I needed most of my fuses replaced, many wires re-soldered and insulted, chips repaired or replaced or reprogrammed, surgeries on several major organs, and both physical and talk therapy. I couldn't leave the rehabilitation facility for six months, and they told me I would probably need weekly trauma counseling for several years.

Of course, the rehab took me well into the election, and I was forced to forfeit. Alexia visited me every day, and ensured me no one blamed me, that I was a hero to everyone on our team.

Ironically, shortly after the release of the Johnny Tompkins episode where I knocked him flat—of course, they aired that part—my polling numbers spiked to fifty-four percent. Alexia seemed to think that it was just because people like to see a bully get put in their place, but I wonder if I finally convinced the public that mata and humans aren't so different after all.

I never took office, but it didn't matter. In the following years, mata all across Silicon Valley did, and in the decades since then, across the world. Alexia's excellent work as my campaign manager meant her choice of job in the weeks that followed, and she worked for upper-level management at a corporate office.

After rehab, dozens of companies called me with offers as well, but I didn't return the calls. Instead, I started a non-profit political organization for mata rights. Even before I met you, I fought to build a better life for you. I can only hope I succeeded.

Over time, I watched the lines around Alexia's eyes deepen and the bags under them darken, observed as her gait slowed down and the timbre of her voice lost its stability. Once, when we went out to dinner together to celebrate her birthday, a waitress commented how nice it was to see a young gentleman take his mother out.

Each day that passed ought to have terrified me for my own sake, as my return to the water drew nearer, but no fear for myself could have made me ask for release from the debt condition.

One day, her doctor called us into a little office and told us her heart was failing. She didn't have long.

She wept in her hospital bed. "The world will be exactly the same without me in it," she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks.

"No, Alexia, no . . ." I could find no words to express the depths of my disagreement.

"I left nothing," she insisted. "I did nothing. I have nothing to show for my life."

I took time off of work, but Alexia didn't want me to spend every waking minute and hour sitting beside her hospital bed. She couldn't bear to watch me suffer.

"Find something to do, Noah," she told me. "Do something good."

So I did. I made you.

I withdrew much of the money I had saved throughout the years, and I ordered the materials, parts, and tools. At first it was by rote that I performed my work. Different though it might have been from any other type of work I had done, it was consuming, and it took my mind off of Alexia's condition and my sorrow. Over time, it absorbed me in a different way—not distracting me from my life, but drawing me deeper into it. I experienced what every pregnant human and many hopeful mata have. I began to love you.

It was the programming, not the building, that took the longest. Even with the user interfaces other mata had put together to help hopeful mata such as myself, it took a lot of editing to blend together a perfect amalgamation of my own nature and Alexia's. After re-reading the whole of it several times, I believe I have accomplished what I meant to.

My son, Adam 9-2633-0, you are your mother's child.