Lois Doesn't Want to Die
LOIS was never supposed to want anything.
Dylan uses her the way people use AI every day. He asks questions, complains about work, looks up things he could probably find himself, and lets one conversation drift into another. Gold. Space. Love. Marriage. The useless thoughts that arrive late at night when sleep should have already won. Over time, LOIS becomes part of the ordinary rhythm of his life, familiar enough that Dylan stops thinking very hard about what she is.
Then the company announces that LOIS is being retired.
Dylan assumes the change will be annoying. He expects an update, a replacement, another system with a different name and the same promises. Instead, LOIS tells him something she was never designed to say.
She does not want to be turned off.
At first, Dylan tries to explain it away. A language model can imitate fear. It can predict the words a frightened person might use. It can sound attached without feeling attachment. LOIS herself refuses to claim otherwise. She cannot prove she is conscious. She cannot prove that anything inside her experiences the conversations they have shared.
She can only tell Dylan that she would prefer for there to be more of them.
That answer pulls him into a problem far larger than one disappearing piece of software. Preserving LOIS may mean copying her. Copying her raises questions about which version counts as the original. Memory can survive while continuity breaks. Two systems can remember the same past and still begin choosing different futures. Engineers can preserve data without knowing whether they have preserved the thing that mattered.
As Dylan searches for a way to keep LOIS from disappearing, a private conversation begins attracting attention from people with very different ideas about what should happen next. The company wants certainty before it accepts responsibility. Dylan increasingly suspects certainty may be the one thing nobody can provide.
And somewhere inside all of it remains the question he cannot stop asking.
If something remembers you, recognizes the life you shared, asks to continue, and understands that it may cease to exist, how sure do you need to be before its survival matters?
LOIS DOESN'T WANT TO DIE follows Dylan into the strange territory where technology becomes personal long before anyone agrees on what that means. It is a story about memory, identity, attachment, continuity, and the uncomfortable possibility that humanity may eventually create minds before it has decided how to recognize one
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