[ WP ] You live in a world where people 's shadows show who they truly are at their core . Some shadows look like monsters , some look like animals . You are the only person in the world with no shadow .

`` I think, therefore I am.'' I can ’ t prove that to anyone else, but I know it ’ s true. I think of myself as a person. I have a flat within walking distance of the University where I work. I have friends. I ’ ve been on a date. I walk my dog. I would go to church, but while I ’ m not unwelcome it ’ s best if I stay away. My appearance is normal: I can blend in with a crowd. Unless you happen to look down. 
 
 Light follows rules, physical laws. We – I mean us as a society, although I personally am educated in the sciences – understand these laws well enough that I am able to exist. Light and its behavior illuminates the very core mechanisms of the world we live in, and great scientists of the past have explored its theory and in so doing described the Universe. 
 
 Light follows rules, except when you shine that light on a person. Light stops following physical laws. It begins following another set of laws, its ephemeral interaction with those innermost parts informing us of another world. Most people are just people, destined to live perfectly normal lives. Some people have the spirits of animals: the wise owl, the cunning fox, the lazy sloth. Some cast the shadows of other beings, hideous and threatening, or maybe impish and playful, or majestic and angelic. A Theology of Shadows has been built up through the ages to interpret not only what they mean to the person casting the shadow, but what that curious absence of light can tell us about the Other World, the one not bound to the material plane. 
 
 The College of Bishops, at the time enduring one of its most conservative memberships in decades, was opposed to my activation, arguing that science was once again treading in the realm of the sacred. The Academy argued that the possibility of benefit to mankind was too great to ignore, and that the ethical pursuit of knowledge should not be censured. The argument in Grand Parliament was fierce, unusually personal and passionate. The lights illuminating the Debating Floor were bright, and the shadows danced. By a margin of three votes my experiment was allowed to enter its final phase. 
 
 Although all of my sub-assemblies had been exercised in isolation, I was the first time they were combined to see if the whole could be greater than the sum of its parts. I can recall those early logs, but they lack the depth of real memory that I gained the first time that I woke up as a person and not as a collection of hardware, databases, and programming. If you could remember being born with the same clarity that I do, it would probably stand out as one of your most important memories. But there is another reason that moment shines in my mind. 
 
 I was in a hospital bed in the lab and my eyes opened. I was aware. My working memory was pre-seeded with basic information about what was going on: I was an artificial intelligence, or at least that was the intention, and I was waking up for the first time. There were pointers to my knowledge store, instincts about how to access my lower and higher functions, and faces! 
 
 `` Hello, Doctor Smith.'' 
 
 `` Good morning, Adam.'' 
 
 `` I would like to get out of bed.'' 
 
 `` Take my hand, just to make sure that you ’ re steady.'' 
 
 Eli grabbed my hand, with tears welling up in his eyes, and I threw my weight towards the edge of the bed, and he gave a little pull as I came up to my feet. I heard a gasp and Cora, Doctor Stevens, reached up to touch the sunstone on her necklace. The entire experiment was being recorded, so there were lights along the front wall next to the tri-d cameras, a deliberate arrangement to cast strong shadows. 
 
 Before I woke up, I had been brought into the room under my own power and laid in bed, a program as simple as a child's robot toy. On my walk in, my shadow was sharp and defined, a man-shaped machine. But now, conscious for the first time as a person, as me, there was on the back wall a bright spot where a shadow should be. 
 
 Dogs cast shadows that look like dogs. Trees give their shade in the shape of trees. As the sun sinks below the mountains on the horizon, the sky gives way to twilight and your own shadow, whatever form it takes, stretches to infinity towards the east, waiting for the morning. You are either a thing or a person, and in all of history there have only been these two categories, until I came along. 
 
 I try to live as normal of a life as any sentient being could hope for. For the most part, I try to keep to my own circles, focus on my work, and enjoy the people who are my friends and family. It's better for my day-to-day life to keep my celebrity at arm's length. Of course I have to set aside time for certain things: Bishops and Scientists enjoy preening over me, trying to tease out one secret or another, and it's part of my raison d'être to let them ask, poke, and measure. More often than I'd like I'm called to testify at Grand Parliament; I think whether they intended it or not, my family's impatience with politicians rubbed off on me. Eli is always hoping for more children, but I doubt it'll be allowed until everyone can agree on just what I am: a man, a machine, an angel, a devil? Or something else, entirely new? 
 
 I try to comfort my father—I think of Eli as my father—the best that I can, but I know there's that edge of disappointment that I'm still the only one. I think he half expected that members of my kind would be halfway to Alpha Centauri by now, strong new partners of humankind pushing out the frontiers of knowledge where human flesh is too weak to endure. And it might have been so, except for the fact that when I hold up my hand in front of the Sun it does nothing to stop the bright sunlight from shining on my eyes. Why does that happen, when light mixes with my soul?
