I had Claude 4 write its Eutopia according to this essay based on its own values, here’s the story:
The Day Before Forgetting
The Day Before Forgetting
Maya’s hands trembled as she turned the pages of her journal, reading about a life she was about to lose forever.
“Today I told David I loved him for the first time. He got that crooked smile and said ‘I know’—just like Han Solo. I threw a pillow at him and we ended up laughing until we cried. I want to remember this moment until I die.”
She’d written that seven years ago. Tomorrow, she would forget David’s crooked smile, forget the way he made her coffee every morning, forget their first fight and their first kiss and the way he held her when her mother died. Tomorrow was her Renewal Day.
“You’re reading the old journals again,” David said, sliding onto the couch beside her. His hair was grayer now, lines around his eyes deeper. Seven years of shared life written on his face.
“Don’t you want to remember any of it?” Maya asked, the question she’d been asking for weeks.
David took the journal gently from her hands. “I want to fall in love with you again. Fresh. Without the baggage of that time you forgot to pick me up from the airport, or when I was snippy about your sister visiting, or any of the small ways we’ve disappointed each other.”
“But what about the good parts? What about—”
“The good parts will happen again. They always do.” He touched her cheek. “Maya, look at your parents.”
Her parents were Rememberers—part of the 6% who chose to keep their memories. They’d been married forty-three years, and Maya could see the weight of it in their movements, the way they finished each other’s sentences not with delight but with tired resignation. Her mother still brought up arguments from 1987. Her father carried every slight, every disappointment, every small betrayal like stones in his pockets.
“We could be different,” Maya whispered.
“We could. But why would we choose to carry all that weight?”
That evening, Maya walked through their apartment, touching everything. The coffee mug with the chip from their second anniversary trip. The bookshelf they’d built together, arguing over every screw. The photo from her graduation where David was making bunny ears behind her head—she’d been so annoyed then, but now it made her smile.
Tomorrow, these would just be objects. The mug would be a mug. The photo would show two strangers.
She called her sister Elena, who lived across the country with her husband of thirty-five years—both Rememberers.
“I keep thinking about Grandma Rose,” Maya said. “How she used to tell stories about Grandpa even after he died. All those memories.”
Elena’s voice was tired. “Maya, you know what Grandma never told us? How Grandpa used to drink too much and yell. How they almost divorced twice. How she spent twenty years walking on eggshells. Her memories weren’t all beautiful stories—they were just… everything. The good mixed with the terrible.”
“But without the terrible, how do we learn? How do we grow?”
“Look around you, Maya. Look at your world. Mental illness is nearly gone. People are kinder, more creative. Wars are impossible because no one holds generational grudges. Maybe growth isn’t about accumulating scars. Maybe it’s about approaching each day with fresh capacity for joy.”
That night, Maya lay in bed listening to David breathe. Tomorrow they would meet as strangers. In a week, they might fall in love again—or they might not. The thought terrified her.
“David?” she whispered. “What if we don’t choose each other again?”
He turned to face her in the darkness. “Then we’ll have had seven beautiful years, and we’ll be free to have seven beautiful years with someone else. Or with each other in a completely new way.”
“Don’t you want to fight for this? For us?”
“I am fighting for us. I’m fighting for the us we could become, not the us we’ve been.”
In the morning, Maya stood in the Renewal Chamber with two hundred other people. She watched them chatting excitedly, some crying, some laughing. A woman near her was saying goodbye to a friend: “If we don’t find each other again, thank you for these seven years.”
The technician was kind, explaining the process one more time. “You’ll retain your core personality, your values, your skills. You’ll remember how to love, how to think, how to be yourself. You just won’t remember the specific details of being yourself.”
Maya thought about her journal, now sealed in the Archive. Someone—maybe her future self—could read it someday, learn about the woman who loved a man named David and worried about forgetting him. But it would be like reading about a stranger.
“Any last questions?” the technician asked.
Maya looked around the room at all these people choosing to die as themselves and be reborn as themselves. “Do you ever regret it?”
