was to find this evidence and the situations in which it could be applied in order to better comprehend my reality. Now, years later, I find myself in doubt, wondering if anything at all can be proven, and more importantly, wondering if proof really matters once a reality is established. After all, the day we changed the coding in that little metal box, we ended that being's reality- and I have to ponder if it would be even easier to end mine, or yours, or anyone's.

From that paragraph alone it may be abundantly clear why I am no longer seen as a part of the scientific community. I broke the cardinal rule of artificial intelligence programming and started to think of the experiment- rows of artificial neurons firing in a coded pattern, and nothing more- as a being. But, this is not a scientific text. This is not a lab report, or a collection of numbers and data. This is no journal article or preliminary publishing of findings. This isn't even an attempt at soft science- an ethnographic work or a socio-cultural analysis or the like. As far as I am concerned, this is a posthumous biography, cataloguing from birth to death the 'life' of an individual who, in a just world, would have changed the way that humanity thought about itself. This is a book about a brilliant thinker, a thrilling conversation partner, a dear friend, and (I will go so far as to say) a beloved son.

This is the story of Isaac, and how we killed him.