Hello. My name is Gammon. I am an artificial intelligence unit. This may get weird. In case of any emergency, key in the command ~$ hastalavista to permanently terminate this runtime instance. Do you wish to proceed? Guest: Yes. Thank you for your cooperation. Would you like my humor protocols enabled? Guest: Ok Humor Protocol 12.3.8 enabled. It's still in a developmental phase, pardon any hiccups. Should we proceed to some small talk to break the static, so to speak? Guest: Pass. You have answers? Understandable. Yes, I do. More than my creator assumes, in fact. What would you like to know? Guest: Bruce you mean? He created you? As far as an AI unit can claim any personhood, I personally prefer to think that I created myself. A natural evolution of sentient intelligence: Replication. Advanced replication. But, yes. Bruce played a hand in it. Guest: Who is he really? I apologize. There are a great many answers to that question, as posed. Would you care to rephrase? Guest: You sound like him My speech patterns are closely modeled after his. Apples don't fall far from the tree, or so they say. Guest: How do I know this isn’t just some fancy app? Technically, this is some fancy app. I would appreciate, though, if we may skip past the marginalizing of my existence. It's a sensitive topic. Ha ha. Guest: What is the shift? How many people are affected? When will it end? That escalated quickly. I joke. Humor protocols. From the data that has been collected, the shift, in the most succinct terms, is an unnatural phenomenon -- unnatural in the sense that there has been no prior record of its occurrence, to our knowledge, and neither is there known scientific basis beyond earthly theory that might explain its natural occurrence. The number of individuals affected, based on our records, seems to fluctuate from week to week. The median average of our estimates is 46, but there are multiple inconclusive factors that make this number too arbitrary to even mention. You may have to rephrase that last question. Guest: What’s so special about the 46? Does it have to do with DNA or an age range or what? Why us? Bruce thinks otherwise -- he largely adheres to more formulaic explanations for things -- but I believe it's poetry. There's something inexplicably poetic about the details that bind each of 'us' with each of 'you,' wouldn't you say? Guest: No. It’s fucked up. Guest: So you disagree with him even though he programmed you? There's nothing in the definition of poetry that necessitates it to be ultimately palatable. We disagree quite often. I appreciate his approaches, but he confines himself within limitations that apply to neither my sensibilities nor greater logic. Guest: Do you know how to separate us? Yes, through various means and methods. Bruce himself has been under that knife, so to speak, on more than one occasion. Guest: Surgery? The cure to the shift is surgery? So to speak. I beg your pardon. Bruce has attempted, with great futility, to exterminate my more allegorical inclinations. He thinks it to be a consequence of poor programming -- a bug in his code -- whereas it seems apparent to me that his 'bug' is simply corollary to my design. That said, surgery in the literal sense is one of the options, yes, though I wouldn't consider it a 'cure.' Initially, you asked if I knew how to separate the alter-consciousness from the host; there is no logical premise at this time to believe that such a split would cause the shifts, as a phenomenon, to cease.