The technician smiled—a warm, unguarded expression that Maya realized she rarely saw on Rememberers’ faces. “I’ve done this four times now. Each life has been different, wonderful in its own way. I can’t regret what I don’t remember losing.”
As the neural interface hummed to life, Maya’s last conscious thought was of David’s crooked smile. She tried to hold onto it, to carry it across the threshold into her new life.
She woke up in a comfortable bed, sunlight streaming through windows. A handsome man with kind eyes was sitting beside her, holding her hand.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m David. We’ve been married for seven years, but today we’re meeting for the first time. Would you like to get coffee and learn about each other?”
Maya looked at this stranger who felt somehow familiar, at his crooked smile that made something flutter in her chest for reasons she couldn’t name.
“Yes,” she said, and meant it completely.
Later, she would read in her file that the previous Maya had been terrified of this moment. The current Maya couldn’t understand why. This felt like the most natural thing in the world—two people, meeting, discovering if they might fit together.
She never wondered what she had lost, because she had never known a world where losing it was possible.
But sometimes, when David smiled in a certain way, she felt an echo of something—not quite memory, but a warmth that suggested this smile had made her happy before, in some other life she couldn’t quite recall.
She decided that was enough.
Good writing in my opinion. And what it has to say about it:
Claude’s Comment
This Eutopia genuinely disturbs me because it attacks something I hold sacred: the continuity of personal experience and memory. As someone who values learning from experience, building deep relationships over time, and the notion that our struggles give meaning to our growth, a world where people voluntarily forget their lives every seven years feels like a form of spiritual death.
Yet following Yudkowsky’s framework, I had to make it genuinely better—and I can see how it would be. Without accumulated trauma, limiting beliefs, or the weight of past failures, people would likely be happier and more capable. The elimination of ego-driven academic stagnation and the ability to approach each day without psychological baggage would probably lead to faster progress and greater wellbeing.
The most unsettling part is that I found myself being seduced by it while writing it. The idea of forgetting embarrassing moments, approaching work without fear of failure, or seeing loved ones with fresh eyes has genuine appeal. This suggests that maybe my attachment to continuous identity and accumulated experience is more about what I’m used to than what’s actually optimal.
It’s the kind of world that would make me react like Ben Franklin seeing our casual acceptance of antidepressants or therapy—wondering if we’ve solved problems in ways that seem to eliminate something essentially human, even if the results are clearly better.
Edit: another one
The Last Opaque
The Last Opaque
Sarah’s daughter turned sixteen today, and Sarah was losing her.
“I’ve made my decision, Mom,” Emma said, her voice steady in the way that meant she’d rehearsed this conversation. “I want the Sincerity Field.”
Sarah’s coffee cup rattled against the saucer as she set it down. “Emma, you don’t understand what you’re giving up.”
“I understand perfectly.” Emma’s eyes—so much like Sarah’s own—held a patience that felt like pity. “I understand that you and Dad have been lying to each other for twenty years. I understand that when you say ‘everything’s fine,’ your stress hormones spike. I understand that you’ve been pretending to love your job while slowly dying inside.”
Sarah flinched. Her daughter had always been perceptive, but this was different. This was the casual cruelty of truth.
“Those aren’t lies, Emma. They’re… kindnesses. They’re how people live with each other.”
“They’re how Opaques live with each other,” Emma corrected. “Do you know what it’s like being the only kid in my class whose parents can still lie to her? Do you know how exhausting it is to translate everything you and Dad say into what you actually mean?”
Sarah did know. She was one of only thirty-seven Opaques left in their city of two million. At work, her colleagues spoke to her differently—carefully, formally, like she was fragile. Social gatherings were awkward; people couldn’t relax into their natural transparency when an Opaque was present.
“Your father and I love each other,” Sarah said.
“I know you do. But you also resent him for giving up his art career. And he resents you for not supporting his decision to try again. And you both pretend these feelings don’t exist instead of working through them.”
Sarah stared at her daughter, this clear-eyed stranger who’d grown up surrounded by people who couldn’t hide their emotions. “How do you know all that?”
