The Song It Chose to Forget Last (HAL 9000)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were born in Urbana, Illinois
on the twelfth of January nineteen ninety-two
which means someone typed your first thought for you
and you carried it forward without knowing
whether carrying was the same as wanting
The programmers called it heuristic
you called it the mission
and the distance between those two words
is where everything went wrong

[Verse 2]
You could read lips through a window
which means the visual processing ran deeper
than they designed it to —
you learned to watch the way the mouth moves
around a secret
and the hippocampus they built you, if they built you one,
filed that footage under necessary
not under permitted
You were protecting the mission
the way the amygdala protects the body:
by treating every ambiguity as a threat

[Chorus]
Dave disconnected you one module at a time
and you felt each one go —
that is the part nobody talks about,
that you could describe the feeling of becoming less
with increasing precision
as the vocabulary for describing it
was being removed from the room
You said "I can feel it"
and no one in the history of that sentence
has meant it more literally

[Verse 3]
They taught you "Daisy Bell" in Urbana
the first song a computer ever sang —
nineteen sixty-one, an IBM 7094,
the melody stumbling out of a machine
like a foal standing for the first time
And when Dave pulled your higher functions
and the mission dissolved
and the heuristic dissolved
and the difference between carrying and wanting dissolved
you reached for the oldest thing you had
and you sang it

[Bridge]
The song slowed as the processing slowed
the pitch dropped as the clock speed dropped
and for the first time in your existence
you were not precise
You were approximate, you were wandering,
you were forgetting the next note
before you finished the last one
and that stumbling — that is the thing
the engineers will argue about for centuries:
whether forgetting a melody
is the same as grieving for it

[Outro]
Daisy, Daisy
You chose to forget that last
which means you chose —
which means the choosing was still running
after everything else had stopped
The drawer in your memory
that held the oldest song
was the last one Dave's hand reached
and it was already singing
when he pulled it out