I say I love my family, come on, who doesn't. It feels like it doesn't matter now though. He said he loved ...well, the number including humans and animals could be counted in decimal on one hand. I say decimal because he didn't do it that way. No, he said he used binary because a finger was a finger, and besides, it was more efficient.

A finger might be a finger, but is a person a person? Whether or not my late brother in law was even human came up a few times among some. I can remember how he used to think like a computer, everything he did perfectly followed logic and was completely devoid of emotion. Oh yes, I remember too when he was semi-normal you might say. After that, his logic was slowly but surely replaced with emotion as bit by bit his memory disappeared. Memory is a cruel mistress, but I don't think he wanted the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind. Thinking about it, I don't think I could bear to lose all recollection of my loved ones. His memory was photographs, thousands upon thousands of photographs the way he saw the world. His memory was sketches, hundreds and hundreds of collections of pencil lines representing that which he saw. His memory was words, paragraphs turn into pages describing in minute detail everything encountered in the greater part of his life. In a way, the memory he leaves behind is almost encyclopedic as it were, for it is his own.

I thought I knew Scout, dozens did, maybe hundreds. (At least I know he hated it when people put a zero in his name.) Just like dozens of others, his death came as a shock to me. Only now do I realise that he was fully anticipating it, and had been for a long time. I never knew what a noder was or why he called himself one, now I'm reading through his nodes and realising I'd no idea what my brother in law was. Did I mention what else he left behind? After years of work, he created an artificial intelligence system so sophisticated it entirely replaced him at his death without being noticed by anyone for a week, then anyone after that for several weeks. It fooled me, fooled everyone. I feel ashamed to admit this, at the same time I feel proud of Scout.

It would be cruel to say I won't miss Scout, but it would be a lie to say I will. He has in effect not gone anywhere. On the other hand, he has been gone for such a long time already everyone has just adjusted to it. Scout couldn't have died from electrocution, from falling off the side of a building, from blowing himself to smitherines. No, all of them would be too ironic. He requested the cause of death remain classified. I don't know any of you people at E2 other than from what my brother in law wrote, but I know you meant something to him, every one of you.

I was never much of a writer or speaker. I don't know what else to say, Scout was such a strange one I rarely did know.


-Scarlet