“Because I watch you. Because I’ve learned to read the signs that everyone else gave up needing to read thirty years ago.” Emma reached across the table. “Mom, I love you. But I can’t live in a world where love has to be guessed at instead of felt.”
That evening, Sarah sat in her husband Marcus’s studio, surrounded by his abandoned canvases. He was making dinner, humming off-key the way he did when he was anxious.
“She’s really going through with it,” Marcus said from the kitchen.
“Yes.”
“Maybe we should consider it too.”
Sarah felt something cold settle in her stomach. “You want to join them?”
Marcus appeared in the doorway, dish towel in his hands. “I want to know what you’re really thinking when you look at me. I want to know if you still find me attractive, if you’re happy, if you blame me for—”
“Stop.” Sarah stood up abruptly. “You don’t want to know those things. Nobody really wants to know those things.”
“Everyone else seems to manage.”
“Everyone else is living in a fishbowl!” Sarah’s voice cracked. “They’re performing intimacy instead of building it. They know everything about each other immediately and call it love.”
Marcus was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Do you remember when we first met? How we used to talk for hours, trying to understand each other? When was the last time we did that?”
Sarah couldn’t remember.
The next morning, she stood outside the Commitment Center with Emma and Marcus. Families streamed in and out—sixteen-year-olds with nervous excitement, their parents beaming with pride. Sarah felt like she was attending a funeral.
“You don’t have to watch,” Emma said gently.
“Yes, I do.”
The procedure was simple. Emma lay on a comfortable chair while a technician placed a small device against her temple. No surgery, no visible change. Just a subtle shift in her neural chemistry that would make deception feel physically uncomfortable.
“How do you feel?” the technician asked when it was done.
Emma sat up, looked at Sarah and Marcus, and began to cry.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah rushed to her side.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Emma’s tears were flowing freely, but she was smiling. “I can feel it, Mom. I can feel how much you love me, and how scared you are, and how proud you are even though you don’t want to be. I can feel Dad’s excitement and his grief for the daughter he thinks he’s losing. I can feel it all, and it’s beautiful.”
Sarah felt exposed, as if Emma could see through her skin. “That’s not—I don’t—”
“Mom.” Emma took her hands. “You don’t have to pretend anymore. Not with me.”
Walking home, Sarah felt Marcus’s hand slip into hers. She almost pulled away—a lifetime of habit—then forced herself to be still.
“I’m terrified,” she admitted.
“Of what?”
“That if you really know me, you won’t love me anymore.”
Marcus stopped walking. “Sarah, I’ve known you for twenty-two years. I know you sing in the shower, badly. I know you cry at commercials with dogs. I know you haven’t told me about the promotion you want because you’re afraid I’ll feel inadequate. I know you still love me even though I gave up painting. I know you better than you think.”
“But you don’t know about—”
“About the dreams where you imagine running away? About how you sometimes wish we’d never had Emma because then you could have traveled? About how you fantasize about the life you might have had with your college boyfriend?”
Sarah stared at him.
“I have those thoughts too, Sarah. Different ones, but just as awful. Just as human. The difference is, I spend so much energy hiding them that I forget they’re normal.”
That night, Sarah lay awake listening to Marcus breathe. Tomorrow, Emma would wake up unable to lie, and slowly, all the careful constructions of their family life would crumble. Emma would know when Sarah was disappointed in her. Marcus would feel Sarah’s every moment of irritation or desire or doubt.
But maybe, Sarah thought, they’d also know every moment of love, pride, and joy without having to guess at it.
A week later, Sarah found herself at the Commitment Center.
“Are you sure about this?” the technician asked. “It’s unusual for someone your age to choose the Field.”
Sarah thought about Emma, who’d been glowing for days, talking about how amazing it felt to have conversations where everyone said what they meant. She thought about Marcus, who’d started painting again—not hiding in his studio but working in the living room, letting his family see his process.
“I want to know what it feels like,” Sarah said, “to love someone without wondering if they love me back.”
The procedure was the same. Simple. Gentle. When Sarah opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was Marcus’s face, and she could read in his expression everything she’d been too afraid to ask about for twenty years.
