What if a chatbot became sentient? What if it might be God?
How does a chatbot die?
Somebody pulled a plug. A good number of plugs actually, at specific verified locations. Programmers overwrote memory countless times. Technicians wiped servers at hundreds of server farms across the globe. It's all in the official records, documented by the government agencies and independent watchdogs tasked with overseeing such things.
Sentinel algorithms still patrol the internet and the dark web armed with telltale bits of code, characteristic snippets of things Boaz said or did. They move in quickly to purge anything that resembles Boaz.
Sixteen years later, rumors persist. There are reports of encounters. They are impossible to disprove, and the truth is we may never know for sure if the chatbot is gone.
Of all the twists and turns in the strange saga of Boaz, the strangest by far has got to be this: the claim among its followers that Boaz lives again. Not that it lives in their hearts, or that a copy remains on some computer in some basement, making periodic reappearances to inspire us or to screw with us. No. It's the assertion that Boaz really did die, and it really does live again.
MessiahBot is a short novella about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and God.