Jack of Harts

When does life begin? We’d been asking it for decades before the AIs came around. Centuries. Millennia. Did you know there were cultures where they never named a baby until it was a year old because infant mortality was so high? Then we had the medical advancements of the 19th and 20th centuries that allowed us to wipe out diseases and save children months before they were even born. But there were still those who said they weren’t alive, yet. Just a parasite. Some random cells that could be erased without any harm. The Early AIs met similar opposition. People who couldn’t believe they were alive. That they could be anything other than random lines of code that could be erased without any harm. When does life begin? That can be a hard question to answer. It took us longer to answer it than I wish it had.