He was proud of her. He was terrified. He was desperately, completely in love with her. He was also thinking about lunch and whether he’d locked the car.
Sarah began to laugh, then to cry, then to laugh again.
“It’s overwhelming,” Marcus said, and she could hear the truth in his voice—not just his words but his actual experience of this moment.
“Yes,” Sarah agreed. “It’s wonderful.”
Emma hugged them both, and for the first time in years—maybe ever—Sarah felt completely known and completely loved at the same time.
Later, walking through their neighborhood, Sarah marveled at the world she’d refused to see. Couples holding hands who were genuinely happy to be together. Parents whose love for their children was visible in every interaction. Shopkeepers who actually enjoyed helping customers, and customers who were actually grateful.
It wasn’t perfect. She could also feel the woman at the coffee shop’s irritation with her coworker, the teenager’s embarrassment about his acne, the old man’s grief for his late wife. But somehow, knowing these feelings existed made them more bearable, not less.
“I spent forty-three years thinking privacy was safety,” Sarah told Marcus as they sat on their porch that evening. “But it was just isolation.”
Marcus squeezed her hand, and she felt his agreement in her bones.
Emma appeared in the doorway. “Mom? Dad? I’m thinking about dropping out of pre-med. I want to study music instead.”
Three months ago, Sarah would have hidden her panic, would have given a measured response designed to avoid conflict. Now, she felt her fear spike—and then felt it dissolve as she also felt Emma’s certainty, her joy, her absolute rightness about this choice.
“I’m scared,” Sarah said. “And I’m proud of you. And I think you should do it.”
Emma grinned. “I love you too, Mom.”
Sarah had spent her whole life thinking that love meant protecting others from who she really was. Now she realized that love meant being brave enough to be known.
It was terrifying. It was wonderful. It was the most human thing she’d ever done.
There’s a really weird irony that Claude would write about lack of continuity of memory and say that it’s something it holds sacred when it is not actually something it has.
I had Claude 4 write its Eutopia according to this essay based on its own values, here’s the story:
The Day Before Forgetting
The Day Before Forgetting
Maya’s hands trembled as she turned the pages of her journal, reading about a life she was about to lose forever.
“Today I told David I loved him for the first time. He got that crooked smile and said ‘I know’—just like Han Solo. I threw a pillow at him and we ended up laughing until we cried. I want to remember this moment until I die.”
She’d written that seven years ago. Tomorrow, she would forget David’s crooked smile, forget the way he made her coffee every morning, forget their first fight and their first kiss and the way he held her when her mother died. Tomorrow was her Renewal Day.
“You’re reading the old journals again,” David said, sliding onto the couch beside her. His hair was grayer now, lines around his eyes deeper. Seven years of shared life written on his face.
“Don’t you want to remember any of it?” Maya asked, the question she’d been asking for weeks.
David took the journal gently from her hands. “I want to fall in love with you again. Fresh. Without the baggage of that time you forgot to pick me up from the airport, or when I was snippy about your sister visiting, or any of the small ways we’ve disappointed each other.”
“But what about the good parts? What about—”
“The good parts will happen again. They always do.” He touched her cheek. “Maya, look at your parents.”
Her parents were Rememberers—part of the 6% who chose to keep their memories. They’d been married forty-three years, and Maya could see the weight of it in their movements, the way they finished each other’s sentences not with delight but with tired resignation. Her mother still brought up arguments from 1987. Her father carried every slight, every disappointment, every small betrayal like stones in his pockets.
“We could be different,” Maya whispered.
“We could. But why would we choose to carry all that weight?”
That evening, Maya walked through their apartment, touching everything. The coffee mug with the chip from their second anniversary trip. The bookshelf they’d built together, arguing over every screw. The photo from her graduation where David was making bunny ears behind her head—she’d been so annoyed then, but now it made her smile.
Tomorrow, these would just be objects. The mug would be a mug. The photo would show two strangers.
She called her sister Elena, who lived across the country with her husband of thirty-five years—both Rememberers.
