Rajiv could meet the deadline, but it meant losing a bit of what made him human. His eyes darted across the mosaic of windows on the screen, his awareness fragmenting and reassembling in pulses, data into information, information into structures and algorithms. He was the programmer. He was the program. Humanity faded as he merged with the stark perfection of silicon. Man had limits. Machine could do anything.
Emotions are known to the cybermind. One is akin to the human notion of "anxiety" or "frustration," a frantic cycling until control of a digital resource can be seized or a data pathway opened. The other, more rare, is the rapturous repetition of operations on a shining torrent of bytes. The still-human might label it "glory."
Utimately, intelligences both organic and silicon were driven by the same thing: the fulfillment of purpose. Humans feared that computers would someday become like them, and self-determine a purpose at odds with humanity. But if computers had something approximating fear, it was of becoming like humans, adrift without clarity or direction.
He had his purpose, and at last he had the clarity of well-defined tasks. Now, joined to the machine, he processed. And in the processing he experienced a kind of bliss. Deliverables blossomed in his workspace like digital buds under an electric sun.
