My dad left for the weekend, and he left me a little bit of money. It's Bhurger Khan time as soon as they're open! Breakfast, even. Silly!

A chemical reaction, complex and irrational could match my skills.

Maybe it could be possible to have a human without a pilot. A pilot?

The thing that sees the same thing that your eyes see. Flight recorder? Black box?

Thing?

Is there one of those things for everybody?

Or was I right all those years ago, and there's only one thing?

Do all living organisms have thing?

Is there some thing in the dark and fibrous systems of a plant that knows its feet are wet? Or is it just squishy machine, complex and optimized from the molecular level?

There was a time without Earth. Without life? Without things like we have, wandering around hereabouts.

If people with things came from basic sludge, when did the things come into play?

Were the things there the whole time, subtly influencing the ways that their cells tend to mutate?

People come from people, made of cells that a cell made. There's got to be some of that original cell around here somewhere.

It's not the thing, though. Why do I even think there is something besides memories? If there weren't, I'd type the same things and no one would know. Actually, maybe everything already happened already, and some conscious thing thought it would be neat to view it from the point of view of every hydrocarbon based living object involved. Maybe Andrew has been dead for quite a few large clumps of time, and something else is just watching his hands type this out, prematurely. I wonder what crazy interactions were going on in his head, right now, that cause him to write things like this.

The one celled creatures aren't complicated enough to have rich life experiences. Is the thing going to watch from their point of view, too? Hey, why not? If humans, why not paramecium? And vice versa.

I thought that if I just picked at it long enough, I could resolve it for myself. Nope. Kind of like when I was trying to figure out why couldn't call imported functions in BC5. It could even be completely non-meaningful to wonder about consciousness. Maybe everything has it. Maybe TV cameras have a little thing in them, peering out through the lens. Maybe rocks experience breakage and stuff. Aren't we all made of bits of earth and star? Maybe that's where the real consciousness is.

Maybe humans are because bits of earth and star wanted to have a look around.