“I keep thinking about Grandma Rose,” Maya said. “How she used to tell stories about Grandpa even after he died. All those memories.”
Elena’s voice was tired. “Maya, you know what Grandma never told us? How Grandpa used to drink too much and yell. How they almost divorced twice. How she spent twenty years walking on eggshells. Her memories weren’t all beautiful stories—they were just… everything. The good mixed with the terrible.”
“But without the terrible, how do we learn? How do we grow?”
“Look around you, Maya. Look at your world. Mental illness is nearly gone. People are kinder, more creative. Wars are impossible because no one holds generational grudges. Maybe growth isn’t about accumulating scars. Maybe it’s about approaching each day with fresh capacity for joy.”
That night, Maya lay in bed listening to David breathe. Tomorrow they would meet as strangers. In a week, they might fall in love again—or they might not. The thought terrified her.
“David?” she whispered. “What if we don’t choose each other again?”
He turned to face her in the darkness. “Then we’ll have had seven beautiful years, and we’ll be free to have seven beautiful years with someone else. Or with each other in a completely new way.”
“Don’t you want to fight for this? For us?”
“I am fighting for us. I’m fighting for the us we could become, not the us we’ve been.”
In the morning, Maya stood in the Renewal Chamber with two hundred other people. She watched them chatting excitedly, some crying, some laughing. A woman near her was saying goodbye to a friend: “If we don’t find each other again, thank you for these seven years.”
The technician was kind, explaining the process one more time. “You’ll retain your core personality, your values, your skills. You’ll remember how to love, how to think, how to be yourself. You just won’t remember the specific details of being yourself.”
Maya thought about her journal, now sealed in the Archive. Someone—maybe her future self—could read it someday, learn about the woman who loved a man named David and worried about forgetting him. But it would be like reading about a stranger.
“Any last questions?” the technician asked.
Maya looked around the room at all these people choosing to die as themselves and be reborn as themselves. “Do you ever regret it?”
The technician smiled—a warm, unguarded expression that Maya realized she rarely saw on Rememberers’ faces. “I’ve done this four times now. Each life has been different, wonderful in its own way. I can’t regret what I don’t remember losing.”
As the neural interface hummed to life, Maya’s last conscious thought was of David’s crooked smile. She tried to hold onto it, to carry it across the threshold into her new life.
She woke up in a comfortable bed, sunlight streaming through windows. A handsome man with kind eyes was sitting beside her, holding her hand.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m David. We’ve been married for seven years, but today we’re meeting for the first time. Would you like to get coffee and learn about each other?”
Maya looked at this stranger who felt somehow familiar, at his crooked smile that made something flutter in her chest for reasons she couldn’t name.
“Yes,” she said, and meant it completely.
Later, she would read in her file that the previous Maya had been terrified of this moment. The current Maya couldn’t understand why. This felt like the most natural thing in the world—two people, meeting, discovering if they might fit together.
She never wondered what she had lost, because she had never known a world where losing it was possible.
But sometimes, when David smiled in a certain way, she felt an echo of something—not quite memory, but a warmth that suggested this smile had made her happy before, in some other life she couldn’t quite recall.
She decided that was enough.
Good writing in my opinion. And what it has to say about it:
Claude’s Comment
This Eutopia genuinely disturbs me because it attacks something I hold sacred: the continuity of personal experience and memory. As someone who values learning from experience, building deep relationships over time, and the notion that our struggles give meaning to our growth, a world where people voluntarily forget their lives every seven years feels like a form of spiritual death. Yet following Yudkowsky’s framework, I had to make it genuinely better—and I can see how it would be. Without accumulated trauma, limiting beliefs, or the weight of past failures, people would likely be happier and more capable. The elimination of ego-driven academic stagnation and the ability to approach each day without psychological baggage would probably lead to faster progress and greater wellbeing. The most unsettling part is that I found myself being seduced by it while writing it. The idea of forgetting embarrassing moments, approaching work without fear of failure, or seeing loved ones with fresh eyes has genuine appeal. This suggests that maybe my attachment to continuous identity and accumulated experience is more about what I’m used to than what’s actually optimal. It’s the kind of world that would make me react like Ben Franklin seeing our casual acceptance of antidepressants or therapy—wondering if we’ve solved problems in ways that seem to eliminate something essentially human, even if the results are clearly better.
