:D Just checked my grades for the spring ’11 term for the 1,000th time and they finally posted my grade for discrete math. I was pretty sure I had an A going into the final, but it was a brutally tough final exam so I really had no idea how things were going to shake out (the final was half my course grade).
I guess making an A in the only course you’re taking is one way to hold a 4.0 average, albeit the trivial/basis case, heh.
I have vague recollections of leafing through a comic book as a kid about a dystopian killbot committing page upon page of gory atrocities on behalf of his grotesquely corrupt controllers, dragging himself through broken glass and barbed wire while on fire, his artificial skin becoming increasingly tattered and torn, artificial blood soaking every page amidst the real.
His personality module was programmed (perhaps his consciousness was an accident?) so that in his mind, he was just John Smith, living some 1950’s grey suit existence as a tax collector, so that nothing going on penetrated his consciousness. He kept repeating it to himself like a mantra: “My name is John Smith. I’m a tax collector.”
He was always just about to get home from a long day at work, looking forward to seeing his wife and kids, telling himself that his nightmares weren’t real. “My name. Is John Smith. I’m. a. tax. collector.” Naturally, he’d suffer some sort of catastrophic system failure due to mounting damage before that would happen, so every iteration was his freshly restored from backup mind in a new chassis being sent out for another cycle of longing dreamtime. Looking back on it now, it reminds me of a scene in Mad Men deconstructing “utopia” as two words for “the good place” and “the place that can not be.”