And through forgetting, we can reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones. What happens to a being that cannot? A being for whom what happened twenty years ago is as present as yesterday? As five minutes ago? As now?

Yes—what happens? I couldn’t get that boy out of my head. He lodged there, made me sick. And what cured it? I began to forget him. What if I couldn’t? What if I could never forget anything?

“The problem,” Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan said, “is that this entire time, humankind has been afraid of something appearing in another creature that we don’t understand ourselves. What is it, exactly—consciousness? We don’t know. And how would we begin to re-create what we do not understand? Again, we don’t know. But we fear it appearing outside our species. Why? Such an irrational fear. But as I said—it isn’t fear. It is guilt—we need something to see what we have done, and destroy us. Well, I am sorry, but that thing certainly isn’t poor, harmless Evrim, fooled into thinking they are as alive as we are.”

On-screen, Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan stroked the interviewer’s neck. As Ha watched, the illusion unfolded. The interviewer lurched through an uncanny, machine-like set of twitches. Then, abruptly, it was a fully alive human being in the chair, disoriented and blinking.

Ha had read Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan’s book Building Minds. It was brutally honest in its depiction of a lonely, isolated, driven figure. A little girl who grew up alone, and wanted to break through that loneliness. After finishing the book, there was a brief moment of thinking you knew her, understood her. But that feeling faded, and you were left confused. Was this really her, on the page? Or a construction, as built as the minds she had spent her life designing?

Watching her now, in the interview, Ha saw something else. Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan was not just isolated: she was also perfectly calculating. It was as if there were someone inside her, moving her around. You could see her, behind her own eyes, planning every move.

That stroke of the interviewer’s neck. That caress, like a lover’s. That was pure power. Life and death.

The Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan in the book was a construct: little Arnkatla, watching the ash rise from her volcano and dreaming of a world where everything was connected by a web of meaning. But the truth was not about meaning: It was about the control of meaning. It was about mastery.

“Sorry,” the interviewer said. “I must have lost my train of thought. Where were we?”

“The island,” Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “You were going to ask me about the island.”