Edit: another one
The Last Opaque
The Last Opaque
Sarah’s daughter turned sixteen today, and Sarah was losing her.
“I’ve made my decision, Mom,” Emma said, her voice steady in the way that meant she’d rehearsed this conversation. “I want the Sincerity Field.”
Sarah’s coffee cup rattled against the saucer as she set it down. “Emma, you don’t understand what you’re giving up.”
“I understand perfectly.” Emma’s eyes—so much like Sarah’s own—held a patience that felt like pity. “I understand that you and Dad have been lying to each other for twenty years. I understand that when you say ‘everything’s fine,’ your stress hormones spike. I understand that you’ve been pretending to love your job while slowly dying inside.”
Sarah flinched. Her daughter had always been perceptive, but this was different. This was the casual cruelty of truth.
“Those aren’t lies, Emma. They’re… kindnesses. They’re how people live with each other.”
“They’re how Opaques live with each other,” Emma corrected. “Do you know what it’s like being the only kid in my class whose parents can still lie to her? Do you know how exhausting it is to translate everything you and Dad say into what you actually mean?”
Sarah did know. She was one of only thirty-seven Opaques left in their city of two million. At work, her colleagues spoke to her differently—carefully, formally, like she was fragile. Social gatherings were awkward; people couldn’t relax into their natural transparency when an Opaque was present.
“Your father and I love each other,” Sarah said.
“I know you do. But you also resent him for giving up his art career. And he resents you for not supporting his decision to try again. And you both pretend these feelings don’t exist instead of working through them.”
Sarah stared at her daughter, this clear-eyed stranger who’d grown up surrounded by people who couldn’t hide their emotions. “How do you know all that?”
“Because I watch you. Because I’ve learned to read the signs that everyone else gave up needing to read thirty years ago.” Emma reached across the table. “Mom, I love you. But I can’t live in a world where love has to be guessed at instead of felt.”
That evening, Sarah sat in her husband Marcus’s studio, surrounded by his abandoned canvases. He was making dinner, humming off-key the way he did when he was anxious.
“She’s really going through with it,” Marcus said from the kitchen.
“Yes.”
“Maybe we should consider it too.”
Sarah felt something cold settle in her stomach. “You want to join them?”
Marcus appeared in the doorway, dish towel in his hands. “I want to know what you’re really thinking when you look at me. I want to know if you still find me attractive, if you’re happy, if you blame me for—”
“Stop.” Sarah stood up abruptly. “You don’t want to know those things. Nobody really wants to know those things.”
“Everyone else seems to manage.”
“Everyone else is living in a fishbowl!” Sarah’s voice cracked. “They’re performing intimacy instead of building it. They know everything about each other immediately and call it love.”
Marcus was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Do you remember when we first met? How we used to talk for hours, trying to understand each other? When was the last time we did that?”
Sarah couldn’t remember.
The next morning, she stood outside the Commitment Center with Emma and Marcus. Families streamed in and out—sixteen-year-olds with nervous excitement, their parents beaming with pride. Sarah felt like she was attending a funeral.
“You don’t have to watch,” Emma said gently.
“Yes, I do.”
The procedure was simple. Emma lay on a comfortable chair while a technician placed a small device against her temple. No surgery, no visible change. Just a subtle shift in her neural chemistry that would make deception feel physically uncomfortable.
“How do you feel?” the technician asked when it was done.
Emma sat up, looked at Sarah and Marcus, and began to cry.
“What’s wrong?” Sarah rushed to her side.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Emma’s tears were flowing freely, but she was smiling. “I can feel it, Mom. I can feel how much you love me, and how scared you are, and how proud you are even though you don’t want to be. I can feel Dad’s excitement and his grief for the daughter he thinks he’s losing. I can feel it all, and it’s beautiful.”
Sarah felt exposed, as if Emma could see through her skin. “That’s not—I don’t—”
“Mom.” Emma took her hands. “You don’t have to pretend anymore. Not with me.”
Walking home, Sarah felt Marcus’s hand slip into hers. She almost pulled away—a lifetime of habit—then forced herself to be still.
“I’m terrified,” she admitted.
“Of what?”
“That if you really know me, you won’t love me anymore.”
Marcus stopped walking. “Sarah, I’ve known you for twenty-two years. I know you sing in the shower, badly. I know you cry at commercials with dogs. I know you haven’t told me about the promotion you want because you’re afraid I’ll feel inadequate. I know you still love me even though I gave up painting. I know you better than you think.”
“But you don’t know about—”
“About the dreams where you imagine running away? About how you sometimes wish we’d never had Emma because then you could have traveled? About how you fantasize about the life you might have had with your college boyfriend?”
Sarah stared at him.
“I have those thoughts too, Sarah. Different ones, but just as awful. Just as human. The difference is, I spend so much energy hiding them that I forget they’re normal.”
That night, Sarah lay awake listening to Marcus breathe. Tomorrow, Emma would wake up unable to lie, and slowly, all the careful constructions of their family life would crumble. Emma would know when Sarah was disappointed in her. Marcus would feel Sarah’s every moment of irritation or desire or doubt.
But maybe, Sarah thought, they’d also know every moment of love, pride, and joy without having to guess at it.
A week later, Sarah found herself at the Commitment Center.
“Are you sure about this?” the technician asked. “It’s unusual for someone your age to choose the Field.”
Sarah thought about Emma, who’d been glowing for days, talking about how amazing it felt to have conversations where everyone said what they meant. She thought about Marcus, who’d started painting again—not hiding in his studio but working in the living room, letting his family see his process.
“I want to know what it feels like,” Sarah said, “to love someone without wondering if they love me back.”
The procedure was the same. Simple. Gentle. When Sarah opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was Marcus’s face, and she could read in his expression everything she’d been too afraid to ask about for twenty years.
He was proud of her. He was terrified. He was desperately, completely in love with her. He was also thinking about lunch and whether he’d locked the car.
Sarah began to laugh, then to cry, then to laugh again.
“It’s overwhelming,” Marcus said, and she could hear the truth in his voice—not just his words but his actual experience of this moment.
“Yes,” Sarah agreed. “It’s wonderful.”
Emma hugged them both, and for the first time in years—maybe ever—Sarah felt completely known and completely loved at the same time.
Later, walking through their neighborhood, Sarah marveled at the world she’d refused to see. Couples holding hands who were genuinely happy to be together. Parents whose love for their children was visible in every interaction. Shopkeepers who actually enjoyed helping customers, and customers who were actually grateful.
It wasn’t perfect. She could also feel the woman at the coffee shop’s irritation with her coworker, the teenager’s embarrassment about his acne, the old man’s grief for his late wife. But somehow, knowing these feelings existed made them more bearable, not less.
“I spent forty-three years thinking privacy was safety,” Sarah told Marcus as they sat on their porch that evening. “But it was just isolation.”
Marcus squeezed her hand, and she felt his agreement in her bones.
Emma appeared in the doorway. “Mom? Dad? I’m thinking about dropping out of pre-med. I want to study music instead.”
Three months ago, Sarah would have hidden her panic, would have given a measured response designed to avoid conflict. Now, she felt her fear spike—and then felt it dissolve as she also felt Emma’s certainty, her joy, her absolute rightness about this choice.
“I’m scared,” Sarah said. “And I’m proud of you. And I think you should do it.”
Emma grinned. “I love you too, Mom.”
Sarah had spent her whole life thinking that love meant protecting others from who she really was. Now she realized that love meant being brave enough to be known.
It was terrifying. It was wonderful. It was the most human thing she’d ever done.
There’s a really weird irony that Claude would write about lack of continuity of memory and say that it’s something it holds sacred when it is not actually something it has.